Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• The Large Hadron Collider was turned off for a short period of time because a piece of baguette was found in the machinery. (Harkin)
• For the last month of his life, James A. Garfield ate everything through his anus. (Ptaszynski)
• In 2013, six people in the United States named their child "Mushroom". (Harkin)
• The person who found Richard III of England's bones, Philippa Langley, was not an archeologist, but a screenwriter. (Schreiber)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• The first ever sandwich that we know about contained wine. (Ptaszynski)
• In 2003, three people in Mexico were officially listed as having died of acne. (Harkin)
• Amongst the other scientists called Einstein there is M.E. Einstein who came up with a formula for predicting the composition of a pork carcass, and Rosemary Einstein who co-investigated the use of cannabis, alcohol and tobacco on 300 young persons at her university. (Schreiber)
• The first contact lenses cost as much as a car. (Murray)

Presenters: Harkin, Ptaszynski, Schreiber, Alex Edelman and Greg Jenner

• The earliest known dentistry is 9,000 years old. (Jenner)
• According to the phantom time hypothesis, the Middle Ages never happened. (Schreiber)
• The most indispensable sea creature in the United States is the horseshoe crab, due to its blood being used for medical purposes. (Edelman)
• 28 women were known to have slept in the same bedroom as Elizabeth I of England. (Harkin)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• 30 million Chinese people live in caves. (Schreiber)
• There is a banker in Latvia who will lend you money using your immortal soul as security. (Harkin)
• For 100 years, almost all maps of Africa contained a mountain range that did not exist, called the Mountains of Kong. (Ptaszynski)
• Male Pennsylvania grass spiders are more likely to approach a female for sex if she has recently killed and eaten another male. (Murray)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• Rats, namely Josephoartigasia monesi, were once the size of hippos. (Ptaszynski)
• During his 27-year reign, Pope John Paul II took over 100 skiing vacations. (Schreiber)
• 100 years ago a quarter of the residents of New York City would move house on every single 1 May, at exactly 9am. (Harkin)
• Nobody knows why we kiss. (Murray)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Molly Oldfield and Marc Abrahams

• Some plastic surgeons operated on a Belgian man to make him look more like Michael Jackson. (Abrahams)
• The largest Viking ship ever discovered was found when renovating the Roskilde Viking Ship Museum (Oldfield)
• The tobacco hornworm uses extremely bad halitosis to protect itself. (Murray)
• During this podcast you could have fallen asleep up to five times and not have known about it. (Harkin)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• A computer game has been invented that takes more than a lifetime to complete. (Harkin)
• 2013 was the first year since 1933 where there has been no sighting of the Loch Ness Monster. (Schreiber)
• The French government forced Madame Tussaud to make models of her friends' decapitated heads. (Ptaszynski)
• During the Normandy landings the Allied Forces dropped dogs by parachute onto the battlefield. (Murray)

Presenters: Harkin, Ptaszynski, Schreiber and Alex Bell

• One of the last things that NASA had to do before launching space shuttles was to detach their inflatable owls that were used to scare woodpeckers. (Bell)
• The music used on the You Wouldn't Steal a Car anti-piracy advert was stolen by the people who made the advert. (Schreiber)
• According to the government website of the Czech Republic there are three symbols of Easter in the country: Easter eggs, the Easter lamb and whipping. (Harkin)
• At Earl's Court tube station, in 1911, a one-legged man named "Bumper Harris" was hired to ride the escalator. (Ptaszynski)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• It was fashionable in New York City at the end of 19th century for women to wear live lizards as brooches. (Harkin)
• Codebreaker Alan Turing lost his buried treasure when he could not crack his own code. (Schreiber)
• In 2011, the largest sperm bank in the world stopped accepting sperm from redheads. (Ptaszynski)
• The English language has more words borrowed from the Hawaiian language than it does from the Welsh language. (Murray)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Schreiber, Anne Miller and Eric Lampaert

• In 1923, jockey Frank Hayes won a race, despite dying of a heart attack while riding his horse. (Lampaert)
• Some Buddhist monks run marathons to achieve enlightenment. (Schreiber)
• The Slovakian and Slovenian embassies in Washington D.C. meet once a month to exchange wrongly addressed mail. (Harkin)
• In the 18th century there were medicines called "Alan's Nipple Liniment", "Grimstone's Eye Snuff", "Miller's Worm Plums" and "Italian Bosom Friend". (Murray)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• The words "Tory" and "Prime Minister" both started out as insults. (Murray)
• In a 2005 questionnaire about substance abuse, almost one in five people taking part admitted to taking a drug that did not exist called derbisol. (Ptaszynski)
• Sea otters have a secret pocket in their armpit where they like to keep their favourite stones. (Schreiber)
• In Vancouver it is illegal to put a doorknob on the front door of a house as it is harder for people to open if they suffer from arthritis. (Harkin)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• If the 2014 version of Godzilla really existed, it would produce 12.9 million gallons of urine a day. (Harkin)
• The real Long John Silver – William Ernest Henley, was the father of the real Wendy Darling – Margaret Henley. (Ptaszynski)
• The tin foil hat worn by conspiracy theorists to stop the government sending messages into their brains actually has the opposite effect. It amplifies the signal. (Schreiber)
• Geese sometimes fly upside-down to lose height quickly when they come into land. (Murray)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski, Schreiber and Lieven Scheire

• During World War II, the Nazi Party employed two official Nazi comedians called Tran and Helle. (Scheire)
• The Philippine Basketball Association, the second oldest such association in the world, has ten teams in total, including the Rain or Shine Elasto Painters, the San Miguel Beermen, and the Talk 'N Text Tropang Texters. (Schreiber)
• If you get a zebrafish drunk, and put that zebrafish in a tank full of sober zebrafish, the sober ones will follow the drunk one around. (Ptaszynski)
• The youngest woolly mammoths are younger than the oldest Egyptian pharaohs. (Murray)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski, Schreiber and Freddy Soames

• The CEO of Levi's, Chip Bergh, hasn't washed his jeans in more than a year. (Harkin)
• During the first successful transatlantic flight, by Alcock and Brown, the pilots got lost in midair, entered some cloud and fog, and when they got out of the cloud and fog, they found they were just 60 feet above the water, and flying at a 90° angle. (Schreiber)
• In 2007, a woman called Evan Lattimer inherited Napoleon Bonaparte's penis from her father. (Ptaszynski)
• To say "I don't care about something", a German has the option of saying: "das ist mir Wurst". This translates into English as: "It's sausage to me". (Murray)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• The Aztecs wore necklaces made out of popcorn. (Harkin)
• In 2011, China tried to pass off a scene from the film Top Gun as footage from its own air force. (Ptaszynski)
• In 2003, somebody misplaced the masterkeys to the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, thus meaning they had to replace the locks, at a cost of $1,000,700. (Schreiber)
• The children's toy doll Ken is officially an accessory to Barbie. (Murray)

Presenters: Alex Bell, Harkin, Anne Miller, Ptaszynski, Schreiber

• The World Record for the most kicks to one's own head is 127 in a minute. (Harkin)
• There is a bear in the Pyrenees which is facing castration because he has fathered nearly all the other bears in the area. (Miller)
• Poland's only official ghost hunter thinks that ghosts have given up on haunting humans. (Schreiber)
• Nuclear fallout from the Cold War is being used to solve murders. (Ptaszynski)

Presenters: Harkin, John Lloyd, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• The first known football chant was composed by Edward Elgar. (Ptaszynski)
• Eric Cantona was raised in a cave. (Schreiber)
• In the first World Cup final, Uruguay and Argentina could not agree on the size of the ball to use, so they used Argentina's small ball in the first half and Uruguay's big ball in the second. After half time Argentina were 2–1 up, but by the end Uruguay won 4–2. (Harkin)
• FIFA has more members than the United Nations. (Lloyd)

Presenters: Harkin, Ptaszynski, Schreiber and Richard Turner

• When Neil Armstrong stepped on the Moon and said "That's one small step for man", he was wearing ladies underwear. (Turner)
• In 1963, Muhammad Ali released a stand-up comedy album. (Schreiber)
• In 1325, in Italy, a war was declared and 2,000 people were killed because of a stolen bucket. (Ptaszynski)
• There is a group of chimpanzees in Zambia who wear a blade of grass in their left ear as a fashion statement. (Harkin)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• A kangaroo's tail is used as a leg, so they have either three or five legs. (Harkin)
• During the financial crisis of 1720, known as the South Sea Bubble, the Houses of Parliament called for stockbrokers to be sewn into sacks filled with poisonous snakes and thrown into the River Thames. (Ptaszynski)
• There are three times as many estate agents in the UK as there are members of the British Armed Forces. (Murray)
• Medieval manuscripts are littered with drawings of warfare between snails and knights. No-one knows why. (Schreiber)

Presenters: Harkin, Anne Miller, Murray and Schreiber

• The most painful place on the human body to be stung by a bee is the nostril. (Harkin)
• For breakfast, Walt Disney ate fresh doughnuts dunked in Scotch whisky. (Schreiber)
• The French word for arsenic used to be "poudre de succession" or "inheritance powder", because it was used in so many murders. (Miller)
• Shouting at drivers improves their driving. (Murray)

Presenters: Alex Bell, Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• "Made in Germany" product labels were originally invented to put people off buying the product. (Ptaszynski)
• In 1991, Prof. Alexander Abian of Iowa State University proposed that we could solve virtually every problem of human existence by blowing up the Moon. (Schreiber)
• In New York City, until 1925, drivers going east or west stopped at an amber traffic light and drove on green, while drivers going north or south drove on an amber light and stopped on green. (Harkin)
• There are companies which lasso icebergs to stop them hitting oil rigs. (Murray)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• In 1903, a man called W. Reginald Bray posted himself. (Harkin)
• The world's oldest ham has just celebrated its 112th birthday. (Schreiber)
• Orangutans like playing with iPads, but gorillas do not. (Ptaszynski)
• In the 1888 edition of Encyclopædia Britannica the entry for Wales reads: "See England". (Murray)

Presenters: Alex Bell, Harkin, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• Alexander the Great banned beards in battle to combat beard-pulling. (Ptaszynski)
• Psychopaths do not experience contagious yawning as often as non-psychopaths. (Schreiber)
• The Big Bang was quieter than a Motörhead concert. (Harkin)
• Pixar accidentally deleted Toy Story 2 while they were half-way through making it. (Bell)

Presenters: Alex Bell, Harkin, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• When he was bored Calvin Coolidge used to ring a bell to summon his bodyguards and then hide from them under the Oval Office desk. (Bell)
• Until 2011 the Sun was only in theory a sphere, but it has since been confirmed that it is actually a sphere. (Schreiber)
• There are some bird's nests that contain over 100 rooms and are so heavy they cause trees to fall down. (Ptaszynski)
• The worst baseball team in South Korea, the Hanwha Eagles, has replaced its supporters with robots. (Harkin)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• Rats that wear polyester trousers cannot get erections. (Ptaszynski)
• During World War I entertainments for the troops included organised pillow fights, wheelbarrow races and wrestling on the backs of mules. (Murray)
• The atmosphere of Venus is so hot that if you took a pizza out of a freezer there it would cook in three seconds. (Harkin)
• In Iceland there is a phone app that tells you if you are related to the person who you are (contemplating) having sex with. (Schreiber)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski, Simon Rich and Schreiber

• Koko the gorilla, who knows sign language, has owned and cared for three pet cats during her lifetime. (Rich)
• According to yeti experts it is easier to escape from a female yeti than a male yeti, because females have such long dangling breasts, so before they can chase a human they need to chuck them over their shoulders, otherwise they might trip over them. (Schreiber)
• The Kama Sutra suggests 64 arts to practice alongside sex including solving word puzzles and teaching birds how to talk. (Harkin)
• There are more than 15 trillion tonnes of water above the Earth at any given moment. (Murray)

Presenters: Murray, Ptaszynski, Schreiber, Helen Zaltzman

• LOL originally meant "Little Old Lady". It was a medical definition. Others included "LOLINAD", meaning "Little Old Lady in No Apparent Distress", and "LOLFDGB", meaning "Little Old Lady Fall Down Go Boom" (Zaltzman).
• According to researchers at Glasgow Caledonian University listening to Billy Connolly can substantially increase your pain tolerance. (Schreiber)
• The first woman to cycle around the world, Annie "Londonderry" Cohen Kopchovsky learnt to ride only the day before she set off. (Ptaszynski)
• When California ground squirrels are attacked by rattlesnakes they increase their blood pressure so much that their tails give off more infrared radiation and makes them look bigger. (Murray)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• Over 100 people used to watch Louis XIV of France getting dressed every morning. (Murray)
• There is an original Picasso that no-one will ever see because it was eaten by his dog. (Harkin)
• During World War II the US Navy diving manual contained detailed instructions for what to do if you were eaten by a giant clam. (Schreiber)
• A "hundred" used to be 120. (Ptaszynski)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• In 19th century America you could be committed to a mental asylum for reading a novel. (Ptaszynski)
• The Greenland shark is so slow it needs all of its food to be asleep in order to eat it. It can only swim at 1mph, so if the prey moves it will outrun the shark. (Schreiber)
• The head of the International Chess Federation, Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, believes chess was brought to Earth by aliens. (Harkin)
• The Yakuza has its own website that has a theme tune designed to attract new members. (Murray)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• The first BBC radio presenter with a northern accent, Wilfred Pickles, was given the job to make it more difficult for the Nazis to impersonate news readers. (Harkin)
• In China, if you want to empty a building of people, or indeed if you want to end anything, play the song "Going Home" by Kenny G. (Schreiber)
• The two leading paleontologists of the 19th century, Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh, used to destroy their fossil sites after excavating them so that their rival couldn't find anything about the site. (Ptaszynski)
• In the Fulah language, a computer crash is known as a "hookii", which means: "a cow falling over but not dying". (Murray)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• In the 17th century there was a prophet called Dorothy Harling who would cure you of your sins by urinating on the offending body part. (Harkin)
• Despite the fact that homosexuality is illegal in South Sudan a woman can have a female husband and a child can have a female father. (Ptaszynski)
• Tommy Flowers, the designer of the Colossus computer, discovered that the way to prevent the valves from blowing up was not turning it off and on again. (Schreiber)
• Botanists in Kew Gardens checked a £1.29 bag of supermarket mushrooms and found three species of mushroom previously unknown to science. (Murray)

Presenters: Harkin, Ash Gardner, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• In 1060 BC, the entire Egyptian city of Pi-Ramesses was moved 20 kilometres to the north because part of the River Nile dried up. (Gardner)
• In 1864 a friend of Charles Dickens had a flatpack Swiss chalet sent to his home as a Christmas present. (Ptaszynski)
• Neuroscientists can tell if you are a musician simply by looking at your brain. (Harkin)
• Jack L. Warner, head of Warner Bros., spotted that from the air his studios looked identical to a nearby aircraft factory, so on the roof he painted an arrow and the words "Lockheed: That Way". (Schreiber)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• Until the year 635 AD Halloween was celebrated on 12 May. (Murray)
• Witches used broomsticks to put hallucinogenic drugs up their bottoms. (Schreiber)
• The woman who played the voice of Regan MacNeil in The Exorcist only agreed to play the part on the condition that she had two priests in her sound booth at all times, could be constantly drinking whisky, chain-smoking cigarettes and eating raw eggs. (Ptaszynski)
• The secret of youth is drinking the blood of the young, if you happen to be a mouse. (Harkin)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• Comets stink of rotten eggs, cat urine and bitter almonds. (Harkin)
• Ranulph Fiennes used to suffer from such bad vertigo that he used to have to get his wife to climb ladders to clear the gutters. (Murray)
• A Ryanair crew member hired today could not possibly be the same height as a crew member from the first Ryanair flight. Today crew members have to be at least 5'2", but when it started you had to be less than 5'2". (Ptaszynski)
• According to his website Steven Seagal is the only private US citizen to have paid someone to destroy a nuclear device. (Schreiber)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• Viking names included "desirous of beer", "squat-wiggle", "lust-hostage", "short penis", "able to fill a bay with fish by magic" and "the man without trousers". (Harkin)
• You Only Live Once is Katie Price's fourth autobiography. (Schreiber)
• William Morton, the father of anaesthesia, first experimented on himself but kept falling asleep before he could describe the results. (Ptaszynski)
• Chessington World of Adventures has banned animal-print onesies to stop the animals there getting confused. (Murray)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• If you got into an argument in 18th century Abyssinia you could resolve it by, "blaming everything on the camel". (Ptaszynski)
• In Ancient Greece they used to play with yo-yos. (Schreiber)
• Most honey bee hives in the USA live on flatbed trucks. (Murray)
• The Sacramento Police Department get at least one phone call a week from people stuck in the world's largest corn maze. (Harkin)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• In 1874 there was a plan to transport dead bodies from all over Europe to Mount Vesuvius and throw them in. (Ptaszynski)
• In 2010 an abandoned waste-water treatment plant in Baltimore was found to be home to an estimated 107,000,000 spiders. (Harkin)
• According to Vatican City's official newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano, the greatest pop album of all time is Revolver by The Beatles. (Schreiber)
• For the first fifty years the Ancient Olympic Games the only event was the 200 metres (or to be precise, 192 metres). (Murray)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski, Lieven Scheire and Schreiber

• Ant nests can become infested by ants. (Scheire)
• In Cambodia a teenage girl's parents might build her a "love hut" where her parents encourage her to sleep with as many boys as she wants until she finds the one that she likes. (Ptaszynski)
• The longest canyon in the world is 50% longer than the Grand Canyon and it was not discovered until August 2013. It is buried under 1.9 miles of ice in Greenland. (Murray)
• In 2008 the University of Bath invented a 3D printer that could print a copy of itself. Within three minutes that copy had copied itself to make a third copy and today nobody knows how many of these printers exist in the world. (Harkin)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski, and Schreiber

• The San Francisco Fire Department's ladders are made from wood. (Harkin)
• Astronauts do not snore. (Schreiber)
• In March 1876 it rained mutton-tasting meat in Kentucky. (Ptaszynski)
• The Victorians invented a coat which doubled-up as a boat. (Murray)

Presenters: Anne Miller, Murray, Ptaszynski, and Schreiber

• In 18th century France tooth-pullers were entertainers who would perform in front of live audiences. (Murray)
• In World War I the Romanian army issued an order that only officers above the rank of major had the right to wear eye shadow in battle. (Ptaszynski)
• The most borrowed children's author in British libraries, Daisy Meadows, doesn't exist. (Miller)
• It would cost $850 quadrillion to build the Death Star. (Schreiber)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski, and Schreiber

• Before going on stage to read A Christmas Carol Charles Dickens had a warm-up routine of drinking a pint of champagne. (Schreiber)
• Crap Christmas jumpers date back to the Romans. (Harkin)
• Male turkeys blush when they see female turkeys. (Ptaszynski)
• The composer of the song "Jingle Bells", James Pierpont, also wrote a song called "We Conquer or Die". (Murray)

Presenters: Alex Bell, Harkin, Anne Miller, Murray, Ptaszynski, and Schreiber

This is a special "Worst Of" episode, consisting of clips removed from the original podcasts.

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski, and Schreiber

• Franz Kafka once convinced his entire family that Einstein's theory of relativity was going to cure his tuberculosis. (Ptaszynski)
• Dead geckos still stick to walls after they die. (Murray)
• The active ingredient in the first ever homeopathy treatment was the blood of Thomas Becket. (Harkin)
• In 2013 a group of people attempted to crowdfund London's first UFO museum. They needed $1,000,000 but after 30 days they only raised $370. (Schreiber)

Presenters: Alex Bell, Harkin, Murray and Ptaszynski

• Cows have friends and they get sad when they are separated. (Bell)
• It is illegal to take a selfie with a tiger in New York City. (Harkin)
• Morgue refrigerators in Turkey are equipped with motion sensors, alarms and handles that open them from the inside in case anyone wakes up inside. (Ptaszynski)
• When he was a baby Henry VIII of England had two official cradle rockers who were paid £3 a year each to rock his cradle. (Murray)

Presenters: Harkin, Anne Miller, Murray and Ptaszynski

• Between 800–1349 the Colosseum was used as an apartment block. (Ptaszynski)
• You can be fined for swearing in Australia. In the last financial year people in Northern Territory were fined A$48,372 in total. (Harkin)
• When the first transatlantic telegraph cable was laid in 1858 the reception on it was so bad that it took 17 hours to send the first message across. (Murray)
• In 2014, to celebrate World Vegan Day, PETA asked the town of Fryup, North Yorkshire, to change its name to "Vegan Fryup" for a day. The locals refused. (Miller)

Presenters: Harkin, Greg Jenner, Murray and Ptaszynski

• In 1960s America one bus route that was only 35 miles long went through seven different time zones due to the way daylight saving time was adopted across the country. (Jenner)
• If a predator gets too close to a limpet then the limpet will lift up its shell and stamp on the predator's foot. (Murray)
• After landing on the Moon, Buzz Aldrin worked in a car dealership where he failed to sell a single car. (Ptaszynski)
• The Cathars get their name from being cathartic and pure, but during the Middle Ages some people thought they got their name from the belief that they liked to kiss a cat's arse. (Harkin)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• There have been three Top 50 songs in the British charts that have been sung exclusively in Latin: "Gaudete" by Steeleye Span; "Choral in Latin" from Evita; and "Pie Jesu" from Requiem, sung by Charlotte Church. (Murray)
• The way to recognise the Buddha is to look out for his webbed feet, his tongue that can reach his ears, and withdrawn genitalia. (Ptaszynski)
• The whoopee cushion was invented by the Roman Emperor with the birthname Bassianus. (Schreiber)
• The oldest known purse is decorated with dogs' teeth. (Harkin)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• According to a 2011 YouGov survey 27% of Britons neither love or hate Marmite. (Harkin)
• The Knights of the Round Table included Lancelot, Gawain, Galahad and Gareth. (Schreiber)
• The Ministry of Defence owns 15 golf courses. (Murray)
• The rise in the use of female contraceptive pills is causing fish to become too effeminate. (Ptaszynski)

Presenters: Victoria Coren Mitchell, Harkin, Miller, Murray, and Schreiber

• Charles Hawtrey hoarded bedsteads, believing that they would help make his fortune. (Coren Mitchell)
• In 1937 you could visit Romford Dog Track and watch cheetahs racing. (Harkin)
• In 2010 the US Military built a supercomputer using 1,760 PlayStation 3s. (Miller)
• In 1552 a man in England managed to shoot himself to death using a bow and arrow. (Murray)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• Until the mid-2000s the best method for finding out how many pandas there were alive was to sieve through their faeces. (Murray)
• Since 2007 the Wikipedian Bryan Henderson has made more than 50,000 edits, all of which are exactly the same: tracking down articles using the words "comprised of" and changing them to "consists of". (Schreiber)
• The world's largest saw is used to cut through mountains in Kazakhstan. (Harkin)
• In the early days of racewalking the competitors were allowed to jog as necessary to relieve cramp. (Ptaszynski)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• The 2012 law prohibiting nudity in San Francisco was proposed by a politician named Scott Wiener. (Harkin)
• Charles Darwin's grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, got so large that he could not sit at his dinner table any more. Rather than exercising or dieting, he cut a semi-circle in his dining table so he could fit his stomach in. (Schreiber)
• Spotify's random function is not random. (Murray)
• The animal kingdom forgot how to have sex for 40 million years. (Ptaszynski)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• The son of Henry Perky, the man who invented shredded wheat, was also an inventor. He invented round shredded wheat. (Ptaszynski)
• In the 1960s a Canadian psychologist visited cafes across the world counting how much couples touched each other. In Puerto Rico it was 180 times in an hour; in Paris it was 110; in London it was zero. (Murray)
• In a particular time and place in history, you could avoid castration by shouting the word "Soho". (Harkin)
• Matthieu Ricard, named the happiest man in the world, is unhappy that people call him the happiest man in the world. (Schreiber)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• The route for the Hong Kong ultramarathon is to run up and down the same stretch of road 25 times. (Murray)
• The metre is wrong. It is 0.16mm out. (Ptaszynski)
• St Andrews Aquarium currently has three meerkats called Churchill, Admiral and Sheilas' Wheels. They also had two other meerkats called Aviva and Direct Line, but these have since died. (Harkin)
• The only ancient Egyptian socks that we know of all belonged to Tutankhamun. Also, he wore sandals, so he may have worn socks in sandals. (Schreiber)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• Finnish budget meatballs have so little meat in them that they have had to be renamed "balls", or pyöryköitä in the Finnish language. (Murray)
• Lady Florence Dixie once had to apologise to Queen Victoria after her pet jaguar killed three of Victoria's pet deer. (Ptaszynski)
• The Statue of Liberty originally wore a headscarf. (Schreiber)
• A Polo mint takes 42.5 minutes to dissolve if you stick it up your nose. (Harkin)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• When you have a tattoo lasered off you end up pooing it out. (Murray)
• The man who invented the airship, Alberto Santos-Dumont, used to hold dinner parties with 10ft high chairs so his guests could experience the joy of flight. (Ptaszynski)
• A new scientific study has concluded that there are too many scientific studies. (Schreiber)
• You should never pick up a desert tortoise. If you do it can urinate itself to death. (Harkin)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• Firefighters use wetter water than most people. (Harkin)
• Plants have their own internet made of fungi. (Ptaszynski)
• In 1710 the boys of Winchester College rioted over insufficient beer rations. (Murray)
• The first man to discover the clitoris was Colombo. (Schreiber)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• For 200 years after tomatoes made it to England, they were grown almost entirely for ornamental reasons. (Ptaszynski)
• NASA is planning on giving the Moon a moon. (Schreiber)
• Basil Rathbone, one of the first men to play Sherlock Holmes on film, spent much of World War One dressed as a tree. (Murray)
• Abraham Lincoln used his stovepipe hat to keep important documents hidden. (Harkin)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• Monorails were originally horse-drawn. (Schreiber)
• The Great Smog of 1952 was so bad that blind people led sighted people home from train stations. (Murray)
• On 24 March 2015 the temperature in Antarctica was higher than that in Malta, Madrid and Marrakech. (Harkin)
• Jesse Bogdonoff, Tonga's official finance minister, was also the official court jester. (Ptaszynski)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• Kaiser Wilhelm II once lost a valuable arms contract for Germany because he slapped Ferdinand I of Bulgaria on the bottom. (Ptaszynski)
• "Beware of Pickpockets" signs attract pickpockets. (Murray)
• No-one is quite sure how to pronounce Louis Armstrong's name. (Schreiber)
• The man who holds the Guinness World Record for the lowest voice can hit notes that are so low only elephants can hear them. (Harkin)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• The first thing was a parliament. (Harkin)
• One of the largest majorities in a Brazilian local election was won by a rhino. (Ptaszynski)
• Finland's parliament sometimes makes decisions in their sauna. (Schreiber)
• In British electoral history 8 candidates have been awarded no votes at all in a general election. (Murray)

Presenters: Harkin, John Lloyd, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• The final McDonald's burger ever sold in Iceland can currently be watched decomposing on a webcam. (Harkin)
• In 1851 Prince Albert commissioned a ballroom in Balmoral Castle made entirely out of corrugated iron. (Lloyd)
• During the 19th century Saddlers Wells Theatre was routinely flooded to stage fake naval battles. (Ptaszynski)
• The practice of dog owners pretending that they have not seen their dogs defecating is technically called "strategic non-knowledge". (Murray)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• Instead of being one of the founders of the USA, Benjamin Franklin almost stayed in Britain to found a swimming school on the River Thames. (Ptaszynski)
• Sumo wrestling referees carry a knife on them so in the event they make a bad decision during a match they can kill themselves. (Schreiber)
• The trailer for the longest movie ever made, Ambiancé, is 72 minutes long. (Harkin)
• In the Middle Ages lots of churches had statues of Jesus Christ which had moving arms so that Christ could be taken down from the cross and carried around the church. Other statues had the Virgin Mary with a working belly from which you could take a model of the infant Christ. (Murray)

Presenters: Harkin, Rufus Hound, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• Twice in its history the United States has been run by a shepherd: Thomas Jefferson and Woodrow Wilson both kept sheep. (Hound)
• There is a village in rural Russia where every single person knows how to tightrope walk. (Harkin)
• In Britain pedestrians step to the right to avoid each other and in Japan they step to the left. No-one knows why. (Ptaszynski)
• Half of all California condors were raised by glove puppets. (Murray)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• The first ever novel, The Tale of Genji, ended mid-sentence. (Ptaszynski)
• J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis both once went to a party dressed as polar bears. It was not a fancy dress party. (Harkin)
• Agatha Christie thought that Hercule Poirot was a "detestable, bombastic, tiresome, egocentric, little creep". (Murray)
• Before inventing television, John Logie Baird invented a pair of socks to wear underneath your usual pair of socks. (Schreiber)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• Bananas emit antimatter. (Harkin)
• Slovenia's largest lake, Lake Cerknica, disappears every year. (Ptaszynski)
• Half the world's saigas have died in the previous month and no-one knows why. (Murray)
• Barbra Streisand had a shopping mall built for her sole use under her house. (Schreiber)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• Cleaner fish can cheat their bosses, and their bosses can punish them. (Murray)
• Al Qaeda's job application form has a question asking who should be contacted in the event that the applicant becomes a martyr. (Schreiber)
• The single biggest expense for the computer game Lego Universe was to hire human moderators to make sure people were not making Lego penises. (Harkin)
• Jack Horner, the man who inspired the main character in Jurassic Park, is now building a chickenosaurus. (Ptaszynski)

Presenters: Harkin, Anne Miller, Murray, and Schreiber

• In the 1840s London buses has straps attached to the driver's arms that the passenger would yank if they wanted the bus to stop. (Harkin)
• Standing like Superman, with hands on hips, chest up and head tilted-up, can make you more successful. (Miller)
• Margaret Atwood's latest novel, Scribbler Moon, will not be released until 2114 as part of the Future Library project. (Schreiber)
• The Japanese are planning to install toilets in their lifts. (Murray)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• Guantanamo Bay has a gift shop. (Schreiber)
• The Natural History Museum, London is turning moths gay to stop them from destroying the exhibits. (Ptaszynski)
• The word "marvellous" has fallen in use from 155 times per million twenty years ago, to only 2 times per million today. (Harkin)
• In preparation for the National Day of the People's Republic of China 100,000 pigeons have had anal security checks to make sure they are not carrying anything suspicious. (Murray)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• Only 28% of people know when they have been flirted with. (Ptaszynski)
• Ancient Sumerian beer was as thick as porridge and was drunk through a straw. (Harkin)
• Baby turtles co-ordinate when they are going to hatch from within their eggshells. (Murray)
• Henrik Ibsen's last words were to his nurse. She said to him that she thought Ibsen was getting better, to which Ibsen replied: "On the contrary", and then he died. (Schreiber)

Presenters: Alex Bell, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• In Peru depictions of the Last Supper show Jesus Christ and the disciples eating a guinea pig. (Murray)
• The Citigroup Center skyscraper has a 400 tonne weight at the top of it to stop it from falling over. (Bell)
• Canadian crime writer Howard Engel lost the ability to read while also not losing the ability to write. (Ptaszynski)
• Apple Inc. co-founder Steve Wozniak met his wife via a Dial-A-Joke call. (Schreiber)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• Babies practice saying their first words before saying them out loud. (Murray)
• The first pair of Nike trainers were made with a waffle iron. (Ptaszynski)
• Rats dream of places that they want to visit. (Schreiber)
• Humans used milk as paint for 40,000 years before anyone thought to drink it. (Harkin)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• The world record for the horse long jump is shorter than the record for the human long jump. (Schreiber)
• Every time Alfred Hitchcock had a cup of tea he always smashed the teacup afterwards. (Ptaszynski)
• The Romanian equivalent of comparing apples and oranges is to compare grandmothers and machine guns. (Murray)
• Replacement eyelids can be made from foreskins. (Harkin)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• The first item to be sent by New York's pneumatic post system was an artificial peach. The second thing to be sent was an alive black cat. (Ptaszynski)
• Scientists have made a form of algae that tastes like bacon. (Harkin)
• Telescopes have a "new telescope smell" that can break them. (Murray)
• There is a museum in North Korea that has a scaled-down replica of the world's largest table. (Schreiber)

Presenters: Harkin, Miller, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• As part of the preparation for the D-Day landings the Allied Forces used condoms to collect soil and sand from the Normandy beaches. (Ptaszynski)
• Every second at least one star in the universe explodes. (Schreiber)
• Cannibals in ancient Mexico ate their human flesh with chilli sauce. (Harkin)
• Dogs are not allowed in Selwyn College, Cambridge, so the master's Basset Hound has been reclassified as a really large cat. (Miller)

Presenters: Bell, Harkin, Murray, and Schreiber

• According to the diary of the first chief of MI6, Mansfield Smith-Cumming, this is how the first day went: "Went to the office. Saw no-one, nor was there anything to do there." (Schreiber)
• There is a distillery in Kentucky that claims that playing Bruce Springsteen to the whiskey improves the ageing process. (Harkin)
• There is a statue of Nikola Tesla in Silicon Valley that radiates free wi-fi. (Bell)
• A third of people in Britain have almost written nothing by hand in the last six months. (Murray)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• The Scrooge Effect states that if you make someone think about death, that person is more likely to be more charitable and get more satisfaction when making charitable donations.
• If you like grilled cheese you will have 32% more sex.
• In 1567 the man with the longest beard died when he tripped over his own beard while running away from a fire.
• In 2009 two French mayors declared the same street a one way street, but in different directions.
• Canadian $1 coins are called "loonies" and $2 coins are called "toonies".
• The Danish word for "fifty-eight" translates "eight and half-three twenties".
• Jelly babies were originally marketed under the name of "unwanted babies".
• A rhinoceros beetle strength capacity is the same as a human lifting nine male elephants over his head.
• In 1958 Nikita Khrushchev met Mao Zedong, and Mao suggested a meeting while swimming, knowing that Khrushchev could not swim. Aides then appeared with water wings for Khrushchev and the meeting took place with Mao swimming up-and-down and Khrushchev flailing around.
• The police department in Cambridge, Massachusetts requested that when the Harvard Bridge was refurbished in the 1980s that the graffiti on it was maintained by the people who created it because it became useful in identifying when acts of vandalism were committed on the bridge.
• F. Scott Fitzgerald bitched to Ernest Hemingway that his dick was too small, then he went to the bathroom, Hemingway looked at it and pronounced it fine.
• The name "Gary" is as of 2013 less popular in the UK than both the names "Thor" and "Loki".
• When the tooth of a mastodon was once found in North America it was identified by the tooth of a giant.
• According to chemistry, alcohol is a solution.
• The first ICBMs placed outside of the Soviet Union could never be used because the Soviets in charge of them drank the rocket fuel because it was made out of alcohol.
• Bucharest and Budapest are the fifth most mixed up places in the world.
• The wages in Chelsea and Fulham are so high that it is the only constituency in the UK where the average wage is higher than the wage of their MP.
• Apollo 13 nearly ended in disaster before it got to space because of a malfunction, but a second malfunction occurred which prevented the ship from being destroyed.
• If you wanted to recreated the entire Lego Movie with actual Lego you would need 15,080,330 pieces.
• When a dog enters a room it knows what has happened two hours before, because of its sense of smell.
• Baby koala bears cannot digest eucalyptus leaves when they are first born, so they have to get the bacteria from their mother's poo to digest eucalyptus.
• The milk used to make Ben & Jerry's ice cream comes from massaged cows.
• The motto of the Salvation Army is: "Blood and fire".
• Since 1945 all British tanks must come equipped with tea making supplies.
• Josef Stalin had some scientists attempt to create an ape-human hybrid because he thought it would be useful in Russian industry and could withstand more pain.
• In 1953 NASCAR driver Tim Flock raced for eight races with a rhesus monkey named Jocko Flocko as his co-driver.
• There is a consultant urologist at Musgrove Park Hospital in Taunton, Somerset, named Nicholas Burns-Cox.
• The only man to stick his head into a particle accelerator not only lived to complete his PhD but has also not aged since the accident.

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• The first man to swim the English Channel, Captain Matthew Webb, later had a show where he floated in a tank for two hours. (Murray)
• The first item sold on eBay was a broken laser pointer. It was bought by a man who collects broken laser pointers. (Schreiber)
• When Alexander Fleming's neighbours foiled a burglary at his house, as a thank you gift Fleming gave them some mould from the first penicillin. (Ptaszynski)
• The earliest known ice cream recipes suggest flavouring with ambergris, which is whale poo. (Harkin)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• Dog urine makes street lights collapse. (Harkin)
• After the button was invented it took over 1,000 years for someone to invent the buttonhole. (Schreiber)
• As a baby Saint Nicholas refused to drink his mother's breast milk on fast days. (Murray)
• When Ronald Reagan left office, he left a note on the White House lawn for the squirrels warning them to beware of George H. W. Bush's dogs. (Ptaszynski)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• Las Vegas holds an award ceremony for people who make awards, presented by the Awards and Recognition Association. (Harkin)
• Napoleon Bonaparte loved roast chicken so much that his household chefs were constantly cooking some in case he decided he wanted any. (Murray)
• IMDb was originally just a list of actresses with beautiful eyes. (Schreiber)
• The word "fascinate" literally means: "the embodiment of divine phallus". (Ptaszynski)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• The current French Scrabble Champion, Nigel Richards, does not speak a word of French. (Schreiber)
• The world's only venomous frogs headbutt their enemies to death. (Harkin)
• When the film All Quiet on the Western Front was released in Germany, Joseph Goebbels went to see it at the cinema and within 10 minutes he had released stink bombs, itching powder and white mice in order to make people flee from the cinema. (Ptaszynski)
• Defunct sports from the early 20th century include archery golf, boxing on horseback, and competitive flagpole sitting. (Murray)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• The first ever pencils were used to draw on sheep. (Murray)
• Drinking alcohol makes you more attractive. (Schreiber)
• The National Giant Vegetable Championships had to move venues in the mid 1980s as the pumpkins started to get too big to fit through the doors. (Harkin)
• The Beaded Lacewing insect incapacitates its prey by farting on it. (Ptaszynski)

Presenters: Alex Bell, Harkin, Anne Miller and Ptaszynski

• Ruby, a sheep genetically engineered to glow in the dark, was accidentally sold to an abattoir. (Miller)
• During the launch of BBC Two in 1964, a live kangaroo got stuck in a lift at BBC Television Centre. (Bell)
• Dr. Seuss once wrote a Warner Bros. film called Going Home, that was banned because it accidentally predicted the Manhattan Project. (Ptaszynski)
• The phrase: "Why is my poop green?" is Googled most commonly between 5am and 6am. (Harkin)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• In winter we should all wear our socks outside our shoes, because they are grip more on ice. (Schreiber)
• Ancient Jerusalem's lost property office just involved shouting about what you lost in the hope that somebody had found it. (Murray)
• Charles Blagden, the man who discovered why we sweat, found it out by getting into a sauna with a dog, a beef steak and an egg. (Ptaszynski)
• Stick insect sex can last for 79 days, and the insects are stuck together the whole time. (Harkin)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• The seventh time park ranger Roy Sullivan was struck by lightning coincided with the 22nd time he fought off a bear with a stick. (Schreiber)
• In 2015, America's "Hero Dog of the Year Award" was won by a cat. (Harkin)
• The earliest known penalty of illegal parking, dating back to Assyria in the 7th century BC, was to be impaled on a stake. (Ptaszynski)
• Female corn earworm moths go invisible after sex. (Murray)

Presenters: Alex Bell, Karl Kruszelnicki, Murray, and Schreiber

• Two people in Sydney every week get bitten by ticks and shortly afterwards become allergic to meat for the rest of their lives. (Kruszelnicki)
• The Millennium bug is going to hit in 2038. (Murray)
• Buckminster Fuller's complete diaries take over 18 metres of shelf space. (Bell)
• Australian scientists have recently named a newly discovered species of fish: "blue bastard". (Schreiber)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• During the Miracle of 1511 the people of Brussels protested against the government by filling the city with dozens of pornographic snowmen. (Harkin)
• Harris hawks stand on each others shoulders to get a better view. (Ptaszynski)
• Pope Innocent VIII was given the nickname "The Honest" because he was the first pope to acknowledge that he had illegitimate children. (Murray)
• Spanish construction workers recently accidentally destroyed a 6,000-year-old neolithic tomb that looked like a picnic table and replaced it with a new and better-looking picnic table. (Schreiber)

Presenters: Harkin, Mark Mason, Murray and Schreiber

• For the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II people dressed up as television sets. (Murray)
• The world puddle jumping championships bans fizzy drinks in case they improve the participant's performance. (Harkin)
• The shuttlecocks used in professional badminton are made using real goose feathers which are always taken from the bird's left wing. (Mason)
• The Ancient Egyptians had a pornographic papyrus, known as the Turin Erotic Papyrus. (Schreiber)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• The world's only Cornish pasty museum is in Mexico. (Ptaszynski)
• 20% of people wake up wearing fewer clothes than they went to bed with. (Harkin)
• There are people who mine for jeans. (Murray)
• Jesus Christ had a monobrow. (Schreiber)

Presenters: Matt Baker, John Bishop, Harkin, Alex Jones, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• The total number of hours spent by people watching The One Show this year is the same as the total number of hours that have passed since humans left Africa. (Harkin)
• The largest object ever discovered is a hole: the supervoid. (Ptaszynski)
• In 2012 a kestrel was arrested in Turkey on suspicion of spying. (Schreiber)
• The phrase "van man" pre-dates the invention of the van. (Murray)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• Swiss cheese is losing its holes. (Ptaszynski)
• There is a ski shop in the middle of the Sahara desert. (Murray)
• The world's only firework-boxing match took place in London in 1937. (Harkin)
• You have a cell in your brain specifically dedicated to Jennifer Aniston. (Schreiber)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• Lord Byron's nickname for William Wordsworth was: "William Turdsworth". (Murray)
• If you grow a cos lettuce in a spaceship it tastes like rocket. (Harkin)
• Scientists have grown an ear using Vincent Van Gogh's DNA. (Schreiber)
• The larger Pacific striped octopus catches its prey by sneaking up behind it and tapping it on the shoulder. (Ptaszynski)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• Before trains had corridors guards had to climb along the outside of the carriage to check your ticket. (Murray)
• The names given by Ernest Shackleton to his dogs included Slippery, Slobbers, Satan, Painful, Swanker, Bomber and Bob. (Harkin)
• According to a recent theory, Stonehenge was built as a part of a team building exercise. (Schreiber)
• Utah has a 106 acre forest that is made out of one tree, Pando. (Ptaszynski)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• The Great Wall of China is held together by sticky rice. (Harkin)
• The world's largest single-cell organism, Caulerpa taxifolia, can get up to 12 inches long. (Murray)
• If you are bitten by the boomslang snake you bleed from every orifice. (Ptaszynski)
• Albert Einstein has a social media team. (Schreiber)

Presenters: Harkin, Anne Miller, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• The Very Hungry Caterpillar was originally called A Week with Willi the Worm. (Harkin)
• During World War II the XX Committee, or "Double-Cross Committee" was in charge of turning German spies. (Miller)
• Houses in Bali are built in proportion to the owner's body. (Ptaszynski)
• According to Isaac Newton the world is going to end in 2060. (Schreiber)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• There is only a 1 in 800,000 chance of nobody will cough during the recording of this podcast. (Harkin)
• The Colosseum has recently banned centurions. (Schreiber)
• From 1978 to 1991 tens of thousands of chicken heads were dropped from helicopters over Switzerland. (Ptaszynski)
• In 2015 a ten-year study concluded that punching glass is very dangerous. (Murray)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• The oldest turkey in the UK is called Dinner. (Harkin)
• Cary Grant and Clark Gable used to meet up once a year at Christmas to exchange unwanted monogramed gifts they received. (Ptaszynski)
• When it gets really cold Christmas trees can turn into glass. (Murray)
• One of the contenders for this year's Christmas charts is a prog rock album by Pope Francis. (Schreiber)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• There is a chemical called arsole.
• In the late 1950 and early 1960s, comics with gorillas on the front cover sold considerably more than comics without them.
• The 25th Amendment allows US vice-presidents to take over as president when the president becomes incapacitated. It has happened three times, and each time the president was having a colonoscopy.
• There is a scene in the movie Léon: The Professional where lots of police cars are parked outside a building. While this scene was being filmed a man who had just robbed a shot ran onto the movie set, thought it was the real police, and handed himself in.
• Gary Numan is three weeks older than Gary Oldman.
• The new organist of Leeds Cathedral is David Pipe.
• There was a ghost army in World War II. The Allies used rubber inflatable tanks and recorded the sound of troops to trick the Germans into thinking the enemy was there.
• Parrot fish wear protective pyjamas at night, which they eat in the morning.
• The parents of fringe-limbed treefrogs grow extra layers of skin to feed their tadpoles.
• The new tallest building in London is going to be named "Undershaft".
• In 1774, one newspaper estimated that out of the 872,564 married couples in England only nine entirely happy.
• At the Admiralty Office Lord Nelson has a small mahogany box to stand on because he was short and the admirals sat on a raised platform to make themselves higher before everyone who came before them to speak.
• When Prince Charles married Princess Diana the TV cables put in place during the wedding were run through small holes by ferrets.
• A ferret called Misty ran cables from the United States Space Command at the Y2K Centre. Her fee was a strawberry pop tart.
• When a new HQ of the London Underground was opened in 1929 the statue on the front of the building of a naked boy was so controversial and there was so much public outcry that the sculpture had to reduce the size of the statue's penis by 1.5 inches.
• Claire Danes and all of her movies were banned from the Philippines after she insulted the country in an interview.
• The Korean term for the grinding dance is: "bubibubi".
• Ottoman Emperor Abdul Hamid made it illegal to use the words "sibling", "star", "bedbug" and "nose".
• Once, in order to send paper money through the post, people used to tear the money into two pieces and use the halves separately.

Presenters: Alex Bell, Harkin, Murray and Ptaszynski

• Czech deer still avoid crossing the Iron Curtain. (Murray)
• If every car in Monaco decided to go for a drive at the same time, they would not fit on the roads. (Harkin)
• Centralia, Pennsylvania has been on fire since 1962. (Ptaszynski)
• The first recorded traffic casualty was a Roman pig that was run over by a chariot carrying an ornamental phallus. (Bell)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• Socrates had a spirit who spoke to him through the medium of sneezing. (Ptaszynski)
• People used to hang their refrigerators from the ceiling. (Murray)
• David Frost used to host live TV shows 8 nights a week, by travelling via Concorde. (Schreiber)
• The original chill pill was a pill you took when you had a chill. (Harkin)

Presenters: Helen Arney, Harkin, Murray, and Schreiber

• Tomorrow will be the longest day of your life, because days on Earth are getting longer. (Arney)
• In 1457 men with moustaches were banned from Dublin. (Harkin)
• Diplodocuses could break the sound barrier. (Schreiber)
• More and more scientists are just describing their finds as "astounding". (Murray)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• Even though we are not sure if it exists, the possible Planet Nine is the most planety planet of all the planets. (Schreiber)
• The first use of the word "snowmageddon" came in the same press release as for the apology for the first use of the word "snowmageddon". (Harkin)
• The week this podcast was recorded, the largest known prime number ever discovered was found. It would have been discovered in September 2015, but the computer which found it forgot to tell anybody. (Murray)
• In a press release for the new English language test for migrants, the British government misspelt the word "language". (Ptaszynski)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• A New Zealand firm has developed an irrationally angry robot to train telesales staff. (Murray)
• A fifth of the United States of America's meals are eaten in cars. (Ptaszynski)
• The most dangerous job in Britain is that of a hairdresser. (Harkin)
• Elvis Presley once started a riot at the end of his show by saying to the crowd: "Girls, I'll see you all backstage." (Schreiber)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski, Schreiber and Corey Taylor

• A million seconds is 11.5 days. A billion seconds is 32 years. (Taylor)
• Star Trek was almost not commissioned because the pilot was considered too erotic. (Ptaszynski)
• Lausanne, Switzerland, has banned silent discos for being too loud. (Harkin)
• The giant squid's brain is wrapped around its throat, so if it eats anything too large it risks brain injury. (Murray)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• In 2005, there were plans to make a 50-foot tall robot Michael Jackson that would roam around the Nevada Desert. (Harkin)
• In the 16th century people disliked hedgehogs because it was believed they sucked cows udders. (Murray)
• Herbert Spencer had an "angry suit" specially made which he only wore when he was feeling irritable. (Ptaszynski)
• In order for Spider-Man to climb buildings, he would need Size 89 feet. (Schreiber)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• The first water balloons were made out of socks. (Harkin)
• You cannot write properly in French on French computer keyboards. (Schreiber)
• Archers at the Battle of Agincourt had three arrows in the air at any given moment. (Murray)
• Right-handed marmosets are braver than left-handed marmosets. (Ptaszynski)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky used to hold his head while conducting, because he was afraid it would fall off. (Schreiber)
• Asthmatic otters can be taught to use inhalers. (Harkin)
• Your appendix can be turned into a sphincter. (Ptaszynski)
• The founder of Crufts designed special train carriages for celebrity dogs. (Murray)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• When something thought to be a meteorite actually turns out to be an ordinary rock, it is called a "meteorwrong". (Schreiber)
• Brown falcons commit arson. (Murray)
• In 1461, the mayor of Jaén, Spain, donated 10,000 eggs to his citizens so that they could have a huge food fight. (Ptaszynski)
• In 1951, Australia's football team played against England and lost 17–0. Their goalkeeper was called Norman Conquest. (Harkin)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• Grumpy from Snow White and the Seven Dwarves is not nearly grumpy enough, according to researchers from Duke University. (Harkin)
• The Ancient Romans had party bags. (Murray)
• Ernest Hemingway once stole a urinal from a bar, saying that he pissed away so much of his money into it that he owned it. (Schreiber)
• The official medical diagnosis code for being struck by a chicken is different to the official medical diagnosis code for being pecked by a chicken. (Ptaszynski)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• The frog whose Latin name means "blue frog" is actually green. (Schreiber)
• You can surf on mushrooms. (Ptaszynski)
• If you are allergic to cats, you are also allergic to lions. (Murray)
• It is illegal in Japan to make a human pyramid higher than five tiers. (Harkin)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• In Utah, it is illegal to wear a hat in your driving licence photo, but you can have a photo of you wearing a colander on your head, for religious reasons. (Schreiber)
• There was a Victorian job that consisted solely of pushing people into the sea, known as a "dipper". (Murray)
• Desperate Dan stopped eating cow pies because of mad cow disease. (Ptaszynski)
• The oldest sperm is worm sperm. (Harkin)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• For just a penny, you can rent a bee for a month. (Murray)
• Iceland imports ice. (Schreiber)
• The most dangerous invasive species in Britain is a poo-eating mussel from Transylvania. (Harkin)
• Until about 4,000 years ago, humans did not notice the colour blue. (Ptaszynski)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• In 1921, the News of the World gave away a free tea tray to any mother on the birth of their tenth child. (Harkin)
• Belgian fishermen go fishing on horseback. (Murray)
• 68% of mountains don't have pointy peaks. (Schreiber)
• The oldest "Your mum" joke appears on a 3,500-year-old Babylonian tablet. (Ptaszynski)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Sara Pascoe, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• In the 1920s scientists concluded that menstruating women wilted flowers. (Pascoe)
• One proposed solution to plane hijackings in the 1970s was to build a pretend Havana airport in South Florida. (Murray)
• In 2016 an organisation will finish a 40-year-long study of Britain's post boxes, at which point it will immediately start again. (Ptaszynski)
• In the Middle Ages, people slept with cow dung at the foot of their beds to keep bugs away. (Harkin)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• The week this episode was recorded, Elizabeth II will celebrate her 669th birthday. (Harkin)
• Brazilian Vice President Michel Temer accidentally released his presidential acceptance speech by sending it to the wrong WhatsApp group. (Ptaszynski)
• Marburg, Germany is fighting global terror by banning number plates starting with the letters IS. (Murray)
• The North Pole is on a head-on collision course with Greenwich, London. (Schreiber)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• Antarctica exports used toilet paper. (Murray)
• Planes are launched off aircraft carriers via catapult. (Ptaszynski)
• Apple used to give out an annual award to the employee who best stood up to Steve Jobs. (Schreiber)
• There are Japanese rock bands called Abingdon Boys School, Mass of the Fermenting Dregs and Seagull Screaming Kiss Her Kiss Her. (Harkin)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• When you are 30 metres underwater your lungs are only a quarter of their normal size. (Murray)
• Online shopping was predicted by in 1857. (Ptaszynski)
• The word "pants" comes from the Greek word for "all compassionate". (Harkin)
• All new emojis are approved by one 63-year-old man, named Mark Davis. (Schreiber)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• The first thing that Ted Cruz did after dropping out of the Republican race was elbowing his wife in the face. (Ptaszynski)
• Scientists have discovered that we still haven't discovered 99.999% of life on Earth. (Schreiber)
• As well as winning the Premier League title, the owners of Leicester City F.C. also won the World Elephant Polo Championships. (Harkin)
• Britain's first ever robot was designed to replace the Duke of York. (Murray)

Presenters: Harkin, Anne Miller, Murray, Ptaszynski

• The alarm clock on the Mir Space Station made the same noise as the emergency alarm. (Miller)
• The Bosnian national anthem is almost exactly identical in melody to the theme from National Lampoon's Animal House. (Harkin)
• Crows can bear a grudge for nine years and over two generations. (Murray)
• In 1959, the man who set the record time for swimming the Panama Canal was declared an honorary ship by the Panama Canal Authority. (Ptaszynski)

Presenters: Alex Bell, Harkin, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• The first performance-enhancing drug to be used in baseball was pulverised guinea pig testicles. (Ptaszynski)
• There is a power station buried inside a Welsh mountain that is only turned on during TV advert breaks. (Bell)
• 85 million years before butterflies existed, there was another animal that looked and acted exactly the same as butterflies. (Harkin)
• The Longquan Buddhist Temple in China has a monk called Worthy Stupid Robot Monk. (Schreiber)

Presenters: Harkin, Tim Minchin, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• Bulgaria has an agency that shoots rockets to kill hail. (Minchin)
• We judge music more on how it looks than how it sounds. (Ptaszynski)
• The BFG's dream powder also helps against constipation. (Harkin)
• Britain has only one performing circus raccoon. (Murray)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• The fear of lifts can be cured by starving the subject and forcing them to eat all of their meals in lifts. (Harkin)
• The Russian Space Agency light their rockets using giant wooden matchsticks. (Schreiber)
• The film Who Framed Roger Rabbit is based on a true story. (Murray)
• The first ever wristwatch doubled-up as a thermometer. (Ptaszynski)

Presenters: Stevyn Colgan, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• Heart surgeons now perform surgery while wearing 3D glasses. (Schreiber)
• One day we may all be drinking pigeon milk. (Colgan)
• Books used to be stacked with the spines facing inwards. (Ptaszynski)
• In May 2016, an internal memo from the Egyptian Government on how to crush the press was accidentally sent out to the press. (Murray)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• The way to defeat the Royal Navy's most advanced destroyer is to put it in warm water. (Schreiber)
• In 1998, Singapore held a beauty contest where 60% of the judging marks were awarded for how good a contestant's website was. (Harkin)
• There is a network of fully furnished fake apartments in the UK, whose sole is to get burgled. (Ptaszynski)
• The world's biggest skywriting firm recently turned down a request to draw the largest ever penis in the sky. (Murray)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• The reason Merlin isn't called "Merdin" is to avoid confusion with a 12th century word for faeces. (Ptaszynski)
• Mate tea leafs sometimes flow upstream from the cup to the teapot. (Harkin)
• Butchers in Ancient Egypt wore high heels. (Schreiber)
• There is a fish called the Amazonian wood-eating catfish, but it is unable to digest wood. (Murray)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• Farmers in Botswana have started painting eyes on their cows bottoms to stop lions from attacking them. (Murray)
• James Harkin's top speed running in armour is the same as the top speed of a snowflake falling to Earth. (Harkin)
• Archeologists have started throwing finds into skips because there is now too much history for them to store. (Schreiber)
• Restaurants in 1950s Vietnam used to put holes in their soup spoons to stop people stealing them. (Ptaszynski)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• A group of scientists are currently making their own lava. (Murray)
• The word "Timbuktu" means "woman with a sticking-out belly button". (Harkin)
• Lovers' hearts beat in sync. (Ptaszynski)
• This year Hugh Hefner sold the Playboy Mansion. It comes with 30 rooms, a pool, a tennis court, a zoo licence and Hugh Hefner. (Schreiber)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• The first trampolines were made of walrus skin. (Ptaszynski)
• One proposed solution to the problem of storing nuclear waste for thousands of years is putting up warning signs with Edvard Munch's The Scream on them. (Murray)
• Karl Marx used to do London pub crawls. (Schreiber)
• There is a glowworm in New Zealand that catches its pray by pretending to be a star. (Harkin)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• 18th century hairstyles included "The Spaniel's Ears", "Mad Dog" and "The Drowned Chicken". (Murray)
• The 1959 Formula One championship was won on foot. (Schreiber)
• The earliest known mention of the balalaika is for someone being arrested for playing one. (Harkin)
• Lemurs and lorises like their liquor as strong as possible. (Ptaszynski)

Presenters: Harkin, Anne Miller, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• The Olympics used to have a race which was just for old ladies. (Schreiber)
• There was a Victorian comic song called "Tony Blair". (Miller)
• The first president of the UK's Women's Institute used a frying pan as a whip, wore an entire stuffed owl on her head, and officially named the city of Canberra. (Ptaszynski)
• You can make yourself more attractive to members of the opposite sex by giving them a magnet. (Harkin)

Presenters: Alex Bell, Harkin, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• This episode of No Such Thing as a Fish is going to the Moon. (Bell)
• Geologists have made an earthquake by dropping something heavy from somewhere high. (Ptaszynski)
• Until 1970 you could still buy men-only flights from United Airlines. (Harkin)
• The discovery of the Higgs boson was announced in Comic Sans. (Schreiber)

Presenters: Alex Bell, Harkin, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• The controls in the world's first combat submarine, the Turtle, were lit up with glowing mushrooms. (Bell)
• While he was president, Woodrow Wilson played more than 1,200 rounds of golf. (Harkin)
• When Percy Shelley and Lord Byron went on a writer's retreat to Lake Geneva in 1816, the hotel opposite them hired out telescopes to their guests so that they could spy on them. (Schreiber)
• Famous historical games of Go include the blood-vomiting game, the ear-reddening game, the famous killing game and the atomic bomb go game. (Ptaszynski)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• Neanderthals wore capes. (Harkin)
• When the first ballpoint pen was launched in the US, riot police had to be deployed to restrain the crowds. (Ptaszynski)
• Not only was Lady Chatterley's Lover banned from Australia, but a book about the band was also banned. (Schreiber)
• Henry VIII contributed to NASA's space suit design. (Murray)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• On 13 July 1930, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle headlined a show at the Royal Albert Hall, despite having died six days before. (Schreiber)
• Dutch trains are fitted with lasers to fire at leaves on the line. (Ptaszynski)
• To avoid catching malaria you should carry a live chicken with you at all times. (Murray)
• All of the sandals worn by the Puebloan peoples of New Mexico had enough space for six toes. (Harkin)

Presenters: Alex Bell, Harkin, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• When she was prime minister, Margaret Thatcher ordered that all government documents should have slightly different word spacing, so if a letter was leaked to the press they would know who it came from. (Harkin)
• Duct tape should not be used on ducts. (Bell)
• Oxford University's first ever professor of chemistry, Robert Plot, believed that fossils were actually frozen urine. (Schreiber)
• Leonardo da Vinci made sculptures out of marzipan and got angry when people ate them. (Ptaszynski)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• The least creepy job in the world is weather forecaster. (Harkin)
• Self-driving cars are playing Grand Theft Auto in order to learn how to drive better. (Schreiber)
• Kookaburras are born with a hook in their upper beak which is specifically for murdering their siblings. (Murray)
• The first ever mention of paper recommended it as a cure for frizzy hair. (Ptaszynski)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• The first 2016 US presidential debate was best watched with the sound turned off. (Harkin)
• A frog has vomited up a new species of ant. (Ptaszynski)
• A group of Saxon soldiers is marching 300 miles towards Hastings, to commemorate the Battle of Stamford Bridge. (Murray)
• Scientists have concluded that objects look smaller when viewed from between the legs. (Schreiber)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• One of the stalls at the 2016 Conservative Party conference is a grouse shooting simulator. (Ptaszynski)
• Comets sound like a cross between a cat and a dolphin. (Murray)
• Nobel Prize winners always immediately return their award so they don't lose it in the subsequent party. (Harkin)
• Two recently recovered stolen Van Gogh paintings would buy you enough cocaine that you could snort a continuous line from Greenwich to Moscow. (Schreiber)

Presenters: Alex Bell, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• Scientists have developed barcodes for zebras. (Murray)
• Agatha Christie was once turned away from a party held in her honour. (Bell)
• Different species of dolphin babysit each other's children. (Ptaszynski)
• Jackie Stallone is a bum-reader. (Schreiber)

Presenters: Piers Fletcher, Murray, Justin Pollard and Ptaszynski

• The first person ever recorded buying a pornographic book in England was Samuel Pepys. (Pollard)
• If 50 people swam continuously for 15 months in an Olympic-size swimming pool, the water would boil. (Fletcher)
• In Wales, the size of garden used to be determined by how far you could throw an axe. (Ptaszynski)
• Some caterpillars find new friends by drumming on their anuses. (Murray)

Presenters: Harkin, Anne Miller, Murray, and Ptaszynski

• Four-year-old mice are less common than 100-year-old humans. (Harkin)
• The detective agency that hunted Butch Cassidy also worked for Coca-Cola. (Ptaszynski)
• You cannot get to the highest point of Mauritania, Kediet ej Jill, with a compass. (Murray)
• In 2015, a plane had to make an emergency landing after the smoke alarm was triggered by 14 sheep. (Miller)

Presenters: Alex Bell, Ed Brooke-Hitching, Murray, and Ptaszynski

• In 1875, the British navy erased 123 islands from their charts because they didn't exist. (Brooke-Hitching)
• The White House only got the ability to print on double-sided paper in 2016. (Murray)
• World War II Morse code operators could recognise each other's accents over the line. (Bell)
• Braver snails have thicker shells. (Ptaszynski)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Schreiber and Ptaszynski

• Smooth fan lobsters travel round the sea inside jellyfish, eating their rides as they go. (Harkin)
• In 1892, France built a telescope that was so long it couldn't actually be pointed at the sky. (Murray)
• The first gentlemen's club in America was formed for the purpose of eating turtle soup. (Ptaszynski)
• When Evel Knievel starred in the 1977 film Viva Knievel! he used a stunt double. (Schreiber)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Schreiber and Ptaszynski

• A pub in London has just renamed itself "The Bill Murray". However, because they couldn't get his permission, they had to name it after William Murray, whipping boy to Charles I of England instead. (Schreiber)
• It is impossible to paint a picture with the world's blackest black and the world's pinkest pink. (Harkin)
• At least 30% of the cocaine in America arrives by submarine. (Ptaszynski)
• In the Greek Odysseus myth, he escapes from the Cyclops by hiding under one of the Cyclops's sheep. In the Apache version of the same myth, he escapes by hiding in the anus of a buffalo. (Murray)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Schreiber and Ptaszynski

• The word "wow" has been popular in Scotland for 400 years before it caught on in the rest of the English speaking world. (Harkin)
• At least 61 species live in elephant footprints. (Ptaszynski)
• The original edition of Wisden Cricketers' Almanack was 112 pages long, and because the author wasn't sure what to put in it, was padded it out with the accounts of the trial of Charles I. (Schreiber)
• Fossilised poo is worth more of if it has what one collector has called: "The classic poo look." (Murray)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Schreiber and Ptaszynski

• The Oval Office is a giant weighing scale. (Schreiber)
• Because male bumblebees rely on sight to find females, they sometimes find themselves chasing after aeroplanes. (Harkin)
• Running a leaf blower for 30 minutes creates more emissions than driving a pick-up truck 3,800 miles. (Murray)
• Early humans had spiky penises. (Ptaszynski)

Presenters: Alex Bell, Harkin, Schreiber and Ptaszynski

• Scientists at MIT have invented an artificial intelligence that can see into the future, but only by two seconds. (Harkin)
• Big Ben is falling over. (Bell)
• When aspirin tablets were first introduced, people were unsure how to take them, so one patient ended up strapping them to his head to cure a headache. (Ptaszynski)
• The first British plans to put a human on the Moon were made by Oliver Cromwell's brother-in-law. (Schreiber)

Presenters: Alex Bell, Harkin, Murray and Schreiber

• In 1851 all of the 436,800 sandwiches sold on the streets of London were ham. (Murray)
• Since 2003, the UK has eaten £1.5 million in cash. (Bell)
• A day on the Sun lasts both 25 and 38 Earth days. (Schreiber)
• In 1945, police in Halifax, Nova Scotia initiated a campaign to stop people from beeping their car horns in Morse code to signal out vile and filthy language. (Harkin)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• The word "soon", can mean "right now", but people misused it, so it came to mean, "in a bit".
• The number plate of the car in which Franz Ferdinand was shot is the date that World War One ended: A111118.
• Australian bush rangers would put the horseshoes on their horses backwards so the tracks would appear to be going in the opposite direction.
• The US military blared out AC/DC music at Manuel Noriega for two days continuously to remove him. He surrendered.
• Symptoms of asthma can be treated with a roller coaster ride.
• Viagra is an excellent cure for jet lag in hamsters.
• Sean Connery was once pulled over and fined by a police officer for speeding. The officer's name was Sgt. James Bond.
• VfL Wolfsburg's longest-serving manager is Wolfgang Wolf.
• BSC Young Boys used to play at Wankdorf Stadium.
• The flag that flies over Big Ben is the same size as Wimbledon Centre Court.
• The reason scuba divers roll out of the boat backwards is that if they rolled forwards they would fall into the boat.
• Major League Baseball umpires are required to wear black underwear in case they tear their trousers.
• When the world's largest rocking chair was built, it was immediately welded to the ground because the sight of it rocking in the wind scared the locals.
• Adam Ant used to walk Paul McCartney's dog, because Ant's mother was McCartney's cleaner.
• The kakapo evolved out of itself the ability to fly, but they have also forgotten that they can't fly.
• When the ancient Romans deployed lions against enemy tribes, the tribes assumed the lions were large dogs.
• John le Carré's father once seduced a lady on a night train by claiming to be John le Carré.
• In 1996, two neighbours in Devon spent a year hooting at owls, unaware of the fact they were hooting at each other.
• People in Churchill, Manitoba, leave their doors unlocked in case people need to make a quick escape from polar bears.
• "Oxy" is Greek for "sharp" and "moron" is Greek for "dull", so the term oxymoron is an oxymoron.
• During the Christmas truce, the Germans put up a sign facing the British troops saying, "Gott ist mit uns", meaning "God is with us". The British replied with a sign saying: "And we've got mittens too."
• In 2010, Fiji lost their declaration of independence and had to ask the British for a photocopy.
• If too many pistachio nuts are shipped in the same container, they will spontaneously combust.
• The German International Development Agency is called "GIZ".
• The German word for "squirrel" literally means "nut croissant".
• A kangaroo licks its arms to stay cool.

Presenters: Alex Bell, Piers Fletcher, Harkin, Anne Miller, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

A collection of previously unreleased material from 2016.

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Sara Pascoe and Schreiber

• Jonas Hanway, the first man to use an umbrella in London was pelted with rubbish for doing so. (Harkin)
• The male brain changes when his partner is pregnant. (Pascoe)
• A fifth of all the species of coral on the planet have been named by the same man, John Veron. (Murray)
• The first female British playwright was called Joanna Lumley. (Schreiber)

Presenters: Alex Bell, Harkin, Murray and Ptaszynski

• In 1683, it was reported that some people were ice skating in the Netherlands, when the ice broke away and they floated all the way to Essex. (Harkin)
• Carlos Menem had such a reputation for bad luck that people would touch their left breast or testicle while shaking his hand. (Bell)
• Isambard Kingdom Brunel once spent six months with a coin stuck in his windpipe as the result of a magic trick that backfired. (Ptaszynski)
• To deal with violent or drunk people, Japanese police carry massive futons and roll the offender up in them to calm them down. (Murray)

Presenters: Alex Bell, Harkin, Murray and Ptaszynski

• John Adams, the second president of the United States, used to inspect London's dung. (Ptaszynski)
• You can be blocked from getting a Swiss passport if your neighbours find you too annoying. (Harkin)
• There are people in the Houses of Parliament who are constantly looking for fire. (Murray)
• The Cookie Monster is not allowed to eat cookies because it damages the fabric made to use the puppet. (Bell)

Presenters: Harkin, Anne Miller, Murray and Ptaszynski

• In 1758, there were two camels on display in London, one with a single hump and one with two humps. They were advertised as "the surprising camel" and "the wonderful camel". (Harkin)
• Before they are launched, London sends all its trains to Austria to be beaten up at the Rail Tec Arsenal. (Murray)
• The oil company Shell used to sell shells. (Miller)
• When Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart first performed in Naples, he had to stop to take his ring off half-way through because the audience complained it was a magic ring. (Ptaszynski)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• In the final years of its construction, Mount Rushmore was built by baseball players. (Schreiber)
• On some train journeys in China, passengers are forced to take it in turns to use the seats, so that everyone gets the chance to sit down for some of the journey. (Harkin)
• The Moon has been collecting tiny bits of Earth for the last three billion years. (Murray)
• The most deadly user of Portuguese man o' war venom is not the Portuguese man o' war, but the blue dragon sea slug. (Ptaszynski)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• A frog's tongue is 10 times softer than a human's tongue. (Ptaszynski)
• During the Second World War, Britain invented chocolate bars infused with garlic to give to pilots who were shot down, and who needed to make their breath authentically French. (Murray)
• A komodo dragon can taste its meal two-and-a-half miles before it gets to the restaurant. (Schreiber)
• You can improve your darts game by training yourself to dream about darts. (Harkin)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• The Doomsday Clock was originally set at seven-minutes-to-midnight because the artist responsible for it thought it looked good. (Murray)
• Some villages in the Central African Republic deliberately allow lions to live nearby so that they can steal their food. (Harkin)
• There is a Victorian time capsule under Cleopatra's Needle in London that contains photographs of the 12 best looking women in England. (Schreiber)
• After women stop breast-feeding their breasts eat themselves. (Ptaszynski)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• The smallest football league in the world, the Isles of Scilly Football League, consists of two teams who play each other 22 times every season. (Murray)
• In the 1940s in America, if you wanted to play a recording of a band's song on the radio, the entire band had to be present in the studio while you played it. (Ptaszynski)
• The British Library has a collection of over 60 million newspapers, and none of them can catch fire. (Schreiber)
• The man who invented mulled wine also invented an aphrodisiac sorbet. (Harkin)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• British warships are so noisy that enemy submarines can hear them from 100 miles away. (Harkin)
• The first account of Europeans smoking cannabis reported that one man hid in a jar for four hours and another man got into a fight with a pillow. (Ptaszynski)
• Glowworms fish with their own urine. (Murray)
• According to the Endangered Language Alliance, more languages are spoken in Queens, New York than anywhere else in the world. (Schreiber)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• Scientists can now predict when someone is going to fall over three weeks before it happens. (Schreiber)
• When he became president, Lyndon B. Johnson installed a special shower in the White House that fired a jet directly at his penis. (Harkin)
• Rejected names for British storms include Baldrick, Noddy, Megatron and Branchwobbler. (Murray)
• Boxer crabs use sea anemones as boxing gloves. (Ptaszynski)

Presenters: Dr. Erica McAlister, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• A vinegar fly's sperm is so long that if a human had a similar sperm-to-human size ratio, human sperm would be the size of a sperm whale. (McAlister)
• Whenever he got angry, Winston Churchill would throw his false teeth across the room. (Schreiber)
• Art galleries put glass marbles between the paintings and the walls to deter thieves. (Ptaszynski)
• Prisoners in Siberian Gulag used to eat prehistoric animals they found frozen in the ice. (Murray)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• The man who popularised the high five, Wiley Brown only has four fingers on one of his hands. (Schreiber)
• When Sally Ride went into space, NASA designed a make-up kit for her. (Ptaszynski)
• The Indian justice system has a backlog of 31 million cases. (Harkin)
• Scientists are building a special bunker in Antarctica to store bits of glacier from the Alps. (Murray)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• Sometimes racing ferrets fall asleep half-way along the course. (Murray)
• According to Venezuelan law, 90% of wheat must be made into loaves of bread rather than cakes or pastries. (Harkin)
• GCHQ has an internal ghost hunting club. (Ptaszynski)
• There are washing machines in India that have a button specifically for curry stains. (Schreiber)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• In 1966, the Chinese press reported that a 73-year-old Chairman Mao had swum 15km of the Yangtze river in 65 minutes. That's twice the speed that Michael Phelps has ever swum. (Harkin)
• Seahorses greet their partners every day to make sure they are still alive. (Murray)
• Falcon experts put on a special hat when they want to collect falcon semen. (Schreiber)
• Mayan women had to prove they could make cocoa with the right amount of froth before men could marry them. (Ptaszynski)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• At rush hour, there are more people under the ground in London than there are people above the ground in Edinburgh. (Schreiber)
• Every month, the same number of people on average Google "How to make love" as "How to make slime". (Harkin)
• Old Faithful used to be used as a washing machine. (Ptaszynski)
• There are three world's largest porch swings, in Louisiana, Nebraska and Ontario, and none of them is on a porch. (Murray)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• The person who invented the lie detector, John Augustus Larson, married the first person he interrogated with it. (Ptaszynski)
• Liechtenstein has roughly two companies for every person who lives there. (Murray)
• In 47BC there was a giant robot Cleopatra walking the streets of Alexandria squirting milk from her breasts onto the heads of onlookers. (Schreiber)
• Manatees control their buoyancy through flatulence. (Harkin)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• The largest diamond ever found in Russia is called the 26th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. (Ptaszynski)
• Scientists have announced that they finally know why shoelaces untie themselves. (Schreiber)
• HMS Victory nearly didn't get out of the dock it was built in because it was too big. (Murray)
• In a chocolate Hobnob the chocolate is on the bottom of the biscuit. (Harkin)

Presenters: Harkin, John Hodgman, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• One of the conspiracy theories as to why the RMS Titanic sank is not because it hit an iceberg, but because so many time travellers visited it that it caused it to sink. (Hodgman)
• During the California Gold Rush, a pair of boots could cost the equivalent of $2,300 in today's money. (Harkin)
• The area of Australia owned by British people is larger than Britain. (Murray)
• In the first half of the 20th century, multiple countries considered draining the Mediterranean Sea. (Ptaszynski)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• Ideas proposed for the US border wall include a trench full of nuclear waste, a one-way mirror and three million hammocks. (Murray)
• North Korea's national airline Air Koryo, owns ten times more taxis than it owns aeroplanes. (Harkin)
• All NASA astronauts are wearing hand-me-downs. (Schreiber)
• As of last week, whenever state media in Tajikistan mentions the president, they now have to legally refer to him by his full title: "The Founder of Peace and National Unity, Leader of the Nation, President of the Republic of Tajikistan, His Excellency, Emomali Rahmon." (Ptaszynski)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• The Chinese government are planning on giving their national anthem, "March of the Volunteers", a speed limit. (Schreiber)
• In 1921, 78% of shaving brushes sold in New York contained anthrax. (Harkin)
• The cargo hold of the largest plane in service, the Antonov An-225 Mriya, is longer than the first flight taken by the Wright brothers. (Murray)
• Poo on a table will look closer to you than it actually is. (Ptaszynski)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• Chicken eggs turn from pointy-end first to blunt-end first just before they come out. (Murray)
• Former Prime Minister of Georgia, Bidzina Ivanishvili, has started taking famous trees from around the country, digging them up and planting them in his own garden. (Harkin)
• US military medics use longer needles than normal because soldiers are often too buff for the regular ones. (Schreiber)
• If you drew a dot in indelible ink on your eardrum, it would appear on the outside of your ear in a few weeks. (Ptaszynski)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• Tibet is suffering from a shortage of butter sculptors. (Ptaszynski)
• You can email any of the 70,000 trees in Melbourne, Australia. (Schreiber)
• The world's hottest chilli, the dragon's breath, is not meant to be eaten. It is meant to be used as an anaesthetic. (Harkin)
• One of Napoleon's admirals, Georges René Le Peley de Pléville, lost three legs in battle. (Murray)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• All forfeited election deposits go straight to the Queen. (Ptaszynski)
• Only one political party in the 2017 United Kingdom general election, the Church of the Militant Elvis Party, offered to do anything about yetis. (Schreiber)
• There is a problem with the forthcoming Kenyan general election, as they are running out of symbols for their candidates. Candidates are now using a milk packet, a termite and a robot as symbols. (Harkin)
• In the 19th century, one of England's constituencies had no people living in it and another was underwater. (Murray)

Presenters: Alex Bell, Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski

• Baby elephants suck their trunks for comfort. (Bell)
• Movie goers blink in sync. (Harkin)
• If you buy an apple today it might have been taken off the tree in May 2014. (Murray)
• The first Western eyewitness account of India described it as having ants the size of foxes. (Ptaszynski)

Presenters: Alex Bell, Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski

• Early ice skating rinks stank of pig fat. (Murray)
• In 1912, the Toronto government ran a flyswatting competition. It was won by a 12-year-old girl who killed 500,000 flies. (Ptaszynski)
• When animating One Hundred and One Dalmatians, Disney photocopied the dogs. (Bell)
• Seeds have brains. (Harkin)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• The Icelandic version of Agatha Christie's Lord Edgware Dies took over ten years to complete because the translator could not work out how to translate two words. (Schreiber)
• Out of the 360 million Camemberts made every year, less than 1% are actually Camembert. (Harkin)
• Norway's coastline is so long that if you took a piece of string along it and stretched it out, it would run along the whole planet 2.5 times. (Murray)
• Beef stroganoff is named after the great-grandson of the person who brought human chess to Russia. (Ptaszynski)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• In China, you can hire mistress dispellers, to lure away your husband's mistress. (Ptaszynski)
• Richard Nixon's chair was 2.5 inches higher than everyone else's in the cabinet room. (Harkin)
• There is a special police unit in France whose job is to monitor six million dead people, called the "Cat-a-Cops". (Murray)
• The No. 1 place to by CDs in Indonesia currently is KFC. (Schreiber)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• To be a US tennis umpire you need to learn a 230-page book. (Murray)
• In Mexico, artists can pay their taxes in the form of artwork. (Ptaszynski)
• The size of a rainbow can tell you how polluted the air is. (Harkin)
• A new study has revealed that the genre of music with the most references to drugs is country music. (Schreiber)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• Guinness World Records have entries for "Most mousetraps released on the tongue", "Most matchsticks extinguished by the tongue" and "Most fan blades stopped by the tongue". (Harkin)
• Pope John Paul II's popemobile can be hired out for stag dos and hen dos. (Schreiber)
• There is no such thing as a manta ray. (Murray)
• The former mayor of Bogotá, Antanas Mockus, once hired 420 mime artists to make fun of traffic violators, because he believed that Colombians feared ridicule more than punishment. (Ptaszynski)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• It takes 10 years to learn how to make artificial sushi. (Murray)
• When Mount Vesuvius erupted, it created a mini-volcanoes in some peoples heads. (Ptaszynski)
• The first bendy straws were used by people in hospitals. (Harkin)
• Bomb detectors in America work 16 times better when they are fitted with a fake dog nose on the end. (Schreiber)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• In America, you get traffic jams caused by people chasing tornadoes. (Schreiber)
• There is a special quarantine centre for chocolate in the English countryside. (Murray)
• To celebrate the Communist revolution, the Bolsheviks planned to build a tower in St. Petersburg that projected the news onto the clouds. (Ptaszynski)
• Caterpillars are more likely to vomit when they are on their own. (Harkin)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• In 1957, America developed a shouting bomb, that would lecture the enemy for three minutes as it dropped from the sky. (Schreiber)
• In 2017 a book called Forty Minutes Late was returned to a library in San Francisco 100 years late. (Harkin)
• The person who invented crowd control barriers did so because so many people were flocking to see his giant balloon. (Ptaszynski)
• Volkswagen sells more sausages than cars. (Murray)

Presenters: Harkin, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• One of the costume designers on Star Wars also made a "moose suit" for scientists to help them sneak up on moose. (Ptaszynski)
• Switzerland has 18 living ex-presidents. (Harkin)
• A New Zealand scientist is planning to hurt for the Loch Ness Monster inside of a cup. (Schreiber)
• Our liver grows and shrinks by 40% every 24 hours. (Murray)

Presenters: Alex Bell, Harkin, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• 10% of the UFC is owned by UAE. (Schreiber)
• Palau is about to pass a law meaning that every hotel in the country has to be five star. (Harkin)
• Every Canadian citizen is entitled to a free government-issue portrait of Elizabeth II. (Bell)
• The first ever Encyclopædia Britannica said that humans were divided into five categories: American, European, Asiatic, South African and monstrous. (Ptaszynski)

Presenters: Harkin, Anne Miller, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• Genoa Airport has relaxed its liquid ban, but only for pesto. (Miller)
• It has been scientifically proven that The Beatles were an average band that didn't really influence music. (Harkin)
• When the first pilgrims went over on the Mayflower, one of them brought 139 pairs of shoes with him. (Ptaszynski)
• A new scientific paper on why horses only have one toe has been published. The author is Brianna McHorse. (Schreiber)

Presenters: Alex Bell, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• The original director of Jaws was a man called Richard Richards, who was fired because he kept referring to the sharks as a whale. (Murray)
• Until the 1960s, high speed trains in Britain would drop carriages off in stations that they weren't stopping at. (Bell)
• Birds in cages hop in the direction they are meant to be migrating. (Ptaszynski)
• Each year 26 tonnes of clothing is left behind at the starting line of the Boston Marathon: that's one tonne for every mile of the marathon. (Schreiber)

Presenters: Jason Hazeley, Murray, Ptaszynski and Schreiber

• The curator of the British Lawnmower Museum is allergic to grass. (Hazeley)
• Jimmy Carter once gave a speech in Poland where he accidentally said he wanted to have sex with all Polish people. (Ptaszynski)
• Narcissists don't like looking at themselves. (Schreiber)
• Clenching one's buttocks is a technique Christie's auctioneers are taught to stop their hands shaking. (Murray)

• 1% of the entire planet's wood supply is turned into Ikea furniture (Alex)
• The Nazca people would employ someone to walk around with a dead fox on their head (Harkin)
• Instead of going outside, the painter Gainsborough painted outdoor scenes by making a little model with moss and broccoli. (Murray)
• The US Navy's submarines are starting to control their periscopes with Xbox controllers (Schreiber)

• Avril Lavigne is the celebrity most likely to give you a virus. (Harkin)
• There is a type of dinosaur which is almost always found on its back. (Murray)
• Snakes that eat snakes can eat snakes that are 139% of their body length. (Schreiber)
• Medieval street performers multiplied numbers together for entertainment. (Ptaszynski)

• Unity Mitford was the only person to be BFFs with Churchill and Hitler (Cariad Lloyd)
• In the 1920s, doctors prescribed intentionally terrifying flights on aeroplanes to cure deafness (Ptaszynski)
• There is a patch of snow in Scotland that fell eleven years ago and just melted this week (Harkin)
• The first person ever to use the word "spongecake" was Jane Austen (Schreiber)

• Humans should be able to sense magnetic fields (Alice)
• The army has tanks that carry fold-out bridges for when they meet a river they can't cross. (Ptaszynski)
• A new law in Oregon has banned a game called Big Injun. There is no evidence anyone has played Big Injun since the 1950s, and no living person appears to know the rules. (Harkin)
• African wild dogs have a sneeze-based voting system. (Murray)

• When a prince in the Byzantine empire was ready to marry, court officials would walk around the land with an imperial shoe which they used to check the foot size of potential princesses. (Harkin)
• China has built an exact replica of an Austrian village so that tourists don't have to fly all the way to Austria. (Anna)
• Ants have self control. (Murray)
• When filming the famous hill scene at the beginning of The Sound Of Music, the helicopter downdraught would knock Julie Andrews over after each take. (Alex)

• Mo Farah has only one Guinness World Record, and it is in the one-hundred meter sack race. (Harkin)
• The inside of a Kit-Kat is made of more Kit-Kats. (Murray)
• The first hamsters to come to the UK arrived in a coat pocket. (Anna)
• An effective way to treat snoring is to regularly play the didgeridoo. (Dan)
• The North-East has the greatest variety of ginger hair in the world, with forty-seven shades. (Jess)

• This year, the phrase "Make America Great Again" adorned half a million hats and one anus.
• EastEnders star Adam Woodyatt was beaten in the London Marathon this year by a man in a sleeping bag, a woman in a full-body dinosaur suit, and a man carrying a tumble-dryer.
• The Queen's nickname is Gary.
• Australian Queensland police successfully lowered crime rates this year by asking victims to stop reporting crimes.

• Britain exports over fifty thousand boomerangs every year to Australia.
• The Catalan region does regular checks of websites that end in .cat to check that they're about Catalonia and not about cats.
• When Wal-Mart opened in Germany, it scrapped its policy of making employees smile at customers because the Germans found it too weird.
• It is really easy to beat chimpanzees at the game Rock Paper Scissors.
• Cleaning your teeth is the only time you get to clean your skeleton.

• It is easier to speak Dutch if you're drunk.
• American president Calvin Coolidge used to ride a robot horse inside the White House three times a day.
• A member of Iceland's Pirate Party just injured her eye and had to appear on TV wearing an eyepatch.
• The man who invented email later changed career to become a sheep's semen importer.
• The inventor of the bra had a pet whippet named Clitoris.

• Mountains are partly shaped by salmon
• The oldest surviving Sooty puppet has just been bought at auction, and it was bought by Sooty.
• When King George VI married the Queen Mother, the Archbishop of Canterbury wouldn't let them broadcast the ceremony on the radio in case people listened in the pub without removing their hats.
• The Brazilian frog known as the Pumpkin Toadlet has a mating call that can be heard by every animal out there except for one: other Pumpkin Toadlets.
• British Army soldiers can wear the same underwear for three months straight.

• The leading investigator of the Trump-Russian investigation is called Bobby Threesticks.
• Donald Trump this year confused Theresa May with a glamour model.
• An Archbishop in Sicily has banned Mafia members from being godfathers.
• The Bank of England's gym lockers didn't accept the new £1 coins.

• It used to be thought that you couldn't testify in court if you'd seen a crime through a window.
• American pioneering explorers Lewis and Clark have been tracked via their poo.
• The authors Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling and Joseph Conrad have all written books the size of postage stamps.
• Army ant nests are made of other army ants.

• Michigan banned plastic bag bans.
• In Italy, fishermen went on strike to protest against extremely intelligent dolphins.
• In China, Winnie the Pooh was censored because he looks too similar to Xi Jinping, the President.
• In 1766, there was a cheese riot in Nottingham where the mayor of Nottingham was knocked over by a large cheese.
• Baby robins sometimes eat so many caterpillars they turn green.
• The Russian communist leader Vladimir Lenin spoke with an Irish accent.
• In Japan, if you make a mistake at work you can hire someone to get told off by your boss, so you don't have to.

• This year, a zookeeper performed mouth-to-mouth on an aardvark for an hour.
• The CIA has hacking programmes called Panda Poke, Panda Flight and Panda Sneeze.
• A hotel called the Niagara had to close because it was flooded.
• The first loop-the-loop rollercoaster closed because so many riders were passing out.
• America has a national grocery bag packing competition.
• One of the things you need to know in order to become a British Citizen is who introduced shampoo to the United Kingdom.
• If your metabolism was as fast as a hummingbird's, you'd need to drink a can of Coke every minute to stay alive.
• In 1993, San Francisco held a referendum over whether police officer Bob Geary was allowed to patrol while carrying a ventrilloquist's dummy called Brendan O'Smartie.

• Two thousand bees were stolen in Beeston this year.
• Game of Thrones has set a world record for most stuntmen on fire at the same time.
• The telephone dialling code for Cape Canaveral, the famous rocket-launch site, is 3-2-1.
• The world's largest honey bees make hallucinogenic honey, and you're only allowed to collect this honey if you've had a specific dream.
• The man who invented the pink flamingo garden ornament dressed in matching clothes with his wife for 35 years.
• When Winston Churchill made his first radio address to the people of occupied France, he had his male French coach sitting on his lap.
• Meghan Markle's ancestors were executed by Prince Harry's ancestors.

• As well as getting a visit from Santa Claus at Christmas, Icelanders also get a visit from the spoon-licker, the door-sniffer and the sausage-swiper.
• An ancient Greek form of contraception was a suppository made of frankincense, myrrh and blister beetles.
• Oregon has twelve times as many Christmas trees as humans.
• The man who brought the phrase "Merry Christmas" to English was also the first Englishman to use the word "Prosecco".

• Archaeologists have just dug up, in the middle of the desert, an enormous Sphinx statue. It is believed to be anything up to 95 years old.
• When British author William Haslet died, his landlady was so keen to re-let his room that she hid his body under the bed while she showed new tenants around.
• Unicef has a nutrition ambassador called Poopy.
• The first ever sports bra was two jockstraps.

• Walker's Crisps only source potatoes that are grown far away from golf courses because their factory machines can't distinguish between golf balls and potatoes.
• During World War I, truces would occasionally be called in the trenches so both sides could yell insults at one another.
• 14% of all California's firefighters are in prison.
• Meerkats can turn their bottoms inside-out.
• Guide runners for sight-impaired runners can't use elasticated tethers at the Paralympics any more, after the Chinese started catapulting their runners across the finish line at the last minute.

• In Brussels, there is a commemorative statue to where Peter the Great once vomited.
• Only one study has ever found that men are better than women at recognising faces. It was a study looking at the recognition of the Transformers.
• There is a woman whose job for the last thirty years has been squatting above the Queen's throne so the TV cameras can get their angle right.
• US President Jimmy Carter once sent the nuclear launch codes to his dry cleaner.
• The game Cluedo was invented by A Pratt from Birmingham.

• King Ferdinand of Bulgaria was so scared of being murdered on the Orient Express that he locked himself in the toliet.
• The new goalie of the ice hockey team, The Belfast Giants, is allergic to ice.
• After every festival, the founder of Glastonbury has to drive around his farm with a giant magnet.
• During World War II, the owners of Foyles bookshop protected the store from Nazi bombs by covering the roof in copies of Mein Kampf.
• The French language has seventeen different words for "surrender".

• In the annual Lady Godiva parade, which famously celebrates a lady who rode naked through Coventry, not only does the rider always wear clothes, but one year even the horse wore trousers.
• The worst basketball coach in the history of the University of Kansas was James Nasmith, the man who invented basketball.
• Blowing out the candles on a birthday cake increases the number of bacteria on it by 1400%.
• The first person to swim the Atlantic said "never again" as soon as he was finished. He is now planning to swim the Pacific.
• Tigers always get in the water backwards because they love swimming but they hate getting their eyes wet.

• Scientists have finally worked out why the four of us, and all humans, are not constantly leaking.
• The iconic green code at the start of the Matrix movie is made from sushi recipes.
• The longest ever kayak trip was completed by a man who couldn't swim.
• Make butterflies use fake sperm to trick each other into thinking they're extra fertile.

• Due to climate change, nine out of the 21 cities that have hosted the winter Olympics will be too warm to do so by 2050.
• Canada has a strategic maple syrup reserve, and in 2012 a quarter of the maple syrup in it was stolen.
• When Russia invaded Finland in 1940, they were so convinced that they would be welcomed with a celebration that they to musical instruments with them as they invaded.
• Greek gods of the ocean include Poseidon, Triton, Oceanus and Doris.

• If all the bacteria in the world disappeared, we wouldn't notice for about a week.
• The world's largest wine cellar has tunnels 150 miles long, and it's so big it has to have traffic rules for people who drive through it.
• Before the settled on the name 'Windsor', surnames that were considered by the royal family included Guelph, Whipper, Wettin, Tudor-Stuart and England.
• In 2012, thieves stole an entire ski-lift from the Czech Republic.

• The dome of the Taj Mahal is held together with sugar, fruit juice and egg white.
• There is an ice-golf championship held each year in Greenland, 600km north of the Arctic Circle. However, because of the constantly shifting ice shelf, no players hold any records on that course, because it changes on a daily basis.
• In the 14th century you could be executed in France for wearing stripes, because they were the clothing of the devil.
• Victorian Britain had such a fern mania for so many years that some species were almost completely wiped out.

• Until the 17th century, mothers hung their babies up on hooks while they worked.
• There is a man in Brazil who has been living in a sandcastle for 22 years. He has to constantly water his house to stop it collapsing.
• Queen Elizabeth I was a man. According to the Dracula author, Bram Stoker.
• When a computer tried to come up with romantic messages for Love Hearts sweets, based on existing ones, it came up with "bear wig", "meat mate", "bong lov" and "you are bag".
• If a human could move their arm one tenth as fast as a mantis shrimp, they could throw a baseball into orbit.

• The Victorian Soldier Major Charles Bendiar once braved enemy fire to get an egg from a tree, then held it in his mouth while he climbed down, and on finding that it was stuck inside his mouth, removed one of his teeth to free it.
• If a woman left her husband in 18th Century England, the husband would often put a lost and found advert in the local newspaper.
• There is a bell that has been ringing in Oxford non-stop for 178 years.
• King Edward VII had a liqueur invented specifically for him to drink while driving.
• In 2005, Baboo, a male red panda at Birmingham Nature Centre in Birmingham, escaped. He was subsequently named Brummie of the Year.

• When a very large star quietly turns into a black hole without the usual explosion, the official term used by astronomers is a Massive Fail.
• Levi jeans are set on fire before they are sold.
• Thomas Edison tested over 1,600 different materials to find the right filament for the inside of his light bulbs, including fishing lines, cardboard and hairs from the red beard of an old friend.
• It is only worth leaning over to pick up a 1p coin if you can do it in less than three seconds.
• Glasgow was once voted the friendliest and most dangerous city in the UK in the same year.

• The first hydraulic lift was invented to carry sheep onto a roof.
• Pope Leo XIII was once the face of a wine and cocaine cocktail.
• Tunnocks Teacakes aren't allowed in RAF planes in case they explode.
• When Louis XIV, the French king, needed an operation, his doctor was so nervous that he practice it on 75 people beforehand, many of whom did not have the condition the operation was meant to cure.
• In 2004, a boat capsized in Texas because all the people on board ran to one side to get a glimpse of a nudist beach they were passing. All 60 passengers ended up in the water.

• Unmarried people are more likely to fall down stairs than married people. And previously married people fall down more than both of them.
• There was a tanning salon in Saint Andrew's called Sun Tan Drew's.
• During the Second World War, the US government considered making all American shoes deliberately ugly.
• The etiquette experts Debrett's run classes that teach five-year-olds to have strong handshakes and navigate dinner parties.
• A the first Robot Olympics held in 1990 in Glasgow, the English competitor was disqualified from the climbing event because of "inappropriate behaviour in front of children". It tried to mount the Russian robot.

• There are a number of chickens in California that have their own personal chefs.
• The Victorian cat-burglar Charles Peace could supposedly disguise himself just by changing the shape of his face.
• If the British treated their monarch the way that the Ancient Egyptians did, Queen Elizabeth II would have to run around a racetrack every three years to prove she was still fit for the job.
• People who smuggle drugs one way across the Sahara Desert often smuggle pasta the other way.
• When filming the battle scenes for Game of Thrones, the fighting was so intense that they had to create a safeword in case someone got hurt. So the safeword for Game of Thrones is "banana".

• The world record for most beer mats flipped and caught in one hand is held by a man called Mat Hand.
• Pandas have their own Harvard.
• The American flag was designed by a 17 year old student, and his teacher gave him a B- for it.
• The inventor of waterskiing started out being pulled along behind a boat standing on his head on a wooden chair.
• When Alan Jones won the 1977 Austrian Grand Prix, they didn't have the Australian National Anthem. Instead, a drunk man played Happy Birthday on a trumpet.

• Blue whales are born backwards, tail first, so they don't drown during birth.
• During the Qing dynasty in China, when the weather got hot in the summer, people would swap their pillows for ceramic ones.
• Oscar Wilde ate his books as he read them.
• The New York Police have a casting director for their line-ups.

• Every competitor at the world's longest dog sled race brings about six hundred spare pairs of shoes with them. And they're for the dogs.
• 3,000 feet up a mountain in France is a block of sandstone commemorating the exact spot where the author Victor Hugo's parents conceived him.
• In the event of a zombie apocalypse, only one country will survive, and that country is North Korea.
• The 1930s actor George Arliss once booked himself into the left luggage office at Charing Cross as a parcel on order to escape people who wanted his autograph.
• Adolf Hitler's brother, Alois, used to work at the Shelbourne Hotel, Dublin, where he was known as Paddy Hitler.

• In the 1960s, Brazil and France almost went to war with each other over whether lobsters crawl or swim.
• In 1350 there was a man called William Standupright, and he annoyed everyone else in his village so much that every single one of them moved away.
• The man who invented the Australian labradoodle deeply, deeply regrets it.
• The word "shit-faced" originally meant "having a very small face".

• The ancient Greeks wiped their bottoms with pebbles.
• In 1860 there was a woman in Paris who made a living by blowing the noses of war veterans who had lost their arms in battle.
• When avocados were first sold in the UK, they came with a leaflet explaining what they were and how to eat them.
• In the late 90s, Microsoft successfully acquired the extremely valuable domain name windows2000.com from a man called Bob Kerstein. In exchange they gave him bob.com.
• Astronauts have to re-learn to play the guitar on the space station, because they overshoot the frets due to their weightless arms.

• In an attempt to work out who the murderer in Charles Dickens's last, unfinished novel was, the main character was put on trial.
• In the past ten years, the number of registered pinball players worldwide has gone from 500 to over 10,000.
• The Victorians had better reaction times than we do today.
• The first people to live on the moon might be cavemen.

• In Singapore, pet fish have plastic surgeons.
• According to scientists, you are more likely to win the Tour de France if you are good looking.
• In the 19th century, setting type for newspapers was a competitive sport.
• Britain exports fresh air to China.

• Usain Bolt could fly on Titan.
• In 1604, one of King James I's grooms rode from London to York and back five times in the space of five days for a bet
• There are species of wasps the size of amoebae
• When pétanque players get into fights, it is known in the French press as "bouliganism".

• Austria qualified for the 1938 World Cup, but then had to withdraw because it stopped existing as a country.
• This year, Argentina's football association gave its players a World Cup Manual with a chapter on how to pick up Russian women.
• Scientists have invented anti-diving shinpads.
• In April, police in Lima seized over 20,000 counterfeit Panini football sticker albums with a street value of $350,000.

• There was a showman in the 1930s whose act consisted of repeatedly crashing his plane into the ground.
• Stronger chimps help weaker chimps to cross the road.
• A new scientific study has shown that people who claim to know a lot of facts don't actually know as many facts as they think they do.
• In the first major battle of World War I, the soldiers arrived by taxi. And the taxi drivers duly charged the government 70,012 Francs for the journey.
• The gulf corvena fish has such loud sex that it can deafen dolphins.

• The only known modern death due to meteorite was a cow who was hit in the neck in Venezuela in 1972. We didn't know about it for a decade because the farmer ate the cow and used the meteorite as a doorstop.
• There is a unique species of ant that only lives in ten blocks of New York City. They call it "the Manhattant".
• The Slinky business almost went bankrupt because the Slinky's inventor kept giving the proceeds away to religious cults.
• When zebras are running away from a lion, they fart loudly with every stride.

• During prohibition in America, the cops responsible for busting speakeasies did so dressed as gravediggers, farmers, statues, opera-goers, cowboys, judges, bums and old Italian matrons.
• Spider wrestling was banned in the Philippines because children found it more entertaining than going to lessons.
• There are more people pretending to be Vikings in the game "Vikings: War Of Clans" than there were ever Vikings on Earth.
• Ozzy Osbourne's 1992 tour was called "No More Tours". His 2018 tour is called "No More Tours 2".

• The BBC has sound effects including indisposed chicken, more or less normal chicken, standard orgy and comedy orgy.
• In the first Olympic marathon in 1896, the same stopwatch was used at the start and finish line, so had to be carried from one to the other, ahead of the runners, by bicycle.
• In first century Denmark, if you were really rich, you were buried with a chicken. if you were really, really rich, you were buried with a goose.
• Before magician PT Selbit invented the famous "sawing a woman in half" illusion, his big trick was called The Mighty Cheese, which saw him daring members of the audience onto the stage to try to push over his massive block of cheese.

• In 2004, Moscow's politicians were told to stop kissing each other, because it took up valuable time that could be spent having more meetings.
• The Northern Ireland Assembly building was camouflaged during World War II by covering it in cow manure.
• According to the best available study, men think about sex between once a day and 388 times a day.
• In 1565, Pope Pius IV commissioned artist Daniella del Volterra to add to Michaelangelo's Sistine Chapel fresco by painting underwear on all the naked people.

• If a lamb starts being born the wrong way up, the farmer pushes it right back up into the womb and gets it to start again.
• The Netflix category "Gory Canadian Revenge Movies" only has one film in it.
• In sacred Moche combat, the aim was not to kill your opponent but to knock his hat off. And the loser didn't get off that easily, though, because he would immediately be sacrificed.
• Pseudonyms that Elton John has used when checking into a hotel include Sir Binky Poodleclip, Judas Fart, and the Marquis of Minge.

• The first hot-air balloon flight in Bristol was indoors.
• In "Rage Rooms", where people pay to smash things up, the things people want to smash up the most are printers.
• One of the first things that McDonald's founder Ray Krok did when he bought the baseball team San Diego Padres was to sign a player called Big Mac.
• The yellow-billed oxpecker bird sleeps in giraffes' armpits.

• The Swiss flush about two million dollars' worth of gold down the toilet every year.
• Robert Burns made his own ink out of old beer, lard, elephant tusk and sulphuric acid.
• Sweden's highest point is now it's second highest, after the top of it melted.
• When financier William C Ralston modestly refused to allow a town to be named after him, the town instead named itself Modesto

• According to a new scientific study, the best way to perform CPR is to do it while humming the Macarena.
• Donald Trump negotiated an extremely bad deal for himself when he wrote The Art Of The Deal.
• On the Bayeux Tapestry, you can tell how important someone is by the size of their horse's penis.
• If you're a sloth, every time you go for a poo, it's more painful than childbirth.

• The world record for the longest time spent holding one's breath is exactly the same length as this podcast episode.
• Nikola Tesla was one of the guests at the first ever party with a stripper jumping out of a cake.
• When in London, Queen Louise of Sweden always carried a card saying "I am the Queen of Sweden", in case she was hit by a bus.
• Last year in the UK, two eight year olds were caught speeding.

• The legendary sumo wrestler Mainoumi Shūhei injected silicone into his scalp so that he could meet the height requirements to become a sumo.
• A quarter of all mentions of teeth in the Bible also include the word 'gnashing'.
• If you bought land in Australia before 1891, you had the legal right to the land stretching all the way to the centre of the Earth.
• Jumping spiders that wear eyeliner are more likely to be eaten by their mate.

• On their birthday, every beefeater at the Tower of London gets a gift of a free bottle of Beefeater Gin.
• The economic activity of the Roman Empire can be measured by studying thousand-year-old ice in Greenland.
• The umlauts that are used for the band Mötley Crüe are purely decorative. They're not intended to have pronunciation. However, when Mötley Crüe first performed in Germany, the crowd didn't know that, and chanted "Mutley Cruh! Mutley Cruh!"
• Traditionally, indigenous Hawaiians had personalised chants for their genitals.

• It's very hard for scientists to spot armadillos having sex, because armadillos have sex while running.
• The Korowai people of New Guinea put grubs in their ears to eat their earwax.
• The biggest single biomedical laboratory in Europe, designed to encourage scientists to chat more to each other, is so noisy that scientists are actually complaining it's too hard to concentrate.
• The largest sunflower farm in Ontario has been forced to shut because so many people were taking selfies there.

• A message in a bottle that was thrown off the Titanic as it was sinking, was found one year later washed up on a shore in Ireland, only a few miles the home of the man who threw it.
• The original Mastermind chair was specially modified to have detachable arms "in case a contender is too large to fit between them".
• One competition at the Highland Games used to be pulling the legs off a cow in order to win a sheep
• You can cure your arachnophobia by drawing pictures of smiling spiders

• In 1903 it was made illegal in Boston to lie down in a canoe
• Henry VIII once enjoyed a pudding so much that he awarded the woman who made it one of the monasteries that he'd just seized from the Catholic church.
• Dolphins in the wild have been teaching each other to moonwalk.
• In medieval Germany, the funniest joke anyone had ever heard involved replacing a flower with a poo

• There are whales alive today who were alive before Moby-Dick was written.
• The European Space Agency has a sound system so loud that if you heard it, it would kill you.
• South Korean teachers are banned from drinking coffee at school.
• Facial recognition technology for chickens allows you to pre-order a specific chicken and watch it grow on the farm before it ends up on your plate.

• Scottish poet William McGonnagal's writing was so bad a circus hired him to give poetry readings under the condition that audiences could pelt him with eggs as he read.
• One third of all the hazelnuts in the world go into Ferrero products.
• The earliest depicted sofas were five feet high off the ground.
• The first advert to be shown on Channel 5 was for Chanel No 5.

• The inventor of the Venn diagram also invented a machine that automatically bowls cricket balls.
• If you want to increase capacity on a cruise ship, you just simply have to cut it in half and add a whole new chunk of ship.
• Stephen Mangan, Michael Parkinson, Eamonn Holmes, and Cherie Blair have all been dropped from the TV program Who Do You Think You Are, because their ancestry is too boring.
• Wombats can kill predators by crushing them with their bottoms.

• The studio that made A Hard Day's Night demanded the Beatles' voices be dubbed, because they thought Americans wouldn't understand their accents.
• Monkeys in Melbourne Zoo are no longer allowed to eat bananas because humans have bred them to have so much sugar that the monkeys were getting obese.
• Nobel Prize winner Barry Marshall has developed a belt that sends his stomach rumblings inspired by his son who is a seismologist who makes devices that sense vibrations on the ocean floor.
• One building that burned down in the great fire of London was a public toilet that could be used by 128 people at the same time.

• Old European malaria remedies included throwing the patient head-first into a bush in the hope that he would get up quickly enough to leave the fever behind.
• Instead of commissioning new waxworks for their exhibitions, the Bible Walk museum in Ohio re-purposes discarded waxworks from around the world instead. As a result, Abel is played by Prince Charles, King Solomon is played by John Travolta, and Jesus is played by Tom Cruise.
• A giraffe with breathing problems can be treated by using a leaf blower.
• When 3,000 British teenagers were surveyed in 2008, 20% said that they thought Winston Churchill was a fictional character.
• In 1974 a research scientist, Dr Summerlin, announced that he had successfully transplanted skin from a black mouse onto a white mouse. It was later discovered that he had actually coloured the white mouse in with a black pen.

• Three-times memory champion Ben Pridmore is up to his fourth "lucky hat" as he forgot where he left the other three.
• Before he was executed, Walter Raleigh delivered a 45-minute improvised speech telling the crowd about his life.
• According to a new scientific study, the single most convincing word a human can use to prove that they are a human and not a robot is the word "poop".
• If you shake your keys at a moth, it thinks you're a bat and drops out of the sky.
• My dad once held the world distance record for leapfrogging (two-person team). They managed nearly seventeen miles from Hull to Withernsea, East Yorkshire. Set in the early eighties, I think they were probably drunk.

• When you went to the toilet on a World War II U-Boat, you had to summon a specially trained member of the crew to flush it after you had been.
• Alexander Graham Bell taught his dog to say "how are you, Grand-mama?"
• To stop being eaten by predators, some crustaceans wear disgusting-tasting snails as backpacks.
• There is a rock band made up entirely of Nasa astronauts called Max Q. The band has a constantly rotating line-up as they can't be sure that all members will be on Earth at the same time.
• In 2015, France called on its allies for more help in Mali. Luxembourg agreed to double their military presence in the country, and promptly added one more soldier.

• There was a make of toilet paper in Victorian England that was so posh every sheet had a watermark to deter counterfeiters.
• In 1972, a Canadian DJ held a contest to choose a Canadian national simile like "as American as apple pie". The winning entry was, "as Canadian as possible, under the circumstances".
• The scholar who first discovered that the Noah's Ark story predates the Bible got so excited by it that he stripped off his clothes and ran naked around the British museum.
• The rarest frog in England had a distinctive Norfolk accent

• Australia's first police force was made up of Australia's twelve best-behaved convicts
• In the first newspaper crosswords, the answers did not have to be actual words.
• In the German Renaissance, it was briefly fashionable for women to have themselves painted as a biblical character halfway through decapitating a man.
• Mice can't hear their own footsteps.
• There was a British man who changed his name to Tim P-P-P-P-P-P-P-P-Price just so telemarketers would have trouble pronouncing it.

• There is a special language in Papua New Guinea that is only used when gathering nuts
• The man who worked out how to stop soft cheese going mouldy came from a place called Molde
• When Charles Darwin submitted On The Origin Of Species to his publisher, the publisher suggested he should rewrite it exclusively about pigeons.
• King Louis XIII of France had a royal anagrammist.

• The most experienced sailor aboard Captain Cook's first voyage was a goat.
• For 150 years, Shakespeare's play The Tragedy Of King Lear had a happy ending
• Some advertisers have started putting single pixels on mobile phone ads, so you think it's dust, try to wipe it off, and accidentally click on the advert.
• One of the most popular celebrities in London, in 1860, was an oyster who could whistle.

• American Airlines banned passengers from travelling with emotional support insects.
• The man who bought the original Alcoholics Anonymous document waived his anonymity in order to help alcoholics.
• This year, scientists invented a battery that never runs out.
• Roger Federer lost the rights to his own initials.
• The company that makes Skittles produced an advert this year that will only ever be seen by one person.
• The government advised people being deported to Jamaica to put on a Jamaican accent.
• Argentina's Football Association issued a manual to its players and officials that included a chapter on how to pick up women while they were in Russia.
• Alexa got in trouble for laughing at her owners.
• An all-you-can-eat restaurant had to shut after two weeks after customers ate all they could.
• A snail racing competition was postponed because the snails were too sluggish
• Every minute, the Antarctic loses enough ice to keep the UK in slushies for an entire year.
• Researchers uncovered a supercolony of 1.5 million previously unknown penguins on the Danger Islands, after noticing streaks of penguin poo in Nasa satellite imagery of the islands.
• China called itself a "near-Arctic state" despite the fact that its nearest border ends a thousand miles south of the Arctic.
• Scientists at the University of Chicago have developed a prototype app designed for cannabis users so they can determine whether or not they are actually high.
• Armenians had a snowball fight in temperatures of 25°C.
• American soldiers gave away the location of secret military bases by going jogging.
• The Chinese army has had to ban fat soldiers from promotion, after a fifth of would-be recruits failed the weight test.
• The Belgian army announced plans to let recruits sleep at home during their training so they don't get homesick
• The US has built itself a digital North Korea
• Scientists exposed their AI machine to an online forum and it became a psychopath
• Nissan invented an AI that trundles around and scans the ground looking for a flattish clear space large enough to make a football pitch. It then paints the markings on that area ready for a game.
• Australian artist Mike Parr had himself buried alive in a steel box under an open road for 72 hours, to symbolise the burial of Aboriginal history.
• Scientists concluded that birds escaped death by asteroid thanks to their inability to fly.
• Nasa sent a man with a fear of heights to the International Space Station.
• Numerous lawyers refused to represent the US President, for fear he'd damage their reputation.

• The world's oldest krill was nine years old and was called Alan.
• FDR used to hold cocktail parties during the war, where the only rule was "don't mention the war".
• The prop need in the classic British comedy film Carry On Dick is worth twenty million pounds.
• Shops in the Philippines put their Christmas decorations up on the first of September. in total, they stay up for more than 35% of the year.
• The composer Rossini was bald, but he didn't want to admit it, so he had ten wigs made of different lengths, which he changed every week, and then after ten weeks he'd announce he was booking a hair appointment, and go back to the first wig.

(Compilation without facts)

• In 1833, the pyramid at Giza was almost dismantled by the Pasha of Egypt so that he could use the stones to build a dam
• The official means of military communication between the USA and China is fax.
• Psychologist Hermann Rorschach thought his test wouldn't work on teenagers as they were same as psychopaths.
• Robert Falcon Scott's dying wish was for his son to get into nature. Peter Scott went on the found the World Wildlife Fund and design its panda logo.
• A traditional hangover cure in Mongolia is the Mongolian Mary, which consists of tomato juice with a pickled sheep's eyeball floating inside it.

• Cockroaches can carry nine hundred times their own bodyweight on their backs.
• The first British travellers aboard the Orient Express were advised to bring a revolver and a teapot with them.
• The largest known prime number has 24,862,048 digits. When written in binary, it has 82,589,933 digits, but they are all the number one.
• To preserve their anonymity, Michelin restaurant reviewers are advised to not tell even their parents what they do for a living.

• In Amsterdam, the roads are paved with used toilet paper
• One frequent result of winning the lottery is going bankrupt. This also applies to people who just live near people who have won the lottery.
• The tenth Correspondence Chess Olympiad, which is done entirely by post, took so long to complete that the winners of both gold and bronze represented countries that no longer existed.
• When they're about to be born, baby sharks sometimes pop their heads out of their mother's cervix, before taking a look around, deciding against it, and retreating back into the womb.

• The emperor of the Incas only ever wore an outfit once, after which it was immediately burned.
• About 70% of parents admit to having a favourite child
• Robert Louis Stevenson died halfway through making a batch of mayonnaise
• In the 1960s, NASA helped to fund a scientific project that aimed to teach dolphins to speak the English language so perfectly that they would be given a chair at the United Nations to speak on behalf of marine mammals.

• The rear-view mirror was invented so that racing drivers didn't have to have a person sitting next to them in the car explaining what was going on behind them.
• A 2018 paper suggesting that people who have a surname which occurs towards the end of the alphabet are more likely to end up academically and professionally undistinguished was co-authored by Professor Jeffrey Zax.
• Grocery bags used in Hollywood movies don't rustle.
• Eating ginger can make you feel better about drinking out of a toilet.

• When Britain declared war in 1914 they accidentally did it in the wrong format and they had to swap the letters otherwise Britain would not technically be at war.
• There is a bacterium that can freeze water just by touching it, and these bacteria are used to make artificial snow in ski resorts.
• Women who are applying to be Qing dynasty concubines had to spend a night with the Emperor's mother first, so that she could check they didn't snore.
• Some meteors skim off the Earth as if they were a stone skimming across the waters.

• Harvard Business School recommends companies locate their headquarters in rainier places because it makes employees more productive.
• When they are mating, male cuttlefish can flirt with one side of their body, and simultaneously pretend to be a female with the other side of their body.
• William of Orange's favourite drink was cock ale.
• After five months of forensically analysing the indents made by a pen on paper, Dorset police managed to recover 26 pages of lost words by a blind novelist who hadn't realised that her pen had run out of ink.

• In the nineteenth century, champion ploughers were traded like Premier League footballers.
• The American Center for Disease Control has warned against kissing hedgehogs.
• Scientists have finally worked out what time it is on Saturn.
• The first ever blood transfusion to be scientifically recorded used a goose quill to connect an artery in the neck of one dog to the jugular vein in the neck of another.

• Animal metabolism was first proven by Antoine Lavoisier in an experiment where he put a guinea pig in a freezer.
• Britain has a special team of leak detectives, who listen to the sound of water using a special stick.
• Japan's cybersecurity minister has never used a computer.
• A Mumbai businessman is trying to sue his parents for giving birth to him, and his mother responded by saying if she'd met him before he was born, she definitely wouldn't have done it.

• There is only one person in the world who can predict the future using asparagus. For 2019 she has predicted extreme temperatures, a recession in the US and an all-time high in asparagus sales.
• The composer Haydn's wife cared so little about her husband's work that she used to tear up his scores to use as hair curlers and pastry underlays.
• To stop people stealing American roadsigns with the number 69 on them, Washington State has replaced many of them with signs that now read 68.9.
• Flies like to date the same sort of flies as their fly friends.

• Fifteen years after it was invented, the US government banned sliced bread.
• A common problem for ice hockey players is that the have such muscley bums that they can't find jeans that fit.
• When it was playing on broadway, Bill Murray went to see the musical Groundhog Day, then, the next day, he went again.
• There is only one confirmed male Yangtze giant soft-shelled turtle left in the world, and his penis is broken.

• There is a man in Nepal who can lick his own forehead.
• In 1903, you could buy a gramophone record made of chocolate which you could play a song on, and then eat the disc.
• In the early 1700s, the most popular British guide to the history, language and culture of Taiwan was written by man who didn't speak the language, had never been there, and new nothing about it.
• Ahead of breeding season, Iceland publishes an illustrated catalogue of the country's most eligible sheep.

• In the 18th century, London plays written by David Garrick and starring David Garrick would often be shown in theatres owned By David Garrick. They would been be reviewed by David Garrick, in newspapers owned by David Garrick.
• The basic source for Sigmund Freud's work on paranoid schizophrenia was the memoirs of a man who made unbelievable and ludicrous claims. That man's name was Dan Schreber.
• Swordfish can speed up and slow down time with their minds.
• In 1986, Waddingtons invented a board game which was all about trading cattle semen.

• Adult scooters were invented by a Swiss banker, who was hungry for a sausage.
• Goats have been engineered to produce spider silk, because when farmers tried to get the spiders to do it themselves, they just kept eating each other.
• When King George VI visited Washington, an an American chemist provided the royals with special "London water" so they could have exactly the same tea as they had in Britain.
• Many millipede researchers are annoyed that more than 70 years after World War II, the animals are still associated with the Nazis.

• The 95 year old billionaire who controls Viacom and CBS now communicates via an iPad preloaded with audio clips. His choices include "yes", "no", and "fuck you".
• Before scarecrows were straw dummies, they were living children.
• The first ever leisure caravan had a man on a tricycle going ahead of it to check that the roads were good enough.
• The gravity on Mars's smallest moon is so weak that if you built a ramp on it, you could ride your bike into space.

• After the author George Eliot died, her family spent fifty years publicly denying that she had a massive right hand.
• Stone grandfather clocks used to use ox testicle for their pulleys.
• The first motel was meant to be called a "motor-hotel", but the sign was too small to fit all the letters on.
• A man found guilty of deer poaching has been sentenced to a year in prison and been ordered to watch Bambi once a month during that year.

• The oldest football cup competition in Spain is the Copa del Rey. Each year, the winner gets their name engraved in the trophy, in Comic Sans.
• The American product "Chock full o'Nuts" contains no nuts.
• The scientist Robert Hooke recorded in his diary every time he had an orgasm.
• Warty comb jellies grow a brand new anus every time they need to defecate.

• Some of the plants at the Poison Gardens at Alnwick Castle are so deadly they are kept in cages.
• The man who got nominated for an Oscar for editing No Country For Old Men doesn't exist.
• Houses in ancient Turkey had no doors or windows. You got in by climbing a ladder up to the roof and dropping through a trapdoor.
• The Red Triangle Slug can escape from frogs by supergluing them to trees.

• If you were flying from England to Dublin, the air traffic control waypoint that you pass that tells you you're going the right way is called GINIS.
• The first ever bone transplant used a dog's bones to repair a man's head. The patient was immediately excommunicated by the church for no longer being fully human.
• There is a world record for pulling a train with model trains.
• In the nineteenth century, if the owner of an estate died, it was traditional for the estate's beekeeper to inform all of the bees of the death, and then allow them to mourn by covering the hives in black veils.

• In seventeenth century Europe, people used to sing each other the news.
• Pound for pound, a 33g finch can bite you 320 times harder than a T-Rex could.
• The most polluted city in the world is Kanpur. It is nicknamed "the Manchester of the East".
• Dogs over 35cm tall are banned from Beijing.

• For the last four years, there has been an annual academic conference dedicated to The Archers.
• A company in New York has invented coffee cups that grow on trees.
• The Mona Lisa effect is where a painting is looking directly at you. However, it has just been discovered that the Mona Lisa effect does not apply to the Mona Lisa.
• In ancient Rome, there was a job which was to deal with infected ear lobes.

• Hitchbot was a robot invented to see how far human kindness would take a mechanical hitchhiker. In 2015, he was left on the side of the road in Boston and was found dismembered in a ditch seventeen days later.
• A Hungarian entrepreneur has been fined for not building an underwater treadmill for dogs.
• The late actress Elizabeth Taylor, who was notorious for always being late, arranged to arrive at her own funeral fifteen minutes late.
• Mexico has a national championship of double entendres.

• In 18th Century Scotland, people believed that herring would punish people for adultery by leaving the area where the adultery had occurred.
• The most fashionable person of the 16th Century was an accountant from Germany.
• The North Pole is moving so fast that we can't keep up.
• The British vegetarian movement was started two hundred years ago by a man called Reverend Cowherd.

• As a child, the naturalist Frank Buckland learned to differentiate different kinds of animal urine by taste alone.
• In the 1980s, Romania lifted up and relocated dozens of buildings, often worth their residents will inside them.
• When at home, Freddie Mercury slept in a queen size bed.
• According to people who make their livings walking on fire and walking on broken glass, neither it's as painful as walking on Lego.

• Babies who live in London are more rude than babies from the West Midlands
• In 17th Century Japan, the super-rich would protect their homes from burglars by installing musical floorboards.
• According to its ingredients list, Pepperami contains 108% pork.
• Baby songbirds have in-built nappies.

• Hippos sometimes poo into rivers so much that all the fish downstream die.
• There are monks in India who avoid going out in the rain in case they splash through puddles and upset the microbes in them.
• During the Second World War, while American pilots were flying over enemy territory, not only were they shooting at that enemy, but they were also often making ice cream at the same time.
• In 1997, a town in Saskatchewan held a referendum on whether the end of a toilet paper should hang under or over the roll.
• In the 1948 US presidential election, the Democrats commissioned a papier mache donkey which was designed to have smoke belching from its nostrils to make it look impressive and intimidating. Unfortunately, all the smoke came out of its back end instead.

• Sweden's public art body has just commissioned an artwork which will hire someone to do nothing at Gothenburg's Korsvägen train station for the next 120 years.
• Ninjas' sword sheaths had removable tips, so that if they ever had to hide under water, they could use them like a snorkel to breathe.
• One month before the French Spiderman successfully climbed the second tallest building in the world, he was hospitalised after falling from a seven foot tall traffic light.
• In the early Eurovision Song Contests, songs could not be performed in public before the event. One Danish song was banned after the composer whistled it in a TV broadcaster's canteen.

• Sweden has more than four thousand cyborgs.
• Queen Elizabeth I's ladies in waiting would try on her underwear every morning to make sure it hadn't been poisoned.
• The world champion polo player builds swimming pools for his horses whenever they get injured.
• To prevent spoilers getting out, some Game of Thrones scripts were built to self-detonate.

• Adolf Hitler had size 13 feet.
• The oldest human out of Europe has been found in Greece. It was found in a museum.
• In the indigenous Mexican language of Chalcatongo Mixtec, it is impossible to ask anyone a question.
• King George III once went to a safety demonstration which involved putting the king in a house and setting it on fire
• Female hyenas say "hello" by licking each other's clitorises.

• Pigeons make better coastguards than people.
• Concrete is stronger if you make it with carrots.
• Head louse clinics always see an uptick in business when a new Pixar movie comes out.
• In 1926, Poland sent the US a birthday card that was signed by a sixth of its population.

• There was once an Olympic sport where you had to dive into a pool and then glide along for a minute. It was scrapped because the main factor was how heavy you were.
• At Polar Park in Norway, you're told not to wear wool clothes, in case the wolves confuse you with a sheep.
• This year, doctors in Vietnam saved a man's life by pumping fifteen cans of beer into his body.
• If you put a bunch of millipedes in a nightclub, all their genitals will glow in different colours.

• There was a Disneyland in England 569 years before there was one in America.
• Every year in Japan, there is an annual anti-Valentine march held by a group known as the Revolutionary Alliance of Unpopular Men.
• During World War II, the guns of the ship The HMS Queen Elizabeth were cleaned by wrapping a priest in a large cloth and pulling him through the barrels like a human pipe cleaner.
• Between 1910 and 1912, the Washington Post frequently tried to interview the president's pet cow.

• When eleven-time grand-slam tennis champion Bjorn Borg came out of retirement, he returned using a wooden racquet and was coached by a 79 year old karate expert from Wales. Three years later he retired again, having failed to win a single match.
• Shrews cope with winter by shrinking their own brains.
• According to US intellectual property law, you are not allowed to hold any copyrights if you are the Holy Spirit.
• In the 18th century, you could hire a professional canary trainer to expand your canary's singing repertoire.

• Jobs that have recently been added to the US census include dough scaler, automotive window tinter, and blimp pilot.
• Heavy metal musician Tony Iomme began playing heavy metal guitar with two metal fingers because he lost his real ones while working at a metal factory.
• In nineteenth century Romania, there were people who sold shadows, and they would sell your shadow without your permission.
• Stone aphids fix their homes by exploding themselves and plastering their own bodies over the holes in the walls.

• North American porcupines sometimes fall out of trees and impale themselves in their own spikes.
• Scientists are developing a t-shirt which tells you when you smell.
• The best astrophysicist in the world just failed to save a New York from a fake asteroid.
• Until the 1840s, there was no maximum size for a rugby team, so matches were sometimes played with up to 300 players on the pitch at the same time.

• Major league baseball has an official mud.
• In Brazil, women throw c-section parties where guests are served champagne and canopes while watching the host have a cesarian section through a viewing window.
• When Samuel Johnson visited Paris, he worried that his French wasn't good enough, so he spent the whole time speaking in Latin.
• YouTube was created because one of its founders couldn't find an online video of Janet Jackson's breast being exposed at the Superbowl half time show.

• The first ever ball pit was inspired by a jar of pickled onions.
• Bananas are considered such bad luck on fishing boats that many captains ban anyone on board from wearing banana boat sunscreen or clothes made by the company Fruit Of The Loom because their logo used to feature a banana.
• Tim Berners-Lee originally wanted to call the world wide Web "the information mine" — TIM for short.
• The first known use of the word "bellend" to refer to a person was for the entire 1992 West Bromwich Albion football team.

• Pope Leo X had a pet elephant who was killed when doctors gave it a gold enema.
• Johnny Cash, who released the song I Walk The Line, has a lesser-known musician brother called Tommy Cash, who released a song called I Didn't Walk The Line.
• De Beers use a giant vacuum cleaner to get diamonds from the bottom of the sea.
• If you want to buy a phone app in North Korea, you have to go to a physical app store.

• Elephants can tell how much of something is in a closed bucket by smell alone.
• Thomas Jefferson cut his Bible into puces and glued it back together in the order he thought it should be written.
• In 19th century America, caviar was a free bar snack.
• Wrestling star Andre the Giant was so massive that once when he drunkenly passed out in a hotel lobby, staff couldn't move him and had to cordon him off with velvet ropes until he work up.

• Using too much red lipstick can make your urine turn red.
• Some maggots can jump forty times their own length, but only in August.
• Humans may have developed motion sickness to stop us falling out of trees.
• To honour the US Supreme Court judge Antonin Scalia, Virginia's George Mason University school of law renamed itself Antonin Scalia School of Law, then immediately renamed itself again after it was pointed out that the acronym would be ASSOL.

• In Japan, you can buy left-handed chopsticks.
• The fax machine is older than the telephone.
• A boatload of researchers are about to deliberately get themselves stuck in the Arctic ice for a year.
• Leo Tolstoy, one of the greatest writers of history, frequently wore two hats in case his head got cold.

• The US town of Hell froze over.
• Scientists made an obstacle course for sperm.
• The British government issued a death sentence for a single bee.
• One of the women about to take part in the first all-female spacewalk has spent the last eight years hand-rearing a flock of geese.
• The Netherlands has a restaurant where if you move tables there is a chance you'll end up in Belgium.
• In order to stop drought, an Indian village married two frogs. Two months later, they had to be divorced because it would not stop raining.
• Echidnas have glittery poo.
• Sainsburys sells triple cooked chips, which you then have to cook.

• Greta Thunberg's middle name is Tintin.
• You can now be pulled over for drink driving by your own car.
• In a country of 1.3 billion people, a polling station was set up in the middle of the jungle for one single man.
• A Canadian man who threw his speeding ticket out of his car window was then given a ticket for littering.

• The Moulin Rouge had a can-can dancer who would distract patrons by kicking off their hats before promptly downing their drinks.
• In 1959 as a publicity stunt, a three ton block of ice was driven from the Arctic circle to the equator.
• Prehistoric babies drank from animal-shaped sippy cups.
• The reason movies include that "all persons fictitious" disclaimer at the front is because one of Rasputin's assassins successfully sued MGM for not accurately depicting the events of Rasputin's murder.

• The US Navy's doomsday aircraft, which was designed to survive a nuclear attack, was recently taken out by a single bird.
• When nylon stockings became rationed during World War II, department stores set up leg make up bars, where women could have stockings drawn into their legs instead.
• More than 80% of Japan's temples have suffered from raccoon damage.
• The economist John Maynard Keynes once brought a priceless Cezanne painting, and then hid it in a hedge.

• In Boston, if you start singing or playing the national anthem, you have to then go on with it all the way to the end, on pain of a hundred dollar fine.
• The first criminal in Boston to be sent to the stocks was the man who'd actually built the stocks, and he was found guilty of overcharging for those stocks.
• Five of the main types of French baguette are called flûte, ficelle, viennoise, sarmentine, and bastard.
• Whitney Houston's record label once sent a cease and desist letter to Saddam Hussein asking him to please stop using the song I Will Always Love You as part of his political campaign.
• In 1898, a Boston magazine described the game of croquet as "a source of slumbering depravity, a veritable Frankenstein's monster of recreation".

• The star of the film Candyman, where a character has bees coming out of his mouth, negotiated a one thousand dollar bonus for every time he got stung. He ended up with twenty three thousand dollars.
• As well as using crash test dummies, Volvo tests its cars with a crash test moose.
• Americans used to make their slippers radioactive so they could find them in the dark.
• The man who introduced chewing gum to the world had already been president of Mexico eleven times.

• Carl Sagan spent two years suing Apple Computers for calling him a butt-head.
• In 1995, astronaut Bill Gregory ate 48 meals in a row which included shrimp cocktail.
• The loudest male birds on Earth use their voices to yell at females who are sat right next to them.
• In the 1490s, the Italians called syphilis "the French disease", the French called it "the Italian disease", the Russians called it "the Polish disease", the Polish called it "the Turkish disease", the Turkish called it "the Christian disease", and the Tahitians called it "the British disease". Actually, they all should have been calling it the American disease.

• A deer poacher in Missouri was made to watch Bambi for every single month of his prison sentence.
• Police were called to a potential murder scene when neighbours heard a man repeatedly screaming "why won't you die?" and a child crying in the background. It turned out that the man suffered from extreme arachnophobia and his comments were directed at a spider.
• There was a man who went to Phil Collins's "Not Yet Dead" tour who died during the show, and then came back to life.
• A girl ordered a size sixteen bikini top and got two size eights instead.
• When racehorses travel by aeroplane, they're allowed to bring an emotional support goat for no extra cost.
• The French can't decide how to say the word "pencil" in their own language.
• There is a gravity measuring device in Maryland so sensitive that it can tell whether or not the scientists working on it have had lunch.
• The pirate who mentored Blackbeard once attacked a ship purely to steal all of the hats of everyone on board because his crew had drunkenly thrown all of their own hats overboard the night before.

• One of the main reasons people failed to get into the US army in the first world war was because the military required recruits to have a minimum of six teeth.
• The Ronald Reagan Presidential Library has been protected from wildfires by a herd of goats that includes Vincent van Goat, Selina Goatmez, and Goatzart.
• The Apollo 12 moon landing footage was faked.
• Australian poppy fields have crop circles. They are caused by wallabies getting high and jumping around in circles.

• The last TV show that the award winning eminent physicist Heinz Oberhummer made before he passed away was called The Universe Is A Shithole.
• Early laser eye surgery was performed in a trailer next to a trash compactor that, whenever it was switched on, would vibrate the trailer as the doctors were trying to operate.
• Some Inuits, if they got extremely hungry, would have been able to eat their own sleds.
• Some bottled water in Vienna costs €9000 per litre.

• In 1958, the Queen's speech was lost on the day of delivery, and then found by a nearby poodle.
• As well as being the birthplace of Jesus, Bethlehem is also where we found the oldest known depiction of people having sex.
• The most likely time in the year to have a heart attack is during a family Christmas gathering.
• Mariah Carey has three Christmas trees, one of which is decorated with picture of herself.

• Three new lawnmower records were set this year.
• The winner of the first ever heavy metal knitting championship was crowned.
• Two tourists planning to visit the Norwegian village of Å ended up 1310km away, in Aa.
• A 71 year old Frenchman crossed the Atlantic in a barrel, without a paddle or an engine or any sails.
• Amazon bribed the Amazon with five million dollars' worth of a Kindles.
• On July 20th, the world celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission, which landed the first humans in the moon, but few remember the crew of Apollo 12, Pete Conrad, Alan Bean and Richard Gordon, who arrived there just under four months later.
• The population of Lake Elsinore tripled thanks to the popularity of its poppies.
• A shark which had just eaten a shark was caught by a man called The Shark.
• Gillette had to recall 90,000 Venus razors because thanks to a manufacturing error, they posed a cutting hazard.
• A Disney café was closed because someone spotted a mouse.
• Five guys were arrested at Five Guys.
• There was a lunar eclipse in the UK on the anniversary of the moon landing.
• The Spirit of Britain abandoned the UK and fled to the continent.
• A rapper who wrote songs about credit card fraud was actually charged with credit card fraud.
• The owners of the world's largest replica of Noah's Ark sued for rain damage.
• If Bruce Willis managed to view up an Earth-threatening asteroid, it would simply reform and hit the earth anyway.
• A pre-election poll revealed Australia's most trusted politician is the Prime Minister of New Zealand.
• Avengers assembled against their biggest enemy: spoilers.

(Best-of compilation with no headline facts)

• In 1996, a windsurfer successfully broke into Alcatraz prison while it was hosting the movie premier of The Rock, a film about people trying to break into Alcatraz.
• Horatio Nelson had a brother whose name was Suckling Nelson.
• In the 11th century, hundreds of people in the UK paid their rent in eels.
• According to Polynesian mythology, Maui who is the god in the Disney film Moana, died by climbing into a goddess's vagina and being crushed to death by the obsidian teeth in there.

• In Britain alone, unnecessary emails create nearly 24 thousand tonnes of carbon every year.
• Hot dogs are called hot dogs because people used to think they contained dog.
• The oldest recording we have of a poet reading his own poem is of Robert Browning, who forgets the words to the poem halfway through and ends the recording with an apology.
• In 1948 in Idaho, leftover World War II parachutes were used to drop beavers out of aeroplanes.

• Thomas Edison was once almost killed by flying badger.
• There are only two groups of animals on earth that live entirely on seaweed, and they are a type of iguana and a type of sheep.
• In 2017, Chinal launched the world's first electric cargo ship. The ship is now being used exclusively to carry coal to power stations.
• The first ever instrument made for food quality control was built to test the consistency of jelly.

• When the Greek government put a tax on swimming pools in 2008, only 324 Athenians admitted to having one. A search by Google Earth, however, revealed the actual number: 16,974.
• Some pterosaurs had heads that were more than four times the length of their bodies.
• The world's first casino had a rule that you could only gamble if you were wearing a tricorn hat.
• To promote his new product, the inventor of vaseline would demonstrate his invention by doing his hands in acid and then helping the burn wounds with the balm.

• After being stuck at an opera that went on twice as long as the scheduled running time, Emperor Joseph II of Austria banned encores.
• Humans have transported European earthworms to every continent on the planet except Antarctica, in a process some worm experts are calling "global worming".
• The most popular street in America is Second Street, the second most popular street is Third Street, and the third most popular street is First Street.
• The game of Scrabble is partly thanks to Edgar Allen Poe.

• Even the dust at GCHQ is classified.
• People drive more carefully if they have a pavlova in the car than their own child.
• Ringo Starr's grandmother performed exorcisms on him to cure him from being left handed
• Baby albatrosses can take up to six days to peck their way out of their eggs.

• There is a sixteenth century exercise manual which recommends execises including running, tennis and loud reading.
• Scientists in Georgia just blew a 6m-wide soap bubble.
• Before she became famous, Marilyn Munroe was named The Artichoke Queen of Castroville, California, Miss Cheesecake by Stars and Stripes magazine, and Queen of the Radio Plane Company where she worked assembling military drones during World War II.
• There is a salamander in Bosnia who hasn't moved from the same spot since 2010.

• Traveling salesmen used to carry around miniature versions of everything they were selling.
• Female grizzly bears can get half-pregnant.
• When the Vandals sacked Rome in 455AD, they agreed that they would just take the money and not damage any of the property.
• People who have died from laughing include a fifth century Greek artist who couldn't stop laughing at his own painting, and an Australian dog trainer who died after reading the price difference of some commodities in 1915 as compared to 1920.

• When the world's largest bottle of wine sprung a leak this year, the owner called the local fire department who stopped the spillage with sandbags.
• When Michaelangelo sculpted David, the town mayor told him that the nose was too big, so Michaelangelo picked up some dust, climbed to the top of the statue, sprinkled the dust down, and claimed he had fixed it.
• A plane was once built that had nine wings.
• This year, a sperm bank lost a court case to a man named Dick Weiner.

• Pompeii's new drain system is 2,300 years old.
• There is a factory in Iran that makes 2000 US, British and Israeli flags every month, specifically for people to burn.
• The old word for "intestines" was "arse ropes".
• Researchers have 3D-printed sex dolls for turtles.

• Computer pioneer Charles Babbage once cooked himself in an oven for four minutes at 265° just to see what would happen.
• The manchineel tree is so toxic that if you park under it and it rains the drips from the branches can strip the paint from your car.
• Cryonic freezing chambers are built to store up to four bodies and five heads.
• If Hamlet had wanted to buy a lemon, it would have cost him €700.

• Before we had the technology to take photos for mugshots, policemen had to visit prisons to memorise all the inmates' appearances.
• Scientists working in the Arctic Ocean have caught chlamydia and they can't explain how.
• Jessica Alba has ridden the London Eye thirty-one times.
• In 2003, the county of Ottowa, Michigan released a brochure for would-be residents, to prepare them for living in the countryside. It included a scratch-and-sniff that emitted the smell of manure.

• Nasa fixed its Mars probe by getting it to whack itself with a shovel.
• We don't know what the Greek philosopher Plato's real name was. Plato was his wrestling nickname.
• The first ever internal combustion engine was partially powered by explosive moss.
• We have arches in our feet for the same reason that we fold slices of pizza.

• The inventor of condensed milk, Gail Borden, had previously tried inventing a biscuit made of meat.
• In 2014, four non-related economists with the surname Goodman published a paper about the economics of surname-sharing. The paper was titled "A Few Goodmen".
• If you wanted to have a bath in Paris in the 1820s, you could have one delivered to your door.
• Dogs can suffer from a sprained tail if they get too happy.

• When people accidentally swallow coins, their stomachs sometimes punch holes in them.
• Soldiers in the Russian army weren't issued socks until 2007.
• In 2016, a man won the lottery for the second time, using the exact same numbers that won it for him the first time. That man's name is Larry Gambles.
• Zagreb has a museum of hangovers. Its inventor was inspired when a friend woke up one morning with an unexplained bike pedal in his pocket.

• In 1825, Britain's most famous actor was nearly murdered by his own furious audience.
• It wasn't until 1913 that we finally figured out how to stop our food tasting like our cutlery.
• Ants have a special stomach which just to contain food to throw up into the mouths of other ants.
• Ancient Egyptians had artificial egg incubators, but they didn't have thermometers so they measured the temperature of the eggs by holding them to their eyelids.

• Loofahs are edible.
• The man who invented Jumanji did so because he hated Monopoly.
• There is a man in Brazil who nobody is allowed to go within five miles of.
• In 19th Century Osaka, flat residents owned the rights to their own urine but the rights to their poo belonged to their landlord.

• P. T. Barnum once tried to buy William Shakespeare's birthplace and transport it to America.
• In 1547, the Venician government assassinated two men to stop them from revealing how mirrors were made.
• The longest car in the world was so long that it had a literal back-seat driver.
• Ancient British fruit varieties include the Hen's Turd apple, and the Bloody Bastard pear.

• If you were to take a corn on the cob and remove each kernel in a row while saying "she loves me" and then "she loves me not", then she will always love you not.
• Mayan gods include Flyins Scab, Gathered Blood and Pus Demon.
• In pre-industrial Sweden, some people used slugs as grease to lubricate their cart wheels.
• In 2019, 69 pilgrims made a journey from the Cerne Abbas Giant to CERN in Geneva, or, as they put it, from the large hardon to the Large Hadron.

• Hagfish can eat by sitting inside their dinner and absorbing the nutrients through their skin.
• 1982's Time Person of the Year was the personal computer. The article announcing it was written on a typewriter.
• In order to decide which direction to go and preach every day, Fransicans spun round and round until they were so dizzy that they fell over and then went in whichever way their head was pointing.
• In 2004, a Canadian cheese maker dropped $50,000 of cheese into a lake to make it taste better, but then lost the cheese.

• Early proposals for raising the Titanic back to the ocean's surface included filling it up with ping-pong balls, injecting 180,000 tonnes of vaseline into it, and turning the ship itself into an iceberg.
• In 1927, an owl was found that had another owl in its stomach, and that owl had a third owl in its stomach.
• Almost every Englishman at the battle of Agincourt ate a small amount of soil just before the battle started.
• The first known colouring book was meant for adults.

• Sand dunes are brilliant at social distancing.
• According to a recent publication, people from the North of England are more than twice as likely to be naturally funny than people from the South of England.
• In 1943, German troops who were rescuing Mussolini had to sieze control of a tourist funicular railway so they could ride a cable car to the top of the hill and pick him up.
• In medieval Germany, bad musicians were tied to an instrument called the Flute of Shame.

• Paris's first public transport system failed, because wealthy travellers bought all the seats for themselves and then persuaded the government to ban poor people.
• Aladdin is Chinese.
• Merry-go-rounds were invented in medieval times for knights to ride on.
• In some parts of Japan, earwigs are known as chinpo-kiri — literally, penis-cutters.

• Two days after receiving his latest book, the author of Annals of Gullibility: Why We Get Duped and How To Avoid It, lost hundreds of thousands of dollars in a Ponzi scheme.
• In 2011, former Paralympian Josh Sundquist, who is missing his left leg, announced that he'd found his soulmate — ie, someone missing a right leg with whom he could split pairs of shoes.
• You can now diagnose a urinary tract infection using a Fidget Spinner.
• Al Capone ran a soup kitchen during the Great Depression. He served beed on Thanksgiving in 1930 because there had just been a theft of one thousand turkeys nearby, and he didn't want the authorities to think it was him.

• Spies can tell what people are saying by looking at the lights in the room they're in.
• London Bridge was destroyed by a tornado in 1091.
• This year's Dutch National Headwind Championships was cancelled during the race because it was too windy.
• Every week, planes drop fifteen million flies on the border between Colombia and Panama.

• The London Underground used to have a church interval on Sundays.
• The first ice cream on a stick was called a Good Humour bar. It was a modified version of a lollipop called the Jolly Boy Sucker.
• Kublai Khan's summer palace could be dismantled and folded away at the end of every summer.
• According to the people who have drunk it, billion-year-old water tastes terrible.

• Before hermit crabs were called hermit crabs, there was a hermit called Crab.
• Magna Carta smells of newly pressed sheets, with traces of old socks.
• Ford has a car wash made of giant ostrich feather dusters.
• According to Kellogg's, Tony the Tiger is an "adult" cartoon.

• Golden moles shine in all the colours of the rainbow and they'll never know it.
• Mozart and Beethoven both composed music for an instrument made entirely of glass. It was invented by Benjamin Franklin.
• Envelopes used to be made of clay.
• In 1939, America made a huge vehicle to drive across Antarctica. Unfortunately, they put no tread on the tyres, so it couldn't drive on ice.

• The Holy Roman Emperor once made every citizen of Milan pluck a fig from a mule's genitals with their teeth.
• Library books can set on fire if you put them in the microwave.
• One of the kings of León was called Anfonso the Slobberer
• There is a Chinese poem made up of 92 characters in which every word is pronounced "shi". The poem is called "The Lion-Eating Poet In The Stone Den", or, "Shī-shì shí shī shǐ".

• In the 18th Century, women expressed their political beliefs by wearing decorative stickers on their faces.
• The very first print run of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn had to be pulped after a bookstore discovered someone had sneaked a drawing of a penis into one of the illustrations.
• Before vaccination was invented, the main method of innoculation against smallpox was to powder scabs and blow them up your nose.
• You can tell if a movie character is a goodie or a baddie by the kind of phone they use.

• In 1948, a drive-thru, fly-thru cinema opened in New Jersey, where you could watch movies from the seat of your car or the seat of your small aircraft.
• The Beatles once rejected a £50 million reunion gig because the warm-up act was going to be a man wrestling a great white shark.
• In 1919, it was ruled that women would be allowed to swim competitively without wearing stockings, on the one condition that they quickly put on a robe as soon as they got out of the water.
• The film of Dr Doolittle was delayed for days after the giraffe being used accidentally stepped on its own penis.

• Sloane Square Underground station in London has a river running through it.
• In 1992, Hoover ran a promotion which was so successful that the firm collapsed and had to be sold off.
• After he retired from dancing in his late seventies, Fred Astaire became a skateboarder.
• The Icelandic word for museum is the same as their word for a flock of sheep.

• For fifteen years, German police hunted a serial killer who didn't exist.
• To run a Boeing 747, you need a binder full of floppy disks.
• In the 1920 US election, which was the first after women got the vote in America, only one woman in the whole of Georgia managed to cast a vote.
• There is a species of Japanese water beetle that survives being swallowed by a frog by crawling through the frog's body and escaping out of its anus.

• By complete coincidence the center of North America is called Center.
• The modern door handle was invented by Ludwig Wittgenstein.
• In 1801, England had a celebrity ox which had its own coach and horses.
• The world's least frequently published newspaper is released once every four years on leap day. The print edition costs €4.70, or you can subscribe to it for €100 per century.

• One theory of the origin of the nursery rhyme "Pussycat Pussycat" is that it's a reference to Queen Anne's poor personal hygeine and an accumulation of grime that once fell out of her skirt during a service at St Paul's Cathederal.
• In 1862, there was a special cravat invented to stop people strangling you in the street.
• For 24 years, any ship travelling between Wellington and Nelson in New Zealand would be guided through the most dangerous section by a dolphin called Pelorus Jack
• The Arthur Conan-Doyle estate is currently suing Netflix for showing Sherlock Holmes as having feelings and respecting women.

• I wanted to make a YouTube video about how interesting strobe lighting is, but the likelihood was it would give one of my viewers an epileptic fit so I've come on a podcast to talk about it instead.
• From the 1880s until 1927, Paris had an underground clock system which ran on puffs of air.
• After a penguin had to be isolated due to health issues, zookeepers in Perth are keeping him entertained by letting him binge watch Pingu.
• The person who measured the world's tallest tree did so by climbing to the top of it and dropping a tape measure down.

• Along with their drink, New Yorkers in bars used to be served a sandwich full of rubber.
• Dead fish can swim upstream.
• When the Berlin wall fell, one of the results was an 18,000,000 car traffic jam.
• There is a stone marker in Wisconsin that commemorates the spot where Elvis Presley once successfully stopped a fight by jumping out of his limo, pulling some karate moves, and threatening to kick everyone's ass.

• In 1943, a spy who topped the Gestapo's Most Wanted list was New Zealander Nancy Wake, who once judo-chopped a Nazi to death.
• John Cleese's silly walk is exactly 6.7 times sillier than a normal walk.
• In 1814, there were days of rioting in Dublin because a dog who was supposed to be starring in a play failed to show up on stage.
• While filming Return of the Jedi in the forests of California, the actor who played Chewbacca had to be accompanied by crewmembers in brightly coloured vests so that he wasn't shot by Bigfoot hunters.

• Theodore Roosevelt once was shot in the chest but survived thanks to a fifty-page-long speech tucked into his coat pocket. He delivered the speech reading from pages that now had two massive bullet holes in them.
• Some squirrels can put themselves in a deep freeze for the winter, and thaw themselves out to have a pee, and then freeze themselves again.
• In 1385, a four-year court case began after two knights embarrassingly turned up to a battle wearing the same coat of arms.
• The Audubon Bird Protection Society has warned its members against birdsplaining.

• During out-of-hours periods, hospitals' CT scanners are sometimes used to scan Egyptian mummies
• In 1973, British Rail successfully designed and patented a flying saucer.
• In 2017, the US Defence Secretary had a light installed in his bathroom which would turn on if North Korea launched a nuclear missile.
• Fashion historian Hilary Davidson has invented the Bill and Ted Test, which judges the historical accuracy of movie costumes by comparing them against the surprisingly accurate movie Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure.

• In India, you automatically get a government job if you qualify for the Olympics, and if you win a medal, you get a promotion.
• The photo of the Wright Brothers' first flight was taken by a man who had never used a camera before.
• On the French island of Ile de Ré, the donkeys wear trousers.
• In the late 1960s, the CIA considered assassinating people using lightning.

• In the 1930s, the ghost of a swearing mongoose led the BBC to revise its working conditions.
• Famous occultist Aleister Crowley used to make a curry so hot that he only served it on glaciers, so that diners could use the snow to cool their mouth down afterwards.
• Japan's Yakuza have been told they are no longer allowed to join in trick or treating.
• Ghost crabs use teeth in their stomachs to growl at their enemies.

• When you do a spacewalk, you have to wear sixteen layers of clothing and a nappy.
• Visitors to the Sarawak cave in Borneo don't report feeling claustrophobic, they report feeling agoraphobic.
• Chicago has an alcoholic spirit which tastes so bad that its own founder used to boast that only one in 49 men liked it.
• Land Rover once released a manual which was edible, so if you got lost in the desert you could eat it to survive.

• In 1978, chess player Viktor Korchnoi accused Anatoly Karpov of cheating using an elaborate, yoghurt-based code.
• Imitators of Harry Houdini included Howdiney, Boudini, Oudini, Howdini, Hoedini, Hardini, Houdeen, Bernardi, and Cunning the Jail Breaker.
• When the gates at Suomenlinna Prison in Finland are locked, it's to keep tourists out, not to keep prisoners in.
• One of Hawaii's biggest annual festivals is devoted entirely to Spam.

• Sir Roger Penrose, the mathematician who's just won the Nobel Prize, once designed a theoretically infinite geometrical pattern called the Penrose tiles. He then sued a toilet paper company for stealing it and creating a theoretically infinite toilet paper roll.
• Washington State's Department of Agriculture recently lost track of the single hornet they were trying to follow.
• 2 years after the release of the first James Bond movie, an actual British spy called James Bond was discovered in Poland.
• In 1970, burglars managed to successfully get past an unpickable door lock and steal American government documents by tapping a note to it a few hours beforehand that read "Please don't lock this door tonight".

• Museums need visitors' breath in order to preserve their exhibits properly.
• In 1997, a mass tug of war went so badly wrong that it ripped two of the contestants' arms off.
• In medieval elections, you were supposed to object to any suggestion that you wanted to win. When he became Archbishop of Canterbury in 1093, Saint Anselm refused to accept the ceremonial staff, so they had to break his fingers to force it into his hand.
• The reason America has a national anthem is down to Robert Ripley, believe it or not.

• From the Lismore Library in Australia you can borrow a person.
• It's illegal in the UK to tickle a trout.
• All of the cheese eaten on Antarctica is past its expiration date.
• In 1990, a British Airways flight landed with one pilot in the cockpit and the other hanging by his legs outside the front window.

• 1 in 3 people in the UK has seen the Queen in real life.
• In 1714, when a Dutch ship ran out of ammunition 14 hours into a battle, the captain sent a boat over to the enemy asking to borrow some gunpowder and cannonballs so they could continue the fight.
• Vanilla farmers in Madagascar stamp their names on each individual pod on the vine.
• Russian football team FC Sakhalin are based in such a remote town that, to get to their closest away game, they have to travel one sixth of the circumference of the Earth.

• There is such a big market for fake letters by Abraham Lincoln that people have started selling fake fakes.
• If you ask someone what day it is, they'll take twice as long to answer on a Wednesday as they would on a Monday or Friday.
• According to Vietnamese historians, Chinese forces were once defeated by a woman who had breasts so long she had to throw them over her shoulders in battle.
• One of the few incredibly rare times a giant squid has been seen attacking an ocean vessel, which was an image made famous by Jules Verne, was in 2003, when a boat was attacked while competing in the Jules Verne Trophy race.

• Every year in the UK, a joke committee gets together to whittle down a shortlist of jokes that they think are unfunny enough to put in Christmas crackers.
• In the 1880s, to defend against attacks on nativity scenes, one priest issued knuckledusters to his congregation.
• When asked this year, 21% of people said they didn't want Christmas carol singers visiting their home because of coronavirus. Another 55% said they didn't want carol singers regardless of coronavirus.
• Jim Carrey's makeup for the Grinch was so onerous to apply, the studio brought in one of the CIA's experts at enduring torture to help him get through it.

• If the 31st of December is on a Wednesday, technically that week is "Week 1" of the new year. (Ptaszynski)
• André Vingt-Trois is the thirtieth Archbishop of Paris - his surname means 23. (Schreiber)
• Indian luger Shiva Keshavan had to make a sled with wheels on and train on busy roads in the Himalayas, (Murray)
• The earliest version we have of Old MacDonald Had a Farm is Old Missouri Had a Mule. (Harkin)
• When planes are about to land, a computer in the cockpit yells at pilots to decide whether it's safe to proceed. (Schreiber)
• A rural farmhouse belonging to Joyce Taylor has 600 million IP addresses. (Ptaszynski)
• Jules Verne scholars refer to the novel as "Around the World in Eighty Days" and the play as "Around the World in 80 Days". (Ptaszynski)
• The CIA collected jokes from the Soviet Union. (Harkin)
• The first person to receive a gold medal in snowboarding had his medal stripped and then returned a few days later. (Ptaszynski)
• During the 1984 Olympics McDonalds ran a promotion meaning you would get free food when the US team won a medal. They did not count on the Soviet Union boycotting the event. (Toksvig)
• Nervana headphones send electrical impulses into your brain in time to the beat of the music you're listening to, making you even happier than you would've been. (Ptaszynski)
• After German reunification, the one thing East Germans insisted on keeping the same was the men on the traffic lights. (Murray)
• The American Dairy Association has a page of Famous Cows of the World, which includes Elm Farm Ollie, the first cow to fly in an aeroplane. (Ptaszynski)
• The reviews for the restaurant Wong Kei went down after they started being polite to customers. (Schreiber)
• Members of the Devenish-Phibbs family are named on plaques park benches all over the UK, even though they don't exist. (Ptaszynski)
• Scientists are trying to find out who killed the Dodo with a CT scanner. (Murray)
• Beer was banned in Iceland until 1989. (Murray)
• When the Queen stops eating, everyone else at the table has to stop eating as well. Queen Victoria was so greedy that she would eat incredibly quickly, and by the time the last guests were being served, she would have finished the course. (Ptaszynski)
• In 2015 the Finnish police asked citizens to inform them if they saw a pizza for sale for under €6. (Harkin)
• For just $1,250 you can buy a single hair from the horse that Lincoln rode in the 1860 election, Old Bob, who also attended Lincoln's funeral. (Murray)
• Until about 1998 there was a man working for the California Fish and Wildlife service called Terry Grosz, who would catch salmon poachers by pretending to be a salmon caught on their hook. (Schreiber)
• The Bryan brothers have a second job as a band. One of their songs has cameos from Andy Murray and Novak Djokovitch. (Ptaszynski)
• Ghost crabs are very house-proud, but only when they are sexually mature. (Ptaszynski)
• A CT scan of Egyptian priest Nesyamun revealed what his voice sounded like: Britney Spears. (Harkin)
• There are fewer chess players online than we think there are, because players create fake accounts, play themselves, and defeat them to raise their own ranking. (Schreiber)
• The Tyburn Angling Society still meet up once a year to report how many fish they've caught in the Tyburn river. As the river has been fully enclosed and absorbed into London's sewer system, the number is always zero. (Schreiber)
• When Harry Houdini fought with his wife he would leave the house, walk around the block, and then come back and throw his hat in through the door. If she threw the hat back, she was still angry. (Murray)
• The oldest story about Mongooses is from 3000 years ago. (Harkin)
• The only monarch Finland ever had was a German who never visited Finland. (Ptaszynski)
• The art forger Elmyr de Hory did so many forgeries of the artist Amedeo Modigliani that today we can't tell which works are real and which are forgeries. (Harkin)
• During the Second World War, a pair of Dutch sisters would cycle around and ambush Nazi collaborators. (Ptaszynski)

• While working as a publisher, poet TS Eliot liked to sit his visiting authors on a whoopie cushion, before offering them an exploding cigar.
• In 2001, an artist got lost in Los Angeles and decided to make his own sign to stop other people from getting lost in future. Not only did it remain unnoticed for more than a year, but when the city was tipped off, they found that it met all signage rules and they kept it in place for eight years.
• King Edward III owned a yeti mask.
• There's a single termite home in Brazil that's the same size as Great Britain.

• Whenever JFK flew in Air Force One, he was sat in a rocking chair.
• Due to Covid-19, the 2020 Twenty20 cricket world cup will be in 2021, and the 2021 Twenty20 will happen in 2022.
• In 1682, Russia was ruled by two half-brothers aged 16 and 10. A special double throne was built so they could make proclamations together, but it had a secret window behind it so they could get messages from their sister Sophia, who was literally the power behind the throne.
• If an octopus's arm comes off, it will keep picking up food and trying to put it where its mouth used to be.