Useless facts. Share yours. No googling allowed.

[SeasickSteveIsMyBoyfriend]

Mona Lisa has no eyebrows.

Its illegal for a woman to eat chocolate on a bus.

111,111 x 111,111 = 12345654321

Don't know if that's true, Bucharest, but I do know numbers do funny things exponentially - like every person of English ancestry being descended from Edward I (or it could be II can't recall). Because you are doubling the number of ancestors every generation - two parents, four grandparents, eight great grandparents, 16 two greats, 32 four greats and so on. And family trees include aunts and cousins so I'm sure the number just explode when you get to lots of generations.

Which is why pyramid selling only works for the people at the very top - within a few steps you have to get everyone in the country signed up to make any money.

Probably.

(I always chuckle at Who Do You Think You Are when some celeb gets excited about great-great-great-great Granny or Granddad being an aristocrat - yeah, you and two thousand other people...)

i haven't (yet) read the whole thread so this may have been mentioned...

wallabies are the australian emblem because they cannot jump backwards.

How could you have more people in your family tree than have ever existed?! That's not possible!

Doctor Who first broadcast was supposed to be on 22nd November 1963, but was postponed due to the assassination that day of JFK

jaffa cakes caused a legal battle to decide whether they are cakes or biscuits (biscuits are subject to VAT, cakes are not). they are cakes because, like cakes they go hard as they get staler - biscuits go soft....

i can eat a whole box of jaffa cakes on the 15 minute drive home from work. fact.

Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are witren, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae.
This is because the brain does not read every letter by itself but the word as a whole.

Isnt the human brain clever

Seen that before, Alfie. Very clever.

If you stick the two ends of a strip of paper together to make a circle, it has two sides - front and back. Slice it in two along the length, and it becomes a long squiggly circle that HAS ONLY ONE SIDE. I still don't understand it, even after doing with paper that's a different colour on each side!

by geometry

I forgot, you have to twist the paper don't you?

The vagus nerve in a giraffe loops down the neck, underneath the heart and back up to the larynx. This has happened over the hundreds of millions of years since they evolved from aquatic creatures (as in fact we all have)

We didn't evolve from apes as many people mistakenly think, but we share a common ancestor with them

AnyFuleKno..

That's a bit blooming clever.

More evolution related fun. Whales have evolved from a creature which was land dwelling, so they have effectively returned to the sea. The most closely related mammal to a hippo is a whale.

Finally for anyone eating their tea, the prawn is a very close relation to the woodlouse

St Johns Wood is the only station on the London Underground that doesn't have any letters from the word 'mackerel' in it.
I LOVE that fact

OMG I've only just finished page one and I am in awe of the amount of stuff I have learnt...

Thanks reeling

A fun fact my boss always likes to trot out (pardon the pun)

Of the 60 Racecourses in Great Britain only 4 do not contain the letters R.A.C.E:

Goodwood
Huntingdon
Plumpton
Ludlow

Oh, and Cbear6's point about human babies being born neonate (i.e. helpless) because our heads are so big is true. It is known as the missing fourth trimester (as in, we should be pregnant for a whole year but have to give birth three months early or baby would get stuck). But the first time I mentioned it on here I got loads of hassle from otherwise intelligent posters telling me I was talking crap! (Admittedly I think I posted on a fairly argumentative thread but still...)

Crabs piss through their eyes.

Bucharest is that really so?? I told dp that the reason i think my pelvic floor survived six children is that I clench and grind my teeth a lot- dp looked at me like but there you go

The difference between elephants's poo and hippopotamus' poo is that elephants just let it drop, and hippos wag their tales whle they are doing it, so it sort of sprays around.

you can die of lack of sleep yes
lovely experiments done on cats with moats of water round them and every time they fell asleep they dipped into the water - eventually they died of no sleep not drowning

C is the third letter of the alphabet - fact