Unique Facts

They don’t change colour to match the background. Never have; never will. Complete myth. Utter fabrication. Total lie. They change colour as a result of different emotional states. If they happen to match the background it’s entirely coincidental. Chameleons change colour when frightened or picked up or when they beat another chameleon in a fight. They change colour when a member of the opposite sex steps into view and they sometimes change colour due to fluctuations in either light or temperature. A chameleon’s skin contains several layers of specialised cells called chromataphores (from Greek chroma, colour, and pherein, to carry), each with different coloured pigments. Altering the balance between these layers causes the skin to reflect different kinds of light, making chameleons a kind of walking colour-wheel. read more : How do pearls form? 10 interesting Facts about The Eiffel Tower How do lemmings die? Why is the coast eroding? How do lemmings die? It’s odd how persistent the be...

Not by mass suicide, if that’s what you’re thinking. The suicide idea seems to have originated in the work of nineteenth-century naturalists who had witnessed (but not understood) the four-year boom-and-bust population cycle of the Norwegian lemming (Lemmus lemmus). Lemmings have a phenomenal reproductive capacity. A single female can produce up to eighty offspring a year. Sudden surges in their numbers once led Scandinavians to think they were spontaneously generated by the weather. What actually happens is that mild winters lead to overpopulation that in turn leads to over-grazing. The lemmings set off into unfamiliar territory in search of food until they pile up against natural obstacles like cliffs, lakes and seas. The lemmings keep coming. Panic and violence ensue. Accidents happen. But it isn’t suicide. A secondary myth has evolved which is that the whole idea of mass suicide was invented by the 1958 Walt Disney film White Wilderness. It’s true that the film was a complete fake....

Lets check out ten facts about the Eiffel Tower – the most recognizable architectural landmarks of Paris, the world-famous as a symbol of France. 1. When this huge tower was officially opened in 1889, it was the highest structure of the planet. In 1930, one other skyscraper ”Chrysler”, got ahead with 18 meters. However, if the height of the Eiffel Tower added to the length of its 24-meter antenna, the “Chrysler”  left behind. Nowadays, the Eiffel Tower is on the fifth place among the high-rise buildings in France. 2. Eiffel Tower, Since the construction is very high, then it is actually painted in three different shades of color. The darkest tone used at the base of the building, and the brightest – at the top. The tower is covered with 60 tons of paint every seven years to protect against corrosion. 3. The famous chef Alain Ducasse holds a gourmet restaurant on the second floor of the tower. 4. In 1912, the developer of the coat-pa...

Yes, they cough them to death. Marmots are benign, pot-bellied members of the squirrel family. They are about the size of a cat and squeak loudly when alarmed. Less appealingly, the bobac variety, found on the Mongolian steppe, is particularly susceptible to a lung infection caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, commonly known as bubonic plague. They spread it around by coughing on their neighbours, infecting fleas, rats and, ultimately, humans. All the great plagues that swept through Eastern Asia to Europe came from marmots in Mongolia. The estimated death-toll is over a billion, making the marmot second only to the malarial mosquito as a killer of humans. When marmots and humans succumb to plague, the lymph glands under the armpits and in the groin become black and swollen (these sores are called ‘buboes’, from Greek boubon, ‘groin’, hence ‘bubonic’). Mongolians will never eat a marmot’s armpits because ‘they contain the soul of a dead hunter’. The other parts of the marmot are a...

Half the human beings who have ever died, perhaps as many as 45 billion people, have been killed by female mosquitoes (the males only bite plants). Mosquitoes carry more than a hundred potentially fatal diseases including malaria, yellow fever, dengue fever, encephalitis, filariasis and elephantiasis. Even today, they kill one person every twelve seconds. Amazingly, nobody had any idea that mosquitoes were dangerous until the end of the nineteenth century. In 1877, the British doctor Sir Patrick Manson – known as ‘Mosquito’ Manson – proved that elephantiasis was caused by mosquito bites. Seventeen years later, in 1894, it occurred to him that malaria might also be caused by mosquitoes. He encouraged his pupil Ronald Ross, then a young doctor based in India, to test the hypothesis. Ross was the first person to show how female mosquitoes transmit the Plasmodium parasite through their saliva. He tested his theory using birds. Manson went one better. To show that the theory worked for huma...

Not a goldfish, for starters. Despite its status as a proverbial fact, a goldfish’s memory isn’t a few seconds long. Research by the School of Psychology at the University of Plymouth in 2003 demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that goldfish have a memory-span of at least three months and can distinguish between different shapes, colors and sounds. They were trained to push a lever to earn a food reward; when the lever was fixed to work only for an hour a day, the fish soon learned to activate it at the correct time.  A number of similar studies have shown that farmed fish can easily be trained to feed at particular times and places in response to an audible signal. Goldfish don’t swim into the side of the bowl, not because they can see it, but because they are using a pressure-sensing system called the lateral line. Certain species of blind cave fish are able to navigate perfectly well in their lightless environment by using their lateral line system alone. While we’re dealing wi...

About two years. On 10 September 1945, a plump young cockerel in Fruita, Colorado, had his head chopped off and lived. Incredibly, the axe had missed the jugular vein and left enough of the brain stem attached to the neck for him to survive, even thrive. Mike, as he was known, became a national celebrity, touring the country and featuring in Time and Life magazines. His owner, Lloyd Olsen, charged twenty-five cents for a chance to meet ‘Mike the Headless Wonder Chicken’ in sideshows across the USA. Mike would appear complete with a dried chicken’s head purporting to be his own – in fact, the Olsens’ cat had made off with the original.  At the height of his fame, Mike was making $4,500 a month, and was valued at $10,000. His success resulted in a wave of copycat chicken beheadings, though none of the unfortunate victims lived for more than a day or two. Mike was fed and watered using an eyedropper. In the two years after he lost his head, he put on nearly six pounds and spent his ti...

The ostrich. Although it is the largest single cell in nature, an ostrich egg is less than 1½ per cent of the weight of the mother. A wren’s egg, by comparison, is 13 per cent of its weight. The largest egg in comparison with the size of the bird is that of the Little Spotted kiwi. Its egg accounts for 26 per cent of its own weight: the equivalent of a woman giving birth to a six-year-old child. An ostrich egg weighs as much as twenty-four hen’s eggs; to soft-boil one takes forty-five minutes. Queen Victoria tucked into one for breakfast and declared it among the best meals she had ever eaten. The largest egg laid by any animal – including the dinosaurs – belonged to the elephant bird of Madagascar, which became extinct in 1700. It was ten times the size of an ostrich egg, nine litres in volume and the equivalent of 180 chicken’s eggs. The elephant bird (Aepyornis maximus) is thought to be the basis for the legend of the fierce roc that Sinbad battles in the Arabian Nights.

a) A very large mushroom b) A small family car c) A grapefruit d) A sailor A grapefruit. Quite interestingly, a blue whale’s throat is almost exactly the same diameter as its belly button (which is about the size of a side plate), but a little smaller than its eardrum (which is more the size of a dinner plate). For eight months of the year, blue whales eat virtually nothing, but during the summer they feed almost continuously, scooping up three tons of food a day. As you may remember from biology lessons, their diet consists of tiny, pink, shrimp-like crustaceans called krill, which slip down a treat. Krill come conveniently served in huge swarms that can weigh over 100,000 tons. The word krill is Norwegian. It comes from the Dutch word kriel, meaning ‘small fry’ but now also used to mean both pygmies and ‘small potatoes’. Krill sticks have been marketed with reasonable success in Chile but krill mince was a bit of a disaster in Russia, Poland and South Africa owing to dangerously high...