Unique Facts

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...

It’s a mushroom. And it’s not even a particularly rare one. You’ve probably got the honey fungus ( Armillaria ostoyae) in your garden, growing on a dead tree-stump. For your sake, let’s hope it doesn’t reach the size of the largest recorded specimen, in Malheur National Forest in Oregon. It covers 890 hectares (2,200 acres) and is between 2,000 and 8,000 years old. Most of it is underground in the form of a massive mat of tentacle-like white mycelia (the mushroom’s equivalent of roots). These spread along tree roots, killing the trees and peeping up through the soil occasionally as innocent-looking clumps of honey mushrooms. The giant honey fungus of Oregon was initially thought to grow in separate clusters throughout the forest, but researchers have now confirmed it is the world’s single biggest organism, connected under the soil. STEPHEN What, or which, is the largest living thing on earth? BILL France.

Mauna Kea, the highest point on the island of Hawaii. The inactive volcano is a modest 4,206 m (13,799 feet) above sea level, but when measured from the seabed to its summit, it is 10,200 m (33,465 feet) high – about three-quarters of a mile taller than Mount Everest. As far as mountains are concerned, the current convention is that ‘highest’ means measured from sea level to summit; ‘tallest’ means measured from the bottom of the mountain to the top. So, while Mount Everest, at 8,848 m (29,029 feet) is the highest mountain in the world, it is not the tallest. Measuring mountains is trickier than it looks. It’s easy enough to see where the top is, but where exactly is the ‘bottom’ of a mountain? For example, some argue that Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania – at 5,895 m (19,340 feet) – is taller than Everest because it rises straight out of the African plain, whereas Everest is merely one ofmany peaks topping the enormous base of the Himalayas, shared by the world’s next thirteen highest mo...

It’s on Mars. The giant volcano Mount Olympus – or Olympus Mons in Latin – is the highest mountain in the solar system and in the known universe. At 22 km high (14 miles) and 624 km (388 miles) across, it is almost three times the height of Mount Everest and so wide that its base would cover Arizona, or the whole of the area of the British Isles. The crater on the top is around 72 km (45 miles) wide and over 3 km (nearly 2 miles) deep, easily big enough to swallow London. Mons Olympus doesn’t conform to most people’s idea of a mountain. It is flat-topped – like a vast plateau in a sea drained of water – and its sides aren’t even steep. Their slight incline of between one and three degrees means you wouldn’t even break sweat if you climbed it. We traditionally measure mountains by their height. If we measured them by their size, it would be meaningless to isolate one mountain in a range from the rest. That being so, Mount Everest would dwarf Olympus Mons. It is part of the gigantic Hima...

The Western Highlands of Kenya in Africa. In terms of annual downpour, Kericho in Kenya has more hail than anywhere else on earth, since it falls on average 132 days each year. By comparison, the UK averages only fifteen hail-days in a year and the worst affected area in the US, the eastern Rockies, experiences an average of forty-five haildays a year. What causes the abundance of hail is not fully understood. Kericho is the home of Kenya’s tea plantations, and a 1978 study showed that organic litter from the tea plants gets stirred into the atmosphere, where it acts as a nucleus around which hailstones can grow. Another theory is that the high altitude of the region could be to blame, as the shape of the terrain causes a large uplift of warm air which quickly condenses. This, and the reduced distance between the freezing level (about 3 miles up) and the ground, reduces the chance of hailstones melting. The average hailstone is about quarter of an inch across, but they can grow large e...

Antarctica. Parts of the continent have seen no rain for two million years. A desert is technically defined as a place that receives less than 254 mm (10 inches) of rain a year. The Sahara gets just 25 mm (1 inch) of rain a year. Antarctica’s average annual rainfall is about the same, but 2 per cent of it, known as the Dry Valleys, is free of ice and snow and it never rains there at all. The next-driest place in the world is the Atacama Desert in Chile. In some areas, no rain has fallen there for 400 years and its average annual rainfall is a tiny 0.1 mm (0.004 inches). Taken as a whole, this makes it the world’s driest desert, 250 times as dry as the Sahara. As well as the driest place on earth, Antarctica can also claim to be the wettest and the windiest. Seventy per cent of the world’s fresh water is found there in the form of ice, and its wind speeds are the fastest ever recorded. The unique conditions in the Dry Valleys of Antarctica are caused by so-called katabatic winds (from t...

We make it two. Or four if you’re a Catholic. Henry’s fourth marriage to Anne of Cleves was annulled. This is very different from divorce. Legally, it means the marriage never took place. There were two grounds for the annulment. Anne and Henry never consummated the marriage; that is, they never had intercourse. Refusal or inability to consummate a marriage is still grounds for annulment today. In addition, Anne was already betrothed to Francis, Duke of Lorraine when she married Henry. At that time, the formal act of betrothal was a legal bar to marrying someone else. All parties agreed no legal marriage had taken place. So that leaves five. The Pope declared Henry’s second marriage to Anne Boleyn illegal, because the King was still married to his first wife, Catherine of Aragon. Henry, as head of the new Church of England, declared in turn that his first marriage was invalid on the legal ground that a man could not sleep with his brother’s widow. The King cited the Old Testament, whic...