Unique Facts

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...

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...

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...