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The bee hummingbird is the world’s smallest bird. It weighs about as much as a tea bag.

If all the Lego bricks ever manufactured were clipped on top of each other, they would reach ten times as high as the distance to the Moon.

The highest military honour in the Roman Republic was the Grass Crown or corona graminea; it was made from plant materials taken from the battlefield, including grasses, flowers, and cereals.

Haile Gebrselassie, the famous Ethiopian distance runner, used to run six miles to and from school each day.

John Calvin believed humans had an innate sense of divinity; for this dogma he used the term semen religionis, ‘the seed of religion’.

See other: Quite Interesting Facts

Bigger Brains

Thinking apes
2.8 million years ago

Modern humans belong to a group or “genus” of animals known as Homo. The oldest known Homo fossil, found in Ethiopia, is 2.8 million years old. The first species was probably Homo habilis, although this has been disputed. Compared to their ancestors, these new hominins had much larger brains.

See other: What Makes Humans Human?

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About 7,000 litres of blood are pumped through the human heart each day.

A Spotted Hyena or Crocuta Crocuta

An average healthy human can urinate 1,4 litres a day. That amounts up to 511 litres a year. It would take over 13 years to urinate the same amount of fluid the human heart pumps in a day.

The ancient Egyptians trapped hyenas as pets and fattened them for the table. In the Ethiopian city of Harar, ‘hyena men’ still feed on wild hyenas at dusk.

In Japanese, two different sets of characters spell out the word danshoku meaning either warm colour, or male homosexual sex.

Assuming an average healthy man over 24 produces a tablespoonful of 15 millilitres of sperm by ejaculating two or three times a day, he will produce about 5.5 litres (5.475) of sperm a year. At this rate it would take an average 24-year old over 454,545 years to fill an Olympic swimming pool; it would take 166,666,666 men to fill it in a day – about all Indian men between the age of 24 and 27.

See other: Quite Interesting Facts