Did you know

• Horses were used to catch electric eels, by waiting for the eels to discharge all their electricity in the horses and then the rider would catch them normally. The electric eels are not actually eels, but actually a knifefish.
  
• In 1903, Thomas Edison released a film called Electrocuting An Elephant which showed how electricity could be very dangerous. He used the film as propaganda against his rival George Westinghouse.
  
• Electrons move along wires at a drift velocity of a mere 0.03 mph. They travel by wave movements. You could use the electric current from a lasagne to make a gherkin glow via a connection by a cable.
  
• The difference between a ship and a boat in Naval terms is that all ships float on the surface of the water, while all boats are submarines.
  
• The animal that creates the most methane in the world is the termite and not the cow as was previously thought. Cows burp methane, not fart it.  Soldier termites act as suicide bombers, releasing a sticky secretion by rupturing a gland near the skin in their neck producing a tar baby effect in defense against ants. Known as autothysis.
  
• Thousands of Americans ring 911 on Christmas Day, because it is the only number that they can ring with their new mobile phone before it is activated, if they received one as a present.
  
• In the Rhubarb Triangle, a triangle made up of the 3 cities of Leeds, Bradford & Wakefield in West Yorkshire, rhubarb grows so quickly, you can hear it grow.
  
• Rhubarb leaves are poisonous. Rhubarb acts as a mild laxative. During the First Opium War, Lin Zexu threatened Queen Victoria that China would refuse to send rhubarb, claiming they would kill everyone by mass constipation.
  
• Corn flakes were originally used to discourage masturbation. John Harvey Kellogg was deeply against the practice.
  
• If you eat nothing but rabbit, you would die of malnutrition, because rabbit meat contains very little oil and therefore by eating only rabbit, your body would run out of other nutrients.
  
• If you eat a rabbit affected with Myxomatosis, it would have no affect on you. Louis XVIII claimed that he could tell from which part of France a rabbit came from by smelling rabbit stew. Theoretically, two rabbits could produce 33 million offspring in 3 years, but 90% of baby rabbits are killed by predators.
  
• Whilst rabbits were introduced to Britain by Normans in the 12th century, they did not become wild until the 19th century.
  
• The first animals to be herded for food were snails in the year 10,700 BC. Snails are hermaphrodite and have a love dart, which may harm the partner when mating, but also increases the chance of pregnancy.
  
• Stomach ulcers are caused by a bacteria called Helicobacter pylori. One of the two men who discovered that stomach ulcers were caused by this bacteria, Barry Marshall, drank some of the bacteria to prove that it was the cause, and as a result won the Nobel Prize.
  
• The green vegetable that contains 10 times more iron on average is thyme, and not spinach as most people wrongly believe.
  
• A tyrannosaurus rex, would taste like chicken, because the chicken is a descendant of the T rex.
  
• When the Pilgrim Fathers first arrived in America, the first thing that the Native Americans said to them was Could I have some beer?.
  
• Most of the Native Americans learnt their English from Squanto, a Native who travelled across the Atlantic Ocean 6 times. He was kidnapped to England, then brought back to America, he was kidnapped again and sold to slavery in Spain, before escaping to Cupers Cove, Newfoundland, but he found it took too long to walk back, so he took a boat back to Ireland before returning to New England.
  
• The quickest way to get from the Eiffel Tower to The Louvre, without seeing a Frenchman is to go through the sewers, because they are lined up exactly the same as the streets of Paris.
  
• If a crewman in outer space went mad, the course of action to take would be to bind his/her wrists and ankles with duct tape, tie him/her down with a bungee cord and inject tranquilizers into him/her.
  
• The first two words spoken on the surface of the Moon were Contact Light, spoken by Buzz Aldrin.  Aldrins sister gave him the nickname Buzz, short for Buzzer, because she could not say Brother.
  
• The only animal that can moonwalk is the manakin bird, which can also sing using its wings.
  
• The first person to put 2 feet on Mount Everest was Radhanath Sikdar, a mathematician from Bengal, who measured the peak as 29,000 feet, but because he thought people would think he just rounded upto 29,000 feet, he added 2 feet to make it 29,002 feet, the measurement of Everest up until 1955, when it became 29,028 feet.
  
• Las Vegas sells more adult nappies than baby nappies, because gamblers do not want stop gambling. A casino in Melbourne had to change the carpet after a week because people urinated on the floor rather than stop gambling.
  
• Baarle-Hertog in Belgium and Baarle-Nassau in the Netherlands, due to the Maastricht Treaty, has 5,732 parcels of land which are split between French-Belgium and Dutch-Belgium. Many of these enclaves are split in the middle between the two countries, so many buildings have doors that lead from one side to the other. In pubs, the Dutch side closes earlier, so half the tables are cut off and everyone has to move to the other side.
• The Dutch also have a large sex shop next to the Belgium side.
• Belgium is named after the Belgae tribe, most of which originated from Winchester.