Interesting Contents Archive

International and multilingual QI fans! We've been collecting some of the most fun ways to begin fairytales in different languages. In English there's 'Once upon a time' and in Korean it's 'When tigers used to smoke'. Let us know the version in your mother tongue.

An owl can hear a mouse stepping on a twig from 75 feet away.

The last surviving widow of a US Civil War veteran died this month.

World’s longest mosquito buffet.

Luckily bastards.

Arthur Conan Doyle was a founder (and goalkeeper) of Portsmouth United.

No opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible. WH AUDEN

Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.

A Finnish idiom for indecipherable handwriting is ‘harakanvarpaita’ which means ‘magpie’s toes’.

Hedy Lamarr, dubbed one of the most gorgeous women in Hollywood, earned recognition in a field quite different from entertainment. She co-invented an early technique for spread spectrum communications. Lamarr died on #ThisDayInHistory in 2000.

The world's oldest known cave painting has been discovered in Indonesia. It is 45,500 years old and depicts a warty pig watching two other warty pigs who may be fighting.

We are all chatty Cathy's. #wtffunfacts #wtffunfact

According to mathematicians in Brazil, the only country that would survive a zombie apocalypse is North Korea, on account of its large ratio of military personnel to civilians.

In 1975, the Manchester team were banned from University Challenge after an on-air protest over its elitism, answering questions with ‘Trotsky’, 'Marx’ and ‘Lenin’. As one teammate said, 'we only knew about five or six revolutionary leaders so we ran out of that after a while.‘

The Earth’s magnetic field has grown 9% weaker over the past 200 years.