Peanuts are not nuts
Botanically they are legumes, like peas and lentils, and they grow underground. Almonds, cashews and pistachios are seeds of fruits, not true nuts either.
Read the fact →Carrots were originally purple
Early carrots in Persia and Central Asia were purple, white or yellow. The orange carrot was bred in the Netherlands in the 17th century.
Read the fact →Chillies measure heat in Scoville units
A bell pepper scores 0, a jalapeño around 5,000, India’s bhut jolokia over 1,000,000 and the Carolina Reaper about 1,600,000 Scoville heat units.
Read the fact →Chocolate was once used as money
The Aztecs valued cacao beans so highly that they were used as currency — a turkey could cost about 100 beans.
Read the fact →Cashews grow on the outside of a fruit
Each cashew nut hangs beneath a cashew apple. The shell around the nut contains an irritating oil, which is why cashews are always sold shelled.
Read the fact →India is the world’s largest producer of milk
India produces over 230 million tonnes of milk a year — roughly a quarter of the world’s total — mostly from small farms with a few animals each.
Read the fact →The first computer bug was an actual moth
In 1947 operators of the Harvard Mark II found a moth stuck in a relay and taped it into the logbook with the note ‘First actual case of bug being found’.
Read the fact →The first 1 GB hard drive weighed about 250 kg
IBM’s 3380, released in 1980, stored 2.52 GB, was the size of a refrigerator and cost tens of thousands of dollars. A microSD card today holds a thousand times more.
Read the fact →More people own a mobile phone than a toothbrush
There are well over 7 billion mobile subscriptions worldwide, while toothbrush ownership is estimated at under 5 billion.
Read the fact →The QWERTY layout was designed for typewriters, not speed
Common letter pairs were spread apart so the mechanical arms of 1870s typewriters would jam less often. We still use it 150 years later.
Read the fact →The first website is still online
Tim Berners-Lee’s page at info.cern.ch went live in 1991 and CERN restored it at its original address, where you can still read it.
Read the fact →Nintendo started in 1889 making playing cards
Long before video games, Nintendo was a Kyoto company that made hanafuda playing cards. It has been in business for over 130 years.
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