Elf ring
Ever see a set of mushrooms growing in a near-perfect circle? Or an arc of dead or dark grass on a green field? Folklore calls it the elf ring or fairy ring, but it actually has a very reasonable biological explanation.
Immortal dog
Some time more than 200 years ago, a dog or wolf in China or Siberia got cancer. It was a strange type of cancer: the cancer cells were contagious. That cell line is still alive today, and will probably be alive forever.
Shakespeare’s starlings
There are more than 150 million European starlings in North America. We have two men to blame for this: Eugene Schieffelin, and maybe William Shakespeare.
Flea poetry
Fleas are not an obvious topic for poetry. And yet it is the core of both the shortest poem in the English language and the dodgiest erotic poem ever written by a cleric of the Church of England.
Trout tickling, flounder tramping, and noodling
Want to catch a fish but don’t have any equipment? Try tickling, tramping, or noodling them.
Most painful sting
Justin O. Schmidt, an entomologist from the United States, has ranked the relative pain caused by bee, wasp, and ant stings. How do you find that out, though? Easy enough, you just sting yourself.
Rooster egg
A tiny yolkless egg shows up in your henhouse. Today, we know this to be a chicken’s first training egg. In the 12th century? It came from a rooster, and you better throw it over your house or it will be born a monster.
Least willow
What’s the smallest tree in the world? It depends on what you define as a tree, but my favourite candidate has the most adorable name possible: the least willow.
Parahawking
Okay okay, I know I said that chess boxing was my favourite hybrid sport, but now there’s a new contender. I have one word for you, just one word: parahawking.
Dead rabbit pregnancy test
In the 1930s there was a reliable and accurate way to find out if you were pregnant or not. But you had to kill a rabbit.
