QI’s most flabbergasting facts

Like strange-but-true trivia? Then you’ll love the bizarre nuggets of information in the new QI book

The BBC’s long-running comedy quiz show QI has always been about far more than just being right or wrong. Each week the researchers, or elves as they’re known, come up with ever more obscure questions with which to baffle regular panellist Alan Davies and three fellow guests, who win points for giving a right answer but also for providing an interesting and funny one instead.

QI (the title is an acronym of Quite Interesting) is now in its 14th series with Sandi Toksvig replacing Stephen Fry as the new presenter. And to celebrate, the elves have come up with a collection of 1,342 flabbergasting true facts in a new book. Here are the jaw-dropping best, and if you don’t believe them you can cross-refer from the book to the QI website (qi.com/1342) to discover where the elves found the information...

Dinosaurs didn’t roar; they mumbled or cooed.

Mice sing like birds, but humans can’t hear them.

Br itain’s share of the cost of funding the Large Hadron Collider each year is the same as what Britons spend on peanuts.

Napoleon was born with teeth.

The Dalai Lama is frightened of caterpillars.

The last note of The Beatles’ A Day In The Life is so high only dogs can hear it.

Bees know when it’s going to rain, so they put in extra work the day before.

Charles Dickens’s father went into business with Butch Cassidy’s great-grandfather.

Steve Jobs was scared of buttons.

Sand wasps fly backwards out of the nest to make sure they’ll remember what the way home looks like.

Wrens can sing 36 notes a second.

Over its lifetime an Arctic tern flies the equivalent of three trips to the Moon and back.

London gets less rain than Rome, Venice or Nice.

The French have no word for ‘shrug’.

Netflix has created socks that pause the show you’re watching if you fall asleep.

Nightmares are more common if you sleep on your left-hand side.

The Bank of England was founded by a Scotsman in 1694.

The Bank of Scotland was founded by an Englishman in 1695.

London has more trees than any capital city in Europe. Every English elm is descended from a single tree imported by the Romans.

No matter how large a tree is, it will break if the wind speed reaches 94mph.

Trees sleep at night to rest their branches.

The first- ever skywriting message was an advert which said ‘DAILY MAIL’.

Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space, forgot her toothbrush and had to brush her teeth with her finger.

The Kansas Barbed Wire Museum has 2,000 varieties of barbed wire. Orangutans warn off predators by making kissing noises.

The first police car chase in the UK had a top speed of 15mph.

Bolivia has had 190 coups or revolutions in its 191-year history.

In 1087, William the Conqueror got too fat to ride his horse, so he went on an alcohol- only diet and died later that year.

In Tanzania a roundabout is a ‘kipilefti’.

Man has probed 20bn km outwards from the Earth, but only 12km into it. Sneezes can travel up to 200ft.

Astronauts wear belts to stop their trousers falling up.

Until 1899, the list of official diseases at the Royal College of Physicians inc luded nostalgia.

Of the 400,000 species of plant on Earth, 300,000 are safe to eat but we actually eat fewer than 200.

China used more cement between 2011 and 2013 than the US did in the entire 20th century.

On Earth, moss grows in an un ruly fashion, but in space it forms spirals.

In his lifetime, Edgar Allan Poe’s bestselling book was a textbook about seashells.

Cauliflowers grow so fast you can hear them doing it.

Cows produce five times as much saliva as milk.

The first song played on the Moon was Fly Me To The Moon.

Slugs have around 27,000 teeth.

The word ‘Nile’ means ‘river’, so River Nile means River River.

In 1787 the top of Mont Blanc was removed and is now in a museum in the Netherlands.

The distance travelled by your blood every day is equivalent to half the earth’s circumference.

Meerkats have competitive eating contests to establish dominance.

Shuttlecocks used in professional badminton are made of feathers from the left wing of a goose. Feathers from the right wing make them spin the wrong way.

Donald Trump’s father and grand mother both had the middle name Christ.

The Great Wall of China was held together with sticky rice.

Fish-scaled geckos escape predators by literally jumping out of their skins.

More Guinness is drunk in Nigeria than in Ireland.

Dolphins can’t smell anything at all. Woodpeckers have a third eyelid which stops their eyes popping out when drilling into wood. The owners of Leicester City FC also own the world champion elephant polo team.

The world’s heaviest pumpkin weighed the same as a Ford Fiesta. In the seven years Wordsworth was Poet Laureate, he didn’t write a

single line of poetry.

The film Frozen took three mill ion hour s to complete.

1,342 QI Facts To Leave You Flabbergasted, Faber & Faber, £9.99. To order a copy for £7.49 visit mailbookshop.co.uk or call 0844 571 0640 (p&p free on orders over £15). Valid until 19 November. QI, Friday, 10pm, BBC2.