Curious World E-Book

Mick O'Hare

• Herausgeber: Bedford Square Publishers
• Kategorie: Für Kinder und Jugendliche
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 211

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

A mind-bending adventure the whole family will enjoy! Packed with amazing trivia, weird world records, and mind-blowing facts, this book is perfect for curious kids, trivia-loving teens, and even grown-ups who can't resist a quirky fact or two. A must read for all curious minds! Discover the fastest, slowest, oldest, and weirdest things on Earth—and beyond! - Which volcano has been erupting for over 2,000 years? - Are spiders faster than Usain Bolt? (you will never look at your house spiders in the same way again)! - Where's the coldest place life can survive? - Which creature has the longest neck (and no, it's not a giraffe)? - What are the smallest known things to exist? Whether you're sharing hilarious facts around the table, keeping the kids entertained and off screens, or wowing your friends with your trivia skills, this book is a guaranteed crowd-pleaser. Perfect for; Gifts for kids (aged 8+) teens, and adults. Families looking to keep eyeballs off screens and brains switched on. Trivia buffs, fact lovers, and anyone who enjoys learning something new. Discover the World's Wildest and Wackiest Wonders – One Fascinating Fact at a Time!

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Also by Mick O’Hare

Does Anything Eat Wasps?

Why Don’t Penguins’ Feet Freeze?

How To Fossilise Your Hamster

Do Polar Bears Get Lonely?

How to Make a Tornado

Why Can’t Elephants Jump?

Why Are Orangutans Orange?

Farts Aren’t Invisible

Yawns Freeze Your Brain

CURIOUS WORLD

The Fastest, the Weirdest, the Loudest… of EVERYTHING

MICK O’HARE

CONTENTS

Cover

Also by Mick O’Hare

Title Page

Dedication

Introduction

The Biggest

The Smallest

The Loudest

The Oldest

The Fastest

The Longest

The Weirdest

The Slowest

The Largest

The Tallest

The Highest

The Driest

The Shortest

The Widest

The Weakest

The Greatest

The Deadliest

Footnote

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Copyright

With thanks to Sally and Thomas for their enduring patience and encouragement.

Dedicated to Pascal Wehrlein and the miracle of London 2024.

INTRODUCTION

Citius, Altius, Fortius. It’s the original Latin motto of the Olympic Games. Or, in English: Faster, Higher, Stronger. And in this book we are most certainly interested in the fastest, the highest and the strongest. But we are also fascinated by the slowest, the oldest and the, er, weirdest.

Of course, there are a lot of fast things in the world. But, although you’ll find out which human can run the fastest, which plane can fly the fastest, even which snail can travel the fastest, we also reveal the world’s fastest glacier, the world’s fastest-growing plant and whether Venus flytraps can survive without eating flies (for reasons you will soon discover, it’s in the same chapter).

But speed, strength and height aren’t everything. We like the idea that a plane can still be airborne at 13 kilometres per hour, that there’s an express train that never tops 40 kilometres per hour and that there is a piece of music being played so slowly that the last note won’t be heard until 2640. Turn to Chapter 8 to learn more.

You’ll also discover the weirdest life form on our planet, why some ‘new’ things aren’t new at all, and where the coldest star yet discovered is located (it’s colder than the average surface temperature of the Earth).

And is there a distinction between ‘biggest’ and ‘largest’? The eagle-eyed will notice we have a chapter devoted to each. We think there’s a difference and logic suggests there has to be, otherwise why do we have two separate words? But we’ll let you be the judge of whether we got it right or not, or whether it was just an excuse to have two chapters on big (or, umm, large) stuff.

Okay, back to the Olympics. Here’s an extra fact that’s not in the book. The highest any man has pole-vaulted at the Games is 6.25 metres, achieved by Swede Armand Duplantis at the Paris Olympics of 2024,* just three centimetres below the world record, which Duplantis also holds. All of which is just a blatant excuse for the author to use his best dad gag of 2025. After the pole-vault final a young fan hoping to get autographs goes searching for athletes. He spots a man carrying an eight-foot-long stick and asks, ‘Are you a pole-vaulter?’ ‘No,’ says the man, ‘I’m German. But how did you know my name is Walter?’

We are sure you can come up with far better jokes and, if so, we’d love to hear from you. And we’d also like to hear from you if any of our facts in this book are incorrect, or have been superseded (preferably by yourself). Or if you know better ones. One thing currently vexing us is why are Venetian blinds called Venetian blinds when they seem to have originated in Persia? If you know the answer, you may find you appear in the next edition. Which chapter you’ll be in depends on how fast, tall, strong or, maybe, weird you are!

Oh, and you’ll find quite a few mythbusters dotted around this book. But one we couldn’t verify was that there is supposedly a desk at Vienna airport where confused and distressed passengers are sent when they discover they haven’t arrived in Australia. If you can confirm its existence, we’d love to hear from you.

Mick O’Hare

CHAPTER 1

THE BIGGEST…

Whales, spiders and poo…

The biggest animal in the world is the blue whale, which can reach 33 metres in length, weigh more than 130 tonnes, live for up to 90 years and have a heart the size of a car. It’s also the largest animal that ever lived, beating even the largest of the dinosaurs (the Patagotitan, since you ask, which was only a measly 70 tonnes).

The blue whale also has the largest blood vessels of any creature. At 25 centimetres in diameter, you could crawl through its main artery (although you might not want to).

Mythbuster: The blue whale is the biggest living thing on Earth. Because it’s such a huge and very visible creature, many people presume the blue whale – a mammal, just like humans – is the biggest living organism on our planet. But they are wrong. The biggest living organism isn’t a mammal or indeed any other creature, it’s a plant. Posidonia australis is the Latin name for a seagrass that grows in Shark Bay on the Western Australia coast. It is spread across 200 square kilometres and is a single plant, believed to be about 4,500 years old.

The biggest tree in the world by volume is the General Sherman tree, a giant sequoia, which takes up 1,487 cubic metres of the Sequoia National Park in California, USA. And, of course, it’s getting bigger by the day. However, it’s not the biggest tree by height, that’s Hyperion, a coast redwood, which, when it was last checked in 2019, was 116.07 metres tall. You won’t be able to visit it, though. Not only is its location kept secret, the rangers of the Redwood National Park, also in California, have cordoned off the area in which it stands to avoid destruction of its habitat.

Who wins? Hyperion is bigger than the Elizabeth Tower in London’s Houses of Parliament, which houses Big Ben. That’s only 96 metres tall. It’s also taller than the Statue of Liberty in New York (93 metres, including the base) and the newly restored spire of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris (96 metres), but it loses out by about 22 metres to the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt.

The Great Pyramid of Giza is not only the biggest pyramid in the world at 138.5 metres in height, it is also the heaviest. It’s too big to put on your kitchen scales but is estimated to weigh more than 6 million tonnes. It’s constructed of around 2.3 million stone blocks, each weighing almost 3 tonnes. Of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, it’s the only one still intact today. While the Great Pyramid of Giza is generally regarded as the world’s biggest, if pyramids are judged by volume alone, then the Great Pyramid of Cholula in Mexico wins out at 4.45 million cubic metres, almost double Giza. This has only relatively recently come to light because for centuries it was covered in soil and vegetation and believed to be a mountain. That’s until archaeologists drilled into it in the middle of the twentieth century and discovered what it really was.

Mythbuster: Egypt has the most pyramids. No, it doesn’t, Sudan does. The Sudan pyramids were built by the Kushite Kingdom, which ended around the year 350, and there are as many as 225 of them. Egypt only has 138. Meanwhile, Mexico has fewer large pyramids but there are possibly thousands of smaller pyramid-like structures across the entire nation, which acted as temples to the ancient civilisations which lived there.

Who wins? Will the Great Pyramid outlast Mount Everest? Well, apart from them having a vaguely similar shape, it’s impossible to say. Humans will attempt to preserve the pyramid as part of our cultural history, whereas Everest will eventually be eroded by the natural processes of the Earth. However, if humanity should, for whatever reason, cease to exist, then the pyramid will almost certainly be eroded faster than the mountain.

The biggest free-floating soap bubble created outdoors was made in Cleveland, Ohio, USA by Gary Pearlman in July 2015. It had a volume of 96.27 cubic metres – that’s about the volume of a double-decker London bus – and was made using two fishing rods with string tied between them. The largest free-floating bubble indoors was made by Graeme Denton (also known as Marty McBubble) in Adelaide, Australia, in May 2019. It had a volume of 21.45 cubic metres.

Meanwhile, in January 2018 Jakub Bochenek managed to fit 417 people – all above the prerequisite adult height of 1.52 metres – inside a bubble he created in Jaworzno, Poland. The bubble was suspended from ropes hanging from a sports-hall ceiling and took up the area of a badminton court, and the people inside were asked to hold their breath lest their exhalations damaged the bubble. Fortunately, nobody fainted.

The biggest turd ever discovered belonged to a Tyrannosaurus rex, which lived in South Dakota, USA, about 70 million years ago. It weighs 9.28 kilograms and is 67.5 centimetres long and 15.7 centimetres wide, measured along its central curve, which was probably created as it fell to the ground from the dinosaur’s bottom. Fossilised poo is known as coprolite and can be quite fragile, so the turd – nicknamed ‘Barnum’ – is kept in a special plaster jacket to keep it intact.

The biggest human turd is the Lloyds Bank coprolite (so called because it was found on the site of what would become a branch of Lloyds Bank in York, England) discovered in 1972. It had belonged, briefly, to a Viking who had travelled to England from Scandinavia in the ninth century. It was an eye-watering (and his eyes surely did water) 20 centimetres by 5 centimetres and was preserved because it had become fossilised in the peaty, moist soil. The Viking’s descendants might be in for a windfall if they can prove their lineage. The last time it was valued, it came in at an estimated £40,000 (US$50,000). No wonder its discoverer, archaeologist Andrew Bone, described it as being ‘as valuable as the crown jewels’.

Who wins? The average human produces around 0.2 kilograms of faeces a day (although the York Viking would no doubt look on in contempt), and the weight of the average human is about 65 kilograms. T. rex weighed, on average, about 6,000 kilograms. So using the 9.28-kilogram Barnum as a guide, this means that gram for gram a human turd, at 0.31% of body weight, is bigger than a T. rex’s, which is only 0.15% of its body weight. However, the species champion when it comes to turd weight to body weight is the sloth. Sloths weigh on average about 6 kilograms but their turds can weigh up to 2 kilograms – a full 33% of their body weight. No studies have yet been done on what size the sheets of its toilet paper would need to be if scaled up to Barnum size.

Mythbuster: Turds are mainly waste material. Actually, that’s not true. Most human turds are 75% water, which our bodies need. That said, if our colons didn’t mix water with the waste to make it slippery, it would be a pain in the bum to get rid of.

Both our Viking and T. rex might appreciate this place. The biggest public toilet in the world is the Porcelain Palace at the Foreigners’ Street amusement park in Chongqing, China. It opened in 2008, occupies four storeys over 3,000 square metres and has more than 1,000 toilets and urinals, some of which are, rather disturbingly, shaped like crocodiles’ mouths. It’s free to use and urinal.net (yes, it’s a real website) says it features calm music and television and will make its users ‘very, very happy’.

Presumably the world’s biggest restaurant needs quite a large toilet capacity. A pity then that Chongqing is a long way from Damascus. The Syrian capital is home to Bawabet Dimashq, which seats 6,014 diners. It has a dining area of 54,000 square metres, a kitchen area of 2,500 square metres, and it employs 1,800 staff. It serves six types of cuisine: Syrian, Arab, Iranian, Middle Eastern, Chinese and Indian.

Brains need food. The biggest human brain ever recorded belonged to an unknown Dutchman who died in 1899 at the Meerenberg Asylum in Santpoort, Netherlands. It weighed 2,850 grams, more than double the weight of the average human brain.

Mythbuster: The bigger their brain, the more intelligent a person is. It’s untrue, and certainly was in the case of the unknown Dutch patient, who had learning disabilities. We also know that brain size differs between ethnic groups; for example, European brains (at an average 1,360 cubic centimetres) are smaller than East Asian brains (1,415 cubic centimetres), yet all human races are of equal intelligence. Additionally, male brains are 11% larger, on average, than female ones and everybody knows which of the sexes has intellectual prominence.

Mythbuster: Human brains are growing in size as society shifts away from manual labour to other forms of work. In fact, human brains are shrinking and have been doing so for a few thousand years, although researchers are at a loss to explain why.

Who wins? Humans are the most intelligent animals on the planet (despite their actions sometimes seeming to prove otherwise), which would make you assume they have the biggest brain-to-body mass. Not so. The brain accounts for a 40th of the body mass of a human. However, they lose out big time to ants, whose brains are a seventh of their body mass. Meanwhile, the biggest brain of any animal belongs to the sperm whale, weighing 8 kilograms. However, the sperm whale’s body weighs in at 40 tonnes, meaning its brain accounts for only a 5,000th of its body mass. It seems quite happy, though.

The biggest human baby officially recorded was born in Cambridge, Canada, in 2023. At 6.577 kilograms, Sonny Ayres weighed nearly twice the average of a newborn child. Apparently, the nurses who delivered him cheered when they realised the world record had been broken. Two of Sonny’s four siblings also weighed more than 6 kilograms at birth.

Who wins? Which mammal produces the largest baby relative to body size? Blue whales give birth to the largest offspring, which can weigh up to 3,000 kilograms and are the size of a small car. However, when it comes to body-size-to-offspring ratio, giraffes – the females of which weigh on average 830 kilograms – give birth to offspring that are a tenth of their size. A baby giraffe is already almost 2 metres tall at birth. Human babies meanwhile are about a 20th of their parents’ size.

Who wins? There’s another birthing title to be won, though, and this time it belongs to Australia. Red kangaroos grow from 1 gram at birth to 82 kilograms as an adult, an increase of almost 100,000 times.

Although the ostrich lays the biggest bird egg in the world, the record being a whopping 2.589 kilograms, the biggest egg-to-bird ratio is a kiwi’s egg, which is about half the average 3-kilogram weight of the mother, a ratio six times bigger than most other birds.

And now back to T. rex. The feared, but extinct, dinosaur probably had the biggest teeth of any animal that ever lived, coming in at more than 30 centimetres in length. The biggest teeth of any living animal are those of the saltwater crocodile, which can grow up to 13 centimetres, less than half the size of T. rex’s gnashers. Meanwhile the biggest human tooth on record was the 37.2-millimetre gargantuan extracted from an unnamed patient in Mainz, Germany, by dentist Max Lukas. Bite-size it was not.

Mythbuster: Elephant tusks aren’t teeth. Well, actually they are, which means that strictly speaking the teeth we talk about above aren’t the record-breakers their owners might hope them to be. This means that the prehistoric elephant-like mastodon beats them all, with tusks around 420 centimetres long.

Mythbuster: Mastodons had the largest teeth. No, they didn’t, because the narwhal’s tusk also counts as a tooth. These can exceed 3 metres, so yah boo sucks to the mastodon (unless, of course, the narwhal suffers from toothache).

The biggest insect by weight is probably a beetle of the elephant or goliath species, which live in South America and Africa respectively. It’s believed they can exceed 100 grams and grow to 10 centimetres in length. However, none have been captured and weighed at those amounts, so the record currently belongs to a female giant weta, a type of grasshopper found in New Zealand. The biggest on record weighed 71 grams.

Mythbuster: Spiders are insects. No, they’re not. Spiders are arachnids, have eight legs and never have wings or antennae. Insects have six legs, antennae, and most of them have wings.

The biggest spider by both weight and body size is the goliath birdeater. It lives in South American rainforests and can weigh 75 grams, with a body length of 13 centimetres. If you are an arachnophobe, this is your biggest nightmare. Fortunately, it usually feeds on worms, insects and amphibians, not humans, but, as its name suggests, it sometimes eats birds too.

Mythbuster: All spiders make webs. No, they don’t. Some, such as wolf spiders and trapdoor spiders, chase down their prey, rather than trapping them in webs.

Who wins? Spiders are super quick. The giant house spider, which you’ll find in most homes in the UK, can travel at more than 50 centimetres per second, or 34 times its own body length. Scaled up to human size, you’d have to run at 205 kilometres per hour to match it. (World-record-breaking sprinter Usain Bolt’s top speed is ‘only’ 44.72 kilometres per hour). If you put the Peruvian slingshot spider up against a cheetah, the world’s fastest land mammal, the spider would win, certainly over the first few metres. It can accelerate at 4 metres per second, using its web as a springboard.

This book was written in what is probably the smallest office in the world, no match for the United States Department of Defense in Arlington, Virginia, USA, better known as the Pentagon. It’s the biggest office in the world. It is home to 23,000 workers, has 28 miles of corridors, 284 toilet areas (twice more than it needs because, when it was built, Virginia was a state that segregated black and white workers), and the car park can hold 8,770 cars. Its shape is partly to ensure that no two rooms in the building are more than eight minutes apart on foot.

CHAPTER 2

THE SMALLEST…

Moons, turds and quarks…

We used to think that atoms were the smallest things in the universe. The word ‘atom’ comes from the Greek word that means indivisible, but we now know there are even smaller particles that combine to make up atoms, and occasionally appear in the spaces between them. The smallest of these particles, and therefore the smallest thing in the universe (until we discover otherwise), is called a quark. Quarks make up the protons and neutrons found in the nucleus of an atom. As far as we know, quarks cannot be broken down further. But, then again, we once thought the same about atoms…

Mythbuster: Atoms make up all the things in the universe. No, they don’t. Stars, planets, comets and their like – the things we know are made of atoms – only make up about 5% of the known universe. The rest consists of dark matter and dark energy. We are still not sure what these two things are – they are invisible to us – but we know they must exist because of the forces they exert on the things that we can see.

Dinosaurs are big, right? Or, at least, they are in the movies. But Oculudentavis was only the size of a hummingbird and is the smallest dinosaur yet discovered, with a skull only about 1.5 centimetres long. It could fly, had large eyes and had lots of teeth, suggesting that, despite its size, it was a predator, which has earned it the nickname ‘The Cretaceous terror of insects’.

Who wins? Which is faster: Oculudentavis or a hummingbird? Well, hummingbirds are very quick. The fastest ones flap their wings at over 60 beats per second and at their fastest – the species known as Anna’s hummingbird – can achieve speeds of around 80 kilometres per hour. Obviously, we can’t compare the Oculudentavis directly because it’s extinct but, as a rule, modern birds (directly descended from flying dinosaurs) have evolved further with improved wings. Ornithologists believe that, based on their morphology, a hummingbird would beat Oculudentavis in a short race. But, over longer distances, who knows?

Who wins (again)? Anna’s hummingbird or a Eurofighter Typhoon jet airplane? The fighter plane can travel at 2,125 kilometres per hour, or 1.72 times the speed of sound. But while Anna’s hummingbird can only fly at 80 kilometres per hour, that means it can travel 385 times its own body length in one second. Meanwhile, the sluggish jet can only manage 39 body lengths in a second.

The smallest bird on Earth is another hummingbird. It lives in Cuba and is called the bee hummingbird. It weighs less than 2 grams, and it’s only 57 millimetres long, or about the size of your little finger.

Bats emit high-frequency sounds to help them detect prey and other objects via echolocation, which means having large ears come in handy – they can be as long as 40 millimetres. Pity then the short-eared bat found in South America, which, as its name suggests, has the smallest ears of any bat at about 8 millimetres.

Pity also the bony-eared assfish, which has the smallest brain-to-body-weight ratio of any fish. That’s less than 1,000th of its bodyweight. Its rather apt name might give some clue as to how intelligent it is (or isn’t). Those ants here must be looking on scornfully.

Meanwhile, the smallest animal of any kind is Myxobolus shekel, an obligately parasitic cnidarian (a group of aquatic creatures that includes jellyfish and corals). No Myxobolus shekel has ever been discovered that is greater than 0.0055 of a millimetre across, a fraction of the width of a human hair.

The smallest skyscraper in the world is the Newby-McMahon Building in Wichita Falls, Texas, USA. It only has four storeys and is 12 metres tall (the tallest skyscraper is the 828-metre Burj Khalifa in Dubai, 69 times the height of the Newby-McMahon – see here).

Mythbuster: The Newby-McMahon Building is a skyscraper. Well, obviously it isn’t, because at four storeys it’s smaller than an average block of flats, but it was meant to be much taller, at 147 metres (or 480 feet). However, the developer J D McMahon was a fraudster. He collected money to build the skyscraper from investors and then erected a building that was only 480 inches tall, rather than 480 feet. The shorthand for 480 feet is 480’, while the shorthand for 480 inches is 480’’, and although McMahon verbally told investors the building would be 480 feet high, the plans that he drew up showed it would only be 480 inches (480’’) high, which McMahon used in his legal defence before quickly leaving town.

The world’s smallest drawbridge is the middle part of the Somerset Bridge in Bermuda, which crosses a channel connecting Somerset Island to the parish of Sandys. It is only 56 centimetres wide, just enough to allow the mast of a sailing boat to pass through as it leaves Ely’s Harbour. Operated by hand, it is depicted on one of Bermuda’s bank notes. Most people walk across it without noticing it’s there.

The smallest bridge between two countries is the El Marco Bridge, which crosses the Arronches (if you are Portuguese) or the Abrilongo (if you are Spanish) stream between, unsurprisingly, Spain and Portugal. It’s only 3.2 metres long and, if you cross it from Spain to Portugal, you travel an hour back in time, because it also straddles a time zone.

Our ‘Biggest’ chapter (here) told us that the world’s largest turd was produced by the Tyrannosaurus rex. But the smallest turds produced by an animal other than an insect are those from mice. They are about the size of a grain of rice, typically around 5 millimetres long.

Bat turds are also very small and, because bats usually hang upside down, they wait until they leave their perches before depositing them. Otherwise, things would get very messy.

Who wins? Or in this case loses? You’d expect giraffes to have quite large faeces, considering their height and weight, but they don’t. Compared to body weight, their turds are even smaller than those of a mouse. Their digestive systems are so efficient at removing all the nutrients from their food that all that emerges at the end of a very long journey from mouth to bottom is a marble-sized piece of poo.

Mythbuster: Giraffe poo is pretty useless. No, it isn’t. A safari park in England makes postcards using the fibre-rich deposits from giraffes mixed with recycled paper. Just don’t lick the envelope.