interesting fact

In the San Francisco office of Cloudflare, lava lamps are used as a physical randomness generator. This is back to internet security and SSL, but on a much bigger scale than Netscape: Cloudflare handles over a quarter of a quadrillion encryption requests per day. About 10 per cent of all web traffic relies on Cloudflare. This means they need a lot

the oldest known printed advert in English is from the fifteenth century – and is for a book.

On paper, therefore, the Victorian logic looks sound: once you have got cooking water at or near 212 °F/100 °C, it shouldn’t really make much of a difference whether the water is vigorously bubbling or only simmering. Yet our eyes and tastebuds tell us that it does. The reason is that properly boiling water moves chaotically and transfers heat to t

Many people think that spit-roasting meant roasting over the fire, but in fact the cooking took place a good distance to the side of the fire, the meat only getting moved close up right at the end to brown it. This is a similar technique to a modern Argentine asado, where a whole animal is slow-roasted at an angle several feet from an outdoor charc

In an age when paper was expensive, they were often recycled, hence their nickname ‘bum fodder’. For further toilet-related fun, the word ‘bumf’, or ‘bumph’, is a shortened version of this.

‘Apple’ was a generic word for fruit in ancient Greece and Rome, and the golden apples were originally depicted as quinces, as they were in the frieze in the Temple of Zeus,

Professor Naomichi Ishige is an anthropologist of Japanese food who has published over eighty books. He once conducted an experiment on some of his Japanese seminar students, asking them: ‘Suppose you lend an article that you use to someone else, who uses it, and then thoroughly cleans it before returning it to you. Which article would you have the

Seismologists know that how long an earthquake lasts is a decent proxy for its magnitude. The 1989 earthquake in Loma Prieta, California, which killed sixty-three people and caused six billion dollars’ worth of damage, lasted about fifteen seconds and had a magnitude of 6.9. A thirty-second earthquake generally has a magnitude in the mid-sevens. A

Giovanni Battista Ferrari in Hesperides (1646). He believed that a Genoese missionary had brought an orange to Sicily from China that tasted strangely like a grape and he remarked on its ‘purple’ flesh. This distinctive colouring is due to the blood-coloured pigments called anthocyanins that are also found in red, purple and blue ‘super fruits’ suc