TheFactNotes
Graça Machel is the only person to have been first lady of two different countries. She was married to Mozambique's founding president Samora Machel and, after his death, to Nelson Mandela — making her first lady of Mozambique and later of South Africa.
Ethiopia is one of the few countries in Africa with its own indigenous alphabet. Amharic and several other Ethiopian languages are written in the Ge'ez script, or Fidäl — a writing system developed locally rather than adapted from Latin or Arabic.
Sudan has more pyramids than Egypt — roughly twice as many. More than 200 Nubian pyramids survive in Sudan, most of them at sites like Meroë, built as tombs for the kings and queens of the Kingdom of Kush.
Africa and Europe are only about 14 kilometres apart at their closest point. The Strait of Gibraltar separates Spain from Morocco by roughly 14 km of water at its narrowest — close enough that each continent is clearly visible from the other.
Dallas Buyers Club won an Oscar for makeup done on a budget of $250. The 2013 film's makeup department reportedly spent just $250 in total, yet the work won the Academy Award for Best Makeup and Hairstyling.
NASA reportedly screens Armageddon as a management training exercise. New managers are said to be asked to spot as many scientific and technical errors as they can in the 1998 film — counts are often put at more than 160.
The film Titanic cost far more to make than the real ship did to build. RMS Titanic was built for about $7.5 million in 1912; James Cameron's 1997 film had a production budget of around $200 million.
A single blood cell completes a full circuit of the body in about a minute. Driven by the heart, a red blood cell travels out through the body and back roughly once every 60 seconds.
Stretched end to end, the DNA in your body would reach far beyond the solar system. Uncoiled and joined together, the DNA in a person's cells is often estimated to span the distance from the Sun to Pluto and back many times over.
The iPod was named after a line from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Freelance copywriter Vinnie Chieco suggested the name after seeing a prototype and recalling the film's line about opening the pod bay doors.
The BMW roundel uses the colours of Bavaria, where the company is based. The blue-and-white quarters echo the flag of the Free State of Bavaria — shown in reverse, because trademark law forbade using a state's symbols directly in a logo.
The Starbucks logo is a two-tailed siren from European folklore. The figure is a melusine — a mermaid with twin tails — chosen in 1971 to evoke the sea and the ocean voyages that once carried coffee.
The letter P in the Pinterest logo is shaped like a pushpin. Look closely at the letterform and the stem of the P tapers to a point — a quiet nod to pinning things to a board.
Uber once redesigned its logo to look like an atom. A 2016 rebrand replaced the familiar "U" with an abstract mark meant to suggest that Uber's cars, like atoms, are everywhere.
The Android robot was inspired by bathroom door signs. Designer Irina Blok has said the green figure grew out of studying the simple pictograms used to mark men's and women's restrooms.
Wikipedia's logo is an unfinished globe made of puzzle pieces. Each visible piece carries a glyph from a different writing system, and the gaps near the top are deliberate — the encyclopedia is never complete.
Ferrari's prancing horse came from a World War I fighter pilot. The emblem was painted on the plane of Italian air ace Francesco Baracca; his mother suggested Enzo Ferrari adopt it for luck.
The wettest place on Earth is a village in northeast India. Mawsynram, in the hills of Meghalaya, receives the highest average annual rainfall recorded anywhere in the world.
The world's highest cricket ground sits at 2,444 metres in the Himalayas. Built in 1893 by the Maharaja of Patiala, the pitch at Chail in Himachal Pradesh was made by levelling the top of a hill.
India has the largest postal network in the world. More than 150,000 post offices reach across the country, among them a branch that floats on a lake in Kashmir.
India produces more milk than any other country. It accounts for close to a quarter of the world's supply — more than the entire European Union combined.
One of the earliest recorded irrigation dams was built in what is now Gujarat. The Sudarshan reservoir, in the Saurashtra region, was created in the 4th century BC during the Mauryan Empire.
Chess was invented in India. Its earliest ancestor, a game called chaturanga, appeared in northern India by around the 6th century and spread westward through Persia.
One of the world's oldest centres of higher learning stood at Takshashila. The ancient site of Takshashila, or Taxila, in present-day Pakistan drew students from across Asia to study dozens of subjects.