Low-birthweight babies are 20 times more likely to die in their first month of life than normal-weight babies.

Agriculture consumes around 70% of all water withdrawn from the world's rivers, lakes and groundwater.

Steel drums are the only non-electric instrument invented in the 20th century.

The last wolf in Great Britain was killed in Scotland, in 1743. Wolves were extinct in England by 1500.

"Historically, when humans were unable to explain the nature of the world around them, they attributed gods, demons, monsters and more recently, extra-terrestrial invaders. "

A team of Canadian palaeontologists working along Hudson Bay in northern Manitoba has discovered the world's largest recorded complete fossil of a trilobite, a many-legged, sea-dwelling animal that lived 445 million years ago.

Rock magnetism and changes in magnetic polarity were observed as early as 1853 by the Italian scientist Melloni, who showed that the direction of magnetisation of some ancient lavas from Mt Vesuvius was the same as the direction of the Earth's magnetic field.

In the mid-twentieth century the US Patent Office was harassed by a flood of patent applications for perpetual motion machines - a machine that will run forever, or, better still, provide a limitless source of energy.

The Irish writer Jonathan Swift described the two small moons of Mars with uncanny accuracy in his novel Gulliver's Travels - which was published 150 years before these moons were discovered…