The English were forbidden from celebrating Christmas between 1647 and 1660 by Oliver Cromwell - who also had King Charles I beheaded.

The most common rock on Earth is basalt.

The first automobile was created on 29 January 1886, when Carl Benz patented a tricycle with a one horizontal cylinder engine that he designed and built.

The African lungfish can live without water for up to four years. When a drought occurs, it digs a pit and encloses itself in a capsule of slime and earth, leaving a small opening for breathing. The capsule dries and hardens, but the fish is protected. When rain comes, the capsule dissolves and the lungfish swims away.

In the 18th century, antiquarian William Stukeley noticed that the horseshoe of great trilithons and the horseshoe of 19 bluestones at Stonehenge opened up in the direction of the midsummer sunrise.

The smallest dinosaurs were just slightly larger than a chicken. Compsognathus is one of the smallest and was about 1 m (3 feet) long and weighed about 2.5 kg.

The idea that molecules have three dimensional shapes dates back to Louis Pasteur, whose deduction in 1844 arose from the fact that solutions of two chemical compounds with identical composition could nevertheless twist a beam of light in opposite directions.

In 1984, twenty-five years after the beginning of the Arpanet (the precursor to the modern Internet), there were more Internet hosts per capita in the United States than there were telephones twenty-five years after Alexander Graham Bell announced his invention.

In 1716, Edmond Halley published a paper describing exactly how transits could be used to measure the Sun's distance, thereby establishing the absolute scale of the solar system from Kepler's third law.