smart & curious
A list of curious facts
The Andean condor—the world’s heaviest bird—can fly for five hours without once flapping its wings.
Google’s ‘Loon’ project is using 35 balloons—as ‘floating cell towers’—to bring internet to remote parts of Kenya. The speed: 4.74 mbps uplink, and downlink speed of 18.9 mbps. That’s faster than our Airtel most of the time.
The age of your dog in human years is: The natural logarithm of the dog’s age multiplied by 16 plus 31. So an 8-week-old puppy is the same age as a 9-month-old baby, but a 1-year-old dog is a thirty-one.
The Dutch traded Manhattan to the British for a one-square-mile island in Indonesia back in 1677. The reason: at the time, they believed it was the world’s sole source of nutmeg. Less known fact: The Dutch East India Company slaughtered and enslaved the local population to ensure their monopoly.
Male Indian bullfrogs turn from green to bright yellow during the monsoon season to attract mates. And they look like this:
The world’s cutest frog—a desert rain frog native to South Africa—squeaks like a dog toy. No lies, our lab jumped up instantly when we played this video. Please feel free to similarly torture your dogs.
A 3,000-year old Egyptian mummy sounds like this. This is a slightly dated—January, 2020—but no less curious fact.