Until 1956, French schools could serve students under 14 up to half a litre of wine, cider or beer with a meal. 🍷

Tonight we're looking at UPBRINGING in a brand new ep of QI XL with Sandi, Alan, Sally Phillips, Josh Pugh & Aaron Simmonds! BBC Two at 9pm, iPlayer after.

By using their antennae, bees can tell what their hive mates’ dances mean in complete darkness.

Until 1956, French schools could serve students under 14 up to half a litre of wine, cider or beer with a meal. 🍷

Tonight we're looking at UPBRINGING in a brand new ep of QI XL with Sandi, Alan, Sally Phillips, Josh Pugh & Aaron Simmonds! BBC Two at 9pm, iPlayer after.

This is tonight! With the awesome trio of Alan Davies Josh Pugh and Sally Phillips and not to forget the best hugger in TV Sandi Toksvig. 9pm and then iPlayer x

In 1873, US physician Edward H. Clarke predicted that women who were educated while menstruating would be physically overwhelmed and end up resembling ‘a sexless class of termites’.

The Near Earth Object Surveyor, a telescope due to launch into space in 2027, has its own official tartan. (📷 Crown Copyright)

When performing at the Metropolitan Opera, Luciano Pavarotti would keep stashes of pasta in the wings to snack on between arias.

The saying ‘Life is just one damn thing after another,’ is a gross understatement. The damn things overlap. THE CINCINNATI ENQUIRER, 1947

A museum in Kentucky that has built a ‘life-size replica’ of Noah’s ark is now planning to build a ‘life-size replica’ of the tower of Babel.

The more books there are in a child’s home, the more likely they are to want to travel or move to a new country as an adult.

One of the first objects ever made from papier-mâché was a Chinese helmet from around 2,000 years ago.

In 1921, the House of Lords rejected a proposal to make ‘acts of gross indecency between female persons’ a crime partly out of fear that the resulting publicity would make women aware of the very possibility of these ‘activities’.

Ticker-tape synesthesia is when a person automatically visualises every word they hear, speak or think, and it appears in their head like subtitles.

The original name of Martin Scorsese’s family was Scozzese, which means ‘Scottish’ in Italian. When his grandparents arrived in America, a customs official wrote the name down incorrectly.

Word of the Day: MULTIPASKING (Finnish) - doing many things at the same time, all badly; ‘paska’ is Finnish for ‘shit’.

A study from 2013 showed that the British public were wrong about nearly everything.

To help build the feline population, in 1960 the British army parachuted cats into Sarawak, Borneo. No one knows how many, with estimates ranging between 20 and 14,000.

A woman called Cynthia Albritton has made plaster casts of over 48 rock star’s penises.

Harar, a walled-city in Ethiopia, has special ‘hyena doors’ which let the animals in overnight to clean up the edible waste.

It’s illegal to sell washed hen’s eggs in the UK, but it’s illegal to sell unwashed eggs in the US.