Several weeks ago my kids got a book from the library and I often see them sitting on the couch in twos and threes poring over the pages.
It’s an Usborne book called 100 Things to Know About the Unknown.
Besides the usual suspects of yeti, dinosaurs, and the human appendix, this book covers dozens of other areas that are awaiting discovery, are impossible to know, were once known, or that we don’t even know that we don’t know! Here are five fascinating facts from this book.
Rough periwinkles vary so much in appearance that over the span of 200 years they were given 113 different scientific names. In the early 2000s taxonomists decided they were all one species and now they have one scientific name: Littorina saxatilis.
In the 1900 Olympic games a young boy was pulled from the crowd to act as coxswain for a Dutch rowing team. He disappeared before receiving his gold medal and has never been identified.
During World War II a doctor in Rome hid Jews in a hospital ward and recorded that they were suffering from Syndrome K. When Nazi soldiers arrived they were afraid of this made-up disease and declined to search the ward, so hundreds of lives were saved.
Ways people once thought you could detect poison in food include using narwhal horn utensils (they would change colour), Venetian glass goblets (they would shatter), or opal rings (they would turn pale).
When eating or resting cows tend to align themselves in a north-south direction.
Just looked for that book on Nicole Leitao’s Usborne website, but I couldn’t find it! There were lots of other books in that series; things to know about saving the planet, oceans, history, etc. but not about the unknown. Very strange but somehow appropriate!