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As a respectful homage to one of my favourite Telly programmes, and the rather excellent spin off books, here is a thread dedicated to fascinating facts, obsure truths, and the exposure of balderdash!

Is simple enough, all you need to do is to post up something you find interesting, having checked it's veracity as much as you can.

Here is one to start off (plenty more as I plunder the book once I'm home!)

If the human stomach did not constantly regenerate it's lining, our digestive acids would start to digest our bodies. Freaky huh?

And in keeping with the vague stomach theme, those little bits of what seems to be carrot in human vomit is in fact shreds of stomach lining.

Over to you. And feel free to include favourite quotes!

The US used spider web threads for some of its periscopes in WWII.

In Japanese the word for spider and cloud are the same.

The english verb To Cleave means to stick together and to chop apart.

The Italian language only contains about 100,000 words.

The Scottish population has a higher proportion of redheads (14%) than any other population.

Henry VIII in fact only had two wives during the course of his lives. The other weddings were either illegal (bigamy) or annulled, which means in the eyes of the Church and the Law, never occured in the first place.

Most of the early English dictionaries were not in Alphabetical order.

There is more evidence supporting the historical evidence of King Cole ( as in the "merry olde soule") than there is for King Arthur.

A new species of Sea Urchin was discovered thanks to E-bay.

Emus and kangaroos cannot walk backwards, and are on the Australian coat of arms for that reason.

You see, Oz is always going fowards, proving that nothing can possibly go wrong with our nation. Yay! No apocalypse for us.

There is no word in Arabic for state.

The English words 'bungalow', 'jungle' and 'pajamas' all come from Indian languages.

Spiderweb, weight for weight, is stronger than steel.

Germany is the second largest consumer of alcohol per capita. It is second only to ireland.

Most of the boundary between Delaware and Pennsylvania is defined by an arc extending 12 miles (19 km) from the cupola of the courthouse in New Castle. It is referred to as the Twelve-Mile Circle.

This is the only true-arc political boundary in the United States.

Kentucky is the only U.S. state to have a non-contiguous part exist as an exclave surrounded by other states.

Fulton County, in the far west corner of the state, includes a small part of land, Kentucky Bend, on the Mississippi River bordered by Missouri and accessible via Tennessee, created by the New Madrid Earthquake.

4 of the United States Of America's states are officially commonwealths: Kentucky, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Virginia

Plantar fasciitis is a painful inflammatory condition of the foot caused by excessive wear to the plantar fascia that supports the arch or by biomechanical faults that cause abnormal pronation.

I have it in my left foot again and it hurts....

The german word for cookie "Keks" does actually come from the english work "cakes".

Iran, per capita, is the largest consumer of tea in the world. Take that, English stereotype!

Scientists have found a claw suggesting ancient sea scorpions were 2.5 meters long. The claw was 18 inches long

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2007/nov/21/dinosaurs.fossils

I once ate a whole block of butter, for a dare then pucked, is that a fact?

In the 2008 Ig Nobel awards Duke University behavioral economist Dan Ariely won for his study that found more expensive fake medicines work better than cheaper fake medicines.

US coins have their value written on them in words, not numbers.

United Kingdom postage stamps are the only ones in the world that do not state their country of origin on them.

Drinking eyedrops will make you poop your pants.

Berlin Germany has the largest turkish population in the world, aside from Istanbul, and they make affordable yet delicious sandwiches.

The 57 in heinz stands for the number of pickle varieties the company once sold.

The pitch of most american car horns is f.

Dr. Seuss was first to coin the word nerd.

There are no (actual) words which rhyme with orange, month, silver, or purple.

The phrase "rule of thumb" is a reference to an old english law about spousal abuse; one could not strike one's wife with an object wider than one's thumb.

At no point is the Amazon river crossed by bridges.

The great pyramid of Giza remained the tallest man-made structure in the world for over 3,800 years, unsurpassed until the 160 meter tall spire of Lincoln Cathedral was completed c. 1300

The ampersand (&) used to be the 27th letter of the alphabet. Children would learn their letters chanting, but instead of finishing "x, y, z and and" tutors added the latin 'per se' to make "x, y, z and per se and".