John Lloyd - 1,342 QI Facts To Leave You Flabbergasted

The most distant object in the universe is 13.42 billion light years away. To get to the nearest star at a tenth of the speed of light would take 42 years and need fuel weighing as much as the Sun.

The Sun gets 4 million tons lighter every second. Ten-trillionths of your suntan comes from stars in galaxies beyond the Milky Way.

For a billion years, the only life on Earth was a kind of slime. Scientists call this period the boring billion. Scientists alive today outnumber all the scientists who ever lived up to 1980. Scientists watching paint dry in Surrey and Lyon in 2016 said the results were exciting.

To avoid exciting men, early bicycles for women had a cherry screen to hide their ankles.

No one knows why bicycles stay upright. No one knows how much money is in circulation. Economists cant explain boom or bust. No one knows why scientists dont have tails. The first scientifically named dinosaur bone was called Scrotum humanum because it looked like a giant pair of human testicles.

The remains of a dinosaur named Aachenosaurus multidens turned out to be lumps of petrified wood. Velociraptors were no bigger than turkeys. Dinosaurs didnt roar; they mumbled or cooed.

Sabre-toothed tigers never existed. Neanderthals are shown as slouching because the first one to be reconstructed happened to have arthritis. The first Neanderthal skull discovered was thought to belong to a Cossack with rickets, the pain of which had furrowed his brow.

In 2015, Spanish workers destroyed a 6,000-year-old Neolithic tomb, mistaking it for a broken picnic table. They replaced it with a better picnic table.

When spun on a table, a US Lincoln Memorial one-cent coin will land on tails 80% of the time. The surface area of a cat, including each hair of its fur, is 100 times that of its skin and is enough to cover a ping-pong table. Ping-pong balls have been made larger to make the sport better for television. In France, Germany, Austria, Spain and the Netherlands they serve beer in McDonalds. In France, Germany, Austria, Spain and the Netherlands they serve beer in McDonalds.

McNuggets come in four official shapes: bell, bone, boot and ball. Slit-faced bats are the only mammals in the world with a T-shaped tail. Batman flies through the air so fast that landing would probably kill him.

A batman was a unit of weight in the Ottoman Empire. Ben Affleck weighs about nine batmans. In the X-Men movies, the sound of Wolverines claws shooting out was made by tearing a turkey apart.

In the Halloween movies, Jason the killer wears a Captain Kirk mask, sprayed white. In The Empire Strikes Back, the emperor had a mans voice, a womans face and a chimpanzees eyes.

In Raiders of the Lost Ark, the sound of the boulder that chased Indiana Jones was made by rolling a car down a gravel road. If every car in Monaco took to the roads at the same time, they wouldnt all fit on. In 2009, the mayors of adjoining Parisian suburbs declared the same street as one-way, but in different directions. In 1845, a bridge collapsed in Great Yarmouth, killing 79 people watching a clown in a tub being pulled by geese. In 1845, a bridge collapsed in Great Yarmouth, killing 79 people watching a clown in a tub being pulled by geese.

Mice sing like birds, but humans cant hear them. The Elizabethans treated warts by cutting a mouse in half and applying it to the affected part. Georgian women worried about mice getting into their wigs at night.

The hair of Twiggys waxwork at Madame Tussauds was dressed by Twiggys hairdresser. A hairdresser in Madrid cuts hair using a samurai sword and a blowtorch. In 1942, an Italian hairdresser called the Phantom Barber of Pascagoula broke into peoples houses and cut their hair.

The people most likely to suffer injuries at work are hairdressers.

The Smithsonian Museum has a framed collection of locks of hair from the first 14 presidents. Benjamin Franklin had a pulley system so he could lock his bedroom door from his bed. Thomas Jefferson kept a flock of geese to supply quills for his pens. Ronald Reagan was a stand-up comedian for two weeks.