QI: The Book of General Ignorance - the Noticeably Stouter Edition (34 page)

Columbus himself never said the world was round – he thought it was pear-shaped and about a quarter of its actual size.

Despite his later reputation, his voyage of 1492 wasn’t intended to discover a new continent but to prove that Asia was much closer than anyone imagined. He was wrong.

Columbus never actually set foot on mainland America – the closest he came was the Bahamas (probably the small island of Plana Cays) – but made his crew swear an oath that, if asked, they would say they’d reached India. He died in Valladolid in 1506 and remained convinced to the end that he’d reached the coast of Asia.

There is a remarkable degree of uncertainty about Columbus. Most of the evidence points to him being the son of a Genoese weaver called Domenico Columbo, but there are enough inconsistencies for him to be claimed as Sephardic Jewish, Spanish, Corsican, Portuguese, Catalan or even Greek.

He spoke the Genovese dialect (not Italian) as his first tongue and learnt to read and write in Spanish (with a marked Portuguese accent) and Latin. He even wrote a secret diary in Greek.

We don’t know what he looked like, as no authentic portrait survives, but his son claimed he was blond until the age of thirty, whereupon his hair turned completely white.

We don’t even know where he is buried. We do know his corpse had its flesh removed, as was the style for the great and the good in the sixteenth century, and that his bones were interred first in Valladolid, then in the Carthusian monastery in Seville, then in Santa Domingo, Cuba, then Havana, then, and apparently finally, in Seville Cathedral in 1898.

However, a casket with his name on remains in Santa Domingo and now Genoa and Pavia have also made competing claims to hold bits of him. DNA tests are under way, but it seems likely that the final resting place of Columbus – or Columbo, or Colón (as he preferred) – will remain as contentious as the rest of his life and achievements.

Not what you think.

Since around the fourth century
BC
, almost no one, anywhere, has believed that the earth is flat. However, if you did want to show the earth as a flat disc, you’d end up with something very similar to the United Nations flag.

Belief in a flat Earth may not even have actually originated until the nineteenth century. The guilty text was Washington Irving’s semi-fictional
The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus
(1828) which, incorrectly, suggests that Columbus’s voyage was made to prove the world was round.

The idea of a flat earth was first seriously put forward in
1838 by the eccentric Englishman Samuel Birley Rowbotham who published a sixteen-page paper entitled: ‘Zetetic Astronomy: A Description of Several Experiments which Prove that the Surface of the Sea Is a Perfect Plane and that the Earth Is Not a Globe’ (‘Zetetic’ derives from the Greek
zetein
, meaning ‘to search, or inquire’).

More than a century later, a member of the Royal Astronomical Society and devout Christian called Samuel Shenton re-branded the Universal Zetetic Society as the International Flat Earth Society.

The NASA space programme of the 1960s, culminating in the lunar landings, should have buried the issue. But Shenton was undeterred. Looking at photographs of a spherical earth taken from space, he commented: ‘It’s easy to see how a photograph like that could fool the untrained eye.’ The Apollo landings were, apparently, a Hollywood hoax, scripted by Arthur C. Clarke. Membership shot up.

Shenton died in 1971 but not before choosing his successor as President of the Society. The odd but charismatic Charles K. Johnson took over and made the Society a rallying point for a heroic, homespun ‘anti-Big Science’ movement. By the early 1990s, membership had surged to over 3,500.

Johnson, who lived and worked in the vast flatness of the Mojave desert, proposed a world in which we live on a disc, with the North Pole at its centre, surrounded by a 150-foot-high perimeter wall of ice. The sun and moon are both 32 miles in diameter, and the stars are ‘about as far away as San Francisco is from Boston’.

Johnson’s desert hideaway burnt down in 1995, destroying all the Society’s archives and membership lists. Johnson died in 2001, by which time the Society had shrunk to a few hundred members. It exists today solely as a web forum, www.theflatearthsociety.org, with around 800 registered users.

Not who, what. Bees worked it out first.

Honeybees have evolved a complex language to tell each other where the best nectar is, using the sun as a reference point. Amazingly, they can also do this on overcast days and at night, by calculating the position of the sun
on the other side of the world
. This means they can actually learn and store information, despite having a brain 1.5 million times smaller than our own.

A bee’s brain has about 950,000 neurons. A human brain has between 100 and 200 billion.

Honeybees have an in-built ‘map’ of the sun’s movements across the sky over twenty-four hours and can modify this map to fit local conditions very quickly – all decisions about where to fly are made within five seconds.

The honeybee is also more sensitive to the Earth’s magnetic field than any other creature. They use this for navigation and for making the honeycomb panels of their hives. If a strong magnet is put next to a hive under construction, a strange cylindrical comb results, unlike anything found in nature.

The temperature of a beehive is the same as that of a human body.

Bees evolved about 150 million years ago in the Cretaceous period, roughly at the same time as flowering plants. The honeybee family,
Apis
, didn’t appear until 25 million years ago. They are really a form of vegetarian wasp.

Bees smell with their antennae. Queen honeybees give off a chemical called ‘queen-substance’ which prevents worker bees developing ovaries.

It takes the entire lifetimes of twelve bees to make enough honey to fill a teaspoon. Bees will travel as much as 12 km (7.5 miles) per trip, several times a day. A single bee would have to travel about 75,000 km (46,600 miles) to make a pound of honey (or less than half a kilo), which is almost twice round the world.

To communicate.

Bees use their buzzing much as they use their movements, or ‘dancing’: to pass on information. Ten distinct sounds have been identified and some have been linked to specific activities.

The most obvious of these uses is ‘fanning’ to cool the hive. It is loud and steady at about 250 beats per second, and is amplified by the hive itself. Bees also buzz more loudly to signal danger (anyone who has approached a hive will have noticed the change in tone) followed by a sequence of 500 beats per second pulses to sound the ‘all clear’ and calm the hive.

The queen bee has a particularly rich range of sounds. When a new queen hatches she makes a high-pitched chirrup called ‘piping’ or ‘tooting’. Her sisters (still curled up inside
their cells) answer with a croak-like call called ‘quarking’. This is a big mistake: there can only be one queen. Using the ‘quarks’ as a guide, the hatched queen picks each off in turn, tearing open their cells and either stinging them to death or ripping their heads off.

Bees use their legs to hear: sound ‘messages’ in the hive are communicated through the intensity of the vibration. However, recent research into bees’ antennae suggest that as well as the chemical receptors they use to ‘smell’, the antennae are covered in eardrum-like plates, which might be ‘ears’.

This would explain why other workers touch the dancing bee’s thorax with their antennae rather than the ‘waggling’ abdomen during the ‘waggle dance’ – they are hearing the directions to the nectar rather than seeing them. After all, it’s dark in a hive.

How bees buzz is more controversial. Until recently, the main theory was that they used the fourteen breathing holes along their sides (called ‘spiracles’) rather as a trumpeter controls the sound of his instrument with his lips.

Entomologists at the University of California have ruled out this theory by carefully blocking the spiracles. The bees still buzzed.

The latest hypothesis is that buzzing is partly caused by the vibration of the wings, with some amplification from the thorax. Clipping a bee’s wings doesn’t stop the buzzing, though it does change its timbre and intensity.

The ant.

An ant’s brain is about 6 per cent of its total body weight – if we were to apply the same percentage to humans, our heads would have to be nearly three times as large, making us all look rather like the Mekon or Morrissey.

An average human brain weighs 1.6 kg (3.5 lb), which is a little over 2 per cent of body weight. An ant’s brain weighs approximately 0.3 mg.

Although an ant’s brain has only a fraction of the neurons of a human brain, a colony of ants is a super-organism. An average-sized nest of 40,000 ants has about the same number of brain cells as a person.

Ants have been around for 130 million years and there are about 10,000 trillion of them at large as we speak. The total mass of ants on the planet is slightly heavier than the total mass of human beings.

There are about 8,000 known species of ant. Ants account for about 1 per cent of all the insects on earth. The total number of insects in the world has been calculated at one quintillion (or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000.

Ants sleep for only a few minutes a day and can survive for nineteen days under water. A wood ant can manage for twenty-four days without its head. A single ant cannot live alone outside the colony, head on or not.

Ants appear to have photographic memories to help them navigate. They seem to take a series of snapshots of landmarks. Scientists do not understand how ants’ tiny brains can store so much information.

Ants are not stronger than people. Though ants can lift many times their own weight, this is only because they are small. The smaller an animal is, the stronger its muscles are in
relation to its body mass. If people were the same size as ants, they would be equally strong.