John Lloyd

Pandas defecate more than forty times a day – excreting about half the weight of what they eat – and their droppings are so fibrous that one Thai zoo uses them to make souvenir paper.

One theory links our loss of fur with increased brain size. A bigger brain creates more heat; in order to keep our temperature under control, we evolved to sweat heavily (sweating is hopeless if you have fur). So, the less fur we had, the more efficient our cooling system became and the bigger our brains grew. Also, as humans walked upright, the only place we still needed hair was on the head, to protect our expanding brains against the sun.

But the most startling fact to emerge from analysis of the genome of the Neanderthals is that they interbred with us. So, unless you are a pure black African, between 1 per cent and 4 per cent of you is Neanderthal.

the Y chromosome, the one that makes a person male (men have both an X and a Y chromosome) is shrinking. It’s lost 1,393 of its original 1,438 genes over the last 300 million years. The geneticist Steve Jones points out that one consequence of this is that women are now genetically closer to chimpanzees than men are, because the two X chromosomes they possess have changed much less rapidly.

a metal is simply defined as something that conducts electricity and heat. Of the 118 elements known, only eighteen are non-metals.

y the time the Egyptians worked out how to make glass, the Chinese had been drinking tea (traditionally they began in 2737 BC) for almost 1,400 years. Its colour was less important to them than temperature, and they found it was best served in their most famous invention of all: fine porcelain, or ‘china’.

1350 BC, but it was the Romans who first produced transparent glass. They liked the way it enabled them to admire the colour of their wine.

The impact of high-grade glass on Western culture cannot be overstated. The invention of spectacles towards the end of the thirteenth century added at least fifteen years to the academic and scientific careers of men whose work depended on reading. The precise reflection of glass mirrors led to the discovery of perspective in Renaissance painting. Glass beakers and test tubes transformed ancient alchemy into the modern science of chemistry.
The microscope and the telescope, invented within a few years of each other at the end of the sixteenth century, opened up two new universes: the very distant and the very small.
By the seventeenth century, European glass had become cheap enough for ordinary people to use it for windowpanes (as opposed to mere holes in the wall or the paper screens of the Orient). This protected them from the elements and flooded their houses with light, initiating a great leap forward in hygiene. Dirt and vermin became visible, and living spaces clean and disease free. As a result, plague was eliminated from most of Europe by the early eighteenth century.
In the mid-nineteenth century, transparent, easily sterilised swan-necked glass flasks allowed the French chemist Louis Pasteur to disprove the theory that germs spontaneously generated from putrefying matter. This led to a revolution in the understanding of disease and to the development of modern medicine. Not long afterwards, glass light bulbs changed both work and leisure forever.

What a sauna can do well is clean your skin, by opening your pores as you sweat. A fifteen-minute session at a temperature of 70°C and 40 per cent humidity raises the body’s surface temperature by 10°C and its internal temperature by 3°C. This increases blood flow to the skin and makes the lungs work harder, increasing the intake of oxygen by up to 20 per cent – which is why endurance athletes often use saunas as part of their training.

true that it’s not a good idea to drink heavily on antibiotics, because the alcohol competes with the drug for ‘processing time’ in your liver. This means the drug may work a little more slowly. What it won’t do is stop it working altogether.