10 things we didn't know last week News snippets

Sliced and diced for your convenience Published duration 11 April 2014

image copyright Science Photo Library

1. Your taste buds go numb when you fly.

2. Swedes will pay a lot for the first strawberries of the season.

3. Flies can completely change direction by rolling their bodies and giving a slight flick of their wings - all within five milliseconds.

4. Hawaii consumes more spam than any other state in the US.

5. Professional musicians struggle to tell the difference between Stradivarius violins and modern instruments in blind testing.

6. Bank of England workers in the 1980s had to do dexterity tests using tweezers and washers.

7. Lawrence of Arabia was offered a job as a nightwatchman at the bank. He turned it down.

8. Yellow sac spiders are strongly attracted to Mazda cars.

9. Only a steel shortage stopped the Soviet Union creating the world's tallest structure in 1922.

10. People called Eleanor are disproportionately likely to get into Oxford University.

Seen a thing? Tell the Magazine on Twitter using the hashtag #thingIdidntknowlastweek