Things I learned this week

Have you ever wondered why crisps don’t go soft in their bags? The bags, after all, have air in them so surely that should cause the crisps to soften. No, in fact the sealed bags are filled only with nitrogen.

Old age is sad! Research suggests that up to the age of 20 you laugh 1,344,290 times. For the rest of your life you will only manage 323,572 more.

MRI scans show that someone in the early stages of love lights up the same areas of the brain as someone with obsesssive-compulsive disorder.

“As you get older, time appears to speed up. This is partly because your perception of time is related to the amount of new information you have to process. As you get older, there is less and less novelty to deal with.”

Feeding Britain’s pets costs over £1.7 billon every year – more than half of what the UK spends on foreign aid.

Until recently most pineapples sold in Britain were of the variety Smooth Cayenne (which, despite the name, were viciously spiked) but in 1970 research scientists came up with the variety Gold. Not only is the Gold much sweeter than the Smooth Cayenne but it also has the advantage of turning gold when ripe whereas the latter remained green throughout. Arguments over who owned the rights to the Gold meant its arrival on our shelves was delayed until 1996. Once it did the sale of pineapples increased enormously.

Hydrochloric acid in the same concentration as can be found in our stomachs must by law be stored and transported in containers marked as having hazardous chemicals. It is powerful enough to dissolve most metals.

(Most of the above were thanks to Tadg Farrington “The Average Life of the average Person”)