The Wow Info: surprising facts about science, food, travel and more

Bare-nosed wombat faeces form cubes in the last 17 per cent of the intestine. Differences in gut-wall stiffness, muscle contractions and drying help create their corners and regular shape.

Walls weaken Wi-Fi by reducing the radio signal that reaches a device. Heavy concrete has a transmission loss of 22 dB at 2.4 GHz and 44 dB at 5 GHz.

A Lagrange point is a position in a rotating system of two large bodies where a much smaller object can keep a nearly constant position relative to them. In the idealised model, only L4 and L5 are stable when the mass ratio is sufficiently large.

People have long been told that the Great Wall of China is the one human-made structure you can spot from the Moon. What have astronauts actually seen, and who started the story?

Two species of dried tardigrade survived ten days in space vacuum during a 2007 orbital experiment. Solar ultraviolet radiation sharply reduced survival, showing that the result did not make tardigrades invulnerable to space.

The Altar Stone at Stonehenge weighs about 6 tonnes, and a 2024 study showed it came from more than 700 kilometres away.

The necktie traces back to knotted cloths worn by Croatian soldiers fighting for France in the Thirty Years' War, and the word cravat still carries their name. A US patent granted in 1924 gave the tie the shape we know today.

A solar sail is a spacecraft propulsion system that uses pressure from sunlight on a lightweight, reflective membrane. NASA’s Advanced Composite Solar Sail System unfurls a sail about 80 square metres in area from a spacecraft about the size of a microwave.

Old books smell of vanilla, almonds and mustiness because ageing paper slowly breaks down and gives off airborne chemicals, some of them close relatives of the flavourings in your kitchen.

The popular belief says Vincent van Gogh sold only one painting, The Red Vineyard, for 400 francs. Verdict: partly true, since it is the only sale documented by name, but he was neither unknown nor limited to a single sale.