The fear of long words is called 'hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia'.

A Latin equivalent was used by the Roman poet Horace in the first century BCE to criticise writers who used unnecessarily long words. American poet Aimee Nezheukumatathil coined the term as we know it today, maybe because of fear of her own name.

The universe doesn't have enough space to write out a googolplex as a 1 followed by a string of zeros.

A googol is 10 to the power of 100, i.e. 10¹⁰⁰, or 1 followed by 100 zeros. A googolplex is 10 to the power of a googol, i.e. 1 followed by a googol of zeros.

If you wrote out a googolplex with a 1 and a string of zeros, using the smallest legible font and covering both sides of A4 paper, then stacked the pages into boxes and stacked the boxes, you might imagine that the boxes would make quite a pile.

It turns out that they would fill the entire observable universe – a spherical space centred on the Earth with diameter 93 billion light years. In fact, the universe would fit less than one billionth of the boxes, so you would need more than a billion such universes.

Chainsaws were first invented to help with the process of widening the birth canal during childbirth.

In the 18th century, two Scottish doctors, James Jeffray and John Aitken, produced the first chainsaw to assist with difficult deliveries. It was used to cut through the pelvic cartilage and bone, allowing doctors to perform emergency widening of the birth canal more quickly than the previous practice with a knife or hammer and chisel.

Of course, this was before the days when any form of anaesthetic was available.

The original chainsaw was hand-powered. It wasn’t until the 20th Century when petrol-driven chainsaws became available that they started to be used on trees.

When Catholics take the bread and wine of communion, they believe that they are eating Jesus' body and drinking his blood. Most Protestants think that's rubbish. However, the little bit of bread they eat does contain millions of atoms that were once part of Jesus' body and the wine contains millions of atoms that were once part of his blood. So the Catholics are, in a sense, right.

Let's consider just nitrogen atoms. Earth's atmosphere contains 1.6 x 10⁴¹ atoms of nitrogen. The biosphere contains 1.5 x 10³⁷ nitrogen atoms, most of which are cycled regularly through the atmosphere. A human body cycles 2.4 x 10²⁶ nitrogen atoms per year. So, as a result of Jesus' 30 years, the atmosphere now contains around 7.5 x 10²⁷ nitrogen atoms that would have once been part of his body. That is about 4.7 x 10⁻¹⁴ of the atmosphere.

A piece of communion bread would contain about 7 x 10²⁰ nitrogen atoms. Assuming they all came ultimately from the atmosphere, about 30 million of the atoms in the bread would once have been part of Jesus' body.

Author Morgan Robertson predicted and described the sinking of the Titanic 14 years before it happened.

In 1898, 14 years before the Titanic sank, Author Morgan Robertson wrote the novella Futility about the sinking of an "unsinkable" ocean liner named the Titan after it struck an iceberg while crossing the Atlantic.

It famously predicted the real-life RMS Titanic disaster 14 years before it happened, sharing striking parallels like its April sinking in the North Atlantic, the matching lengths of the ships and the lack of sufficient lifeboats.

Robertson's uncanny accuracy in describing the disaster led many to believe he was clairvoyant, though the author attributed the similarities to his extensive knowledge of maritime engineering and trends.

After the real sinking in 1912, the book was re-issued under the title The Wreck of the Titan to capitalize on the tragedy.

Information taken from a Google AI Summary and checked for accuracy. Picture from Picryl.

The longest a chicken has lived without its head is 18 months.

The longest-living headless chicken was a rooster named Mike, who survived for 18 months (September 1945 to March 1947).

He survived because the farmer’s axe left about 80% of his brain stem intact. Because the brain stem controls essential, involuntary bodily functions like heart rate, breathing, and basic reflexes, Mike was able to live a normal chicken lifespan minus the ability to eat or cluck.

His owners, Lloyd and Clara Olsen of Fruita, Colorado, fed the bird by dropping a mixture of milk and water, and tiny grains of corn, directly down his esophagus using an eyedropper. Mike became a massive national sideshow attraction, touring the United States while earning his owners up to $4,500 a month.

Mike tragically choked to death in a motel room in Phoenix, Arizona, in March 1947 when his owners left behind the syringe they used to clear mucus from his breathing tract.

Information from Google AI Overview, Image from Flickr.

If you stacked all the bacteria in the world one on top of the other in a single column, the height of the column would be about 500 million light years.

There are thought to be about 5 x 10³⁰ bacteria in the world. [There are about a billion bacteria in a cubic centimetre of soil and about 60 trillion in the human gut, more than there are cells in the human body.]

Each bacterium is about 10⁻⁶ m thick. 5 x 10³⁰ x 10⁻⁶ = 5 x 10²⁴. 1 light year is about 10¹⁶ m, so the stack would be 5 x 10⁸ light years, i.e. 500 million light years tall.

Of course, even if the bacteria could be moved into position at the speed of light, it would take at least 500 million years to build the stack.

A camel can drink 200 Litres of water in one go. That is the contents of a full 44-gallon drum.

No explanation necessary; it just can.