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Greater promiscuity in females does, indeed, lead to bigger testes, pre­sumably because a male needs to make more sperm to have a fight­ing chance of fathering offspring, if those sperm are competing with sperm from a lot of other males. Gorillas, which discourage dalliances between other males and the females of their harem, have small testes. Chimpanzees, among whom females mate widely, have large ones. Hu­man testes lie between these two extremes.

If America stood for anything, it was to kick Communist butts.

Her passage through the family was like the river Rhone flowing through the lake of Geneva "without mingling any part of its streams with that lake".

In 2000 the census takers in China reported an undercount of 1.81%. Officials deemed this to be within acceptable limits. To compensate, they added more than 22m notional people to the to­tal, to produce a population of 1.27 billion. Many of the uncounted were so-called "black children", ie, those born in breach of regu­lations that limit urban couples to a single child. From sample surveys, officials estimate the population at the end of 2009 to have been 1.33 billion.

She accidentally poisoned him with a potion she thought would render him eternally faithful.

By riding on the coat-tails of his wife's brother-in-law, Nathan Rothschild.

Durex, Trojan and Australia's Ansell offer chiefly condom brands that appeal to men, with names such as "Performa", "Magnum", and "Jissbon", whose name in Chinese means "James Bond". Safedom, by contrast, sells "Elegant Winter" condoms under brands such as "Beautiful Girl" and "Green Lemon" in oval-shaped, paisley-patterned tins. Its marketing emphasises female health benefits. Whether or not Safedom goes all the way in Europe and other markets will, as usual, depend on the womenA short man, and a serial fornicator, Koestler, it seems, used his conquests as a kind of self-validation.

A trait is sexually selected if it evolved specifically to enhance mating success. They come in two main forms: weapons, such as an elk's horns are used to fight off competitors; and ornaments, like a peacock's tail, which are used to advertise genetic fitness to attract the opposite sex.

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Why not name storms after senators instead?

On current trends, the Arctic ocean will be largely ice-free in summer by 2040.

Sharks kill jast 10-20 people worldwide each year while humans kill around 73m sharks.

How did the world get from bacteria to Bach, from fungus to fugues?

In August 2016 the result of the Great Elephant Census, the most exten­sive count of a wild species ever attempted, suggested that about 350,000 African savannah elephants remain alive. This is down by 140,000 since 2007.

If Mr Xi were a bird, he would be a swan.

The body had decided that the pink dolphin, a rare type sometimes seen cavorting in the territory's harbour, would be a mascot of the handover festivities.

Of the millions of animal species on Earth, only one has built a spaceship and flown to the Moon.

By the middle of the century the ocean could contain more plastic than fish by weight. There are estimated to be 5trn bits of plastic in the ocean, with over 8m tonnes of the stuff added every year.

How much LSD should you give to an elephant, should you feel minded to do such an irresponsible thing? The answer is not the 297 milligrams that was injected into a poor pachyderm called Tusko in 1962, leading shortly to his death. Tusko should have had a few milligrams, not several hundred.

If Britain had a favourite wild animal, it was probably not the fox, gallant but verminous, or the hare, magical but moonstruck, but the bright-eyed pointy-nosed hedgehog, suddenly appearing on lawns at dusk like the head of an old brush.

There are 25m tonnes of spiders around the world and that, col­lectively, these arachnids consume between 400m and 800m tonnes of animal prey every year. This puts spiders in the same predatory league as humans as a species, and whales as a group. Each of these consumes, on an annual basis, in the region of 400m tonnes of other animals. Somewhere between 400m and 500m tonnes is also the total mass of human beings now alive on Earth.

You cannot negotiate with nature.

Scientists expect almost all corals to be gone by 2050.

In 563 AD a tsunami devastated Geneva.

IDC, a market-research firm, predicts that the "digital universe" (the data created and copied every year) will reach 180 zettabytes (180 followed by 21 zeros) in 2025 (see chart). Pumping it all through a broadband internet connection would take over 450m year.

Many male mammals have a bone, known as a baculum, in their penises to add to stiffness. What is surprising is that many others — men includ­ed — do not. What causes a baculum to evolve is not clear.

The ocean covers almost three-quarters of the planet. It is di­vided into five basins: the Pacific, the Atlantic, the Indian, the Arctic and the Southern oceans. Were all the planet's water placed over the United States, it would form a column of liquid 132km tall.