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Bilbo Baggins journeyed many places in Middle-Earth, but his quest extends to other planets, too. The Lord of the Rings was published in 1954, adding to the story that J.R.R. Tolkien began with The Hobbit in 1937.
All of the mountains on Saturn’s moon Titan are named after peaks andcentral characters in The Lord of the Rings series: Bilbo, Handir, Nimloth, Arwen and Faramir Colles were all named in 2012. (“Colles” isn’t another Tolkien reference: it’s actually a term that planetary experts use to refer to hills.) Naming a hill after Gandalf wasn’t approved until July 2015, a full 360 years after Titan was discovered in 1655.
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Adolf Hitler, JRR Tolkien, and Anne Frank's father all fought in the Battle of the Somme. Ralph Vaughan Williams and Siegfried Sassoon also fought in one of the world's bloodiest battles.
The Battle of the Somme, also known as the Somme offensive, was a major battle of the First World War fought by the armies of the British Empire and the French Third Republic against the German Empire. It took place between 1 July and 18 November 1916 on both sides of the upper reaches of the river Somme in France. The battle was intended to hasten a victory for the Allies. More than three million men fought in the battle, of whom more than one million were either wounded or killed, making it one of the deadliest battles in all of human history. Debate continues over the necessity, significance, and effect of the battle.
Hitler was injured fighting for the German Empire on the Somme. Over the years there has been speculation that he suffered a wound to his genitals as well as the leg wound suffered while serving with a Bavarian unit, which gave rise to the legend that he only had one testicle.
Adolf Hitler c 1914
Ralph Vaughan Williams was a composer whose work The Lark Ascending is frequently voted Britain's most popular piece of classical music. He enlisted as a private in the Royal Army Medical Corps on New Year's Eve, 1914, the same year he produced the work.
Otto Frank, Anne Frank's father, was the only member of the family to survive the Holocaust. Born in Frankfurt he was drafted into the German Army in 1915 served on the Western Front for the rest of the war, earning promotion to Lieutenant. He moved the family from Germany to Amsterdam in 1933 after Hitler's rise to power and increasing violence and discrimination against Jews, even those who had put their lives on the line for their country.
Harold Macmillan, the British Conservative Prime Minister from 1957 to 1963, was an officer in the Grenadier Guards who was wounded twice during the Somme. He spent the rest of the war recovering and was left permanently affected.
Harold Macmillan, WW1
JRR Tolkien, The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings author, was an officer in the 11th Battalion, Lancashire Fusiliers. Serving in the difficult northern sector of the Somme battlefield, Tolkien's health eventually suffered. He contracted trench fever at the end of October 1916 and was then sent back to hospital in Birmingham. He was unfit for service for the rest of the war.
JRR Tolkien
Siegfried Sassoon: As a second lieutenant with the 1st Battalion, Royal Welsh Fusiliers, war poet Sassoon witnessed the carnage of July 1 weeks after earning a Military Cross in a daring operation to rescue a soldier in No Man's Land.
Siegfried Sassoon
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"Hitler Has Only Got One Ball", sometimes known as "The River Kwai March", is a World War II British song, the lyrics of which, sung to the tune of the World War I-era "Colonel Bogey March", impugn the masculinity of Nazi leaders by alleging they had missing, deformed, or undersized testicles.
Multiple variant lyrics exist, but the most common version refers to rumours that Adolf Hitler had monorchism ("one ball"), and accuses Hermann Göring and Heinrich Himmler of microorchidism ("two but very small") and Joseph Goebbels of anorchia ("no balls at all").
Hitler has only got one ball,
Göring has two but very small,
Himmler is rather sim'lar,
But poor old Goebbels has no balls at all.
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The fruits and vegetables we buy in the grocery store are actually still alive, and it matters to them what time of day it is.
Researchers have discovered that the way we store our produce could have real consequences for its nutritional value and for our health. "Vegetables and fruits don't die the moment they are harvested," according to lead rresearcher Dr. Janet Braam, Professor of Biochemistry and Cell Biology at Rice University in Houston, Texas. "They respond to their environment for days, and we found we could use light to coax them to make more cancer-fighting antioxidants at certain times of day." Even after harvest, they can respond to light signals and consequently change their biology in ways that may affect health value and insect resistance. The researchers made the initial discovery in studies of cabbage. They then went on to show similar responses in lettuce, spinach, zucchini, sweet potatoes, carrots and blueberries.
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Splenda is the best-selling artificial sweetener in America.
It was first created by Shashikant Phadnis, a young Indian chemist at Queen Elizabeth College, in London, and his adviser, Leslie Hough, as an insecticide by adding a sugar solution to sulfuryl chloride, a highly toxic chemical. In the violent reaction that followed, a wholly new compound was born: tetra-deoxygalactosucrose.
In 1975, Phadnis was told to test the powder, but he misunderstood; he thought that he heard it as needing to taste it. Uing a small spatula, he put a little of it on the tip of his tongue. It was sweet --- achingly sweet. “When I reported my findings to Les, he asked if I was crazy, “ Phadnis remembers. “ How could I taste compounds without knowing anything about their toxicity?” Before long, though, Hough was so delighted with the substance that he dubbed it Serendipitose and tried putting some in his coffee. “Oh forget it, “ he said, when Phadnis reminded him that it might be toxic. “We’ll survive!”
It turned out to be useless as an insecticide but effective as an artificial sweetener, about six hundred times as sweet as sugar. When mixed with fillers and sold in bright-yellow sachets, it’s known as Splenda, the best-selling artificial sweetener in America.
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