Animal Eyes

Einstein was an exceptional human being – and his brain was out of the ordinary, too! A study found that his parietal lobe was 15% larger than average. That’s the region of the brain that is responsible for mathematical thought and spatial cognition.

The first ever science documentary got stuck straight into the most important topic – cheese. Made in 1903, Cheese Mites showed audiences what a piece of stilton looked like beneath a microscope. The scientist reveals a veritable smorgasbord of mites, in his words “crawling and creeping about in all directions, looking like great uncanny crabs, bristling with long spiny hairs and legs”. The year was 1903, and early cinema goers were shocked and thrilled by the images, stilton manufacturers were appalled, and sales of cheap microscopes soared.

Alfred Mosher Butts, a New York architect, invented the popular board game Scrabble in 1931. He wanted to create a game which involved some luck and a lot of skill (and a large vocabulary)! Butts decided on the point-values of the letters by studying the front page of the New York Times.