In an emergency, most fish can swim ten times their body length in one second! Are the Olympic gold medal-holders listening?

Imagine fighting with your neighbour over how much sunlight you can use! Almost 2,000 years ago, the Romans had laws to protect a person’s right to access solar energy. It was the first ever municipal use of sunlight. Huge volumes of wood burnt every day for their central heating systems was taking its toll on the forests. So the enterprising Romans turned to the endless bounty of the Sun god to keep themselves warm and cosy.

Ever heard of a fly with a blocked nose? Soon there will be swarms of fruit flies incapable of sniffing their way to their food, because they lack Or83b, the gene that controls the sense of smell in most insects. Scientists are in the process of designing a compound of insect repellents that will block this gene.

Were hobbits only figments of Tolkien’s colourful imagi-nation, or did they exist after all? In the Flores Island in Indonesia, scientists have recently dug up human skeletons no larger than the size of a three-year old child. The bones are about 18,000 years old, when modern humans had lived. The local dig workers have decided to call them ‘hobbits’, even though the official name given to them is Homo flore-siensisafter the island.

Plugging to lunar soil? Helium-3, the gas used to blow up balloons could be mined from the moon's surface and brought to earth to meet future energy demands. The helium on moon can provide 10 times more energy than all the fossil fuels on earth. About 25 tonnes of helium can provide electricity to the US for a year!

Dogs can sometimes pick up a scent from up to half-mile away. Canines possess about 220 million olfactory recep-tors to help them smell — roughly 40 times the number humans have.