Interesting Facts

The odds of Leicester City winning the Premier League at the start of the 2015/16 football season were 5000:1. This means that gamblers thought the following things were more likely to happen:- 2,500:1 - David Moyes to be an X Factor judge 2,500:1 - Arsenal would sack Arsene Wenger and install Piers Morgan as boss 2,000:1 - Kim Kardashian will become US President by 2020 1,000:1 - Sir Alex Ferguson would win Strictly Come Dancing 1,000:1 - Hugh Hefner would admit he's a virgin 1,000:1 - Robbie Savage will be named the next James Bond 1,000:1 - Bono will become the next Pope 500:1 - Simon Cowell will become the next Prime Minister of the UK 500:1 - Andy Murray would name his first born Novak You might need to look up some of these names to see how unlikely they are, apart from Kim Kardasian: As Trump is a contender, I don't see why this couldn't happen.) Update -  The people of Leicester must be very, very happy today.

Licorice Allsorts are a very popular sweet in the UK.  They are a colourful mixture of liquorice, sugar, coconut, aniseed jelly, fruit flavourings, and gelatine. ( They were first produced in Sheffield, England, by Geo. Bassett & Co Ltd, under the name Bassett's Allsorts, but the idea of mixing up several sweets came about by accident.  According to Basset's own marketing, in 1899 a sales representative for the company, Charlie Thompson, supposedly dropped a tray of samples he was showing a client in Leicester, mixing up the various sweets. After he scrambled to re-arrange them, the client was intrigued by the new creation. All I know is they are delicious, and thankfully there isn't one bit of salted liquorice in them.) 

According to research from from the University of Leicester, rodents could evolve to fill niches as larger mammals go extinct. (The largest extinct rodent known to science was Josephoartegasia monesi. It lived three million years ago, was larger than a bull, and weighed over a ton. Like its modern-day relative, the sheep-sized capybara, it lived in South America. Gigantism is a well known evolutionary response that occurs when a small creature steps into an ecological niche left by a larger species. Rats the size of sheep!  If that isn't a good enough reason to protect the elephant, rhino and other species from extinction, I don't know what is.)

A load of old bones found under a council car park in Leicestershire, belonged to King Richard III. (Archeologists, from the University of Leicester, have confirmed that DNA evidence proves the discovery of the body of Richard, who was slain at the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485.) Update - The University of Leicester, which led the project to find and exhume Richard, was given permission to reinter the king's remains at the cathedral in Leicester, which is close to Bosworth in central England, but descendants of the monarch, who was the last king of the Plantagenet dynasty, are seeking a legal challenge to have his body laid to rest instead in York, the northern English city with which he had close links during his life. They should be grateful Laika didn't find them, or they really would be - history.

Archaeologists in the UK are searching for the bones of the last Plantagenet king of England, Richard III. (So, where are they looking? In a grand cathedral, or the grounds of a palace? No, they're searching beneath a city centre parking lot in Leicester. The car park is said to have been built over a Franciscan friary known as Greyfriars, which housed the monarch's remains after he died at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485.)