10 things we didn't know this time last week

10 THINGS Ten eggs - by Jeremy F Harrison Your chance to be creative. See 10 things? Send us a picture

It's easy to lose track of the news. So at the end of the week, it's good to keep an eye on some of those things which shouldn't go unnoticed.

If you spot something you think should be included next week, send it to us using the form at the bottom of the page.

 

1. A giant asteroid spotted by US astronomers has a one in 909,000 chance of hitting Earth in 2014. That's the same odds as Elvis reappearing and marrying Madonna, or an expedition to Mars finding the Loch Ness Monster. But it is far more likely that asteroid 2003 QQ47 will collide with our planet than you will scoop the Lotto jackpot - the odds of winning the lottery are just 13,983,816-1.

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Space suited and booted

2. Blood really does boil - if you are 80,000 feet up without a space suit or a pressurised capsule. So the balloonists who planned to fly to the edge of space were fully kitted out with Russian-made pressure suits as they would have been perched on an open flight platform - had their attempt got off the ground.

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3. Riviera Gigolo was the pseudonym Alastair Campbell used when he wrote soft porn stories for the top-shelf magazine Forum. It was his first job as a writer.

4. McDonald's, that all-American icon, is looking to France to revitalise its brand - it is its best-performing European subsidiary. French management put this down to their autonomy. Items tailored to local tastes have been added to menus - such as a McDonald's take on the croque monsieur - and hard plastic chairs have been ditched in favour of soft seating in natural materials. So much for the McD's adage that customers want the same burger experience in Beijing, Paris, Moscow, Chicago...

5. The belief that British cities are badly designed, concrete jungles compared with their more traditional Continental counterparts is not strictly fair - the UK's usage of concrete is only 60% of the EU's average and 70% of America's.

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A Liverpool cleric owned the ticket

6. An unused Titanic ticket - the only first-class passage booked that was not used - belonged to a Liverpool vicar. The Reverend John Stuart Holden was unable to make the journey when his wife fell ill the day before the luxury liner's doomed voyage in 1912. After the ship sank, he hung it in a cardboard frame on which he wrote: "Who redeemeth thy life from destruction."

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7. The tropics of London? Some 55.5 million years ago, the south-east was warm enough to sustain palm trees and sharks. Fossilised remains of oysters, shark teeth and palm fronds have been uncovered in a site in Stratford dug up for the Channel Tunnel Rail Link.

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10 THINGS ON CEEFAX If you're in the UK, you can now see 10 Things at the weekend on Ceefax, page 129

8. A gallon-and-half of warm water, lead weights and a sandbag - this is what it feels like to be pregnant. Teenage boys are being strapped into weighted Empathy Belly suits so they understand what it means to get a girl pregnant. Lead balls imitate a baby's limbs sticking into the rib cage, and sandbags are positioned to press on the bladder.

9. Adolf Hitler was a clever mimic, according to the late Diana Mosley. In one of her last interviews before she died, the wife of Oswald Mosley told how her friend the Fuhrer did rather good impressions of his cronies: "He was very clever at imitations, a sign that someone is very observant, he could take people off in a clever way."

10. Yoga and GPS technology will be used to help prevent crashes in India's vast rail network, which carries 13 million passengers each day. Drivers will be encouraged to attend yoga classes to keep them fit and alert, and an anti-collision device which uses the Global Positioning Satellite system will beam warnings of any obstructions or other dangers direct to the cab.

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If you see something you think should be included next week, let us know using the form below.