147. The Big Bum Coconut

Fruit come in all shapes and sizes, no sizes greater however, than that of the Coco de Mer. This bizarre fruit is both rare and exotic, with more than a passing resemblance to a pair of buttocks, earning it the nickname of the ‘Bum nut’ This curiosity is only found on two islands in the Seychelles, Praslin and Cureuse. Also known as the ‘Seychelles Coconut’ it requires 7 years to mature and then another 2 to germinate.

Once it is finished with all of its growth it reaches phenomenal weights, the heaviest one weighed reached 42kg  the largest weight of any fruit ever recorded. Behind this also lies a small mythology, it’s latin name Lodoicea callipyge means in part ‘beautiful rump’ after sailors who saw the mysterious double coconut thought it resembled a pair of disembodied woman’s buttocks.Until the trees were found to be the source in 1768,  people believed their source to be a mythical tree at the bottom of the sea.                  

 

114. Peanut Diamonds

Peanuts are bizarrely useful things. They are also just bizarre things that ripen underground. Firstly, they are not nuts. Technically a type of Pea, so peanuts are a fruit. They also are weird in other ways, they have more protein than beef liver and more energy than pure sugar.

Also they are used in the manufacture of Dynamite.

So how are they useful? Cheese, milk, coffee, cosmetics, soap, plastic, ink, dyes and many more products can be made using in part, peanuts. The main ‘Peanut Man ‘was a man called George Washington Carver. He was a freed slave who lived through the end of the 18th Century and the beginning of the 19th. Over the course of his life his fascination with peanuts led him to discover 325 uses for peanuts. Pretty cool right? That list I gave before was nothing compared to what he found.

Even then more uses were found for the common Peanut. This last one though is not really a use, it is just very impressive.

If you put enough pressure on a peanut, it will become a diamond. a bona fide tiny little diamond. I want one!

Further Reading:

• Wikipedia: George Washington Carver

 

71. Canada Juice

FACT: Here’s an odd one for you : Canada is the worlds largest fruit juice drinking nation per capita population.

In Canada they just really like their fruity tinctures, with the average Canadian drinking around 53 litres of diluted fruit mush each year, beating out their nearest competition, America, by around 10 liters, a considerable difference.

You go Canada, keep murdering those fruit and consuming their diluted insides!

 

65. The Omnipresent Banana

MISCONCEPTION: The best fruit is the Banana, I eat lots of different bananas, just because they are that delicious. Mmmm! Bananas.

FACT: I can understand the great enthusiasm and love many people feel for bananas, I really can. However, whilst they are loved the world over and are very useful; bananas are a herb, not a fruit. Whilst they appear to come off of a tree , its just happens to be the worlds largest herbaceous plant… so there.

As I was saying there really are no ends to bananas usefulness, monkeys love them, the leaves are good for waterproofing ceilings or wrapping up parcels. In fact with their easily peeled skin they seem to be perfect for human consumption.This is all good, that is why several thousand years ago humans started cultivating them, before even apples be were looking after the curvy herb. Just remember…

The banana was never meant to be. It is a freak, in the traditional sense at least.

Th banana is a hybrid between to closely related plants, one of which tastes horrible, meanwhile the other is stuffed full with seeds. Due to the fact that nature does no like cross-breeding the offspring, out eponymous hero the banana, is sterile. Bananas cannot breed. Fortunately for the banana lovers worldwide some smart humans realised that by taking cuttings you could produce more bananas, however these would be identical to the original banana.

Over many hundreds of years of trade and expansion we today have reached what many people consider to be the perfect banana. If you have ever had a banana split, smoothie, or bought a banana from a supermarket, it was the same banana. Down to the last gene. It was a Cavendish banana.Every lat one.Unfortunately, due to the magic of having the same sweet taste every time, the banana is susceptible to disease. Currently genetic scientists the world over are working hard to find a way to prevent a banana  apocalypse. This may sound ridiculous but I assure you it is very serious,  it has happened before.

There was once a more popular breed of banana than the Cavendish, it was called Gros Michel, its fame spread and some claim it was even better than our beloved Cavendish. Then one day, catastrophe struck. It was the Panama disease. This condition spread like wildfire because if one Gros Michel could get it, the millions of others would too, and they did. Over ten or so years the disease spread through plantations around the world, reducing millions of tons of delicious herbs to a rotting mess. By the 1970’s Gros Michel was extinct, Cavendish was the king now. The new omnipresent herb in our midst.

So there you have, the rise and fall of a freak of nature, a banana that cannot breed but is everywhere you look. The story of an apocalypse and a new king. The banana is a most phenomenal herb.

For a longer, probably better written article on the sex-life of bananas click here.

 

52. The Brazil Nut Problem

FACT: As you may well know from experiences with muesli or similar mixtures such as varying sizes of Lego bricks an odd thing happens when you shake them. the odd thing is that the largest, heaviest objects sit on the top. If they are not then they miraculously rise up through the mixture when it is all shaken. This is a problem, specifically the Brazil Nut Problem. It is a problem still, because it has not been solved.

Named after the large nuts which rise up to the top of Muesli the Brazil nut problem has bothered physicists for decades.

In 1987 Anthony Rosato tried to explain it by suggesting that when larger nuts rose it left opportunities for the smaller oat flakes to infiltrate the gap, causing the large nut to land further up each shake. However according to Sidney Nagel of the University of Chicago the explanation is incorrect. After studying the physics of the everyday for many years he has come up with his own slant on the Brazil Nut problem.

He believes that both larger nuts and the oat flakes rise up when shaken but then in the ensuing gaps between the objects the oat flakes can slide down the sides whereas the large nuts cannot do so as the gaps are too small. Meaning that after successive shakes the largest nuts end up on the top.

This, while a good explanation, is incomplete and Mr Nagel confirms it himself, saying that the problem always brings something new which ,’comes along to knock us out of our complacency.’

There you go, simple nuts confound even the best of us.

Click here for a video explaining this in greater depth