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