Illustration by Natasha Allegri

Things you’ve always never wanted to know

Every year, the Yellow River in China carries to the sea enough loess, a yellow loamy deposit from the deserts, to build a wall 3 feet high and 3 feet thick that would stretch 23 times around the planet.

Ninety-nine percent of all forms of life that have existed on Earth are now extinct.

Presidents George Washington and John Adams had to employ protection money — paying off certain pirates in the Mediterranean Sea with a couple million dollars — while Congress debated the creation of a U.S. Navy.

A former U.S. vice president, Aaron Burr, was charged with treason — for trying, it was said, to separate the Western lands from the U.S. and establish his own rule in the early 1800s. He was acquitted, but his image remained tarnished.

Signing a memorial to Congress for the abolition of slavery was Benjamin Franklin's last public act.

The English scientist Isaac Newton and the German mathematician Gottfried Leibniz, working independently, both discovered calculus, the branch of mathematics that studies continuously changing quantities.

The cars on the freeways today would be electric if Thomas Alva Edison had had his way. At the turn of the century, he worked on an improved battery to power an electric car that would be quiet, light, clean, and odorless. By 1909, his new battery was on the market, but it was too late. Ford’s internal-combustion engine had become king of the road.

Though he is usually considered the founder of botany, Theophrastus, a student of Aristotle, is best known today for a series of satiric character portraits that bear the mark of universality — such as the Boastful Man, the Flatterer and the Grumbler.

Human beings have been exterminating animals at the average rate of one species a year for the last two centuries. That rate appears to be on the increase, despite the raise of ecological awareness that began in the 1960s.

World War II isn’t really over. There has never been a formal peace treaty between Germany and the Soviet Union.

Columbus had with him on his first voyage to the New World a copy of Marco Polo’s book about the 13th-century, 22-year odyssey to China and back.

The Pacific Ocean fills nearly a complete hemisphere of Earth’s surface.