Summer on Uranus lasts for 21 years – but so does winter.

Planets, meaning wanderers, are named after Roman deities: Mercury, messenger of the gods; Venus, the god of love and beauty; Mars, the god of war; Jupiter, king of the gods; and Saturn, father of Jupiter and god of agriculture; Neptune, god of the sea.

One year on earth is 365.26 days long. One day is 23 hours, 56 minutes, and 4 seconds long. The extra day in a leap year was introduced to compensate for the discrepancy in the Georgian calendar.

There are more than 326 million trillion gallons of water on Earth.

More than 70% of earth’s dryland is affected by desertification.

The high jump method of jumping head first and landing on the back is called the Fosbury Flop.

Gymnasiums were introduced in 900BC and Greek athletes practised in the nude to the accompaniment of music. They also performed naked at the Olympic Games.

About 42,000 tennis balls are used in the plus-minus 650 matches in the Wimbledon Championship.

Sports command the biggest television audiences, led by the summer Olympics, World Cup Football and Formula One racing.

The record for the most major league baseball career innings is held by Cy Young, with 7,356 innings.

In his time, Michael Schumacher was the highest paid sportsman, ahead of Tiger Woods and Arnold Palmer. (Not including sponsorship endorsements.)

A soccer ball is made up of 32 leather panels, held together by 642 stitches.

Golf the only sport played on the moon – on 6 February 1971 Alan Shepard hit a golf ball.

The record for the most Olympic medals ever won is held by Soviet gymnast Larissa Latynina. Competing in three Olympics, between 1956 and 1964, she won 18 medals.

In 1975 Junko Tabei from Japan became the first woman to reach the top of Everest.

The first instance of global electronic communications took place in 1871 when news of the Derby winner was telegraphed from London to Calcutta in under 5 minutes.

The first modern Olympic Games were held in Athens, Greece in 1896. There were 311 male but no female competitors.

Korfball is the only sport played with mixed teams, consisting of 4 men and 4 women.

The oldest continuous trophy in sports is the America’s Cup. It started in 1851, with Americans winning for a straight 132 years until Australia took the Cup in 1983.

Jean Genevieve Garnerin was the first female parachutists, jumping from a hot air balloon in 1799.

In 1898, one of the first programmes to be broadcasted on radio was a yacht race that took place in British waters.

A baseball ball has exactly 108 stitches, a cricket ball has between 65 and 70 stiches.

Bill Klem served the most seasons as major league umpire – 37 years, starting in 1905. He also officated 18 World Series.

Ferenc Szisz from Romania, driving a Renault, won the first Formula One Grand Prix held at Le Mans, France in 1906.