Food & Culture.

A sealed bowl of thin yellow millet noodles found buried under 3 m of sediment at the Lajia archaeological site on the Yellow River in Qinghai, China, is about 4,000 years old, the oldest known noodles. The find was reported by Lu and colleagues in Nature in 2005.

Three films are tied for the most Academy Awards won by a single film, with 11 each: 'Ben-Hur' (1959), 'Titanic' (1997), and 'The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King' (2003) — the last of which is the only one of the three to win in every category it was nominated for, sweeping all 11 nominations.

Rio de Janeiro's Carnival, held annually before Lent, is recognized by Guinness World Records as the world's largest carnival, with about 2 million people a day taking part in its street parties (blocos) alongside the samba-school parades in the Sambadrome.

Chefs at the Mohegan Sun Hotel and Casino in Uncasville, Connecticut, made a wedding cake weighing 6,818 kg (15,032 lb) on February 8, 2004 — certified by Guinness World Records as the largest wedding cake ever made.

A chocolate chip cookie baked by the Immaculate Baking Company in Flat Rock, North Carolina, on May 17, 2003 covered 754 m² (8,120 sq ft), measured 30.7 m across and weighed about 18 tonnes (40,000 lb), the largest cookie on record.

A lemon grown by Aharon Shemoel on his farm in Kefar Zeitim, Israel, weighed 5.265 kg (11 lb 9.7 oz) on January 8, 2003, the heaviest lemon on record.

The cellars of the KWV (Koöperatiewe Wijnbouwers Vereniging) in Paarl, in South Africa's Western Cape winelands, cover 22 hectares (54 acres) with a capacity of 121 million litres, recognized by Guinness World Records as the largest wine cellar in the world.

Shigetaka Kurita, working for Japanese mobile carrier NTT DoCoMo, created the first set of 176 emoji in 1999 for use on early mobile internet devices — a set of simple 12x12 pixel icons that laid the groundwork for the emoji now built into virtually every text messaging and social media platform worldwide.

The Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal (Dictionary of the Dutch Language), begun in 1864 and finished in 1998, covers Dutch words from 1500 to 1976 in 43 volumes (including three supplements) and 49,255 pages, with 350,000 to 400,000 entries. It is believed to be the largest dictionary in the world by number of pages.

The Khmer alphabet, used for the Cambodian language, has 74 letters — 33 consonants, 23 dependent vowels and 12 independent vowels among them — and is listed by Guinness World Records as the largest alphabet in the world.

Rotokas, spoken by about 4,000 people on the island of Bougainville in Papua New Guinea, is written with just 12 letters (A, E, G, I, K, O, P, R, S, T, U, V), the smallest alphabet in use. The language also has one of the smallest sound inventories known.

Palm Dairies Ltd. created a 24.91-tonne (54,914 lb) ice cream sundae in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, on July 24, 1988 — a Guinness World Record for the largest ice cream sundae ever made, a record that has stood for decades in part because later rule changes have made it far more difficult to attempt.

A set of Babylonian clay tablets known as the Yale Culinary Tablets, dating to around 1750 BCE, contain the oldest known written recipes in the world — roughly 25 recipes for stews and broths, written in cuneiform, held today by Yale University's Babylonian Collection.

The series finale of M*A*S*H, titled 'Goodbye, Farewell and Amen,' aired on February 28, 1983, and was watched by an estimated 105.97 million viewers in the United States, according to Nielsen ratings — the most-watched series finale, and for decades the most-watched single television broadcast of any kind, in U.S. television history.

'Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung,' commonly known as the Little Red Book, is estimated to have had somewhere between 800 million and over 1 billion copies printed and distributed in China from 1964 onward, making it, by most estimates, the best-selling secular book of all time (excluding religious texts such as the Bible and Quran, whose collective print histories are even harder to total precisely).

The Magnavox Odyssey, released in 1972, was the first commercial home video game console — it played simple games using plastic overlays placed on the television screen to simulate graphics the console's simple hardware couldn't generate, predating Atari's Pong (also 1972, first as an arcade game) by several months.

Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis, a 45-letter term for a lung disease caused by inhaling very fine silicate or quartz dust, is the longest word in major English dictionaries including the Oxford English Dictionary. It was coined in 1935 by Everett M. Smith, president of the National Puzzlers' League, as a deliberately long word.

'The Jazz Singer,' released October 6, 1927, was the first feature film to include synchronized sound dialogue as part of its story (earlier films had used synchronized music or effects) — its commercial success rapidly accelerated the film industry's transition away from silent films, effectively ending the silent film era within just a few years.

The Speyer wine bottle, a sealed Roman glass vessel found in 1867 in the grave of a nobleman near Speyer, Germany, dates to between 325 and 359 CE and still contains liquid wine under a layer of olive oil. Roughly 1,650 years old, it has never been opened and is displayed at the Historical Museum of the Palatinate.

Sobrino de Botín, in Madrid, Spain, has operated continuously since 1725 — certified by Guinness World Records as the oldest restaurant in the world, having served customers including (according to the restaurant's own lore) Francisco Goya, who is said to have worked there washing dishes before becoming a famous painter.

Denmark's Dannebrog, a white Scandinavian cross on red, holds the Guinness World Record as the oldest continuously used national flag, in use since 1625. Legend says it fell from the sky during a battle in 1219, and the design appears in sources from the 14th century.

Het Wilhelmus, the national anthem of the Netherlands, dates back to at least 1572, during the Dutch revolt against Spain. It is the oldest national anthem in use when counting the original melody and lyrics together, though it only became the official anthem in 1932. Japan's Kimigayo has older lyrics but its melody dates from 1880.

The Venice Carnival traces documented references back to 1162, when the Venetian Senate declared a public celebration to mark a military victory — making it among the oldest continuously referenced carnival traditions in the world, though its modern annual form as an elaborate masked festival developed more fully over subsequent centuries.

The Bavarian State Brewery Weihenstephan in Freising, Germany, traces its brewing licence to 1040, when Benedictine monks at Weihenstephan Abbey were granted rights to brew and sell beer, and is widely regarded as the oldest operating brewery in the world. It is now owned by the Free State of Bavaria.

Nishiyama Onsen Keiunkan, a hot-spring inn in Yamanashi Prefecture, Japan, was founded in 705 by Fujiwara no Mahito. Guinness World Records recognized it in 2011 as the oldest hotel in the world, and the same family has run it for more than 50 generations.