##EMBED## A woodpecker’s brain is protected by a spongy elastic material between their bill and their skull that holds their brain snugly and provides a cushion. This keeps their brains from getting injured while they bang away at at tree at a remarkable rate and force. For instance, the pileated woodpecker can strike a tree trunk at around 20 times […]
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##EMBED## How the cores are placed into wood pencils is as follows: An Incense Cedar plank is cut with several long parallel grooves. The core is then inserted into the grooves. A separate Incense Cedar plank is then glued to the top of this first plank. The combined planks with the core inside are then cut into pencil size, varnished, […]
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##EMBED## In March 2007, an honor student in Pennsylvania was accused of threatening his school with a bomb. It was later found he had actually called an automated school phone line to get information about class schedules; someone else made the bomb threat exactly an hour later, but, due to Daylight Saving Time, the time seemed to match up to […]
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Today I found out it is possible to mummify yourself. One such method of self-mummification was practiced by Japanese Shugendō monks as the ultimate act of self denial. Shugendō is a form of Buddhism that originally combined elements of Buddhism, animism, Old Shinto, mountain worship, and Taoism, among other religions. “Shugendō” itself means something to the effect of “the way […]
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##EMBED## Joshua L. Chamberlain was the last Civil War soldier to die of wounds incurred in the Civil War. He also has the distinction of being the only soldier to be battlefield promoted to General. Click Here for Sources and to Learn Why No One Knows Why Maine is Called Maine
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##EMBED## The term “toilet” itself comes from the French “toilette”, which meant “dressing room”. This “toilette” in turn derived from the French “toile”, meaning “cloth”; specifically, referring to the cloth draped over someone’s shoulders while their hair was being groomed. During the 17th century, the toilet was simply the process of getting dressed, fixing your hair, and applying make-up and […]
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##EMBED## Many avian life forms posses a region of their bodies that contain a biological magnetite, generally in their beaks. It is believed this gives them a strong magnetoception and thus allows them to sense direction accurately. More recently, it has been shown that certain birds have the ability to see magnetic fields. How this works is the Earth’s magnetic […]
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Today I found out about the real life “George Bailey” (It’s a Wonderful Life), who founded the Bank of Italy which became Bank of America. The man was A.P. Giannini who was said to be who Capra modeled the character of George Bailey as well as the bank president in Capra’s 1932 movie, American Madness, after. At the age of […]
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##EMBED## Most web addresses begin with “www” because of the traditional practice of naming a server according to the service it provides, in this case “World Wide Web”. So outside of this practice, there is no real reason for any website URL to need to be preceded by “www”; the administrators of whatever website can set it up so that […]
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##EMBED## The word blond derives from the Old French word “blund”, meaning literally “a color midway between golden and light chestnut”. “Blund” then is typically thought to have come from the Latin word “blundus”, which was a vulgar pronunciation of the Latin “flavus”, which means “yellow”. The French origin of the word “blond” is how we get the added “e” […]
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Today I found out Hall of Famer Richie Ashburn once struck a spectator twice in the same at bat with foul balls, the second time as she was being carried off on a stretcher. The event happened on August 17, 1957 during a game between the Philadelphia Phillies and the New York Giants. The spectator was Alice Roth. Roth was […]
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##EMBED## Wil Wheaton did the voices for many of the Romulans in the 2009 movie, Star Trek. This was at the urging of Greg Grunberg, who, among other things, starred in director J.J. Abrams’ Alias TV show and briefly in Lost. Grunberg was originally also supposed to play an on-screen role in Star Trek, but was unable to do so […]
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Today I found out, until he was nine years old, the woman Eric Clapton thought was his sister was actually his mother. Clapton’s mother, Patricia Molly Clapton, was just 16 years old when she met and subsequently had a very brief relationship with Clapton’s father, Edward Walter Fryer. Fryer was a 24 year old Canadian soldier stationed in Britain during […]
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Today I found out where the ampersand symbol and name came from. The symbol for “&” comes from combination of letters in the Latin for “and”, “et”. Specifically, in Old Roman cursive, it became common to combine e’s and t’s, which produced something like this: Over the next six centuries the ampersand gradually became more elaborate until we get the […]
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Today I found out the symbol on the “pound” or “number” key (#) is also called an “octothorpe”. The origins of this term date back to the 1960s and 1970s in Bell Labs with the first documented place this word showed up being in a U.S. patent filed by Bell Labs in 1973. The exact etymology of this word isn’t […]
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Today I found out what the “bee” in “spelling bee” means. While no one knows exactly where the word derives from, the “bee” in “spelling bee” simply means something to the effect of “gathering” or “get together”. The earliest documented case of this word appearing with this meaning was in 1769, referring to a “spinning bee”, where people would gather […]
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Today I found out Adolf Hitler had a British nephew who joined the U.S. navy during WWII. Hitler’s nephew, who he would come to call “my loathsome nephew”, was originally named William Patrick Hitler, but he later changed it to William Patrick Stuart-Houston to distance himself from his uncle’s name after WWII. William was born in Liverpool, the son of […]
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##EMBED## The tallest man in history was Robert Pershing Wadlow, who was 8 feet 11.1 inches (2.72 m) tall and 485 pounds at the time of his death. By the age of 4 years old, he was already 5 ft 4 inches tall (1.63m). At the age of 13, he became the tallest boy scout in history at 7 ft […]
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