Today I found out why spicy foods can cause your nose to run. In most spicy foods, this is thanks to the same chemicals that cause the burning sensation on your tongue, namely capsaicin or allyl isothiocyanate. Capsaicin is chemical found in fruits of the genus Capsicum, which includes peppers. It is present, usually in relatively high amounts, in the […]
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##EMBED## Click Here for Sources and to Learn What Causes a Hangover Text Version “Hangover” was a common term in the 19th century meaning “unfinished business”. Around the early 20th century, the common meaning shifted slightly to mean as it does today.
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##EMBED## Click Here for Sources and to Learn Where the Word “Witch” Comes From Text Version Candy corn is made from sugar, corn syrup, glaze, egg whites, honey glycerin, mineral oil, wax, and salt, with coloring added. Each piece of candy corn contains about 6 calories. About 20 million pounds of candy corn is sold annually, the vast majority of […]
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##EMBED## Click Here for Sources and to Learn Why Crackers Have Holes Text Version The word “cookie” comes from the Dutch “koekjes” which came from the Dutch “koek”, meaning “cake”; cookie was introduced to English in the very early 18th century. It is thought this term caught on more in the United States due to the strong Dutch heritage in […]
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##EMBED## Click Here for Sources and to Learn Why Crackers Have Holes Text Version The term “biscuit”, derives from the Latin “bis coctus”, meaning “twice baked”, which is essentially what many types of biscuits are. The term first showed up in English around the 14th century. In America, the term biscuit now pretty much only means a small, quick rising, […]
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Today I found out why red meat turns brown when cooked. This is thanks to a protein called myoglobin, which also is what makes the raw red meat look red, not blood, as many people think. Myoglobin is a protein that stores oxygen in muscle cells, very similar to its cousin, hemoglobin, which stores oxygen in red blood cells. This […]
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Myth: Bats are blind The saying “blind as a bat”, simply isn’t correct. The truth is that all 1,100 bat species can see and often their vision is pretty good, although not as excellent as many other night-hunting animals. There are two main groups of bats, which are believed to have evolved independently of each other, but both from a […]
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##EMBED## Click Here for Sources and to Learn Why Crackers Have Holes Text Version Nabisco originally released the saltine cracker in 1876. Their slogan for this new type of cracker was “Polly wants a cracker?”, which is where that saying came from. Saltine crackers were mildly successful after being released, but received a huge boost in popularity thanks to the […]
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##EMBED## Click Here for Sources and to Learn Why You Used to Have to Use #2 Pencils With Scantron Forms Text Version Classically, scantron forms used blue ink for the lines and outlines to the circles because the original scantron systems couldn’t pick up the light in the blue spectrum. Modern systems are simply designed to ignore whatever color the […]
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##EMBED## Click Here for Source and to Learn More About the United States’ Plan to Nuke the Moon Text Version A young Carl Sagan was one of the scientists hired in the U.S.’s Cold War plan to drop a nuclear bomb on the moon. Specifically, Sagan was hired to study how exactly the mushroom cloud would expand on the moon, […]
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##EMBED## Click Here for Sources and to Learn Other Interesting Coffee Facts Text Version The term “cup of Joe” stems from American soldiers in World War II, “G.I. Joes” were known to consume a large amount of coffee, as Maxwell Instant Coffee was included in their rations.
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##EMBED## Click Here for Sources and to Learn What the Color of Bread Twist Ties Indicates Text Version The sour taste of sourdough bread comes from lactobacillus, which lives in symbiosis with yeast, feeding on byproducts of the yeast fermentation. The sour taste itself comes from the lactic acid produced by the lactobacillus. This also helps the bread last longer […]
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Today I found out how anti-static dryer sheets work. There are two primary methods used to get rid of static charge buildup in drying clothing, which happily go hand in hand with one another using the same substance. The first method is to lubricate the clothing. The second method is to use a positively charged material to more or less […]
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##EMBED## Click Here to for Sources and to Learn What the Color of the Twist Tie on Bread Packaging Indicates Text Version Pliny the Elder, the famed author, naturalist, philosopher, and commander, died trying to rescue people stranded on the shores after the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius, which destroyed Pompeii and Herculaneum. While attempting to sail his ship near the […]
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##EMBED## Click Here for Sources and to Learn More Interesting Math Facts Text Version The equal sign (“=”) was invented in 1557 by Welsh mathematician Robert Recorde, who was fed up with writing “is equal to” in his equations. He chose the two lines because “no two things can be more equal”.
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Today I found out what the “PEZ” in “PEZ Dispenser” stands for. PEZ started out as a peppermint breath mint company in Vienna, Austria in 1927. The name PEZ derives from this fact. Specifically, “PEZ” comes from the German word for peppermint, “pfefferminz”, with the “p” coming from the first letter of the word; the “e” is from the sixth […]
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##EMBED## Click Here for Sources and to Learn More About the Founder of Wendy’s Text Version Dave Thomas of Wendy’s introduced the KFC trademark sign featuring a revolving red-striped bucket of chicken.
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Today I found out why chocolate is bad for dogs. Chocolate contains an alkaloid called “theobromine”. Theobromine is in the same family as caffeine and is a type of stimulant (they both are mythylxanines). Theobromine stimulates the central nervous system, cardiovascular system, and causes a slightly increases blood pressure. Dogs and certain other animals, such as horses and cats, cannot […]
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