Christine asks: Where are all the B batteries? There’s A’s (AA and AAA), no B, then C, and then D. Why did they skip a letter? There actually are B batteries, but they aren’t something you’ll usually see stocked at most stores any longer. Since the invention of the battery, there have been a pretty amazingly diverse number of battery […]
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Mirrors in ancient times were typically just small pools of collected water with the vessel containing the water having a dark color to it. As early as 6000 BC in Turkey people started manufacturing non-water mirrors. These early mirrors were usually made of obsidian, which is a naturally occurring volcanic glass. These pieces of obsidian would be cut appropriately and […]
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Jack B. asks: Why does a person’s hair only grow a certain length and then stop, but then when you cut it, it will grow back to its maximum length? I very briefly mentioned this in an article about two years ago that you might also be interested in (There is No Difference Between Fur and Hair), but I’ll go […]
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E. Bondine asks: Where did the slang “chump change” originate? The phrase “chump change” first popped up in the mid-20th century, initially used primarily by African Americans to mean similar to what it does today, “a small or trivial amount of money”. As to how those two words ended up being joined to form the phrase “chump change”, we have […]
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Earthworms can consume about 1/2 to 1 times their body weight every day. They also will eat just about any dead organic matter along with processing a variety of garbage and even tiny rocks that have organic matter on them, grinding the rocks into a paste that will enrich the soil. They are quite literally nature’s garbage disposals. Earthworms also […]
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Eric Marlon Bishop, better known as Jamie Foxx, picked this somewhat androgynous name due to the fact that early in his career he noticed that female comedians, also known as comediennes, often got picked to perform over male comedians at comedy clubs. Reference
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Myth: Helicopters will drop like a rock when the engine shuts down. In fact, you have a better chance at surviving in a helicopter when the engine fails than you do in an airplane. Helicopters are designed specifically to allow pilots to have a reasonable chance of landing them safely in the case where the engine stops working during flight, […]
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Today I found out what causes hiccups. In medical terms, a hiccup can be called a hiccough, a synchronous diaphragmatic flutter, or singlutus. Hiccups are classified into three categories: normal, protracted or persistent, and intractable. Protracted are those hiccups that last over 48 hours, but not more than one month. Intractable hiccups continue for more than one month. If hiccups […]
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About 1.7 million tons of almonds are produced every year world-wide with California producing about 80% of the world’s almonds and near 100% of the U.S.’s commercial supply of almonds. Close to one million bee hives, which is about 50% of the U.S.’s total number of bee hives, are used to pollinate California’s almond groves. Source
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Anna asks: What is a baby platypus called? They are called ‘baby platypus’… Really, that’s it (officially). A common misconception is that they are also named ‘puggles’, but this isn’t technically correct. I mean, you can call something anything you want and because so many people think that’s what they are named, they are often called that, but it isn’t […]
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Mary asks: Why do men’s bike frames have the top bar horizontal, while women’s bike frames have it slanted? Seems more hazardous for men to have it horizontal… I think I speak for all men who have accidentally had their foot slip off a bike petal in saying, it is true that the horizontal bar on men’s bike’s frames is […]
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In 1830, a French tailor by the name of Barthelemy Thimonnier patented a sewing machine that used the chain stitch; the first such machine to replicate sewing by hand. By 1841, he had a factory with over 80 machines and a contract with the French army for uniforms. However, the factory was destroyed by a riotous group of French tailors […]
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Sharks, stringrays, and chimeara all possess an electroreceptive organ called an ampullae of Lorenzini. This organ gives them the ability to detect even small variations in electric potential. They can use this to detect magnetic fields, among other things. Suddenly sharks with lasers attached to their heads seems even more dangerous. Reference
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Today I found out a ‘jiffy’ is used as an actual unit of time. The word ‘jiffy’ has been around since at least the late 18th century. What it derived from is unknown, but it first popped up as a “thieves slang for ‘lightning’”. Fast forward about a century and a half later and famed Physical Chemist Gilbert Newton Lewis, […]
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Amazingly, if we were actually able to convert matter perfectly to energy with 1 kg of matter being completely annihilated, the energy produced from just that small amount of matter is about 42.95 mega tons of TNT. So an adult male weighing in at around 200 pounds has somewhere in the vicinity of 4000 megatons of TNT potential in their […]
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In the early days of the World Wide Web, one of the most popular alternatives to the Web (and indeed more popular for a time), Gopher, looked like it was destined to dominate the Internet. Then the University of Minnesota announced in 1993 that they would no longer let people use their Gopher server implementation for free. Instead, licensing fees […]
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Today I found out Ernest Vincent Wright’s 1939 novel Gadsby is over 50,000 words long, yet doesn’t contain a single letter “e” anywhere other than the cover. Given that ‘e’ is the most commonly used letter in English, you might think this would have been impossible, but Wright stated this wasn’t nearly as limiting as one might think. For instance, […]
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The ancient Romans once used dolphins to help them fish. The dolphins were trained to drive fish towards fishermen. Once a large enough group of fish was near the fisherman, the dolphins would signal the fishermen to cast their nets. Fisherman in Santa Catarina, Brazil, still train dolphins to do this. Source
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