Category Archives: Featured Facts

Can Color Blind People See More Colors When They Take Hallucinogenic Drugs?

Sam asks: If you gave a color blind person something like LSD or some other sort of hallucinogenic drug, would they see colors they couldn’t before? First a little primer on colour blindness from the good people at ColorBlindAwareness.org: Most color blind people are able to see things as clearly as other people but they unable to fully ‘see’ red, […]

Read more

How a Donkey and an Elephant Came to Represent Democrats and Republicans

Jennifer asks: Why is a donkey and an elephant associated with the Democrats and the Republicans? The donkey is stereotypically bumbling, slow, and stubborn; the elephant– big and clumsy. Being compared to one of these animals is not exactly flattering in this sense. Yet, for well over a century, they have been the popular symbols of America’s major political parties […]

Read more

The True Story Behind The Appalling Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment

Controversial research programs, unethical experimentation, and human trials have been part of the medical field for centuries. It doesn’t make it any less wrong, but certain scientists with questionable ethics have gotten away with a lot in the name of, well, science. The more (in)famous examples of wayward science include eugenics sterilization, electroshock therapy, ionizing radiation experiments, and the CIA […]

Read more

Why There is an Area of New York Called “The Bronx” and Why Ambulances are Called That

Why There is an Area of New York Called “The Bronx” This is thanks to a seventeenth century Scandinavian man by the name of Jonas Bronck, originally from Tórshavn in the Faroe Islands. In 1639, Bronck immigrated to New Amsterdam in New Netherland, which was right next to what is today called Bronx River, named after Jonas Bronck. Why? In […]

Read more

One Million Downloads

After just about three and a half months since launching, our Daily Knowledge Podcast has reached 1 million downloads.  Thanks for listening!  If you have any feedback for us on it, we’re always interested. If you haven’t checked it out, you can listen to the podcast episodes here online, or subscriber via iTunes here, or simply use this xml link […]

Read more

Why Certain Types of Traps are Called “Booby Traps”

It turns out this has nothing to do with the mammaries of the fairer sex, but rather has its origins in the Spanish word “bobo,” meaning “stupid,” “fool,” or “naïve.” This Spanish word in turn comes from the Latin “balbus” meaning “stammering”, which to the Romans was thought to be a sign of stupidity. So, essentially, a “booby trap” is […]

Read more

Why Native Americans Didn’t Wipe Out Europeans With Diseases

Greg H. asks: Diseases from Europe wiped out most of the Indians, so why didn’t the Europeans also get wiped out by diseases from America? While estimates vary, approximately 20-50 million people are believed to have lived in the Americas shortly before Europeans arrived. Around 95% of them were killed by European diseases. So why didn’t 19 out of 20 […]

Read more

How March Got So Mad: The Story Behind the NCAA Basketball Tournament

Every spring, a sort of illness strikes millions of Americans. Symptoms include screaming uncontrollably in celebration, panic sweating, obsessing over hastily filled-out brackets, sitting motionless in front of a television for hours, and wearing the bright colors of a college individuals attended many years ago. It’s called “March Madness” and it’s arguably the most popular sporting tournament in America. But […]

Read more

In the Original Story, Pinocchio killed Jiminy Cricket, Got His Feet Burnt Off, and was Hanged and Left for Dead

You probably already knew that Disney has a habit of taking dark, twisted children’s fairy tales and turning them into sickeningly sweet happily-ever-afters. Take Sleeping Beauty for example: it’s based on a story where a married king finds a girl asleep, and can’t wake her so rapes her instead. The 1940 version of Pinocchio is no exception. The movie is […]

Read more

What is Gluten?

Amanda asks: What is gluten and why is it bad for you? These days, just casually strolling down a grocery aisle, one can find a multitude of gluten-free products. From gluten-free whole grain bread to gluten-free beer to gluten-free Betty Crocker chocolate brownie mix, the market for food items without gluten has exploded over the past decade. But is gluten […]

Read more

Why Tuberculosis was Called “Consumption”

Originally, of course, nobody knew what caused the various forms of tuberculosis, and they certainly didn’t understand it was caused by what would eventually be called tubercle bacillus (usually the offending microbes are specifically Mycobacterium tuberculosis). The word “tuberculosis” was coined by Johann Lukas Schönle in 1839, from the Latin “tuberculum,” meaning “small, swelling bump or pimple.” However, it wouldn’t […]

Read more
1 43 44 45 46 47 73