Mike L. asks: What is the chemtrail smoke behind airliners? So called “chemtrails,” though more technically known as contrails, first appeared behind planes going all the way back to the earliest days of high altitude flight. One of the earliest known surviving references of such occurred when an American soldier by the name of Captain Ward Wells observed a peculiar […]
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Mark H. asks: Is it true diplomats can get away with murder because of diplomatic immunity? While the idea of some form of diplomatic immunity has existed seemingly as long as there have been humans banding together in some form, the modern rules surrounding this were originally laid out in 1961 at the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, with to […]
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Kerri G. asks: Is it true that Rick Astley only made like $10 from Rickrolling? To begin with, for anyone who’s somehow managed to avoid the more than a decade old phenomenon of Rickrolling, in a nutshell this involves tricking someone into clicking on a link that takes them to the video for the relentlessly upbeat and infinitely cheesy 1980s […]
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Sarah M. asks: What happens if you renounce your citizenship but don’t belong to another country when you do it? It turns out, renouncing your citizenship to a given nation is generally a fairly simple affair in many nations of the world. It doesn’t even usually cost that much. For example, in the UK- fittingly for a country stereotypical known […]
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Holly H.asks: I was watching Grey’s Anatomy and in one episode a guy is hit by a bazooka and the bomb gets lodged inside his body without exploding. Has this ever happened in real life? At first thought the idea of a human being hit by some kind of large explosive that not only doesn’t detonate and kill the person, […]
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Chloe T. asks: Can police officers or FBI agents commit crimes while undercover? The use of undercover or covert law enforcement is common throughout much of the world and, for the most part, men and women tasked with going undercover are expected to, and do, follow the law. However, beyond the occasional bad officer doing things they aren’t supposed to, […]
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Gina K asks: When people have to resort to cannibalism to survive, is it considered a crime? To begin with, cannibalism is absolutely legal in the United States (with the exception of the state of Idaho), the UK, much of Europe, Japan, etc. However, as Cornell Law School notes, a number of laws are in place across America “that indirectly […]
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Jeremy B. asks: Is it true that pot is legal in Amsterdam? Amsterdam is one of the most popular tourist destinations in Europe- a city famous for its canals, its museums, its history and, well, it’s weed. Except, it turns out the common idea that marijuana is legal in the Netherlands isn’t accurate at all. This is despite the fact […]
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Nathan K. asks: How did Pomp and Circumstance get to be the tune always played at graduations? Every year, hundreds of thousands of students march across a stage in a gown and a squared hat to receive a piece of paper that says they’ve completed a particular phase in their education. This school graduation will undoubtedly be marked by cheering, […]
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Orlando D. asks: Does it matter what you sign on contracts? Could you draw a picture or put an X and have it still be legally binding? With so many facets of modern life being automated, signatures being easy to forge, and given how difficult it is to prove based on signature alone whether a given person actually signed something, […]
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Darren W. asks: Are there any records of someone paying with a briefcase full of money or is this just a Hollywood trope? A briefcase full of cash is a trope so common that even TV Tropes, a website dedicated to cataloguing cinematic cliches, requests that users only mention “exceptions, parodies and subversions”. While you’d expect something so ridiculous to […]
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John A. asks: Are there any real examples of medieval castles having alligators in the moat to keep out intruders? A common image in pop-culture is that of a castle moat filled to the brim with water and hungry crocodiles. So did anyone ever actually do this? The short answer is that it doesn’t appear so. That said, while there’s […]
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Joseph R.asks: What happens if the president is too sick to work? The president of the United States never technically takes a day off. Even when they’re ostensibly “on vacation” they are still very much the leader of the country and have many duties to fulfill on a daily basis. For example, even while on vacation, they need to continue […]
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Ron G. asks: Your donating bodies to science article left me wondering. What do hospitals do with limbs of people they amputate? Like, if I have a limb amputated, can I ask for it back? It’s standard procedure in most hospitals to incinerate any limbs, organs or tissue they remove from a non-organ donor patient. However, just because this is […]
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Jesse K. asks: How are drug sniffing dogs trained? I mean, they don’t have them actually sniff drugs, right? Sniffer dogs are a key tool in the arsenal of law enforcement to do their jobs- trained to sniff out everything from drugs to fruit and boasting a reasonably good success rate (with one caveat that we’ll get too shortly). As […]
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Tryst G. asks: Who first noticed Kevin Bacon could be connected to any actor in just six degrees or less? The basic premise of any person being within six degrees of relationship to each other traces back to at least 1929, mentioned in the short story “Chain-Links” from the book Everything is Different, by Hungarian author Frigyes Karinthy. In the […]
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Tyler K. asks: Why does soda taste worse when it’s flat? A notion that will come as a surprise to just about no one is that most people think soda and other carbonated drinks taste significantly better when they still contain a lot of fizz as opposed to being “flat.” It turns out that, contrary to popular belief, this phenomenon […]
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Michael P. asks: Does tapping on the top of a shaken pop can really prevent it from fizzing up? For the uninitiated, it’s commonly held that when opening a recently shaken can of soda, you can avoid, or at least reduce, the inevitable shower of sugary carbonated liquid by simply tapping the top or side of the can briskly with […]
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