John asks: Did pirates really make people walk the plank? For thousands of years, pirates of various sorts have preyed on innocent ships at sea. Their exploits have been documented by the likes of Cicero and Homer in ancient Rome and Greece, and Vikings were once the scourge of the sea, plaguing seaside towns throughout the middle ages. However, the […]
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Mark asks: Why is it illegal to remove mattress and pillow tags? Well Mark, unbeknownst to many innocent consumers out there, the warning that it is unlawful to remove the tags from a mattress or pillow is not for you! It is for pillow and mattress sellers only. How many times does that mean you have unnecessarily awoken with the […]
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It is, without question, one of the most oft-quoted anecdotes in the history of comedy. It goes, pretty much, like this: A woman with 10 (or 12 or 14 or 16 or whatever) children makes a guest appearance as a contestant on Groucho Marx’s quiz show You Bet Your Life (which started out on the radio and later found its […]
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Leo Major was a French Canadian man born in 1921. He probably didn’t think he was going to be more of a hero than the average soldier when he joined up with the Canadian Army at the start of World War II—supposedly he simply joined up because he wanted to show his father, with whom he had a shaky relationship, […]
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While many seniors celebrate their birthdays playing Bingo, followed by a late dinner at the Denny’s at 3pm, actor Christopher Lee had other plans this year- he was busy rocking out. Lee partnered with guitarist Richie Faulkner of Judas Priest fame on a heavy metal album that was released on his 91st birthday. The album is based on the life […]
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Today I found out about the remarkable Harriet Quimby, the first woman in the United States to get a pilot’s license. Born in Michigan in 1875, Harriet Quimby’s family moved to California when she was a young woman. Their farm had failed, and they sought a better living situation in the warm, sunny state. Quimby found that the atmosphere was […]
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Today I found out that the man who is credited with inventing Doritos (which incidentally means “turned golden / crisp”) had the chips sprinkled over his grave when he died. Archibald Clark West was born to Scottish immigrants in Indiana in 1914. With his mother too poor to take care of him, he was raised in a Masonic home after […]
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At 2:45 a.m. on Monday, August 6, 1945, a propeller-driven, four-engine Boeing B-29 Superfortress aircraft lifted off from the unassuming island of Tinian, its destination due North. Inside, as was customary for the B-29, was a bomb. However, unlike the bombs with which the US Air Force had scorched Japan for roughly a year, this bomb was not filled with […]
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What is the strangest thing ever found on the set of a TV show? I’m going to go with “a human body”. Yes, a real live (or should I say “dead”?) human corpse. And that’s only part of the strangeness of this tale. In 1977, The Six Million Dollar Man was a hit TV series starring Lee Majors. That year, […]
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Travis asks: How did Judge Judy get her gig? Is she actually a real judge and are her rulings actually legally binding? Say what you want about Judge Judy, but the woman is successful and not by mistake. The no-nonsense woman with the signature white doily is indeed a real-life judge and now television icon making boatloads of money. She […]
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Craig asks: Do chicken egg whites really help heal burns? Craig, I’ve actually had a couple of people try and convince me of this in the past. A quick Google search will yield several, not so reputable, websites claiming this is true; but the short answer to your question is, “No. Egg whites do not help with burns, and they […]
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So a new book was just put out for pre-sale by Dan Lewis, the man behind the Webby Award winning Now I Know newsletter and someone who occasionally lets me re-publish some of his awesome articles here on Today I Found Out, such as this one. So I thought I’d recommend it here. Dan is a phenomenal writer and is […]
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Twister has been a sure fire way to break the ice at parties for decades now. Earlier centuries had waltzes and minuets as socially sanctioned ways to get physically closer to the opposite sex. In the 20th century, for a time this popularly switched to the game of Twister; a very different activity, but the same underlying concept. Before we […]
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Myth: Bumblebee’s shouldn’t be able to fly. There’s an oft repeated “fact” that the humble bumblebee defies all known laws of physics every time it flaps its tiny little bee wings and ascends to the sky. Now obviously this is false, since, well, bumblebees fly all the time and if every time a bee took off it was tearing physics […]
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Jesse asks: Why doesn’t wood melt? Jesse, I love this question. It seems like everyone knows things are solid at certain temperatures. If you heat them up, they will become a liquid. Heating it further will turn the substance into a gas. This elementary truism of science is every grade school students’ claim-to-fame at their science fair. At some point, […]
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Kyle asks: What is the record for the most languages spoken by a human? If you speak one language, you’re a normal, functioning human being. If you speak two, you’re bilingual. If you speak three, you’re trilingual- four and you’re quadrilingual. But what about if you speak 10? Or 20? Or 30? Well, then you’re considered a polyglot or a […]
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Ken asks: Why is nicotine so addictive? When someone says a substance is addictive, they can mean two separate things. Physically addictive, more accurately physically dependent, is when your body begins to depend on the presence of a particular substance for its physical well being. It’s begun compensating its normal processes to adjust for the new artificial normal. The sudden […]
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Car accidents are a sad fact of life. Every day thousands lose their lives in collisions, crashes and accidents. Though the car itself is a fairly recent invention, the first recorded accident involving them could have happened almost 300 years ago, depending on what your definition of a car is. Though it looked nothing like the modern cars you see […]
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