As you may know, naturally created diamonds are formed from carbon subjected to extreme pressure (725,000 pounds per square inch or so) and heat (1,650 to 2,370 °F) some 90-120 miles down. The world’s natural diamond supply (that has come to the surface) was formed in this way some 1-3 billion years ago. However, scientists only realized that diamonds are […]
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Diane F. asks: Who started the tradition of girls jumping out of cakes? Almost everyone has seen depicted the bizarre bachelor party tradition of a scantily-clad woman jumping out of a giant cake. It turns up most often in decades-old films, TV shows, and comics, but it still persists today at lavish Vegas shindigs—though the cakes are now usually made […]
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At one point in time, Nicolas Coppola, better known as Nicolas Cage (he changed his last name so as not to seem to be trying to cash in on his uncle, Francis Ford Coppola’s, name), was among the highest paid actors in the world, earning some $40 million in a year at the apex of his success. In 2009, Cage’s […]
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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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The following is an article from Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader If you look back on your life, you can probably point to a time or two where you were faced with a really tough decision. Had you chosen differently, your world would look very different right now. So it was for Confederate general Robert E. Lee (1807–70)—one of the most […]
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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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The following is an article from Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader DAY TRIPPERS When the U.S. Post Office introduced airmail service in 1920, the mail could only be flown during daylight hours, when pilots could see where they were going. In an age before sophisticated navigation systems, flying after dark was just too dangerous. The pilots who transported the mail navigated […]
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Worryingly described by entomologists and arachnologists as a “not uncommon” occurrence in certain parts of the globe, spider rain can see anywhere from a few thousand to several million spiders tumble from the sky in a given area, seemingly out of nowhere. So what causes it? This is thanks to a rather interesting behaviour exhibited by spiders known as ballooning, […]
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A commonly held folk etymology for “doohickey” is that it derives from the mark left on a leaf after dew has evaporated, with said mark essentially being akin to a the skin-blemish definition of the word “hickey.” Thus, lacking a commonly known word for such, people referred to this dew mark as a “dew hickey,” with this later evolving to […]
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Ian asks: When someone leaves their body to science, what happens to it and how does a person opt into this? As you might expect, the rules surrounding how one goes about donating one’s body FOR SCIENCE varies a little from region to region, though the general process and what happens after you donate seems to be relatively consistent. For […]
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The following is an article from Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Historians usually rank Jimmy Carter as one of America’s more lackluster presidents. His term was marked by inflation, an oil embargo, high unemployment, and a hostage crisis in Iran. Result: he lost his 1980 reelection bid to Ronald Reagan by 8.4 million votes, the largest ouster of an incumbent president […]
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Jeremy asks: Why do we drop the ball on New Year’s eve in Times Square? dropping-the-ballWhen Adolph Ochs purchased the floundering New York Times in 1896, he made it his mission to make the newspaper the number one paper in all of New York. He started by forming the New York Times Company and made himself the majority owner, ensuring […]
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Jamie asks: Why is New Year’s day January 1st? Because Julius Caesar said so. Early Roman Calendar Since long before Caesar’s time, date keeping was dicey. In fact, the 355-day Roman calendar that immediately preceded Caesar’s Julian, worked on a four year cycle where every other year, an additional month was inserted between February (Februarius), the last month of that […]
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This is an excerpt from our book, The Wise Book of Whys, available on Kindle | Nook and in Print | Audiobook This tradition is mostly thanks to Guy Lombardo and the Royal Canadian Band. While their work is largely unknown to those born in the last few decades, the band has sold over 300 million records to date. Guy […]
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The following is an article from Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader How deadly could a secret program code-named “Operation Vegetarian” be? So deadly that had it ever been implemented, millions would have died and thousands of square miles of European soil might still be unoccupied today. ALONE On September 1, 1939, Adolf Hitler set World War II in motion when he […]
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This is a weekly wrap of our popular Daily Knowledge Newsletter. You can get that newsletter for free here. Apparently We Have All Been Saying “UFO” Wrong? We here at TodayIFoundOut are firmly in the camp that language is constantly evolving and grammar lives to serve language and effective communication, not the other way around. Putting aside the issue of unintentional […]
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For all the things that Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” is known for, Tiny Tim, a relatively minor character in terms of appearances in the story (but, importantly, one of wholesome heart despite his physical condition), was one of the characters that Dickens wanted people to pay the most attention to. After all, he wrote “A Christmas Carol” to bring […]
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The following is an article from Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Here’s a holiday tradition that you may not have heard of if you’re not a bird-watcher. It’s more than a century old and still going strong. BIRD MAN Frank Chapman was an ornithologist, publisher of Bird-Lore magazine, and curator of birds at New York City’s American Museum of Natural History […]
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