Katie O/ asks: How much caffeine would someone have to drink to be fatal? There have been numerous deaths attributed to excessive caffeine ingestion. So if you happen to be a person who loves coffee and energy drinks, you might want to know approximately what amount you should avoid drinking on a given day. So how much caffeine would it […]
Read more
There are several different types of blood. Contained within them are different types of cells and countless molecules that give our bodies the needed nutrients to work effectively. The two main types of cells within the blood are red and white blood cells. Red blood cells make up nearly 45% of your blood volume. White blood cells make up less […]
Read more
silentrob asks: Is it true that beards grow faster in the winter than they do in the summer? A commonly touted notion is that your hair will grow faster, be thicker, and otherwise naturally longer in the winter time thanks to the supposed evolutionary benefit to help keep you warm in the colder months. But is this actually true? And […]
Read more
If you’ve spent virtually any time on the interwebs, and particularly lurked in the social media areas of this marvel of human ingenuity, you’ll no doubt at one point or another come across the fact that many women have living male cells hanging out in their bodies, including in their brains. The most common explanation, according to social media, for […]
Read more
el_juano asks: Is it possible for someone to get infected with cancer from someone else? In an oversimplified nutshell, cancer is, to quote cancer.gov, a disease “in which abnormal cells divide without control and can invade nearby tissues.” Given its propensity to spread and divide in an uncontrolled manner throughout a person’s body, it brings up the question of whether […]
Read more
MasaC asks: Why do fingernails on a chalkboard make us cringe? Few sounds cause humans to cringe more than nails across a chalkboard, a fork scraped on a plate, or a heavy metal chair dragged across a tiled floor. But what exactly is it about this sort of scraping noise that is so offensive to our brains that many even […]
Read more
L.I.A.L asks: Why do we have moles all over our body and what do they do? Moles, in general, are simply an abnormal grouping of cells called melanocytes. Melanocytes are the cells responsible for giving your skin its pigment. They reside in the basal layer of your skin, and overall, have a surprisingly uniform distribution. Their density will vary depending […]
Read more
Mindy N. asks: After a long run my leg muscles are tired, but my heart is not. Why doesn’t the heart need any rest? An average of around 60 to 100 times every minute of every day of every year of your ultimately meaningless life, your heart beats… until it doesn’t. Not long after it stops, all knowledge of your […]
Read more
In the early 1960s, international communications were limited to transmissions through undersea cables or occasionally unreliable radio signals bounced off of the ionosphere. As you might imagine from this, many in the Western world weren’t too keen on the state of the situation given that were to someone, say, the Soviet Union, cut those cables before launching an attack, international […]
Read more
Hippiekiyay asks: Do pets care if you leave the radio on when you leave? A survey of about 2000 British dog owners conducted in early 2017 found that around 40% of dog owners admitted to leaving the radio on when they left the house so that their dog wouldn’t be lonely, while another 32% admitted that they did the same […]
Read more
Astryx_x asks: Do suppressed memories actually exist? We’ve all seen it in movies- a character will be going along in their lives blissfully unaware of some extremely traumatic event in their long distant past… that is, until a bit of syrup dribbles onto their cheek and they are transported back in their mind to that time they were abducted by […]
Read more
Randrew asks: Why do people say the human soul weighs 21 grams? It’s often said that it’s impossible to put a price on a human life, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you can’t define it by other metrics, something physician Duncan MacDougall tried to do in the early 20th century by setting up an experiment to discern the weight of […]
Read more
Contrary to popular belief, a decent percentage of the human population has known definitely the Earth was roughly spherical for over two thousand years. Hardly impressive, as noted in our BrainFood Show podcast, bees also use this fact in their own absurdly fascinating navigation and in communicating directions to other bees. As for humans, we took a little longer to […]
Read more
Mandy R. asks: In movies they always act like it’s important for a person to stay conscious when they’ve been seriously injured. Does that really help someone live? Special thanks to Scott from the Medical Confessions podcast for answering this one for us! We’ve all seen movie scenes where someone is seriously injured and slowly drifting in and out of […]
Read more
Willow T. asks – Is it true that you soil yourself when you die? Depending on your current religious affiliation, at the moment of death a number of things may happen to your soul, from being judged by Anubis to being conscripted to kick an endless amount of ass for the glory of Odin in Valhalla. The things that happen […]
Read more
Contrary to popular belief, space isn’t actually “cold” per se, at least not in the way often depicted in movies. Space is just mostly empty and all that nothing doesn’t have a temperature. For example, if you were in space without a space suit, the two ways you’d lose heat are just via evaporation of moisture on your skin, in […]
Read more
Developed over the course of decades, GPS has become far more ubiquitous than most people realize. Not just for navigation, its extreme accuracy in time keeping (+/- 10 billionths of a second) has been used by countless businesses the world over for everything from aiding in power grid management to helping manage stock market and other banking transactions. The GPS […]
Read more
Philip R. asks: Has any scientist ever named a newly discovered creature after someone they dislike out of spite? Naming a newly discovered species is a rather prestigious privilege. As you can probably imagine then, many see the act of choosing a suitable name for a newly discovered creature as a task that requires a great deal of consideration and […]
Read more