The Fourth of July, New Year’s Eve, and numerous other celebrations across the globe wouldn’t be what they are today without fireworks. It turns out that we owe our fascination with the pyrotechnic displays to ancient Chinese pyromaniacs. Sometime between 600 and 900 A.D., a few alchemists, hoping to concoct an elixir that would make them live forever, instead found […]
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Kerry asks: Did an apple really fall on Newton’s head? In grade school you probably learned Newton’s apple story around the time you learned that George Washington chopped down a cherry tree, that people in Columbus’ time thought that the world was flat, or that the Pilgrims celebrated the first Thanksgiving in America and invited the Native Americans to join […]
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Today in History: October 22, 1969 On this day in history, 1969, Paul McCartney denied rumors that the real Paul McCartney had died in 1966. Come on, admit it. If you’re a Beatles fan you’ve looked for all the clues on the album covers and in the song lyrics. It’s one of the rites of passage from being a casual […]
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Today I found out that Samuel Clemens was born and died during Halley’s comet years. This is a somewhat uncommon occurrence given that Halley’s comet only passes by the Earth approximately every 76 years. What makes it even more remarkable is that Clemens predicted the year of his death. In 1909, Clemens—known by his pen name, Mark Twain—said, I came […]
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Today I found out why buffalo wings are called that. Unsurprisingly, neither the origin of the name nor the food item itself have anything to do with actual buffalo, nor American Bison which many people call buffalo even though they are not. Rather, this tasty item originated in Buffalo, New York, with most foodstorians indicating buffalo wings probably were first […]
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Today in History: October 21, 1967 On this day in history, 1967, nearly 100,000 people – hippies, professors, women’s groups, radicals, war veterans, liberals, and people from most every walk of life – gathered in Washington D.C. to protest the war effort in Vietnam. This protest was a dramatic indication that support for President Johnson’s war in Vietnam was rapidly […]
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This is a weekly wrap of our Daily Knowledge Newsletter. You can get that newsletter for free here. Dr. Seuss Wrote “Green Eggs and Ham” on a Bet The bet was made in 1960 with Bennett Cerf, the co-founder of Random House, and was for $50 (about $382 today). Despite Dr. Seuss, a.k.a. Theodore Geisel, winning the bet by producing […]
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Where sound goes to die, acoustic shadows are areas where sounds, from a certain direction and on a given day, will not penetrate; these acoustic phenomena occur either because the sound waves are absorbed, refracted or simply blown in a different direction. Relatively unnoticed in our modern, wired world, the phenomenon played a significant role in some of the most […]
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Grape-Nuts is a wheat and barley cereal developed by C.W. Post in 1897, and it has actually made some interesting contributions to American food history. A box of Grape-Nuts actually contains “whole grain wheat flour, malted barley flour, isolated soy protein, salt, whole grain barley flour, malt extract, and dried yeast.” It also boasts a number of essential vitamins and […]
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Today in History: October 18, 1469 Ferdinand and Isabella were one of the most famous power couples in European history. In their eyes, their crowning achievement wasn’t expanding their empire to include the New World, or uniting the various dominions that would become modern Spain- they believed their greatest accomplishment was driving out all Muslims from their country. When Ferdinand, […]
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From a young age I was introduced to what are still two of my favourite movie franchises of all time – Star Wars and Indiana Jones. I suppose it was inevitable, really. With parents who named me after a Doctor Who character, I would expect them to continue being awesome as I grew up. You may notice that my last […]
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Nathan asks: Do earwigs really burrow into your brain and lay eggs? Let me just say I hate earwigs. Small, slimy-looking, fast moving, and always popping out of some dark place when I least expect it- no insect short of a silverfish fills me with more revulsion. Now, to answer your question, we’ll start off talking about the mating habits […]
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Today in History: October 17, 1777 The Battle of Saratoga, which was actually two battles that took place during September and October of 1777, was a major victory for the American Revolutionaries and a crucial turning point of the Revolutionary War. It was the push the French were looking for to enter the war against the British, which reinvigorated the […]
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Mormonism was still in its infancy when Jacob Haun moved from Wisconsin to Missouri in 1835 to set up a mill in Caldwell County. The Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints was established by Joseph Smith in 1830. Despite being quite new, the church quickly prospered, and soon a large branch was set up in Missouri as […]
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After decades of war, civil and otherwise, in the 1950s the People’s Republic of China (PRC) was eager to create the communist utopia promised by Marx and Engels a century before. Among the many Five Year Plans and campaigns undertaken to achieve that goal was the spectacular failure known as the Four Pests Campaign. Great Leap Forward After a decade […]
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Today in History: October 16, 1793 During the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789, the Queen of France, Marie Antoinette, was one of the most hated and prominent targets of the French revolutionaries. The French people disliked her because of her foreign birth (particularly being from Austria, the bitter enemy of France at the time) , ostentatious lifestyle and […]
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Myth: Whales spray water out of their blowholes. Contrary to what you may have seen in such movies as Pixar’s otherwise extremely entertaining Finding Nemo, whales don’t spray water out of their blowholes. Further, the whale’s trachea doesn’t connect to the esophagus of the whale; so when Dory and Marlin went down the whale’s throat, in real life, they’d have […]
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Today I found out the fate of the survival of Hitler’s bloodline rests in the hands of just five family members: the two sons (Peter Raubal and Heiner Hochegger) of Adolf Hitler’s half-sister Angela Hitler, and the three remaining sons (Alexander, Louis, and Brian Stuart-Houston) of Adolf’s half-brother Alois Hitler Jr. During his life, Hitler strove for what he viewed […]
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