Today I found out what causes “eye floaters”. For those who’ve never experienced this phenomenon, eye floaters are little oddly shaped objects that appear in your vision, often when one looks at bright light such as a blue sky. Their shapes vary greatly, but will often appear as spots, cobwebs, or randomly shaped stringy objects. These are not optical illusions, […]
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Today I found out that the word ‘whence’ is pretty much always used incorrectly, especially by modern day writers. For example, (from the Lord of the Rings, spoken by Elrond): “The Ring was made in the fires of Mount Doom; only there can it be unmade. It must be taken deep into Mordor and cast back into the fiery chasm […]
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Today I found out that Honey Bees know the world is round and can calculate angles. It turns out, scientists have figured out how to interpret a Honey Bee’s dance; a Honey Bees dance is where they communicate where to find food, a new home, and things of this nature. Using this information, an experiment was done called the “Schafberg […]
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Today I found out the difference between jelly and jam. The difference between jelly and jam is that jelly is made strictly from the juice of fruit while jam is made from crushed fruit. Specifically, jelly is made by crushing fruit, then straining out everything but the juice. The juice is then boiled, typically with sugar and pectin added, the […]
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Today I found out what the color of the twist tie or tabs on bread packaging means; namely, what day of the week the bread was baked on. This practice of having a different color twist ties or tabs for different days of the week is not meant necessarily to be used by the customer, but actually to aid the […]
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Today I found out what the first website ever made was. Simply put, it was a website made by the World Wide Web’s creator Tim Berners-Lee, who was working for CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research). The first ever website was published on August 6, 1991 and served up a page explaining the World Wide Web project and giving information […]
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Today I found out the world’s strongest animal is the copepod. Relative to their size, typically about 1mm long, copepods are also the world’s fastest animal, being able to jump at a rate of about a half a meter per second. Their incredible strength, relative to their size, makes them over ten times stronger than any other known species on […]
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Avast: meaning “stop” or “hold still.” The word was originally derived from the Dutch phrase “houd vast,” which literally means “hold fast.” The frequent usage of this phrase eventually got it slurred down to “hou’ vast” and later “avast.” This became a common term among sea-folk around the late 17th century. Coxswain: a boy servant (swain) in charge of a […]
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Today I found out what the M’s stand for in “M&Ms”. In 1941, Forrest Mars Sr., of the Mars candy company, struck a deal with Bruce Murrie, son of famed Hershey president William Murrie, to develop a hard shelled candy with chocolate at the center. Mars needed Hershey’s chocolate because he anticipated there would be a chocolate shortage in the […]
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Today I fount out that all lifesavers spark when chewed, not just the Wintergreen Lifesavers (also known as Wint-O-Green). The flash you see when these hard sugar candies are crunched is caused by triboluminescence, which is similar to the electrical charge build-up that produces lightning, except on a much smaller scale here. With most hard sugar candies, this flash tends […]
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Today I found out there is an irony mark in punctuation. The irony mark specifically is a backwards question mark: ؟ This mark was originally proposed by the 19th century French poet Alcanter de Brahm, also known as Marcel Bernhardt. Around the same time other “second level” punctuation marks were proposed. For instance, Tara Liloia and Josh Greenman suggested a […]
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Today I found out no one really knows why Maine is called Maine. One of the most popular theories is that it is derived from the nautical term “the main” or “Main Land”. Maine has an incredible number of islands off it’s coast, so perhaps sailors referred to it as “Maine”, as in “Main Land”, to distinguish it from the […]
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Today I found out that the tongue doesn’t have zones specializing in specific tastes, contrary to popular belief. So why did your third grade teacher tell you they did and make you memorize each zone, then mark you down when you got one of them wrong which resulted in you not getting to go play with your friends that night […]
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Today I found out there was once a woman who had immortal cells. These immortal cells have multiplied to the point that if you were to weigh all of them that live today, they’d weigh about 50 million metric tons, which is about as much as 100 Empire State Buildings. So who was this woman and why are scientists keeping […]
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Today I found out why the sky is blue. For the short answer, when light from the sun enters our atmosphere it collides with molecules in the air. The blue part of the light gets scattered more than the other parts during these collisions and thus makes the sky appear to our eyes as blue. If the light from the […]
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Today I found out where Bacon comes from. Now you might think, as I always did, that Bacon comes from combining two parts awesome with a smidgen of outstanding. But in fact, Bacon, or as my brother calls it “meat candy”, obviously comes from our snout nosed little bald friends, pigs, which don’t seem remotely awesome. Though of course, one […]
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Today I found out where the “Lorem Ipsum Dolor” text comes from and what it means. For those of you who don’t know, the “Lorem Ipsum Dolor” text has been used since about the 1500’s as a sort of placeholder text in typesetting, printing, and now in such electronic media as graphical, software, and web development. It’s used to show […]
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Today I found out how to make maple syrup. Ever find yourself sitting there enjoying a stack of pancakes dripping with melted butter and maple syrup (getting hungry aren’t you?) and find yourself wondering, “I wonder how maple syrup is made?” Ya me neither. However, on the off chance you’re out of maple syrup and the apocalypse comes tomorrow and […]
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