Jeremy A. asks: How did flipping the bird come to mean fu? While some common gestures, such as the high five, have pretty well known and surprisingly modern origins, it turns out one of the most popular of all has been around for well over two thousand years, including having various similar connotations as it has today. Unsurprisingly once you […]
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Michael F. asks: Are executions really held at midnight like shown in the movies? If so, why? By the time Rainey Bethea was executed on August 14, 1936, most of the United States had ceased executing people publicly. However, in Kentucky in 1936 an execution could still be held publicly and, according to the jury at his trial, Bethea deserved […]
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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 […]
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William K. asks: What’s it like being an extra in a movie? Becoming a Background Actor, or “extra” as they are more widely known, is a fairly simple process that usually involves little more than responding to an ad. Depending on the scope of the project and the kind of extras needed, this ad could appear anywhere from a dedicated […]
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In late 2001 an economist called Edward Castronova made tsunami sized waves in the world of economics when he published a paper claiming that an isolated place called Norrath had a currency stronger than that of the Japanese Yen- an especially bold claim considering Norrath had less than a million inhabitants, had only existed for about two years and didn’t […]
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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 […]
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ScrobTheFancyTurtle asks: Love your video on what happens when people are accidentally declared dead. But it got me wondering, what happens if you make a will, go missing, so your will is executed, then turn up alive later? Do you get your stuff back? As we discussed in our article on what happens to a person who is accidentally declared dead […]
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James H. asks: How realistic is the idea presented in video games of shooting explosives to set them off? Given that their main and really only purposes is violently exploding, you might be surprised to learn that most explosives utilised by the military are shockingly stable. So much so, in fact, that, contrary to what is often depicted in movies […]
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As a wise man once said, “They say that the best weapon is the one that you never have to fire. I respectfully disagree! I prefer the weapon you only have to fire once.” Adhering closely to this mantra, the M65 was indeed only fired once and then simply used as a deterrent in the early days of the Cold […]
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Mary A. asks: How did someone get the job of an executioner in medieval times? Few occupations from history are as maligned as that of Medieval-era executioner. Popularly painted as gleeful dispensers of death and torture, the truth seems to be that many executioners throughout this period usually treated the occupation with a certain reverence and exhibited an extreme dedication […]
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Isaac R. asks: When people buy expensive art worth hundreds of millions of dollars, how do they pay for it? Like could they pay with cash or do they have to have their bank wire the money? Just wondering about the nuts and bolts here. As we’ve discussed before, there are a handful of people walking around right now with […]
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Jessica K. asks: Has anyone ever inherited millions of dollars from a long-lost relative they’ve never heard of like happens in movies? If you’re like, well, pretty much everyone, at some point you’ve received an email claiming you’ve inherited a large sum of money from some person you’ve never heard of. All you have to do to get it is […]
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Back in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as food began to be more and more mass produced and shipped long distances, instead of locally grown and sold fresh, it was basically the Wild West in regards to food production and there were no real official regulations on what you could add to food, or even that if you […]
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Mavos asks: If the queen happened to kill someone can she be prosecuted? As the current monarch of the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and a bunch of other countries that have her on their money, the Queen enjoys something known as sovereign immunity. In a nutshell, sovereign, or crown immunity as it is sometimes known, means that the Queen is […]
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Joshua T. asks: What were all those metal things you see on the beaches in pictures of the Omaha landing? The Normandy Invasions represented one of the single largest military maneuvers in history. Beginning on June 6, 1944, D-Day (see, What does the “D” in D-Day stand for?), the invasion was the largest amphibious assault of all time and involved […]
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Described as “the bravest man you’ve never heard of”, Captain Humbert Roque Versace’s story is one that is not as well known as it should be. So allow us to remedy that by discussing how he spent two years basically being a huge pain in the ass for his captors in a Vietnamese POW camp- so much so that he […]
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Dan P asks: We see in the old movies and cartoons that the villain ties their victim to the railroad tracks to kill him or her in a gruesome way thought the hero always rescues the victim in the nick of time.Are there any documented cases of someone being tied up and left to die on the railroad tracks? A […]
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Asa K. asks: What happens when people are accidentally declared dead, and how do they prove that they’re alive? As with most legal matters, answering the question of what exactly happens when a person is accidentally declared dead varies from country to country, although, curiously, from our research, with some exceptions like a few instances we found in Canada particularly, […]
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