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 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 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 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 Moon dust smells like spent gunpowder. This is according to the astronauts that have had the opportunity to smell fresh Moon dust that had been tracked into the lunar module after excursions out on the surface of the Moon. The astronauts didn’t just smell the dust though, they also touched and tasted it. They say it […]
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Today I found out how glow in the dark stuff works. Glow in the dark products all contain some type of phosphor. Phosphors are any substance that radiates light after being energized in some way. There are literally thousands of chemicals that are phosphors. These chemicals all have varying degrees of brightness, color, and length of time they glow after […]
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Today I found out the red juice in raw red meat is not blood. Nearly all blood is removed from meat during slaughter, which is also why you don’t see blood in raw “white meat”; only an extremely small amount of blood remains within the muscle tissue when you get it from the store. So what is that red liquid […]
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Today I found out, before the 17th century, almost all cultivated carrots were purple. The modern day orange carrot wasn’t cultivated until Dutch growers in the late 16th century took mutant strains of the purple carrot and gradually developed them into the sweet, plump, orange variety we have today. Before this, pretty much all carrots were purple with mutated versions […]
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Today I found out that Seattle doesn’t really get that much rain compared to most U.S. cities. In fact, Seattle ranks 44th among major U.S. cities in average annual rainfall, getting approximately 38 inches annually. Cities that get more rainfall than Seattle include such as Houston Texas (48 inches), New Orleans (60 inches), Mobile AL (65 inches), Memphis (52 inches), […]
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Today I found out that almonds are not nuts. In fact, an almond is the seed of the fruit of the almond tree. This tree bears fruits with a “stone-like” seed within. Fruits with these characteristics are called “drupes”. Specifically, a drupe is a fruit that has an outer fleshy part surrounding a shell that contains a seed. Other drupes […]
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Today I found out why your stomach growls when you are hungry. Generally speaking stomach growling, or as the Greeks named it and Doctors call it today “borborygmi” (which is an onomatopoeia), is the noise created during rhythmic muscle contractions in your stomach and intestines. Your digestive system is one big long tube that goes from your mouth to your […]
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Today I found out what causes people to have red hair. It turns out, it is not because they are the spawn of Satan or otherwise evil at heart (Well, supposedly. Everyone knows a group of red-heads known as “The Fire of Rankin”, lead by the Septi Caput Capitis counsel, secretly rules the world in Edinburgh, Scotland; coincidentally this is […]
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Today I found out around 85% of humans only breathe out of one nostril at a time. Even more interesting is that the pattern of switching from breathing out of one nostril to the other happens in a cyclical fashion, with about four hours or so between each switch typically; although, this can vary from person to person and vary […]
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Today I found out how a sewing machine works. Modern day sewing machines typically use something called “lock stitch”; in older machines a “chain stitch” was fairly popular, but is generally no longer used due to the fact that it pulls out very easily. A lock stitch on the other hand is quite strong and is created by using two […]
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Today I found out that the mathematical volume of a pizza is pizza. How does that work you say? Well if z = radius of the pizza and a = the height then Π * radius2 * height = Pi * z * z * a = Pizza. On a different note, three statisticians go out hunting together. After a […]
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Today I found out how an LED works. An LED or “Light Emitting Diode” is basically as the name describes; it is a special type of diode that is specifically optimized to give off light, usually in the visual or infrared spectrum, as electricity is passed through it. A diode is a special type of semiconductor that has many uses. One of […]
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