Zippy Facts

South Africa is located at the southern end of Africa. It borders on both the Atlantic and Indian oceans. What is the capital of the nation? That depends. The legislature of South Africa meets in the city of Cape Town, on the Atlantic coast. The president and many government agencies have their offices in the…

If you’ve ever made bread dough by hand, you can imagine what a strain it would be to knead dough with your arms all day. About 6,000 years ago an unknown Egyptian baker took a tip from wine makers and tried using his feet instead of his hands to do the hard work. It worked…

Particles jettisoned from the Sun during a solar flare or contained in the solar wind can reach Earth in a matter of hours or days. Above Earth’s North and South Poles, the planet’s magnetic field is strongest and the atmosphere is filled with particularly highly charged atoms. The interaction of solar and atmospheric particles results…

The phrase “plain as the nose on one’s face” means: ridiculously obvious; as conspicuous or evident as anything could possibly be. The comparison must have been known to Shakespeare, who used it ironically in Two Gentlemen of Verona (1591). The Lady Sylvia had enjoined Valentine, who loves her, “to write some lines to one she…

A brilliant craftsman and designer, Daedalus designed the intricate Labyrinth that held the Minotaur. After Theseus killed the Minotaur, King Minos imprisoned Daedalus and his son, Icarus, because he suspected that Daedalus had revealed the secret of the Labyrinth to Ariadne. To escape, Daedalus fashioned two sets of wings out of wax and feathers. Just…

The physicians of ancient Greece considered hysteria to be an exclusively female problem caused by a disorder within the woman’s distinctive internal organs. Hystera is the Greek word for womb and survives today in the medical procedure hysterectomy. Men suffer the antisocial symptoms of hysteria less frequently than women, but when they do, they are…

Radon is a radioactive, colorless and odorless gas that is found all around us in very small amounts and is responsible for most of our daily dose of radiation. Radon gas is one of the decay products of radium, which in turn is a decay product of uranium, the most common naturally occurring radioactive substance…

Birds have a sort of thin extra eyelid called a nictitating membrane that protects their eyes and may do so in the rain. The membrane is not entirely transparent, so the birds may not see clearly, but they can probably see light and dark. As in cats, dogs and other animals, this membrane can flick…

Neptune’s Great Dark Spot, like Jupiter’s Great Red Spot and Saturn’s Great White Spot, indicates an atmospheric storm. It is an anticyclone, a cyclone rotating in a counterclockwise direction, about the size of Earth that travels eastward about 8° south of the equator at a pace of 100 feet (30 m) per second. The Great…

The green color in plants and algae is a miraculous molecule called chlorophyll that can absorb the energy of sunlight and use it to convert carbon dioxide and water into glucose and oxygen gas. The plants then either use the glucose directly for their own growth energy or polymerize it (connect thousands of glucose molecules…

Mariner probes had already orbited Mars, but NASA’s Viking program was designed specifically to land on the planet in search of, among other things, life. Viking 1 went into orbit around Mars on June 19, 1976. NASA planned to send a module to land on the surface on Independence Day, to celebrate the U.S. bicentennial,…

Pablo Picasso was an amazing and prolific painter. However, unlike Michelangelo, who was also an accomplished poet, or Leonardo, who dabbled brilliantly in the fields of science, math, philosophy, and music, Picasso’s genius in painting did not overlap into other fields. For example, when he tried his hand at writing plays, he took just four…

The flying phalanger of Australia is a small, furry marsupial related to the possum. Although it looks like a flying squirrel, it is not. When this small, fuzzy creature wants to collect materials for a nest, it gathers a bundle of leaves together, wraps its tail around them, and takes them home. The phalanger looks…

H. L. Mencken, in The American Language: Supplement One (1945), relates that he had accumulated “numerous etymologies” purporting to account for the name of the American beverage we know as the cocktail, but only seven of them could be regarded as plausible. His list, with dates, highly condensed, is: (1) from French coquetier, “egg cup,”…

Since ancient times, silver and gold have been major sources of wealth in Europe and other parts of the world. Most of the silver deposits in Europe had already been mined by the time the New World was discovered. One of the reasons for Spain’s interest in America during the early days of exploration and…

The Great Rift Valley is the longest rift in the world. It was formed when tectonic forces created giant cracks in the earth’s crust and began spreading apart. It is 3,750 miles (6000 km) long and more than 50 miles (80 km) wide at some points. The Great Rift Valley begins in Jordan, near Syria…

Perfect pitch, which is also called absolute pitch, is the ability to name any note (such as A, B flat, C sharp) just from hearing the tone, without reference to other notes in a scale. Relative pitch, which is far more common, is the ability to tell what note is being played by judging the…

A visionary scientist made a serendipitous discovery and fought over a decade for the scientific community to accept it. When they did, the world received the lifesaving drug penicillin. In 1928 bacteriologist Dr. Alexander Fleming, a modest man, son of a Scottish farmer, was working in his laboratory at St. Mary’s Hospital in London, a…

For hundreds of years, wooden shoes, called klompen, were worn by most Dutch people for very practical purposes. Because much of Holland lies below sea level, there are a great many areas that are marshy and damp. It is from these areas that Holland, or its real name The Netherlands, meaning “low lands,” got its…

People who buy or own something that costs a great deal of money to keep up, without serving any useful purpose, are said to own a “white elephant.” But there are actual Asian elephants whose skin is so light that that they are considered white. These white elephants were worshipped as gods by the people…

When you are stargazing, the farthest you can see along the ground in any direction is called your celestial horizon. Just as the Sun rises over the horizon, so do all stars appear to rise and set over your celestial horizon. On a map, your celestial horizon corresponds to Earth’s horizon around you, but when…

Spook Hill is a most unusual street in Lake Wales, Florida. While there are no spooks, ghosts, or goblins living on the street, the strange and mysterious happenings there have given Spook Hill its name. If you were standing at the bottom of Spook Hill and dropped a ball, the ball would roll uphill! If…

Nuyorican (or Neorican) is Spanglish for a Puerto Rican New Yorker. Spanglish is an informal mix of English and Spanish, spoken by many Latinos. Some Puerto Ricans, however, object to the term. Puerto Ricans have their own names for certain sections of the city. East Harlem, or Spanish Harlem, has been a Puerto Rican enclave…

The third degree is a very difficult and sometimes brutal questioning, especially by police. In fact, without its sinister connotation, the expression comes from the Masonic Lodge and its three degrees of membership, each requiring an increasingly difficult examination. The first is Entered Apprentice, the second is Fellowcraft, and the third degree, the one most…

North and South Vietnam have been unified since 1976. In that year the Communists of North Vietnam defeated South Vietnam after nearly 20 years of war and it became one country, called the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. The United States was involved in that war, in which 58,000 Americans died. The Vietnam War ended with…

Locks have been around for thousands of years, but the kind of lock we use today is less than 200 years old. In 1817, the British government offered a prize to anyone who could design a lock that couldn’t be picked open by a thief. A man named Jeremiah Chubb presented a lock that he…

More U.S. presidents were born in Virginia than in any other state. The eight presidents were George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, William Henry Harrison, John Tyler, Zachary Taylor, and Woodrow Wilson. The largest city in Virginia is not its capital, Richmond, but Virginia Beach. It had a population of 425,257 in 2000,…

Suffolk County, New York, has beautiful beaches and beautiful people. Rich New Yorkers own elaborate summer houses there, in different neighborhoods from the local year-rounders who serve them, of course. Those who don’t own can rent them, rentals at $20,000 a month and more are common. Some people commute to jobs in Manhattan from Suffolk….

For the entire duration of the American Revolution, or until March of 1782, the first lord of the British admiralty was John Montague, 4th Earl of Sandwich. He was exceedingly unpopular, and the period of his tenure of office was notorious for graft, bribery, and general mismanagement. The personal life of the Earl was also…

The word calculus means “pebble” in Latin. Pythagoreans used pebbles, lined up to form various shapes, to represent numbers. The earliest ideas that led to integral calculus can be found in the Egyptian Moscow papyrus, and described calculations of volumes and areas, one goal of integral calculus. Historically, calculus was known as “infinitesimal calculus”. Archimedes…

Many Native Americans living along the Pacific Coast showed respect to their most honored dead by burying them in canoes. For instance, when a Tillamook chief died, his followers thoroughly washed the body, painted his face red, and wrapped him in a blanket held tight with strips of cedar bark. The body was then placed…

The threespine stickleback is always as much of a bully as a four-inch fish can be, but in the spring it turns a brilliant red and becomes more of a bully than ever. It is time for it to build a nest and rear some babies. It gathers algae and scraps of plants and begins…

Although one sometimes wonders whether downtown traffic moves at all, the traffic lights are timed to help clear congestion and keep the arteries moving at a regular pace. When plotting the timing of lights in a certain area, a traffic control department has to consider how fast the traffic should move, the length of the…

The longest-lived creature in the insect world is the termite queen. She has been known to live for over 50 years. During that time, the queen can lay over 30,000 eggs each day, so in her 50 years of life, it is possible for her to give birth to half a billion children!

Before non-Natives arrived in North America, the woodlands of the Northeast were the home of some 50 tribes. Anthropologists group most of these peoples as either Algonquian or Iroquoian. The tribes in each group were distant relatives of one another. They also spoke similar languages and shared many of the same customs and ways.

“0 Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and stonest them which are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not!” This passage from Matthew xxiii, 37, was the source of the expression “to take under one’s…

If you judge the U.S. presidents by the fruits of their actions, we suppose someone could make a case that a number of them were not Christians, regardless of what faith they claimed. However, Abraham Lincoln was one who specifically rejected Christianity, even writing a pamphlet called Infidelity, which sought to disprove the Bible generally…

Most historians believe “The King and I” is largely inaccurate, and we’re not just talking about the snappy tunes. It is true that Anna Leonowens was the teacher to the King of Siam’s wives and children. Fortunately, for readers and moviegoers, the King’s son didn’t invite Leonowens back to Siam when he took over the…

There are a number of vacuum gadgets on the market that purport to speed up marinating. Even some commercial meat processors use them. But they’re pure deception. You’re supposed to put your meat into a sealed container and pump most of the air out with a small hand-operated or electric pump. The idea is that…

The name Bangkok began appearing on western navigational charts as early as the 1400s. It may have been the Chinese who coined the name originally. By some accounts, the name Bangkok means “village of the wild plum.” So why did westerners go by the Chinese name instead of the Thai name? Well, there was a…

The expression “to make one’s mouth water” means to anticipate something with great eagerness. Literally, and the original sense, one referred to the actual drooling that one experiences over the prospects of sinking one’s teeth into a comestible that exudes a particularly delightful aroma, as a schoolboy from Boston might say. The experience must have…

On September 13, 1961, a Mercury capsule was launched into orbit and, after one complete revolution, landed safely. On board was a simulation of an astronaut. Afterwards, a Mercury capsule successfully carried the chimpanzee Enos twice around Earth. Despite the astronauts’ test pilot experience NASA first intended for them to be “minor participants” during their…

The usual evasive answer to this question is “one or two drinks a day.” But what is “a drink,” anyway? A bottle of beer? A glass of wine? A brimful, six-ounce martini? There are tall drinks and short drinks, stiff drinks and weak drinks. One man’s drink may look to the next guy like a…

Bandidos existed in the 1800s, but the modern caricature of these nineteenth-century southwestern bandits as mere criminals is not quite accurate. To some, the bandidos were heroes. Also known as desperadoes, from the Spanish word desesperado (“desperate man”) they began their outlaw careers in the 1850s. They included Juan Cortina in Texas and Joaquin Murieta,…

Australia is about 7,000 miles southwest from North America, lying between the South Pacific Ocean and the Indian Ocean. A commercial airplane flight to Australia’s largest city, Sydney, takes more than 14 hours nonstop from Los Angeles. Australia is the only country that is also a continent. It is the world’s smallest and flattest continent,…

Literally, “valley, or dale, of the Aire,” a river in the southern part of Yorkshire, England, joining the Ouse and emptying into the Humber. The name Airedale is applied specifically to a breed of terrier originating in this valley, wire-haired, with crown, back, and sides black, and face, throat, and limbs tan. The dog, usually…

Almost everything in the universe travels in a circular path. The moon goes around the earth, the earth goes around the sun, and even the sun revolves around the center of our galaxy. This is because of two basic laws of science. First, an object moving in space, where there is no air to slow…

The homely American phrase “to swap horses in midstream” is just our way of saying “to change leaders (generals, presidents, or what have you) during the course of an engagement (or at the height of a crisis),” and the point is always stressed that such change may lead to disaster. As a matter of literary…

Attempts have been made to give the term country-dance a French background, insisting that it was first the contre-danse of French, Italian, or Spanish origin. Such is not so. It was the other way round. Those dances were eighteenth-century adaptations from the English country-dances. It is not known when nor in what part of England…

The name of the American insect known as the Katydid is customarily said to be due to the repetitious sound produced by it, as if, over and over again, it were saying Katie did! It does our heart good to be able to record that others also have not detected this flat statement in the…

Bacteriologists are quite proud when their name becomes attached to a disease causing organism. This is not true of other people, American Legion members are not at all happy about having Legionnaire’s disease named after them, and homeowners and real estate agents in Lyme, Connecticut, could have done without having their city’s name permanently attached…

In the early years of the nineteenth century numerous chemists and inventors were trying to find satisfactory ways to utilize the baffling substance known as “rubber.” The substance got that name because the one thing for which a use had been found for the stuff was to “rub” out lead-pencil marks. The most notable success…

The Asian elephant is the only other animal besides humans that, with training and a great deal of coaxing, has demonstrated this ability to stand on its head. Bet you can’t stand on your head.

All mountains were formed through very slow movements of the earth’s crust. These changes produced four different kinds of mountains, depending on how the crust reacted to these movements. If the earth’s crust formed waves, or upfolds and downfolds, much like an accordian, and layers upon layers of rock pressed on each other, they formed…

The white spots that are often scattered on your nails are simply signs that the nail has been bruised or injured. However, before this was known as a medical fact, superstitious people gave other meanings to these spots. On the thumbnail, they meant you would receive a gift. On the index finger, the spots represented…

As said of various other words, some of our remote ancestors must have possessed wonderful gifts of imagination. Someone, about six hundred years ago, discovered that if the end of the ordinary iron prize or prise were sharpened to a point or beak, its use as a lever would be more effective. Someone then likened…

In America and Europe, many people consider 13 an unlucky number. The reason for the superstition is open to question. In Japan, the numbers 19, 33, and 42 are considered unlucky. The reasons for these superstitions aren’t so unclear. The Japanese word for the number 19 sounds much like the word for “bad luck”. The…

We really should call the flying squirrel the “gliding squirrel,” as no mammal except the bat is really capable of flying. The flying squirrel doesn’t have wings, but it does have thin flaps between its front and back legs. When a flying squirrel wants to move from one tree to another, it spreads its legs…

Not until 1904 did the United States begin policing the border with Mexico. Even then, the aim of the patrol was not to keep out Mexicans but to keep out Asians who were trying to enter through Mexico. Because of anti-Asian sentiment, people from China and Japan were not allowed to make a home in…

It’s all a matter of habitual practice or personal taste. That is, if one is not accustomed to a cold shower, a sudden dash of cold water on one’s naked body may be quite a shock. The very notion; “to throw cold water”, a hundred and fifty years ago, gave one the jitters, or at…