Zippy Facts

The study of our history and origins is critical to understanding who we are. That includes the history of humans, of life on our planet, of our planet itself, and of the universe as a whole. But how can anyone study a history that came and went unseen billions of years ago? George Gamow’s work…

Cells present in the amniotic fluid within the fetal sac are largely of fetal origin, and they contain the secret of a baby’s sex. In the procedure called amniocentesis, a sample of this fluid is examined and the baby’s sex revealed. Because of a minimal but nevertheless real risk to the health of the fetus…

Although they also wrote novels, Claude McKay and Langston Hughes were probably most famous for their poetry. Claude McKay was born in Jamaica, and in 1913 he arrived in America to study agriculture at Tuskegee Institute. His interest in writing brought him to New York City, the center of book and magazine publishing. He eventually…

Scientists can’t say for certain what the man of the future will look like. But they do predict that he will have a smaller face and a bigger nose. He’ll have less hair than he does now, in fact, he might even be bald! Man’s face has been gradually getting smaller since cave-man days. In…

Glue, like paste or cement, joins things together. These materials are known as adhesives because they make things adhere, or stick together. Stickiness, however, is not all that it takes. In order for an adhesive to be practical, it must change from a soft liquid to a hard solid within a short period of time….

The first performer ever to win an Oscar, a Tony, an Emmy, and a Grammy was Rita Moreno, a Puerto Rican. The actress and singer was born Rosa Dolores Alverio in Humacao, Puerto Rico, in 1931. She moved to Manhattan as a child. She first appeared on Broadway at age thirteen and in movies at…

Honolulu, the capital of Hawaii, is about 2,400 miles (3,864 km) southwest of the U.S. mainland, about the same as the distance between San Francisco and Washington, D.C. It is the southernmost state in the Union, in fact, Honolulu is on about the same latitude as Guadalajara, Mexico. Hawaii is the only U.S. state that…

Little more may be done with the word “hobo” than to repeat the several theories that have been advanced to explain its origin. Any one of them might be true, but there is no proof as yet. Slightly less than four centuries ago the French musical instrument, the hautbois, came into English use. Its name…

The 1957 Broadway musical by Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim was ultimately based on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. The creators of the show wanted to update that tragic love story by placing it in modern urban surroundings. They needed two warring camps, and originally thought of pitting Catholics against Jews. But by the mid-1950s, the…

Imagine a fly is flying in the opposite direction to a moving train. The fly hits the train head-on. As the fly strikes the front of the train, its direction of movement changes, because it hits the windscreen and continues as a blob of goo on the front of the train. At the instant it…

The phrase “to bark up the wrong tree” means to mistake one’s course of action; to be on the wrong course; to have one’s attention diverted from the intended object. Literally, this American phrase referred to a hunting dog used in the pursuit of raccoons. When this nocturnal animal takes to a tree, the dog…

The planet Pluto has three known natural satellites, Charon, Nix and Hydra. Charon was first discovered by astronomer James Christy in 1978. We know little about Pluto, and we know less about its only moon, Charon. Pluto’s moon is about one-half the size of its host planet: 739 miles (1,182 km) in diameter. It orbits…

The aromatic spice we know as allspice was not known in Europe before the discovery of the West Indies. The Spanish name was pimienta, “pepper,” and because of that and the place of origin the dried seeds of the berry were known to English traders as “Jamaica pepper.” However, because the housewives of England thought…

Jesse Jackson (1941- ) is one of the most active civil rights leaders and a spokesman for all minorities in the United States. Jackson was ordained a Baptist minister in 1968, when he had already become actively involved with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). In 1971, he left the SCLC to start his own…

African Americans of the Old South highlighted their social season with a dancing contest called a cakewalk. The contestants often practiced for months and included couples of all ages. The prize was a huge cake which was set in the center of the hall and around which the dancers exhibited their skills. A panel of…

A tinker traveled from town to town repairing tin pots, kettles, and pans and got his name from the noise he made while working. His equipment included clay from which he made a mold to hold melted solder for refastening handles and joints. He called this mold a “dam,” and because it was only good…

They used to call the Dandelion lion’s-tooth in England before the sixteenth century, but someone then got fancy notions and began to use the French name of this common European weed, dent de lion, though it has the same meaning. Of course, it didn’t make sense to the average Englishman to spell something dent de…

“Throw them away, of course!” would probably be your answer. And that is exactly what most people do. But in some societies, where superstitions are strong, fingernail cuttings are believed to be used by sorcerers for casting evil spells against their owners. Therefore, the cuttings are carefully guarded or hidden. Another old superstition claims that…

In English Arras is the name of a kind of tapestry richly woven with scenes and figures, and also of the hangings of this material which, in olden days, were hung around the walls of large rooms, often so spaced as to furnish concealment for an eavesdropper, a lover, or a knave The French call…

By age five or six, children would do small tasks such as helping in the big house or in the field fetching water, picking up stones, or working in the trash gang. At the age of ten or twelve, children, both boys and girls, were given a regular field routine.

Though we’re not saying that the reading of the Thirty-nine Articles has an actual bearing on the “forty winks” or short nap that is likely to succeed that reading, or interrupt it, such a sequel could be inferred. The Thirty-nine Articles, for the benefit of the unenlightened, are the articles of faith of the Church…

Three completely different ecosystems can be found in the Olympic Peninsula in western Washington state. Dozens of glacier capped mountains, 60 miles (97 km) of undeveloped Pacific coastline, and old growth and temperate rain forests. Most of this region lies with the boundaries of Olympic National Park, 95 percent of which is designated as wilderness…

Of the world’s famous painters, Rembrandt painted the most self portraits, with 62 self-portraits. Vincent van Gogh is number two, with 40. He had a good excuse, though, while institutionalized for madness, he didn’t have models or landscape views available. One of his portraits is Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear, painted in the mental institution not…

While scientists have calculated a mean sea level for the earth as a whole, it is only a mathematical average value taken from a series of observations around the world. In fact, there is no single “sea level,” and the large bodies of water in the world have different and constantly varying levels because of…

The word “toilet” has had a rather curious development in the little more than four hundred years it has been in the language. Its origin was the French toilette, the diminutive of wile, “cloth.” Its first use in English was as the name for the fragment of cloth used for wrapping clothes. Then it was…

Venice lies on a group of marshy islands in the Adriatic Sea, about four miles from the mainland of Italy. The city was founded by people escaping barbarian invasions on the mainland, mainly during the fifth and sixth centuries. By the fifteenth century, a great fleet of merchant ships made Venice one of the wealthiest…

When you are in a warm house and it is cold outside, you probably have seen the windows steam up. At one time or another, you also probably took your finger and drew a picture on the window and found that your finger came away wet. And did you ever wonder why? Did you wonder…

The expression “to have one’s heart in one’s shoes” is no more than the current version of a very old saying that describes extreme fear. An ancient humorist, wishing to imply that his heart sank lower with fear than another’s could, wrote, in the early fifteenth century, that his heart fell down into his toe….

The building does move, but the motion is a very slight bending, only about a quarter of an inch, in winds of more than 75 miles an hour. The illusion of a larger motion probably has to do with wind-whipped clouds; an observer on the ground can see a tall building appear to “fall” if…

Maundy Thursday is the day before Good Friday, the Thursday next before Easter. To most persons not of the Roman Catholic or Episcopalian faiths the designation of this day is incomprehensible, for the term “maundy” now appears in no other connection. It originated from the thirteenth chapter of John, in which the Last Supper and…

Insects definitely see colors, smell and sometimes hear, but not the way people do. Our eyes see a we range of wavelengths, but many insects have vision tuned into a specific range to find resources like food and shelter. For example, because of filters in their eyes, quite a few insects see leaves as yellow,…

The “pope’s nose” is the part of a chicken that last goes over a fence; that is, the rump of a fowl. The name is said to have been applied to this tidbit during the days following the reign of James II of England when feeling was intense against the possibility that the British throne…

Both Latin dances cumbia and tango come from South America. The cumbia comes from Colombia, where bands called vallenato ensembles play the music that goes with it. Instruments include a diatonic button accordion, drums, shakers, and scrapers. The music combines Spanish, Native American, and African influences. The tango is a graceful, romantic ballroom dance that…

In all seriousness, the basilisk lizard got its nickname because it can walk on water. Its feet are webbed just enough that when it’s running at fast speeds, the lizard can skate above the water line. If the other lizards had sufficient faith, perhaps they could do it, too. The Common Basilisk is a lizard…

The explorers who invaded Mexico in the sixteenth century found, in addition to treasure of silver and gold, a vegetable treasure in the form of a new fruit, unknown in Europe, which the Mexican Indians called tomati. They thought sufficiently well of this fruit to take samples back to the Old World, and the name…

Vidalias aren’t unique in their mildness. There are several brands of mild onions grown in other parts of the country, including the Maui, Walla Walla, Texas 1015, and OSO. Note that I have called them “mild,” not “sweet.” They don’t necessarily contain more sugar than other onions; they simply contain lesser amounts of both the…

The name Big Ben doesn’t refer to the chapel clock in London, but to the 13-ton bell that rings in the clock tower. The “Ben” behind the bell was Sir Benjamin Hall, the first commissioner of works at the time of installation in 1856. A loud man, it’s said. So the name was very appropriate….

We have probably all heard “bite the dust” for the first time while watching an old western B movie when a cowboy hero does away with a pesky varmint to impress the schoolmarm. The phrase was first used in English literature in 1750 to imply wounding or killing by satirical novelist Tobias Smollett (1721-1771) in…

A plateau is an elevated area that spreads over a large region. A mesa, from the Spanish word for table, is a plateau that drops steeply off on all sides. A butte is a smaller mesa and is formed when a mesa erodes. If you visit the Four Corners area of the United States, the…

One wonders whether coming generations will think that we, in this day of countless new inventions, have shown like imagination and poetry in the coining of names as that given to our early forebears. It does not so appear. Certainly not in such words as telephone, automobile, airplane, radio, television, electric refrigerator. But consider the…

A potentially dangerous situation was first called a hazard by the western European Crusaders after returning from the Holy Land. It was there that they encountered and were fleeced by unscrupulous local gamblers using loaded or doctored dice. “Hazard” is how they pronounced “al zahr”, which is the Arabic word for dice. In time the…

The cheetah was previously believed to be the primitive species among the big cats and evolved approximately 18 million years ago. Recent studies have suggests that the last common ancestor of all species of felines lived only about 11 million years ago. The same research shows that the cheetah, does not have ancient lineage, and…

You’re not expected to sniff it for evidence of moldiness. That’s rare in this day and age. Moreover, when a small amount of the wine is poured for monsieur or madame’s approval, a couple of swirls and sniffs will tell all that one needs to know. If the wine smells and tastes fine, who cares…

Hydrogenation is, quite sensibly, the name of the process by which hydrogen is added to something. Hydrogen is the lightest of all known substances, but paradoxically, hydro-genating an oil makes it thicker and more solid. If we went all out with complete hydrogenation, the oil would become as solid as candle wax, which would make…

The leading producers of oil in the world are Saudi Arabia, the United States, Russia, Iraq, Iran, and Venezuela. All of these countries are members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, also known as OPEC. The goals of OPEC are to ensure the stabilization of prices in international oil markets and eliminate harmful…

It is widely believed that planet earth is gaining mass. A large number of small meteorites strike the earth every year, while the amount of material thrown out into space is comparatively negligible. Most of what is launched returns to earth as man-made meteorites. Everything that is sent into orbit remains in the range of…

Contrary to popular myth, it was not a Native American custom but a colonial one first. Scalping on the American continent was first instituted by the Dutch colonial government around New York when they actually set a bounty for killing Indians. They came up with the idea of requiring a scalp as concrete evidence of…

The gas and dust in a comet’s tail are extremely lightweight. The tails are created by solar wind rushing past the orbiting comet and blowing material away from the defrosting coma. When the comet approaches the Sun, the force of the wind pushes the tail out behind the comet. When the comet is moving away…

The average American now watches an amazing four hours of television each day! That doesn’t mean that every person in this country watches four hours of TV. Some people may watch one hour, some may watch seven hours, but on the average, Americans stare at a TV screen for about four hours a day. If…

Although shins take a beating during a game of shinny, the name comes from the Celtic game of shinty. A pick-up game of hockey, either on the street or on ice, shinny has no formal rules, and the goals are marked by whatever is handy. The puck can be anything from a ball to a…

A dumbbell is a silent bell devised to strengthen the men who rang very large church bells. At Canterbury in the Middle Ages, it took twenty-four men to ring one bell. To build up strength, and develop their skills, novices used a silent or “dumb” bell, which was a heavy weight suspended by a rope…

Now and then someone comes along who, just like the heroes of mythological times, does something that causes his name to be perpetuated. Sometimes his action is altogether innocent, with no thought that it will bring him lasting glory; sometimes his name becomes noted because the action was held to be especially ridiculous or arbitrary….

One of Archimedes’ achievements was discovering the mechanics of the lever. He knew a small force at one end of a lever could move a great weight if the pivot, or fulcrum were in the right spot. “Give me a place to stand and I can move the world,” he said. King Hiero asked for…

Basque Americans settled mainly in Nevada, Idaho, and Oregon, along with some other parts of the West, including California and Wyoming. They first came to the United States in the 1800s. Skilled as shepherds, Basque immigrants found work in that business and came to dominate the sheepherding industry of the West. Most were poor when…

Before the Amish were Amish, there were Mennonites, founded in the 1530s by a Roman Catholic priest named Menno Simons. The Mennonites believed that the Reformation hadn’t gone far enough, and so they created their own churches based on the simplicity of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. As pacifist non-nationalists, they refused to swear oaths,…

There are a few words native to the Teutonic languages which, in these, are spelled with w, but which, on having been adopted into the Romance group, were spelled with a g, or, perhaps, with gu. One of the latter is represented by our word guard. This started in Old Teutonic as warda and was…

A Christmas carol is a song of religious joy, but the musical form of a carol doesn’t have to include Christmas. Its main feature is the repetition, either musically or chorally, of a theme, as in a circle. The word carole entered English from the French at the end of the thirteenth century, but it’s…

“Songe d’Automne,” also called “Dream of Autumn,” by Archibald Joyce (1908) could have been the last song the band played on the Titanic before it sank. Or it could have been the hymn “Nearer My God to Thee,” the bandleader’s favorite and the tune many survivors remember hearing last. The truth is that no one…

Scientists estimate that the sun is 4,600,000,000 years old. They believe that it was formed when the force of gravity pulled gases and dust together in space. As this mass of gases and dust came together, it continuously contracted, or got smaller. As the mass pulled together in a ball shape, the pressure of the…

The Black Death that ran through China and across Europe in the 14th century is considered the worst plague in recorded history. Depending on the way the virus was contracted, 70 to 90 percent of those exposed to the plague died from it. During a five-year period, from 1347 to 1352, over 25 million people…