The Best Interesting Random Facts
George Washington Carver had many thoughts on the environment that were years ahead of their time. He once said, “There is no better plant food than the things we ignore or throw away every day.” Carver taught his students how to make compost of leaves, garbage, and weeds long before the organic gardening movement of […]
There are some rules of thumb for estimates for a limited area, but estimates for whole countries or the world are just guesstimates. Archaeologists tend to find and count all the formerly inhabited sites in a study area; make an educated guess about which ones were occupied at a certain period, usually based on pottery […]
The best way to explain is with an example. Sodium reacts violently on contact with water, while chlorine is a highly toxic greenish-yellow gas. However, sodium chloride, the compound which contains these two elements, is harmless common salt, showing the properties of an element are very different from the properties of that element’s compounds. The […]
Usefulness is a subjective term, but wasps, which with bees and ants make up the order Hymenoptera, are extraordinarily well adapted to certain human ends. Almost all are predators or parasites of injurious pests, and some act as pollinators of valuable plants. With varying degrees of success, wasps of different species have been bred, imported […]
Yes, glacier ice purer than regular ice, and it is not surprising that some entrepreneurs have marketed it commercially for drinks. There are several scientific and aesthetic reasons for the superiority of glacier ice. First, the ice in glaciers is relatively pure water because after thousands of years of compression of the tiny snow grains […]
Unlike thermos, which has become a generic word, Styrofoam is still struggling to retain its identity as a trademark, but nobody seems to be paying attention; people call all polystyrene foam products “styrofoam” anyway. The material is a good insulator because the plastic foam contains billions of trapped gas bubbles. Gases hinder heat conduction because […]
In the eighteenth century, American colonists in New England came up with an ingenious way of boosting the alcohol content of apple wine without the complicated apparatus of a still. They just left barrels of the wine out in the cold New England winter, where the surfaces froze. But water freezes at 32°F (0°C), while […]
Caffeine is very soluble in water; as much as 150 grams of caffeine could dissolve in a cup of boiling-hot water. But there isn’t anywhere near that much caffeine in a tea bag. Typically, it’s less than a thousandth of that. What caffeine there is is extracted out of the tea bag almost completely in […]
Farts are pretty flammable. Of the three main gases in fartsnitrogen, methane, and hydrogenmethane and hydrogen are both highly flammable. Nitrogen’s not. According to the statistics we found, over a quarter of the idiots who try lighting farts get burned. The rest are treated to a barely visible show of yellow and blue flames, as […]
For much the same reason that stars twinkle, except that there are enough light rays coming from the object that no matter how much they scatter, some of them will always be reaching your eyes. So there’s no actual twinkling. When you look down the road on a hot day, you may see shimmering “lines […]
Nikola Tesla was one of the greatest scientific minds in history and one of the most imaginative inventors. Many of his ideas were so far ahead of their time that they remained misunderstood and unstudied. Tesla invented the radio, but the Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi received credit for it. He discovered X rays, but German […]
There’s a little bit of neon in the air we breathe, so yes, our atmosphere contains neon. You can extract it by using a process called adsorption. That involves superchilling the air at temperatures below 411 °F so it becomes a liquid. When you run the super cold liquid over charcoal, the neon molecules stick […]
Rattlesnakes are good swimmers, though they are not in a class with species that spend all or most of their lives in water or even with the familiar garter snake. From anecdotal accounts, we know that rattlesnakes will swim readily enough when their travels in search of food, mates, or refuge require them to cross […]
A newt is a type of salamander in that it fulfills the basic requirements: its skin is thin, it breathes through gills until its lungs grow, and the adults can leave the water and walk among us as land-dwellers. The biggest difference from other salamanders is that adult newts have flatter tails than most. This […]
Generally, your odds are 3,000,000 to 1 that you won’t get hit by lightning. But in lightning strikes, as in real estate, location is everything. If you’re a park ranger and spend most of your time outdoors, your odds of course will be higher than if you’re a practicing couch potato. If you get your […]
Recent studies show that birds like Robins find worms in the ground visually, not by hearing or smell. When robins run along the lawn, cocking their heads, it looks like listening, but actually it is just looking. What the robin usually sees is the castings or pellets of mud at the entrance to the worm […]
It goes back to the fact that most humans are right-handed. Long before we had modern weapons such as guns and automobiles, people had to do battle using swords and horses. Now if you are right-handed, you wear your sword on the left, so that you can draw it out rapidly with your right hand. […]
The central processing unit, the microprocessor that actually performs the calculations, is what takes the most power when the calculator is running. The more calculations the machine is asked to perform, the more power it would draw. Just being turned on would take only enough of the calculator’s battery power to light up the display. […]
Oils are liquids whose molecules don’t stick together very strongly, so they can slide easily past one another. That’s what makes them slippery. But chemically speaking, edible oils and inedible oils are quite different. And thereby hangs an embarrassing tale. A few decades ago I was teaching graduate-level chemistry in Spanish (what chutzpah!) at a university in […]
In 1609, Galileo Galilei announced the discoveries he had made with his first telescope. Johannes Kepler was of course fascinated by the idea and wrote the first treatise on optics. His theories were basically correct and are still in use today. The study also included a discussion of the nature of light and proposed that […]
The corkscrew effect you may notice is the bottom end of the whirlpool that is occurring inside the container as the milk exits. The force that causes liquid to corkscrew or spiral is usually called the Coriolis force, or Coriolis effect. This is responsible for all whirlpooly stuff you might find. Milk cartons and bottles […]
The invention of the thermoscope, a thermometer like device used to measure body temperature, is usually credited to the physician Santorio Santorio in 1612. Many argue that knowledgeable men of the day, including Galileo, collectively invented the device. However, Santorio was the first to actually add a number system to gauge changes in temperature.
All fish have internal pressures that are equal to the pressures outside their bodies at their normal depths. This is true of both tissues and the gas-filled bladders in the abdominal cavity that many fish have. They would only be in trouble if they changed depth greatly. If they come up a great deal, they […]
Like every other householder in this country, I have religiously kept an open box of Arm & Hammer (is there any other kind?) baking soda in my refrigerator, and I can testify that I have never smelled a bad odor. It must also have worked to repel tigers. because not once did I encounter a […]
Cream cheese and cottage cheese are not purely American, but primarily so. What cream cheese and cottage cheese have in common, along with French Neufchatel and a few others, is that they are not aged or ripened. The milk or milk-and-cream mixture is curdled by an acid (usually lactic acid), and the curds are ready […]
Some birds do hit branches when they fly, but most are very maneuverable. Birds also have excellent vision, and the flight pattern and style, musculature and aerodynamic characteristics, and even how fast they fly, are adapted to the environment in which they fly. Birds that live in the forest and fly through the canopy are […]
The current plans involve bringing along a rocket that could be launched from Mars into a low orbit, where it would meet another craft that would return to Earth. The vehicle that returns to Earth would carry some kind of Earth-entry vehicle, like a capsule or shuttle plane. To make the return cheaper by bringing […]
The predictable list of animals that have been sent into space includes dogs, monkeys, rats, mice, rabbits, and fish. No pigs, as of yet, but guinea pigs and pigtailed monkeys have all been put into orbit, as well as the eye lenses of pigs, cows, and sheep. Some not-so-likely animal crew members have included jellyfish, […]
Cream is made from milk by boosting the percentage of milk fat (also called butterfat, because it is made into butter) beyond the percentage the cow put into it. That is, some of the watery, non-fatty part of the original milk (the “skim milk”) is removed to increase its “richness”: its smooth, unctuous mouth feel. […]
Sundials were and are not that accurate, alas. There were too many variables in sun positioning during the year to make sundials useful for more than a give-or-take-an-hour guess of the time. The quantum leap forward in time measurement took place in December 1656, when Dutch scientist, musician, and poet Christiaan Huygen invented the world’s […]
Just smile. Anyone who thinks steaks contain blood, well, they’re wrong. They’re not necessarily wrong in their preference for eating well-done steaks, although many would argue that such behavior should be declared a felony. Where they’re wrong is in calling your steak bloody. There’s practically no blood in it at all. Blood, you might politely […]
Jello, like many materials, has both a viscous and an elastic side to its nature. It is a gel made up of a network of weak elastic bonds. These are easily broken under the shearing action caused by your fingers when using it to clean your hands. If these bonds are not broken down but […]
Your car is a box of homemade weather, produced by your air intakes, your heater, your air conditioner and your passengers. But sometimes, because of your passengers’ irrepressible habit of breathing, the car fills up with a lot of water vapor and some of it condenses onto the cold windshield, fogging it up. What do […]
Most American cities use the recommendations of The Traffic Engineer’s Handbook, which presumes an average speed of 6 feet per second for Joe Pedestrian. If you would like this expressed as a formula, take the total number of feet across the street and divide by 6. Subtract that figure from the total amount of time […]
The larynx, like many other body parts, is under hormonal control during development. Male hormones encourage the growth of the larynx, and the Adam’s apple is the prominence made by the cartilage that creates the housing for the larynx. The larger male larynx, the longer vocal cords and the bigger box that resonates when the […]
Once scientists realized that fossils were a key to uncovering Earth’s past, the search was on for more, older fossils. Three main new sciences grew out of these studies, paleontology, archaeology, and anthropology. Paleontology is the study of fossils, including those of humans, animals, and plants. Archaeology is the study of past human culture and […]
