The Best Interesting Random Facts
Cookies or biscuits contain much more sugar and salt than bread like baguettes, which is the main reason why they become soft if left out. The finely divided sugar and salt are hygroscopic and soak up moisture from the atmosphere, the osmotic pressure in a sweet biscuit is quite high. The dense texture of a […]
As with so many great events in history, the first words spoken over the phone came purely by accident. When Alexander Graham Bell spilled acid on his pants in his workroom, his shriek of pain and panic came through a system he was testing. In the next room, Thomas Watson heard Bell’s electronically transmitted voice […]
Antoine Lavoisier was heavily involved in many official duties for the French government. He was the leader of the commission set up to create a new system of weights and measures. The result was the metric system used in most of the world today. Despite his close ties to the government, Lavoisier was a strong […]
The short answer is that aflatoxin is of very little concern. Aflatoxin is produced by the fungus Aspergillus flavus, and most people don’t eat moldy food, because it tastes bad. Documented human aflatoxin problems usually occur in tropical countries, where the wet climate is conducive to mold growth, or in extremely poor ones, where people […]
Athlete’s foot, also known as ringworm of the foot, is a fungal infection of the skin that causes flaking, scaling, and sometimes severe itching of affected areas. The Infection is commonly transmitted in moist areas where people walk barefoot, such as showers or bathhouses. It can also be transmitted by sharing footwear and even towels […]
The reason dogs yowl when emergency services go by may be that to the dogs, the siren sounds like other dogs howling and they respond by howling back. This goes back to the time when they hunted in packs and signaled to one another when searching for prey. Even if the screaming siren does not […]
We do indeed breathe in a considerable number of molecules that once passed through Leonardo’s lungs and, unfortunately, Adolf Hitler’s or anyone else’s for that matter. The calculation is not too difficult and is as follows. The total mass of the Earth’s atmosphere is about 5 x 10^21 grams. If we take air to be […]
It’s usually more humid in the summer because there’s more water vapor available. I don’t mean that the oceans, lakes and rivers somehow expand in the heat. (Well, maybe a tad.) More precipitation? Perhaps. But it’s not the amount of water itself; the humidity can be quite low over the middle of the ocean. What […]
Oil is a good lubricant, obviously, because it’s so slippery. But what makes a substance slippery? All liquids are slippery to some degree. A wet floor or highway, wet with water, is a well-recognized hazard that keeps many lawyers in expensive clothing. But water isn’t much use as a lubricant in our engines and other […]
Many folks have assured us that their bread doesn’t have time to go concave when spread with honey. However, for those folk who chomp their honeyed bread in a more leisurely fashion, there is a simple explanation. Bread is approximately 40 percent water while honey is a strong solution containing approximately 80 percent sugar. This […]
Not all of Hippocrates’ ideas were accurate. Hippocrates believed that illness occurred when body fluids were out of balance. These fluids were called humors and included blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile. The humors occurred when the four main elements of Greek thought: fire, air, earth, and water, mixed with dryness, dampness, heat, and […]
There is no relationship between breast size and volume of milk. The female breast contains fifteen to twenty lobes of milk-secreting glands embedded in various amounts of fatty tissue, which is not involved in milk production. Instead, it is controlled by hormones produced during and after pregnancy that stimulate the milk-secreting glands, and the nursing […]
The graying of the inner surfaces of incandescent bulbs is the result of gradual evaporation of tungsten from the filament while the light is on. This evaporation eventually makes the filament so thin it burns out. Various methods have been developed to reduce graying. Filaments of the first incandescent lamps burnt in a vacuum, but […]
A falling drop of rain creates a tiny pressure wave ahead, below the raindrop. This wave pushes the fly, gnat, wasp, bee, or insect sideways and the drop misses it. Fly swatters are made from mesh or have holes on their surface to reduce this pressure wave, otherwise flies would escape most swats. The insect […]
Hawking believes that the conditions in a black hole are the key to our entire universe and the big bang theory. In a black hole, matter collapses into an infinitely dense, infinitely small point. Hawking says that if you reverse the process, you have an infinitely dense, infinitely small point, surrounded by nothingness, exploding outward […]
Rusting takes place through a juxtaposition of iron and oxygen that actually constitutes a miniature electric battery, on the atomic scale. That is, the oxygen molecules are taking electrons away from the iron atoms, and that is exactly what goes on inside a battery: electrons being snatched from one substance by another. Anything that helps […]
Herman Melville’s assertion on the reverse magnetization of a compass is entirely plausible. Lightning involves very high currents with high associated magnetic fields. They remagnetize exposed outcrops of high-coercivity, high resistance to the effect of an applied magnetic field, rocks with ease. Currents exceeding 10,000 amperes have been deduced from rock magnetizations. The associated magnetic […]
They are referring to how the germs react to one of the basic tests in bacteriology, the Gram stain or Gram’s stain, which distinguishes between two major classes of bacteria by how they take up certain dyes. On a microscope slide, heat-treated gram-positive bacteria take up a purple dye (originally gentian violet), which is then […]
In 1900, an amazing coincidence took place in the scientific world. Three scientists, unknown to each other, had all discovered the laws of heredity simultaneously. They were Hugo de Vries of Holland, Carl Torrens of Germany, and Erich Tschermak of Austria-Hungary. Before announcing their great discovery to the world, they checked the earlier work of […]
Of all the body cavities in contact with the outside world, the nose is probably one of the most hospitable. The nose is warm, very well aerated, moist and supplies unlimited quantities of bacterial food secreted continuously by the nasal mucosa, mucus contains quantities of glycoprotein and dissolved salts. In other words it is an […]
A Scottish clockmaker and inventor named Alexander Bain patented the first facsimile machine on May 27, 1843, thirty-three years before Alexander Graham Bell’s invention of the telephone. It took another few decades before the invention got any significant use. A commercial fax service (called “pantelegraphes”) opened between the French cities of Paris and Lyon in […]
Silver bullets serve mostly as a calling card, but they do have a very slight advantage over lead. Ordinary bullets are made of lead because lead is so heavy, or dense. And it’s cheap. We want a bullet to be as heavy as possible because we want it to have as much damage-causing energy as […]
It is the current through the heart and surrounding region that causes most deaths from electric shock. The effect depends on duration of exposure and also varies between individuals. The frequency of mains power, around 50 or 60 hertz, is very dangerous, and currents of only a few tens of milliamps at such a frequency […]
The penguin dives the deepest underwater of all the birds on earth. This is probably because it’s an excellent swimmer. Some species can dive 900 feet, the height of a typical seventy-five-story building, and hold their breath for nearly twenty minutes while swimming.
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 […]
Antigravity? We don’t use that word. Science fiction is two shelves over to the left. Surprisingly, there is no upward-pushing force. It’s just that there is less downward-pulling force on the helium than there is on the air that surrounds it because helium gas is lighter than an equal volume of air. Gravity pulls less […]
English author and philosopher Francis Bacon was the forerunner of the great frozen-food scientists of the early 20th century, such as naturalist and author Clarence Birdseye. Bacon did many experiments with meat and discovered the undeniable connection between meat preservation and subfreezing temperatures. Tragically, his experiments killed him. While on a joumey in March 1626, […]
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 […]
Mashed potatoes would seem to be the easiest thing in the world to make: just boil ’em and mash ’em, right? But potatoes are mostly starch, and a lot depends on how the starch behaves. Potato flesh is made up of plant cells. Inside the cells are thousands of starch granules, little round packages in […]
The chemicals in hot peppers that cause the burning sensation may protect them from animals so they get eaten by birds. Any plant, whether it is a shrub like a pepper, a tree or an herb, that has bright red or orange fruit with a number of small seeds in it, and in which the […]
Microwaves sure won’t do you any good. Even small doses of microwave energy might do long-term damage, and larger doses can cause a dangerous buildup of heat, especially in body parts like eyes, which don’t cool quickly. Having said that, though, it’s also true that people stationed at microwave towers used to stand in front […]
We all know water comprises just two chemical elements, oxygen and hydrogen, both of which exist as gases in Earth’s atmosphere. Making water should therefore be as simple as smashing the two together with enough force to overcome the energy barrier keeping them apart – right? However, this reaction produces a huge amount of energy, […]
There are plenty of dead pigeons around, if you look carefully, but there are lots of things around that clean them up, scavenging animals of all sorts, including rats, and even gray squirrels. Insects probably do not have a major role in pigeon disposal. It might take a week for the various carrion beetles to […]
Most scientific funding at the time was going toward the study of X rays. Marie Curie was much more interested in this new radiation and its source. The Curies were poor, so they had to take the only “lab” available to them, a cold, rundown shack near the Sorbonne. Curie’s first step in her research […]
Ear wax, known to scientists as cerumen (pronounced suh-ROO-mun), traps dust and dirt particles to keep them from going down the ear canal to the eardrum. Besides protecting against dirt and water and lubricating the canal, ear wax is slightly acidic, so some experts say it has mild antibacterial properties and helps fight the growth […]
The tips of fingers and toes are covered by a tough, thick layer of skin which, when soaked for a prolonged period, absorbs water and expands. However, there is no room for this expansion on fingers and toes, so the skin buckles. Your whole body does not become crinkled as the skin has a layer […]
