Just after I asked you guys how to get rid of that high salt content in Ramen a few weeks ago, here I am pouring it on (nudge nudge) this week. This post contains 27% of your daily value for salt, one of the most important compounds and foodstuffs known to man.

• Of course, salt has many other uses besides enhancing flavor and preserving food. As most of you know, it was also used to preserve humans. One of the most interesting naturally-occurring cases is that of the “Iranian Salt Men,” whose remains from 1800 years ago have been preserved naturally in salt mines. Even their hair stayed intact!
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The guys in their pastel shirts and Ray-Bans and the girls with their big hair and shoulder pads occasionally took a break from partying in the 80s. Those looking to relax with a good book often picked up a Stephen King novel, devouring the goriest bits with gusto. Despite King’s destructive addictions during the 80s, he managed to churn out numerous best-sellers. Test your smarts with our literary quiz on the “King of the Eighties.”

We’ve been extremely fortunate with our last three batches of interns. Stacy Conradt and Andréa Fernandes joined the staff and quickly became reader favorites. When Jason Plautz isn’t dominating the League of Publications with Sports Illustrated’s softball team, he contributes weekly articles and quizzes. And current interns Matt Soniak and Allison Keene will graduate into regular roles next month (unless another knowledge/trivia magazine/blog poaches them). As I said the last time we went intern hunting, this is certainly a big-shoes-to-fill situation.

All our previous interns worked from their various homes and dorm rooms. And that’s been fine. But if you do live within commuting distance from Brooklyn, we’ll set you up with your own desk/spot on the couch in our Mid-Atlantic Headquarters a few days a week. Interns will brainstorm, research and write up flossy articles, lists and quizzes. On some days, you’ll be given a topic in the morning and asked to write a story for that afternoon. Plus the occasional task, like image searching or caption contest vote-counting.

If you’d like to join the team, send an email to floss.intern@gmail.com. We’ll send you the application and all the details on Monday, May 4th.

I’ve always had problems with heights, perhaps to an irrational degree. Growing up, we had a fold-down ladder that led from the garage to the attic, and for years, I hated climbing it. Once I got used to that, I found the courage to climb the big oak tree in our backyard — until I fell out of it one day, smacking my head on a few branches on the way down and landing in a big pile of spiny plants. Ouch. I figured heights weren’t for me and that was that, and for years I avoided them. Until recently, that is.

My wife joined a climbing gym, and I started to tag along. Then in New Zealand, I realized that my having any fun at all kind of depended on me facing this fear — or at least managing it — so that I could do the helicopter tours, small plane flights, paragliding, walks along rickety swing bridges and scenic drives up hair-raising, barrier-less switchbacks without having panic attacks. I succeeded to a degree — here’s proof — and it got me wondering about acrophobia, the fear of heights, and what makes it tick. Here’s some of what I learned.

Latching onto that early falling-out-of-tree episode, I grew up believing my fear was mostly associative. But I was wrong — unlike most phobias, acrophobia is one of the few that’s non-associative. Studies have shown that you’re not conditioned to be afraid of heights; it’s more of a hard-wired, Darwinian thing. An experiment called the “visual cliff” done on babies (creepy!) proved that even infants are wary of heights: when presented with a glass floor that had a clear view of a 10-foot drop beneath it, many infants, toddlers and young animals were reluctant to venture onto it. (more…)

In the early 1980s, Scandal was the name of a rock band featuring lead vocalist Patty Smyth. But by the end of the decade, “scandal” was a word that had been branded onto a series of sensationalist happenings that involved people who are - or would become - famous. And even though the names were all over the news back then, it may be difficult to remember who did what some quarter-century later.

See if you can match the name to the scandal. Then return here and post your score. Or you can lie about it and say that your gardener has been blackmailing you. What? You don’t have a gardener? Hmmmm…

San Francisco pitcher Barry Zito is 0-6, in the second year of a $126 million contract, and was just demoted to the bullpen. Could this be Steve Blass disease? Read Jason Plautz’s account of other famous victims from last year.

It might not be as widespread as Lou Gehrig’s ALS, but Steve Blass Disease has taken its fair share of victims. The disease, named after former Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher Steve Blass, refers to an athlete’s sudden and inexplicable loss of ability. Blass got the unfortunate ignomy of having the disease bear his name after his career derailed when he lost the ability to pitch strikes. Until that point, he’d built quite a resume, acquiring 18- and 19-win seasons, making the All-Star team in 1972 and helping the Pirates win the 1971 World Series. Then, in 1973, the wheels came off. He tripled his ERA, walking 84 batters in 88 innings and striking out only 27. In short, he just couldn’t pitch. He was sent to the minors in 1974 and, after a failed attempt to make a return, retired before the 1975 season, becoming a sales representative for a ring company.

What’s remarkable about Blass’ downfall is that there’s no explanation. He didn’t have any injury, there was no event that shattered his confidence. he just…stopped. The dreaded Steve Blass disease has struck plenty of other athletes, all without reason. The reigning theory is that it’s all mental- one mistake leads the player to start overthinking a simple act, like kicking or throwing a ball. But can a simple brain fart stop an athlete’s performance? Well, Yogi Berra did once reportedly say “Ninety percent of this game is half mental.” However, baseball genius and sports psychology-non-believer Bill James would chalk up that explanation as a modern-day equivalent to witchcraft. There is, as of yet, no known cure, but I’m sure someone, somewhere, is trying to line up Jerry Lewis to host a telethon.

So, who else suffers from this tragic, tragic disease?

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Got a few minutes? We need a small army of volunteers to participate in an online survey for the magazine, of the magazine. Here’s who qualifies:

1) People who have read (or at least skimmed) our latest 10 issue.

2) People who could complete the survey between now and Sunday.

If you’re interested, head on over and take the survey.

One (1) survey respondent—chosen at random—will win a $25 shopping spree in the mental_floss store. (To enter, you’ll just need to supply your email address.)

By the time the snooze feature was added in the 1950s, the innards of alarm clocks had long been standardized. This meant that the teeth on the snooze gear had to mesh with the existing gear configuration, leaving engineers with a single choice: They could set the snooze for either a little more than nine minutes, or a little more than 10 minutes. But because reports indicated that 10 minutes was too long, allowing people to fall back into a “deep” sleep, clock makers decided on the nine-minute gear, believing people would wake up easier and happier after a shorter snooze. We’d tend to disagree with that logic, but, then, we must be in the lazy minority. Although today’s digital clocks can be programmed to have a snooze of any length, most stick with nine minutes because that’s what consumers expect.

16 Surefire Ways to Make Your Commute Less Stressful. Calling in sick did not make the list.
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Top 20 Screen Robots. Whether you agree with the rankings or not, you can relive some memories with this list, with video clips for each robot.
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Intelligence And Rhythmic Accuracy Go Hand In Hand. That still won’t make you a good dancer.
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The Tasty Art of Chocolate & Candy. It looks too good to eat, but it’s chocolate, so I would anyway!
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Although he was renowned as a tiger hunter, Jim Corbett respected and admired tigers and leopards. His legacy includes the first tiger conservation efforts in India.
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Chaos in the Print Shop. An ad Rube Goldberg would be proud of!
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8 Essential Gadgets For a Secret Agent. All available for sale to James Bond wannabes.
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Best of the worst foods ever. If you’re gonna break that diet, do it in style!

In the 1800s, fire engines were horse-driven carriages. Unfortunately, horses and other equipment found in a fire station were prime targets for thieves at that time, especially in some of the poorer urban areas (where many fires occurred). Some firefighters tried to combat thievery by sleeping alongside their steeds, but since they were often exhausted from fighting blazes, that idea didn’t always work. Eventually, the solution became clear: a watchdog.

And not just any watchdog. You see, horses are not solitary animals. They prefer the companionship of some other animal; another horse, a dog, a goat or even a chicken. Left alone too long, they grow restless and neurotic. Dalmatians, it was discovered, formed an amazingly close bond with horses once they were introduced. They also became quite protective and possessive of their equine friends, so it became impossible for anyone to try to spirit away a horse under cover of the night. In fact, the spotted pooches were also used by stagecoach drivers for the same purpose, and became colloquially known as “coach dogs.”

This tidbit was pulled from Kara Kovalchik’s “Ten Wild Fire Facts.”