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Mental Floss
Anyone with even a fleeting relationship to political news these days has probably noticed that partisan bickering in the U.S. Congress has reached a bit of a crescendo of late. So we got to thinking: When do politicians just give up on the vitriolic rhet
Haley Sweetland Edwards|
Image credit: StockbyteWhen a bug flies into a spider web, the game is over. It’s almost instantly stuck, and a sitting duck for the web’s owner. When you or I walk into a web, we’re a little better off than the bug because we won’t be dinner, but the sti
Matt Soniak|
Hulton Archive/ Next week (July 11) is John Quincy Adams' birthday! While the idea of celebrating the 250th birthday of some dead guy with killer muttonchops surely appeals to any flosser, your guests might feel weird attending a party in honor of a pres
Julia Davis|
Installment #24: In the first half of 1912, the small Christian kingdoms of the Balkan Peninsula began plotting an attack on their former oppressor, the weak, declining Ottoman Empire. In March the main conspirators, Bulgaria and Serbia, signed a treaty o
Erik Sass|
Tom Pennington/ The National Flag Code was adopted on June 14, 1923, by the National Flag Conference. The representatives from the U.S. Army and Navy and more than 60 other organizations in attendance were charged with examining the rules and procedures
Jamie Spatola|
Scientists have a sense of humor just like the rest of us. The difference is that a scientist's jokes are sometimes enshrined in the body of knowledge for eternity, or close to it. One of the ways they do this is naming things that previously had no name,
Miss Cellania|
Picture an atom. Now picture that atom getting excited. Maybe its birthday is coming up. Anyway, when an atom or a molecule gets excited, its electrons' energy levels go up. When the electrons fall back down to their normal state, they release energy in t
Matt Soniak|
When an Apple programmer’s project got canceled, he didn’t despair. He just kept sneaking into the office until the program was finished.
the mag|
Reader Brit asks: "Is there any rhyme or reason to calling a road an avenue, a boulevard, a street or a lane? Is it just at the discretion of whoever names the
Matt Soniak|
The characteristic green tint is by design, for a few reasons. First, device makers have experimented with a few different colors and found that the different shades that make up the monochrome night vision image are most accurately perceived and distingu
Matt Soniak|
Pretty much ever since humans discovered flight, we’ve been strapping animals into our new devices just to see what would happen. Over the last 330 years or so, we’ve launched dogs, cats, chimps, monkeys, roosters, ducks, spiders, fruit flies, silk worms
Haley Sweetland Edwards|
Everyone knows that Stephen King was a janitor and Ransom Riggs shared creepy old photos on mentalfloss.com. What did some other famous writers do before their big breaks?
Adrienne Crezo|
Cuius est solum, eius est usque ad coelum et ad inferos means "whoever owns the soil, it is theirs up to Heaven and down to Hell."
Matt Soniak|
In the early 1880s, Chancellor Otto Von Bismarck of Germany had a problem. Marxist unrest was spreading across Europe and some of his own countrymen were calling for socialist reforms. To take the wind out of their sails and stave off more radical policie
Matt Soniak|
Installment #23: In the 19th century, European statesmen came to share an amoral (some would say cynical) view of geopolitics, in which international relations were based solely on the size and strength of rival players and their perceived self-interest,
Erik Sass|
RAY STUBBLEBINE/Reuters/Landov New York Mets pitcher R.A. Dickey, the only active major leaguer who throws a knuckleball, hasn’t allowed an earned run in 42 2/3 innings and recently became the first pitcher since 1988 to throw back-to-back one-hitters. T
Scott Allen|
Over seven seasons, the General Lee went airborne more than 150 times. Although it seemed fine on screen, the General rarely survived a jump. Warner Brothers totaled an average of two Chargers per episode.
Lucas Reilly|
Image: Hemera | Thinkstock The media has become obsessed with the so-called “Miami Zombie” case, and for good reason. It sounds like something ripped straight out of a horror movie and brought to life. But these kinds of things seem to occur with a prett
M Asher Cantrell|
If the air and the water are the same temperature, what accounts for the difference that we perceive? It's a matter of heat transfer, the transition of thermal energy from a hotter object to a cooler object.
Matt Soniak|
If you like sampling new beers or hate having money, you might want to try one of these budget-busting brews.
Lucas Reilly|
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