Mental Floss

BIG QUESTIONS





Oregonencyclopedia.org

If you’ve ever been enrolled in the Fruit-of-the-Month Club or gotten a Tower of Treats as a gift, you’re probably familiar with the names Harry and David, but don’t know much about them. Are they real people? Do they have last names?

Matt Soniak




Getty Images

Wouldn’t it do just the opposite? Doesn’t it prove that the rule does not hold for all cases and is therefore not a rule at all?

Arika Okrent
iStock / baona

When this refracted light reaches you, your brain and eye don’t account for all the bending it did along the way. What you see is an inferior mirage where the mirage is under the real object.

Matt Soniak
iStock / SIphotography

When you speak, vibrations from your vocal cords resonate in your throat and mouth, and some get transmitted and conducted by the bones in your neck and head. The inner ear responds to these just like any other vibrations, turning them into electrical sig

Matt Soniak








Christopher Columbus did a lot of naming in his day. As it turns out, he had a hand in naming four of the five island-nations with two names. Is that an obscure enough fact for you? Still, this is definitely the kind of fact that shows up on pub trivia ni

Haley Sweetland Edwards


New Orleans bounce artist 5th Ward Weebie raps as women from the audience twerk onstage at Tipitina's in 2014.

Though twerking may have gone viral—and been added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2013—thanks to Miley Cyrus, the dance's origins date back nearly two centuries.

Maureen Monahan




ThinkStock

When you're waking up from a nightmare, your first question might be, “Was that a bagel chasing me through my house with a sledgehammer?” And after the shock of dreaming about a homicidal, anthropomorphic breakfast dish wears off, your next question is pr

Erik van Rheenen


Kevin C. Cox/Getty Images

Sometimes it’s literally a glob of grease, other times it’s a synthetic sticker. We’ve all seen baseball and football players with the black rectangles under their eyes on sunny days, which is thought to help reduce the sun’s glare and allow athletes to b

Will McGough
ThinkStock

In 1963, Singapore declared its independence from Great Britain. Without much land area or natural resources of its own, the new nation secured some protection and economic help by joining Malaya, Sabah and Sarawak to form the Federation of Malaysia. But

Matt Soniak
physics.ox.ac.uk/Erin McCarthy

Between our look at the longest prison sentences the other day and the 69-year-old pitch drop experiment finally getting caught on camera last month, reader Justin got curious and wrote in to ask, “what’s the longest experiment that scientists have filled

Matt Soniak
ThinkStock/Erin McCarthy

Men are from Mars and insist on turning up the air conditioning; women are from Venus and always complain of being cold. In a world striving for gender equality, is there something holding us back from liberty and comfortable temperatures for all, or is i

Roma Panganiban