Mental Floss
Mental Floss

BIG QUESTIONS

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From your car, to your lawn mower, to your snow blower, to your chainsaw—the power of almost every engine you deal with is measured in terms of horsepower. None of these things seemingly have anything to do with horses, so where did that measurement come

Matt Soniak
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Humans have observed marine mammals stranding themselves on land since at least the first century CE, when the ancient Romans and Greeks recorded beaching incidents. Modern marine biologists are only able to determine the cause of a beaching about 50 perc

Matt Soniak

The smoke alarms in my apartment building are both ridiculously sensitive and ridiculously loud. They regularly go off even when there’s no smoke, and I often have to scramble up on top of a chair to reset them because a pot of boiling water is producing

Matt Soniak
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First off, popcorn isn’t just any old corn. It’s a cultivated strain of flint corn known as zea mays everta. Its kernel is also a whole grain—it consists of the bran (the hull or outer covering), the germ (the “embryo” that germinates into a plant), and t

Matt Soniak
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Fictional characters, and even real-life folks, often talk about animals and people—particularly snarling dogs and knife-wielding lunatics—being able to “smell fear” on people. No one ever seems to be able to describe just what fear smells like, though.

Matt Soniak
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Daven Hiskey runs the wildly popular interesting fact website Today I Found Out. To subscribe to his “Daily Knowledge” newsletter, click

Daven Hiskey
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Whether you’re buying them for your kids or yourself, you’ve surely noticed that Barbie dolls, action figures, and other toys often come packed in their own tiny Fort Knoxes, with layers upon layers of plastic, twist ties and tape all housed in an unbreak

Matt Soniak

Tis the season to be getting the cold and flu. But is it possible for the bacteria and viruses that infect us so easily to get sick themselves?In 1917, a microbiologist working at the Pasteur Institute in Paris discovered what he described as an invisible

Matt Soniak

Whether you end a letter or e-mail with it—or you recognize it from the end of each Gossip Girl episode—“Xoxo” is commonly known to refer to the phrase “Kisses and hugs.” But how did these two inconspicuous letters come to represent that well-known

Sean Hutchinson
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For everyone who’s ever been unhappy with the way they look in a picture or on video, there’s almost always someone there to try and comfort them by pointing out that the camera “adds ten pounds” to its subjects.Sometimes this just excuses actual flabbine

Matt Soniak
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Poinsettias are as indispensable to Christmas as evergreen trees and mistletoe. Every year, they come out of the greenhouses and off the store shelves into our homes, and every year, some well-meaning but factually-challenged aunt or family friend warns u

Matt Soniak
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Buckingham Palace has confirmed what the British tabloids have suspected for a while: The Duchess of Cambridge is expecting. Unfortunately, Kate has also been admitted to the hospital due to hyperemesis gravidarum, or acute morning sickness—so severe that

Kara Kovalchik

For a long time, scientists thought that pruning of the skin after spending time in the water was simply a matter of fingers being a little spongey. The outermost layer (the stratum corneum) of the outermost layer (the epidermis) of our skin is mostly mad

Matt Soniak
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