Mental Floss

THE BODY

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Luckily for us, our bodies have procedures to counter the sun our bodies absorb.

Matt Soniak






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Despite urban legends claiming that waking a sleepwalker will send them into shock or give them a heart attack, it’s pretty much harmless. While you can wake them up, you probably shouldn’t, and that’s for both your benefit.

Matt Soniak


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Head shrinking is rumored to have occurred all over the world, but documented only among a few indigenous South American tribes living in Peru and Ecuador. How do you take a flesh-and-bone head and shrink it?

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


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


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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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A mental_floss staffer who shall remain nameless asks, “Why is cranberry juice good for treating UTIs? I will not tell you why this question had been on my mind.”Bacterial infections in the urinary tract and its organs are pretty common, especially in adu

Matt Soniak
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Try and say “she sells sea shells by the sea shore” three times very fast. The first time might go alright, but on the second or third go-round, chances are the words start to degrade as you’re saying them, falling apart in your mouth like a crumbling Jen

Matt Soniak
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If you’re like most people, you simply can’t pass up the opportunity to partake in a piece of chocolate (or five).

Erin McCarthy
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When I was a kid, my parents often tried to sell me on the idea that carrots were good for my eyes—and if I wanted to avoid vision correction in the future, I would eat them now. But after I was fitted for my first pair of glasses in fourth grade, they dr

Matt Soniak


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Though fingerprints are handy for identifying perps, biologically, scientists still aren't quite sure what our fingerprints are for. But as they test different hypotheses, they're getting closer to the answer—and learning some pretty cool stuff in the pro

Matt Soniak


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You lie down to get some sleep after a long night of drinking, and the room seems to be spinning uncontrollably. Why does this happen?

Matt Soniak


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A friend of mine recently got pinkeye. Whenever she put in her eye drops, she noticed a distinct and very unpleasant taste on the back of her tongue.

Matt Soniak


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Reader Jen wrote in to ask, “Why do old injuries ache during crummy ache during crummy weather?" The idea that certain aches and pains correspond with, and can even predict, the weather is widespread, and has been around since at least the days of ancient

Matt Soniak
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The heart is the most important muscle in the body, so it seems like something of a marketing ploy by the folks at Bayer to suggest that something so simple as a humble aspirin tablet can be of any use when this life-sustaining organ goes into epic fail m

Kara Kovalchik
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Eye floaters—or 'muscae volitantes,' Latin for 'hovering flies'—are those tiny, oddly shaped objects that sometimes appear in your vision, most often when you’re looking at the sky on a sunny day.

Matt Soniak
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More than any other bodily injury, getting hit in the testicles is probably what every man dreads most. Of all the soft, fleshy spots on the human body, none register the same kind of incapacitating, end-of-the-world pain as the family jewels.

Matt Soniak