Mental Floss

FACT CHECK

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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/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


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No doubt most of us have heard that black and other dark objects are more absorbant and white and light objects are more reflective, but let’s start out by clarifying just what’s being absorbed and reflected.

Matt Soniak


Wikimedia Commons/Erin McCarthy

Chinese characters are made up of strokes. Learning to write them involves not only learning where all the strokes go, but also the order in which they are supposed to be written and the direction of each individual stroke (left to right, up to down, etc.

Arika Okrent




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People have long been known to willfully pull out their own hair owing to anxiety, but it’s widely believed that chronic stress can cause inadvertent hair loss as well.

Kevin Kampwirth
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Musical power couple Beyoncé and Jay-Z jetted down to a tropical and somewhat-forbidden destination last week for their fifth wedding anniversary: Cuba. Because of travel restrictions to the country, the couple’s trip raised the eyebrows of some U.S. lawm

Karina Martinez Carter




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At one time or another, though, we’ve all been the emotional drunk, a condition typically marked by ill-timed espousals of affection (or reprisal), acute introspection, and an incontrollable urge to cry in the middle of a crowded bar.

Kevin Kampwirth


Lost-World.Com

When I was a little dinosaur fan, all I wanted was a pet dinosaur. An Apatosaurus would have been choice—big enough to be impressive, but not especially likely to eat me. But that’s never going to happen. As much as I hate to say that science will never s

Riley Black


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Close perusal of a Wonder loaf’s list of ingredients reveals some 29 tongue-tying components, while the whole grain loaf has five or six, none over two syllables. So why are more heavily processed foods and those with more ingredients typically less expen

Kevin Kampwirth
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Travelers to Chicago may experience the wind gusts that come off Lake Michigan, get tossed around a bit and think, “So this is why it’s called the Windy City.” The nickname, which dates back to the late 1870s, is deceiving because, literally, Chicago is a

Bryan Dugan
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The best early ‘90s children’s bookshelves were full of books about child detectives, including Cam Jansen, the fifth grade super-sleuth with a photographic memory. She was called “Cam,” short for “camera,” because she would close her eyes and say, “cli

Roma Panganiban
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For every world religion, there is a place to worship. For Christianity, there are a confusing variety of names for these places, which are frequently—but incorrectly—used interchangeably. Church, chapel, and cathedral are the trio of terms most commonly

Roma Panganiban