The world is more interesting than you think.
Unexpected facts, big ideas, and little discoveries. Find something that sparks your curiosity today.
A little more wonder
One keyboard character can outnumber every letter: the space.
One keyboard character can outnumber every letter: the space. In a text-entry study using a large British English corpus, spaces made up about 18% of the…
Discover more
Your fingernails grow roughly twice as fast as your toenails.
Your fingernails grow roughly twice as fast as your toenails. A study of young adults measured averages of about 3.5 millimeters a month for fingernails and…
Discover more
Jawed Karim uploaded the very first video to YouTube on April 23, 2005, an incredibly mundane eighteen-second clip titled 'Me at the zoo' featuring him standing in front of some…
Jawed Karim uploaded the very first video to YouTube on April 23, 2005, an incredibly mundane eighteen-second clip titled 'Me at the zoo' featuring him…
Discover more
Betty White was six when commercially sliced bread arrived.
Betty White was six when commercially sliced bread arrived. White was born in 1922; commercial machine-sliced bread debuted in 1928. The comparison turns a…
Discover more
Benjamin Franklin's morning bath contained no water.
Benjamin Franklin's morning bath contained no water. In a 1768 letter, Franklin described sitting naked in his room for half an hour to an hour while reading…
Discover more
Borders handed its online bookstore to Amazon.
Borders handed its online bookstore to Amazon. In 2001, the bookseller outsourced its web sales to the company becoming its strongest online rival. Amazon…
Discover more
STACKY FOR IPHONEA bigger world.
One discovery
at a time.
Keep discovering with Stacky. Interesting facts in an app that is always within reach.
Director William Friedkin completely cut the infamous spider-walk sequence from the original 1973 theatrical release of The Exorcist, deeming it too technically flawed because…
Director William Friedkin completely cut the infamous spider-walk sequence from the original 1973 theatrical release of The Exorcist, deeming it too…
Discover more
Jenga turns someone else's safe move into your problem.
Jenga turns someone else's safe move into your problem. Each removed block changes how the tower carries its weight, while the player adds that block to the…
Discover more
Catholic mystics have long venerated the Shroud of Turin as the authentic burial cloth of Jesus Christ, claiming the faint image of a bearded man miraculously scorched into the…
Catholic mystics have long venerated the Shroud of Turin as the authentic burial cloth of Jesus Christ, claiming the faint image of a bearded man miraculously…
Discover more
A diesel-electric locomotive carries its own power station.
A diesel-electric locomotive carries its own power station. The diesel engine drives a generator or alternator, which supplies electric traction motors at the…
Discover more
C got its name because it followed B.
C got its name because it followed B. Dennis Ritchie developed the language at Bell Labs in the early 1970s, building on the earlier B language. C then helped…
Discover more
Clean metal surfaces can stick together without melting.
Clean metal surfaces can stick together without melting. Cold welding occurs when surfaces make sufficiently intimate contact for metallic bonds to form.…
Discover more
Hong Xiuquan failed his imperial civil service examinations so many times in nineteenth-century China that he had a nervous breakdown and hallucinated that he was the younger brother of Jesus Christ.
Hong Xiuquan failed his imperial civil service examinations so many times in nineteenth-century China that he had a nervous breakdown and hallucinated that he…
Discover more
A pack of gum helped launch the barcode checkout era.
A pack of gum helped launch the barcode checkout era. On June 26, 1974, a Marsh supermarket in Troy, Ohio, scanned a pack of Wrigley's Juicy Fruit in the…
Discover more
An early treadmill made prisoners climb without getting anywhere.
An early treadmill made prisoners climb without getting anywhere. William Cubitt’s 1818 design used a large rotating wheel that inmates stepped on, sometimes…
Discover more
Volkswagen advertised a Beetle by driving it into the sea.
Volkswagen advertised a Beetle by driving it into the sea. A 1972 commercial sent a Beetle into Long Island Sound to demonstrate its tight construction. A…
Discover more
Grasshoppers do not have ears on their heads, but instead process sound through small, drum-like membranes called tympana located on either side of their abdomen, tucked just beneath their wings.
Grasshoppers do not have ears on their heads, but instead process sound through small, drum-like membranes called tympana located on either side of their…
Discover more
Daniel Radcliffe wore out wands by using them as drumsticks.
Daniel Radcliffe wore out wands by using them as drumsticks. Between Harry Potter takes, he tapped the props against his leg until they wore down and broke.…
Discover more
Gematria is a traditional mystical system where alphabetical letters are assigned numerical values, allowing practitioners to find hidden connections between words that happen to add up to the exact same number.
Gematria is a traditional mystical system where alphabetical letters are assigned numerical values, allowing practitioners to find hidden connections between…
Discover more
Pong's first test machine filled up with too many coins.
Pong's first test machine filled up with too many coins. Allan Alcorn built the arcade prototype, and its placement in a local bar revealed demand strong…
Discover more
A brewery vat failure sent a deadly beer flood through London.
A brewery vat failure sent a deadly beer flood through London. In 1814, a vat at the Horse Shoe Brewery failed, releasing a huge volume of porter into…
Discover more
SpongeBob's early name was SpongeBoy.
SpongeBob's early name was SpongeBoy. The planned series was called SpongeBoy Ahoy! before the character acquired the name now familiar worldwide. A name…
Discover more
A doctor helped sell Americans on tomatoes by calling them medicine.
A doctor helped sell Americans on tomatoes by calling them medicine. In the 1830s, John Cook Bennett promoted tomatoes for digestive complaints, including…
Discover more
Windows Solitaire turned mouse practice into something people wanted to do.
Windows Solitaire turned mouse practice into something people wanted to do. Dealing and moving cards gave users repeated practice at clicking and dragging in…
Discover more