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A little more wonder
Chinese National Highway 110 experienced a traffic jam in 2010 that lasted for 12 agonizing days and stretched for 62 miles, moving at a blistering pace of two miles per day.
Chinese National Highway 110 experienced a traffic jam in 2010 that lasted for 12 agonizing days and stretched for 62 miles, moving at a blistering pace of…
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Heartburn happens when stomach contents reach tissue not built for them.
Heartburn happens when stomach contents reach tissue not built for them. The stomach normally contains an acidic mixture behind a protective surface. If the…
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Freemasons based their rituals on medieval guilds
Their square and compass were everyday tools of medieval stonecutters, and Masonic rituals drew on the traditions of craft guilds.
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Ace Ventura turns rewinding into a physical gag
In the second film, Carrey performs a sequence that imitates being rewound, reversing gestures and speech-like sounds. The joke makes a person behave like a…
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Toto's performer needed a stand-in after an on-set injury
Terry, the terrier in The Wizard of Oz, hurt a paw when a performer stepped on her during rehearsal. Another dog filled in while she recovered. The animal…
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Your eye offers two very different maps for identification
The iris is the textured ring around the pupil; the retina is tissue at the back of the eye with a branching blood-vessel pattern. Biometric systems can use…
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The credit-card experiment that dropped 60,000 cards
People in Fresno didn’t have to apply: in 1958, Bank of America mailed 60,000 credit cards to them unsolicited. The rollout brought fraud and missed bills,…
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Plato believed souls picked their next life
His myth has souls choose their next lives, making them responsible for what follows—even when they choose a tyrant's life.
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Why tarantulas share their burrows with tiny frogs
The frog eats ants and other insects that might attack the tarantula’s eggs, while the spider’s burrow shelters the frog from larger predators. One guards the…
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Why Tarantino misspelled Inglourious Basterds
Tarantino deliberately misspelled the title *Inglourious Basterds*, but refused to explain the choice, telling reporters, “I’m never going to explain that.”
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The label on a lab coat changed a psychology experiment
In a 2012 study, participants performed differently on attention tasks depending on whether a white coat was described as a doctor's or a painter's. The…
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The famous Tomb Raider nude code was never real
The code was a hoax: no button combination could undress Lara Croft. Core Design even threatened to sue magazines that kept publishing it.
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Linux began as a student's “just a hobby”
Linus Torvalds released the Linux kernel in 1991, calling it “just a hobby, won't be big and professional.” It went on to power corporate servers,…
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A flight price is easier to judge with a history
Google Flights can compare a fare with typical prices and show a price graph across travel dates. That gives a sudden increase some context: is this…
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The US central bank sets rates independently
The president chooses the Fed’s board, but Congress doesn’t have to approve each interest-rate decision. That leaves monetary policy in the central bank’s…
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Queen Victoria was prescribed cannabis for menstrual pain
Reynolds called concentrated cannabis tinctures “one of the most valuable medicines we possess,” treating them as a serious remedy, not a novelty.
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Internal Revenue Service tax code is currently over nine million words long, which makes it about eight times longer than the entire Harry Potter series combined.
Internal Revenue Service tax code is currently over nine million words long, which makes it about eight times longer than the entire Harry Potter series…
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Douglas Engelbart originally designed the computer mouse cursor to point straight up in 1981, but the Xerox PARC interface team tilted it forty-five degrees to the left because…
Douglas Engelbart originally designed the computer mouse cursor to point straight up in 1981, but the Xerox PARC interface team tilted it forty-five degrees…
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Your appendix may keep a backup supply of gut bacteria.
Your appendix may keep a backup supply of gut bacteria. Researchers have proposed that its sheltered shape and bacterial biofilms help beneficial microbes…
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Cambridge University researchers invented the world's first webcam in 1991 for the sole purpose of monitoring a coffee pot in the Trojan Room computer lab.
Cambridge University researchers invented the world's first webcam in 1991 for the sole purpose of monitoring a coffee pot in the Trojan Room computer lab.…
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Cerebrospinal fluid literally washes your brain while you sleep to clear out toxic proteins that accumulate during your waking hours of agonizing over embarrassing things you did five years ago.
Cerebrospinal fluid literally washes your brain while you sleep to clear out toxic proteins that accumulate during your waking hours of agonizing over…
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Paris tried a moving walkway fast enough for a slow run.
Paris tried a moving walkway fast enough for a slow run. The high-speed walkway at Montparnasse used acceleration and deceleration sections to get passengers…
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Machu Picchu was already known to people living beside it.
Machu Picchu was already known to people living beside it. Local residents guided Hiram Bingham to the ruins in 1911, where families were farming among the…
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A city's traffic jam can be longer than any one road.
A city's traffic jam can be longer than any one road. Reports of hundreds of kilometers of congestion can add up slow or stopped stretches across a whole road…
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