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
Why gamblers throw harder when they need a six
We genuinely believe the laws of physics care about our bank accounts. The illusion of control is the tendency for people to overestimate their ability to…
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Jurassic Park dinosaur sneeze being pure CGI
Before CGI became a lazy crutch, it was used to simulate gigantic prehistoric bodily fluids. The iconic scene where a brachiosaurus unleashes a massive, gooey…
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Why international adoption can cost so much
You would think giving an orphan a loving home would be straightforward, but it actually requires mountains of bureaucratic payments. Between home studies,…
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Celery won't give you negative calories
Crunching on sad, stringy greens will not magically erase your dietary sins. The negative energy concept is a complete fabrication designed to sell absurd…
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Lincoln's funeral train crossed the country in black
Mourning in the 1800s was intensely dramatic. Following his assassination, an opulent private locomotive was stripped down, painted completely black, and…
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Platonic solids are strictly limited to five variations
You can draw a regular two-dimensional polygon with any number of equal sides you want. But if you try to make perfectly symmetrical 3D dice using identical,…
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The salty desert pools behind lithium batteries
The green revolution is powered by giant desert pools of toxic salty sludge left to bake in the sun for months. Once the water vanishes, we scrape up the…
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Why vertical farms can cost ten times more
To save the planet, we decided to grow lettuce in the most expensive real estate possible. Vertical farming stacks crops inside climate-controlled urban…
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Earth is the odd planet out in its name
Humanity looked at Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, branded them with the epic titles of ancient mythological deities, and then named our own home…
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The duel settled with infected sausages
Guns are far too loud; a true gentleman aggressively settles arguments with heavily infected meat. When challenged to a deadly fight, a clever intellectual…
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Alice Bailey's school completely abolished all tuition
In a space where most leaders charge thousands for basic weekend seminars, she went the exact opposite route. Her international correspondence school operated…
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Massive steel ships float by displacing heavy water
Because solid steel naturally sinks like a rock, shipbuilders bypass this inconvenience by spreading the weight over a massive hollow volume. As long as the…
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When Lara Croft's hair brought PCs to their knees
Who needs stable frame rates when your protagonist's ponytail looks absolutely fabulous? In 2013, AMD partnered with developers to introduce TressFX, a system…
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Why your phone screen gets smudgier
A brand-new smartphone screen feels impossibly smooth and completely repels greasy fingerprints. This magical barrier is just a microscopically thin chemical…
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The dinosaur that was bigger than T. rex
While the T-Rex gets all the cinematic glory, Spinosaurus was out out there making it look completely average. This terrifying, sail-backed behemoth holds the…
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Why borrowed tools make people more reckless
When you use your own tools, you treat them with reverence. When you borrow your neighbor’s expensive mower, your brain immediately recognizes that any…
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The first web browser had the same name as the web
When you invent the underlying architecture of modern existence, you are allowed a few naming hiccups. Berners-Lee originally named his browsing software the…
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Folding screens crease right down the middle
Bending a screen in half behaves exactly the way you would expect bending any solid object to behave. No matter how advanced the flexible layers get,…
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How bumping an Xbox 360 could ruin a disc
If you slightly bumped this massively popular console while it was running, it would carve a perfect, destructive ring into your expensive optical media. It…
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Tetris four line clears provide maximum score jumps
Erasing a single row is for cowards. The game heavily incentivizes hoarding an entire vertical column to drop the long straight piece and clear four rows…
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Spiritualists wrapped themselves in glowing fabrics painted with radium to convince people they were ghosts
In the ultimate combination of mystical grift and fatal scientific ignorance, fake mediums in the 1920s discovered a terrifying new prop. To create the…
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Fire signs loudly announce whatever crosses their mind
Inner monologues simply do not exist within their loud, fiery brains. Every random observation is broadcasted at maximum volume to whatever unlucky audience…
Discover moreDave Grohl nearly recorded the first Foo Fighters album alone
Instead of moping after Nirvana ended, Dave Grohl simply decided he didn't need bandmates anyway. He went into a studio and tracked nearly every single…
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German war plans simply assumed Russian armies moved slowly
The entire strategic survival of an empire hinged on a terribly racist scheduling assumption. The infamous strategy entirely relied on the massive Russian…
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