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Prosopagnosia deletes the ability to recognize faces
Imagine looking at your closest friends and seeing a completely unrecognizable arrangement of features every single time. Face blindness makes navigating…
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Latitude and longitude must be exact
Simply typing in the name of your sprawling metropolitan city isn't actually enough if you want true precision. You need the exact geographic coordinates of…
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When Steve Jobs asked Bill Gates to save Apple
The ultimate corporate swallowing of pride. In 1997, Apple was hemorrhaging money, weeks away from total financial collapse. Freshly reinstated CEO Steve Jobs…
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Why currency exchange boards can fool travelers
Brightly lit electronic boards deliberately highlight inflated numbers to trap mathematically challenged travelers. By emphasizing the rate at which they sell…
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Some men experience pregnancy symptoms too
Male empathy can literally become a medical condition. In Couvade syndrome, partners experience intense sympathetic pregnancy symptoms, including weight gain,…
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Saying one word can disrupt your memory
Articulatory suppression is a brilliant way to break your own mind. Try to read and memorize a list of words while constantly saying the word 'the' out loud.…
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Machu Picchu was an emperor's private retreat
Backpackers love to project ancient mystical prophecies onto Peruvian ruins, but the historical reality is far more bourgeois. Archaeologists widely agree…
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Angel number 888 delivers unlimited abundance
Eight is the infinity sign standing up, which means endless cash flow is supposedly coming your way. Seeing this sequence means financial rewards are right…
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Asteroid Urania pushes theoretical knowledge and facts
Rulers of late night Wikipedia spirals, this rock gives you an insatiable hunger for massive, useless facts. It makes you deeply fascinated by the cosmos,…
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Tick vectors rapidly expand due to global warming
As if climate change wasn't miserable enough, it is actively empowering the worst bugs on earth. Warmer winters mean that ticks are no longer dying off in the…
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Mortal Kombat reused one fighter for its ninjas
Sub-Zero, Scorpion, and Reptile are all exactly the same digital actor wearing the exact same baggy costume. They just splashed different digital hues onto…
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Jak and Daxter: a quest for orbs and insults
The silent protagonist trope is much more tolerable when you have a loudmouthed sidekick compensating for it. Jak and Daxter featured an epic quest to reverse…
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Maglev trains beat track friction—then hit an invisible wall
Because even when you defeat the friction of the earth, the very atmosphere itself becomes your enemy. Maglev trains float gracefully above their tracks,…
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Why sleeping on your left side may ease heartburn
Gravity is the ultimate, free antacid if you know how to use it. Because of the asymmetrical shape of the human stomach, which naturally curves to the left…
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Corporate purchasing catalogs are entirely detached
Companies selling pens and paper to large offices charge wildly inflated prices. They rely solely on the fact that the employee placing the order is using…
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Why feeling watched can make you behave better
True altruism is shockingly rare; mostly, we just behave well because we fear massive social ruin. The mere whisper of a suggestion that an observer is…
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Capricorn is objectively the smallest zodiac constellation despite getting equal sky representation
Poor Capricorn. It’s supposed to be this mighty, ambitious sea-goat, but astronomically, it is an incredibly faint, tiny blip taking up minimal real estate in…
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How Nauru's mining boom changed what its people ate
Forget the tropical island diet of fresh fish and coconuts. After decades of strip-mining their own island for phosphate, the wealthy residents of Nauru lost…
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How actuaries turn your lifespan into statistics
There is a whole profession dedicated to betting on when you will die. Actuarial life tables use complex statistical models based on your habits, zip code,…
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Frogger gets much scarier when the music stops
Crossing a busy highway is stressful enough without a catchy tune. The iconic amphibian traffic adventure completely drops its backing track once the round…
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The paint-can trick behind airtight food containers
Food preservation tools occasionally draw inspiration from the hardware aisle. The famously airtight seal on your grandmother's plastic containers was…
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How activated charcoal traps poisons
It is essentially a microscopic sponge for terrible decisions. Activated charcoal is so highly porous that it traps pharmaceutical compounds and poisons in…
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Tropical cocktail umbrellas add visual flair
Paper parasols serve absolutely no structural purpose. They were introduced purely to add an absurd level of visual flair to sweet drinks and trick patrons…
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Random objects appearing from thin air
Apports are solid objects that mystically drop into a room during a seance. Because nothing proves life after death quite like a phantom manifesting a cheap…
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