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
London had a subway while the US Civil War was still raging
The trick was to build the railway beneath the streets, not above them: workers dug a cut-and-cover trench, put in tracks, and covered it back up. Steam…
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Twilight's route to publication depended on one interested agent
Stephenie Meyer describes receiving repeated rejections and unanswered queries before finding representation. An unpublished manuscript didn't need unanimous…
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Porsche built a gasoline-electric hybrid in 1900
The Lohner-Porsche Semper Vivus used combustion engines to generate electricity for wheel-hub motors. The engines supplied energy instead of mechanically…
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Every Google search leaves a carbon footprint
Google's servers use electricity to retrieve and rank billions of pages in milliseconds, so each search has a carbon footprint.
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Canada's official reserves reached zero gold in 2016
The country's reserve reports listed foreign-currency securities, deposits, IMF-related assets—and zero gold. A national financial reserve did not have to be…
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World of Warcraft turned logging off into a reward
In the beta, Blizzard first cut players' experience in half if they played too long without resting. After players objected, it halved the baseline rate and…
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Paris tried receiving mail in metal balls during a siege
During the 1870–71 siege, sealed zinc spheres carrying letters were put into the Seine upstream of Paris. The plan was for the current to move them past enemy…
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The desert caught between two unwanted border claims
Bir Tawil lies between Egypt and Sudan. Each country's preferred border gives it the more valuable Hala'ib area while leaving Bir Tawil to the other side.…
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A male platypus carries a venom-delivering spur on each hind ankle
The spur connects to a gland, with venom production associated especially with the breeding season. A strike can cause severe, lasting pain in humans. The…
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The Grand Canyon is much younger than the rocks it exposes
Some rock near its bottom is close to two billion years old, while the familiar canyon landscape largely developed over the past five or six million years.…
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Cut Alaska in half and both pieces beat Texas
Alaska is more than twice the size of Texas, so even if divided in half, each piece would still be larger than Texas.
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Why ancient Greeks ate cabbage after drinking
They believed cabbage was hostile to wine and could drive alcohol out of the body—a supposed hangover cure, not a proven one.
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Most article sharers argue without reading past the headline
A majority of users who share and argue over articles never scroll past the headline, leaving much of the debate based on just a few words.
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GLaDOS is voiced by an opera singer
Ellen McLain’s trained operatic voice is behind the end-credit song, whose polished singing contrasts with GLaDOS’s robotic persona.
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Mario's longtime voice also belonged to a Skyrim dragon
Charles Martinet voiced Paarthurnax, the ancient dragon mentor, as well as Nintendo's famously cheerful plumber. One performer supplied both the exuberance of…
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String interpolation inserts variables directly into sentences without concatenation
It lets a program slot a variable directly into a sentence instead of building the sentence by joining separate strings.
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Pinterest is organized daydreaming
Pinterest lets people organize visual plans for weddings they aren't having or houses they don't own—a highly organized form of daydreaming.
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Death Stranding turns bodily fluids into weapons
The arsenal includes grenades made from the hero’s sweat, blood, and excrement.
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Giant sloths dug cave systems beneath South America
Some fossil burrows in South America are tunnels big enough to walk into, with deep grooves scratched into their walls. Those marks point to powerful claws,…
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Zelda and Rainbow Six's Ash share a voice
Patricia Summersett voices Princess Zelda in Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, and Ash in Rainbow Six Siege. The same performer moves between royal…
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Elephant ancestors evolved bizarre elongated snouts before developing useful trunks
Palaeomastodon fossils show an elongated snout that may hint at an early step toward the elephant trunk. But fossils preserve bone, not the soft tissue that…
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A hill's steepness can feel different when you are exhausted
Experiments by Dennis Proffitt and colleagues linked reported slope estimates with fatigue and physical condition. The interpretation has been debated,…
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Walking completely on hands was a historical challenge
A hand-walker has to balance a whole body over a tiny base, then move that base one palm at a time. The shoulders do the lifting and the wrists handle the…
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Why hotel staff are called bellhops
The “bell” in bellhop was once literal: hotel guests rang brass bells, and staff were expected to hop to it. The bells faded from everyday hotel life, but the…
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