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
North Pole, Alaska celebrates Christmas all year
The town leans into its name with candy-cane-shaped streetlights and businesses that keep Christmas decor up all year.
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Garry's Mod became a hit without giving you a mission
It hands you physics tools, props, and characters, then lets you decide what the game is. Build a machine, stage a scene, or strap something absurd to a…
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Basic ASCII formatting supports exactly 128 characters
Its 7-bit code has 128 character slots, too few to cover accented letters and the full range of characters in other languages.
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Mystical passivity strips you of all control
In this account of mystical experience, the person feels their will give way to a force beyond their control, as though watching reality dissolve from the…
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Noumenon represents reality you cannot access
The idea is that a thing-in-itself exists independently of human perception, so our senses can reveal its appearance but never its ultimate nature.
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Someone made a PDF that plays Doom
The DoomPDF project runs the 1993 game using JavaScript supported by Chromium's PDF viewer. Document form fields become the display and controls, stretching…
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Gibsonton made room for lives on the carnival circuit
Florida's Gibsonton became an off-season base for carnival workers, drawn by its climate and an existing show-business community. Residential business zoning…
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Dharma dictates the fundamental order of reality
Dharma is the right way of living in alignment with the order believed to hold the universe together; straying from it is thought to create disorder.
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Publishers aggressively time diet book releases for January
Publishers time diet-book releases for the first week of January, when post-holiday guilt can send readers looking for quick fixes like cleanses and diet…
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Watching thirty minutes of unskippable credits for nothing
Some players sit through the roughly 30-minute scroll in case it hides a post-credits scene, only to land back at the main menu.
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A font file can run computer code
TrueType fonts contain a bytecode instruction set that controls how letters are rendered on screen, so font files can execute small programs.
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Why your voice sounds rough in the morning
When you lie flat, fluid can collect in tissues around your throat, including the area that shapes your voice. That mild swelling can make the sound rougher…
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Pantheism equates existence with the absolute
Pantheism treats reality itself as the absolute, rather than placing an ultimate source outside the world. That makes everything—from mountains to traffic…
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A graphic novel is still a comic
The term “graphic novel” helped make longer comics seem more appealing to adult readers. Structurally, they’re still comics.
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When game cases came with tiny illustrated books
Game cases once came with illustrated booklets full of character backstories, control layouts, and artwork. Today, some contain only a slip with a digital code.
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Self published writers buy expensive barcodes to operate
A private agency is the sole U.S. source for ISBNs, which independent authors can buy to help retailers list and distribute their books. The numbers can be…
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PowerPoint has been made to execute a computer program
Tom Wildenhain demonstrated a Turing machine built inside PowerPoint, and the later PPSuite project explored running compiled code in slides. Carefully…
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Why Oregon's Idiotville disappeared
Residents of the isolated camp said only an idiot would work there, giving it the name Idiotville. The camp was eventually abandoned.
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Silicones serve as both industrial lubricants and implants
A silicone lubricant and a flexible silicone implant can start with the same kind of silicon-and-oxygen chain. Leave the chains free to move and the material…
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Visual novels barely qualify as interactive media
Visual novels rely mostly on reading text alongside static character portraits, with occasional choices that can determine which illustrated character you…
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Maya suggests reality is merely a projection
Maya is the idea that the material world is an illusion obscuring absolute truth—a much older concept than modern simulation theory.
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Price discrimination charges more because you will pay it
The movie is the same; the audience changes. A theater may charge less in the afternoon, when customers are more price-sensitive, and more at night, when more…
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Hitman's homing briefcase started as a bug
In Hitman, a thrown briefcase could lock onto a target’s head and follow it around corners. Developers kept the bug and made the slow-moving, heat-seeking…
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Why your peripheral vision spots motion first
Your peripheral vision is better at catching movement than fine detail. So you might notice a glass wobbling toward the edge of a table before you can make…
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