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
The word “mancation” was once trademarked
A group of guys hanging out together is apparently intellectual property. In 2006, a film studio officially trademarked the word to describe an all-male…
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Industrial formaldehyde permanently crosslinks delicate tissue proteins
There is a very specific biological reason dead biological specimens are aggressively stored in jars of clear liquid. Formaldehyde molecules act like…
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Why Ripe Cranberries Bounce
If you want to know if a cranberry is perfectly ripe, just aggressively throw it at the floor. Because they are filled with small pockets of air, fresh and…
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Durak literally translates to the fool in Russian
Unlike Western card conventions where you strive for a single winner, Durak is played solely to determine a single loser. The last person holding cards is…
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Goku only killed two major Dragon Ball Z villains
Despite spending 40 years screaming, powering up, and hitting people hard enough to shatter planets, Goku is surprisingly non-lethal. In the entire canon run…
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Squash began as a prison pastime
Elite prep school kids might dominate the courts today, but squash started in the 1800s at Fleet Prison. Inmates with too much time and limited space started…
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Colloidal silver can turn your skin blue
If you ever genuinely wanted to look like a literal Smurf, aggressively consuming massive amounts of heavy metals is certainly one way to accomplish it.…
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F. Scott Fitzgerald was terrible at spelling
You can craft the Great American Novel and still fail a second-grade spelling test. Fitzgerald’s manuscripts were legendary for being littered with horrific…
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Hops are incredibly vulnerable to powdery mildew
Your craft beer is constantly under threat from a sneeze. The hops plant is notoriously sensitive to agricultural diseases, especially mildews that coat the…
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Why Hunan banned Alice in Wonderland
Because God forbid a caterpillar gives a child bad ideas about social mobility. In 1931, the governor of Hunan province in China banned Lewis Carroll's…
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Why green potatoes can make you sick
Don't ignore the green spots on your old potatoes. When exposed to sunlight, potatoes produce chlorophyll, which is harmless, but it also triggers the…
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Apports are random objects dropped by invisible hands
Sitting in your living room when a random vintage coin suddenly falls from the ceiling is deeply confusing. These sudden materializations of physical objects…
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Gabriel Garcia Marquez pawned appliances to mail his novel
True suffering for your art means literally freezing. Marquez and his wife were so broke when he finished 'One Hundred Years of Solitude' that they couldn't…
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Phantom footsteps always echo on the top floor stairs
Hearing heavy boots stomping around in your empty attic is the universe’s best way of telling you to move. These auditory disturbances never bother to walk…
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Travel influencers frequently photoshop themselves
The pressure to appear constantly adventurous is so high that online personalities routinely edit themselves into picturesque settings. Entire software tools…
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Crisis apparitions visit you to say one final goodbye
Having a friend suddenly appear at the foot of your bed just to look sad is generally a terrible indicator for their mortal well-being. These projections…
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The surprising reason gap years became popular
Taking a twelve-month hiatus to 'find yourself' overseas was originally just a clever British scheme to keep young adults out of the workforce for an extra…
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The hourglass that takes a full year to empty
Located in Nima, the world's largest hourglass is over five meters tall and filled with impossibly fine sand. It is meticulously designed to take precisely…
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A bottle of tequila starts with a seven-year-old plant
Margaritas require extreme botanical sacrifice. A blue agave plant takes seven long years to swell with enough starches to make alcohol. Once perfectly ripe,…
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Why surveyors made Everest two feet taller
When early surveyors calculated the peak's height to be exactly 29,000 feet, they realized no one would believe such a suspiciously round number. So, they…
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The murder mystery that has run since 1952
Agatha Christie's murder mystery opened in London's West End in 1952 and basically just never stopped. Other than a brief pause during the pandemic, the play…
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Sailor Moon’s creator married another manga legend
It's essentially the ultimate power couple of the manga industry. Naoko Takeuchi, the brilliant mind behind Sailor Moon, is married to Yoshihiro Togashi, the…
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This 1939 novel avoids the letter E
Proving that some writers just love torturing themselves for no financial gain, Wright authored 'Gadsby' in 1939. It is a 50,000-word lipogram, meaning he…
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Les Misérables contains an 823-word sentence
Because editors back in the 19th century were apparently too terrified to suggest a period. Victor Hugo famously penned a massive 823-word sentence in his…
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