Mental Floss
Mental Floss

BIG QUESTIONS

Getty Images

Happy Washington's Birthday! Oh, did you think we were celebrating Presidents' Day? In fact, the federal holiday on the third Monday in February is officially known as Washington's Day to celebrate the birthday of the first president.

Jason Plautz
ThinkStock

Snails are objects of fascination for kids playing outside. Lucky for the snails, they have their hard shells to protect them from children and predators alike. But are they born with that natural armor, or do they have to find it or grow it for themselve

Kaitlyn Boettcher
ThinkStock

Falling in love is one of the best feelings in the world. The tools available to biologists have advanced immensely in the last few decades, and they're using that technology to decipher the physiology involved in falling in love.

Andrew Koltonow
ThinkStock

fastidious self-care is reflected in human routines—brushing teeth, combing hair, clipping nails—but also in the habits of scuttling, scream-inducing cockroaches. There’s a certain irony in the hygienic customs of insects whose presence often connotes fil

Roma Panganiban
Wikimedia Commons

Combine Diet Coke and Mentos, and the result is explosive—Diet Coke shoots out of the bottle like a miniature, sticky Old Faithful. The reaction is so intense, you can make a rocket propelled by the resulting geyser. But what's the science behind this rea

Daven Hiskey
Thinkstock

High heels, though a staple of nearly every woman’s closet these days, aren’t exactly the most reasonably designed footwear. We wobble and slip and turn our ankles on every uneven stone, but refuse to trade them in for more sensible flats and sneakers. Wh

Caisey Robertson
Thinkstock

For humans, sudden gyrations of the head and neck—whether they’re from car accidents, rollercoaster rides, or chiropracty gone awry—can tear blood vessel linings in the neck, leading to clots that can cause stroke. Not so in owls, which can quickly rotate

Erin McCarthy
ThinkStock

Last month, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers announced that if water in Lake Michigan drops below the level of the Chicago River, the River could reverse course and begin flowing backward to its source. Has an American river ever done an about-face like t

Matt Soniak
Getty Images

Head shrinking is rumored to have occurred all over the world, but documented only among a few indigenous South American tribes living in Peru and Ecuador. How do you take a flesh-and-bone head and shrink it?

Matt Soniak
iStock/AndreyPopov

Quack, in the sense of a medical impostor, is a shortening of the old Dutch quacksalver (spelled kwakzalver in the modern Dutch), which originally meant a person who cures with home remedies, and then came to mean one using false cures or knowledge.

Matt Soniak
iStock/Callipso

From your car, to your lawn mower, to your snow blower, to your chainsaw—the power of almost every engine you deal with is measured in terms of horsepower. None of these things seemingly have anything to do with horses, so where did that measurement come

Matt Soniak
iStock/shayes17

Humans have observed marine mammals stranding themselves on land since at least the first century CE, when the ancient Romans and Greeks recorded beaching incidents. Modern marine biologists are only able to determine the cause of a beaching about 50 perc

Matt Soniak

The smoke alarms in my apartment building are both ridiculously sensitive and ridiculously loud. They regularly go off even when there’s no smoke, and I often have to scramble up on top of a chair to reset them because a pot of boiling water is producing

Matt Soniak
Getty Images

First off, popcorn isn’t just any old corn. It’s a cultivated strain of flint corn known as zea mays everta. Its kernel is also a whole grain—it consists of the bran (the hull or outer covering), the germ (the “embryo” that germinates into a plant), and t

Matt Soniak
PREVNEXT