Mental Floss

BIG QUESTIONS

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A friend of mine recently got pinkeye. Whenever she put in her eye drops, she noticed a distinct and very unpleasant taste on the back of her tongue.

Matt Soniak
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Who put the bomp in the bomp bah bomp bah bomp? Who put the -stan in Afghanistan? I don’t know about the former, but we can thank the Proto-Indo-Europeans for the latter.

Matt Soniak
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Readers Meg, Wayne, and Rajiv all wrote in to ask about the tune that clock chimes typically play. What’s it called? Where did it come from? How’d it get so popular? Here’s the story.http://youtu.be/2mfBkd7MAdMIn 1793, a new clock was installed at St Mary

Matt Soniak


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Reader Jen wrote in to ask, “Why do old injuries ache during crummy ache during crummy weather?" The idea that certain aches and pains correspond with, and can even predict, the weather is widespread, and has been around since at least the days of ancient

Matt Soniak


Everyone wants dibs (such as “I’ve got dibs on that last piece of pizza!”) but do we know what they are or why we call them? Chances are you first started calling dibs back when you were a kid on the playground. Coincidentally, the playground is exactly

Kara Kovalchik


They don’t, technically. It’s actually their larvae, or caterpillars, that eat clothes, not the adult moths.It’s only a relatively small group of moths, the family Tineidae, that have any interest in your clothing. Throughout much of the US, you’ll only f

Matt Soniak


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While they might be bright red when they hit your dinner plate, crabs and lobsters are usually brown, olive-green or gray when alive and in the wild (at least in the mid-Atlantic U.S.; crustaceans farther south come in a variety of vibrant colors).

Matt Soniak

There are probably blackout periods you can’t remember at all from your childhood, and the memories you do have are likely hazy and garbled. Although pretty much everyone experiences this phenomenon known as childhood amnesia, its causes are still somewha

Julia Davis
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The heart is the most important muscle in the body, so it seems like something of a marketing ploy by the folks at Bayer to suggest that something so simple as a humble aspirin tablet can be of any use when this life-sustaining organ goes into epic fail m

Kara Kovalchik

At some point in the last few thousand years, someone in India or Southeast Asia decided to try catching one of the wild fowl than ran through the jungles and roosted up in the trees. We don’t know exactly what that person was intending, but the bird prob

Matt Soniak


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As more and more Americans embrace email and other communication technologies, the U.S. Postal Service has absorbed the hit. The agency lost an estimated $10 billion in 2011 and expects to top that this year, leaving many analysts to wonder how long it ca

Ethan Trex


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Throwing rice at a newly married couple has been a tradition for thousands of years, possibly going back as far as the ancient Assyrians and Egyptians. Are birds suffering from our holy matrimonies?

Matt Soniak


Stockbyte/John FoxxBefore Curiosity landed on Mars, the main topic of discussion among amateur astronomers was the blue Moon that is scheduled to make an appearance on August 31. The widely accepted definition of a blue Moon is a full Moon that appears tw

Kara Kovalchik


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Eye floaters—or 'muscae volitantes,' Latin for 'hovering flies'—are those tiny, oddly shaped objects that sometimes appear in your vision, most often when you’re looking at the sky on a sunny day.

Matt Soniak
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The pyramid was supposed to serve as a lightning rod, and since Frishmuth had already done some plating work for the monument, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers called on him to fashion the topper as well.

Matt Soniak


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Birds’ digestive systems and naughty bits don’t work exactly like ours or most other animals'. Instead of pooping and peeing separately, they basically do it all in one weird mess.

Matt Soniak


“A combination of grassy notes with a tang of acids and a hint of vanilla over an underlying mustiness” is how an international team of chemists describes the unique odor of old books in a study. Poetic, sure, but what causes it?Books are made up almost e

Matt Soniak


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Don't say, "I don't know." Since making its debut on 'You Can't Do That on Television,' Nickelodeon’s green slime has become an icon of pop culture.

Matt Soniak


When a run-of-the-mill watermelon and a souped-up frankenmelon love each other very much, they come together and make a baby seedless wundermelon.Seedless watermelons are a lot like mules – sterile hybrids formed by crossing genetically incompatible paren

Julia Davis
Bob Ross Inc.

Bob Ross said he made over 30,000 paintings in his lifetime. If he didn’t sell them, where did his army of happy clouds go? We’ll let Bob explain:“One of the questions that I hear over and over and over is, ‘What do we do with all these paintings we do o

Lucas Reilly
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More than any other bodily injury, getting hit in the testicles is probably what every man dreads most. Of all the soft, fleshy spots on the human body, none register the same kind of incapacitating, end-of-the-world pain as the family jewels.

Matt Soniak