Mental Floss

BIG QUESTIONS

iStock / Creativeye99

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
Getty Images

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


Getty Images

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


iStock / santypan

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
stock_colors/E+ via Getty Images

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
iStock / jkbowers

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




iStock / charnsitr

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


Kevin Winter / Getty Images

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


pkripper503/iStock via Getty Images

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




Image credit: Daniel R. Tobias/Wikimedia CommonsI was working at Tower Records back in the late 1980s, when the compact disc started replacing the vinyl LP. Beyond the arguments over the analog vs. digital sound (which continue to this day) and the higher

Bill DeMain


It is now a deadly weapon in Mario Kart and a slapstick comedy staple, but how did the banana peel gets its reputation as such a threatening object?A Danger to SocietyBefore the discovery of its comedic potential, the banana skin was considered a real pub

Laura Turner Garrison
Getty Images

In south London, at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, it’s possible to walk up to a metal strip running along the ground in a courtyard and, stepping over it with one foot, straddle the world. Suddenly, one half of your body is in the Western Hemisphere a

Matt Soniak

Image credit: StockbyteWhen a bug flies into a spider web, the game is over. It’s almost instantly stuck, and a sitting duck for the web’s owner. When you or I walk into a web, we’re a little better off than the bug because we won’t be dinner, but the sti

Matt Soniak
istock.com/setsukon

Picture an atom. Now picture that atom getting excited. Maybe its birthday is coming up. Anyway, when an atom or a molecule gets excited, its electrons' energy levels go up. When the electrons fall back down to their normal state, they release energy in t

Matt Soniak