Mental Floss

BIG QUESTIONS

You hear the term all the time, but is there really anything special about grand juries? Not on the surface. Like a regular trial jury, a grand jury is selected and sworn in by a court, and are often, in fact, pulled from the same pool of people as trial

Matt Soniak
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So I'm up in Seattle this week, staying at a hotel some blocks from the original Starbucks (which, it turns out, isn't REALLY the original, but rather the second location, which was situated better for marketing purposes, but who's counting).

David K. Israel








Three Lions/Hulton Archive

Various people had their hands on it, but the credit for the bulk of the pledge goes to Francis Julius Bellamy, a Baptist minister from New York.

Matt Soniak

Stephanie and her curious two-year-old want to know why we sometimes say “Holy Mackerel!” Unfortunately, the answer is about as clear as the tomato sauce Brits like to douse the fish

Stacy Conradt
Getty Images

The circling thing is a relic of domestic dogs' wild past, a bit of hard-wired behavior that hasn't been bred out yet. Biologists and dog experts say that it might just be a strange quirk for domestic pooches, but for wild dogs and wolves, circling before

Matt Soniak


Consider the following ingredient lists:McDonald's Fancy Ketchup: Tomato concentrate from red ripe tomatoes, distilled vinegar, high fructose corn syrup, corn syrup, water, salt, natural flavors (vegetable source).Heinz: Tomato concentrate from red ripe t

Matt Soniak






The alphabet, as best as historians can tell, got its start in ancient Egypt sometime in the Middle Bronze Age, but not with the Egyptians. They were, at the time, writing with a set of hieroglyphs that were used both as representations of the consonants

Matt Soniak

We don't want to spoil anything from this season of Breaking Bad for those who haven't seen it. But for the floss readers curious about lily of the valley, a plant that played a part in Sunday's season finale, we're happy to talk botany. Read on at your o

Matt Soniak
iStock/YelenaYemchuk

Hot sauces, curries, wasabi peas and other spicy treats turn you into a snot faucet. Why is that? Capsaicin is the chemical found concentrated in the placental tissue of chile peppers and allyl isothiocyanate is an oil contained in plants like mustard and

Matt Soniak
fongleon356/iStock via Getty Images

Dog turds are stealth weapons. People with 20/20 vision often fail to notice them until they appear hours later, on the bottom of a shoe. How the heck is someone who can’t see supposed to track down and eliminate these sidewalk scourges, then?

Matt Soniak


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It’s hard to make that first trip to the college bookstore for required texts without leaving with a bit of sticker shock. Why are textbooks so astonishingly expensive? Let’s take a look.

Ethan Trex




iStock/Zffoto

Around the world, moths make kamikaze dives into light bulbs and open flames with such regularity that they have their own idiom. What is it about lights that make moths so crazy?

Matt Soniak


memoriesarecaptured/istock via getty images

Buying fruit juice at the supermarket is a surprisingly complicated task that leads to myriad questions. What’s really in that “100% juice”? Why does that “juice” have the word “cocktail” loitering behind it? Let’s take a look at the exciting world of jui

Ethan Trex
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You ever wake up and have lots of crust in the inner corner of your eye? What is this stuff, and where does it come from?

Matt Soniak
iStock/tweetyclaw

The rims on U.S. dimes, quarters, half dollars and some dollar coins are called reeded edges. They’ve been on American currency almost since day one as a way of keeping people honest.

Matt Soniak