Does Drinking Alcohol Really Keep You Warm When It's Cold Out?
Alcohol is a vasodilator. When you have a drink, the volume of blood brought to the skin’s surface increases, making you feel warm.
Alcohol is a vasodilator. When you have a drink, the volume of blood brought to the skin’s surface increases, making you feel warm.
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
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Here are some eye-popping holiday beverages you can whip up.
Nobel Prize winners and MacArthur "Genius" Fellows alike have held forth on the metaphysical, philosophical, semiotic, sociological, literary, and historical implications of latkeness vs. hamentashness.
In my house, we really like Mexican food. And Thai food. Oh, and Chinese food. We like all food, I guess, but that’s sort of beside the point.
FlickrIf you spill coffee anywhere near as often as I do, you may have noticed something peculiar: When a puddle of coffee is allowed to dry undisturbed, the brown sediment collects almost entirely on the edge of the spill rather than being spread out eve
Wikimedia Commons"Happy as a clam" is one of those expressions that makes you wonder: Does this phrase come from an actual measurement of the happiness of
A mental_floss staffer who shall remain nameless asks, “Why is cranberry juice good for treating UTIs? I will not tell you why this question had been on my mind.”Bacterial infections in the urinary tract and its organs are pretty common, especially in adu
One of the great things about Halloween is that you get the chance to eat foods that you would never consider eating otherwise, like flayed skin cheese balls, Frankenstein finger cookies, stuffed cockroaches and brain cocktails. Once you’ve had your fill
If you’re like most people, you simply can’t pass up the opportunity to partake in a piece of chocolate (or five).
Snake oil salesmen all over the web would have you believe that, for a few easy payments, they'll reveal to you a diet focused on “negative calorie” foods.
When I was a kid, my parents often tried to sell me on the idea that carrots were good for my eyes—and if I wanted to avoid vision correction in the future, I would eat them now. But after I was fitted for my first pair of glasses in fourth grade, they dr
Before a ship slides from its berth into the water, it must first get hit on—by a bottle of booze, usually champagne. Here’s the lowdown on the history and physics of smashing some bubbly and launching a ship
You lie down to get some sleep after a long night of drinking, and the room seems to be spinning uncontrollably. Why does this happen?
If you ever find yourself in a Brewster’s Millions situation and have to burn through a fortune in a hurry, then all you need are this article, a few plane tickets and an empty stomach. (It never hurts to plan for the unexpected.)
Last month we brought you cakes inspired by famous painters, so this time around, let's look at cakes based on a more contemporary art style: comic books. 1. Spider-Man
The Texas State Fair—the largest state fair in the country—holds a yearly competition for the most innovative deep-fried foods. Here are 25 fried Frankenfoods from fairs past.
Tomatoes contain two pigments for photosynthesis—chlorophyll, which is green, and lycopene, which is red. When tomatoes start to grow, they contain much less lycopene than chlorophyll, which gives them their green color. But when harvest season arrives, t
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).
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
With record-breaking temperatures sprouting up everywhere this summer, there’s no better time to cool off with a nice refreshing milkshake. Of course, while some people are content with strawberry, chocolate or vanilla, others want more variety. Here are
We’ve featured cakes based on video games before, but for those who prefer to play their games in the real world against non-virtual friends, here are 11 great tribute desserts. 1. Dungeons &
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?