Every autumn, many deciduous trees perform what looks like an act of botanical self-sabotage: They discard the very leaves they spent all spring growing. This happens year in and year out like clockwork, so much so that English speakers would refer to autumn as “the fall of the leaf,” which eventually was shortened to simply […]
When a product you ordered online finally arrives, it might come in a box with Styrofoam peanuts, crinkle-cut paper, or plastic air pillows to protect the items and keep them from jostling too much during transport. But another material that often comes with packages, silica gel packs, serve a different purpose. These little packets come […]
A bad headache can make you really grateful you live in the age of modern medicine. You swallow a pill no bigger than your fingernail, and soon the throbbing begins to fade — thank you, science. But imagine learning that the pill contained no pain reliever at all: You’d been given a placebo, a treatment […]
Gritty police procedurals would have you believe lie detector tests take place in dark rooms where a guilty perp breaks only after the clever detective asks the right “gotcha” question, sending the machine’s needles skittering across the page. In reality, that machine isn’t called a lie detector — it’s called a polygraph, and that’s because […]
Your belly button is basically a souvenir from before you were born — and it comes in two main styles: innie and outie. An innie navel is a recessed dip in the middle of the abdomen. Conversely, an outie sticks out from the same spot and is far less common. Only about 10% of people […]
Pull into any gas station today and you’ll likely see the word “unleaded” all over price signs and pumps. Is that adjective really necessary, though? It’s not like you’re going to use the rival station across the street because you were actually looking to put “leaded” gas in your tank. As a matter of fact, […]
Sleeping isn’t usually considered a productive activity. You’re lying still, your eyes are closed, and (hopefully) you’re blissfully unaware of the world around you. It can feel as though you’re simply pressing pause until morning. But beneath the covers, your body is anything but idle. As darkness falls, your internal clock flips a remarkable series […]
Astronomer Carl Sagan once said, “The cosmos is also within us. We’re made of star stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.” It’s a beautiful idea connecting humanity and the universe across time, but is it scientifically true, or just poetry? It’s poetic and it’s true. Nearly everything in your body […]
Whether it’s the sharp sting of a papercut or a deeper slice from a knife slip while chopping veggies, you’ve undoubtedly had a few cuts in your lifetime. But unless a wound is serious enough to require stitches or a trip to the doctor, we rarely stop to consider how a cut goes from bleeding […]
If The Three Little Pigs taught us anything, it’s that in construction, materials and methods matter if you don’t want your house to collapse under a strong wind. But shapes do, too, which is why certain ones are frequently used when building buildings, bridges, tunnels, and other structures. Some shapes are ideal for distributing weight […]
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