Searchable. Filterable. All regrettably stuck in your brain now.
When you skip sleep, astrocyte cells start destroying healthy synapses—a process called 'phagocytosis.' Your brain literally cannibalizes itself to stay awake. Maybe take that nap.
The U.S. Mint loses roughly $85 million annually producing pennies. Each one-cent coin costs 2.7 cents to manufacture. Congress knows. They keep making them anyway. Lobbying from the zinc industry might have something to do with it. Your pocket change is a monument to bureaucratic inertia.
Osteoclasts dissolve old bone while osteoblasts build new bone continuously. By your 30s, you've had three complete skeletons. The you of ten years ago is structurally gone. Identity is temporary scaffolding.
Venus rotates so slowly that one Venusian day takes 243 Earth days, but it orbits the Sun in just 225 Earth days. Also, it spins the opposite direction of most planets. Venus does what it wants.
Lego bricks DO withstand compression better than concrete! An ordinary plastic LEGO brick is able to support the weight of 375,000 other bricks before it fails. This, theoretically, would let you build a tower nearing 3.5km in height. Now what would you do with giant lego bricks?
Build a house? →The same company that makes aspirin once sold heroin to children for coughs. 'Heroin' was their trademark, derived from 'heroisch' (heroic) for how it made patients feel. The marketing aged poorly.
Lobsters detect food by walking on it. Their legs and feet are covered in chemosensory hairs that identify what's edible. They're essentially tasting the ocean floor with every step. Dinner and a commute, combined.
Petrichor is caused by geosmin, a compound released by soil bacteria when rain hits dry ground. The word combines Greek 'petra' (stone) and 'ichor' (the fluid of gods). Your nose detects divine geology.
Fredric Baur designed the iconic Pringles can in 1966 and requested his ashes be buried in one. His children honored this in 2008, stopping at Walgreens on the way to the funeral. Brand loyalty, eternal.
Before becoming a beverage, coffee was eaten as food. East African tribes ground coffee berries and mixed them with animal fat to consume for energy.
More coffee knowledge on Nescafe.com →In 2007, tardigrades were sent into orbit and exposed to the vacuum and radiation of space for 10 days. Most survived. Some even reproduced afterward. They don't care about your extinction concerns.
Einstein's relativity isn't theoretical—it's in your pocket. GPS satellites experience less gravity and move fast, causing their atomic clocks to tick 38 microseconds faster daily. Without corrections, your location would drift 10km per day. Physics is inconvenient.
There are roughly 3.3 million saunas in Finland—that's one for every 1.6 people. Parliament has one. The Burger King in Helsinki has one. Some people are born in them. Priorities seem clear.
Those elegant bubbles rising in your glass? They nucleate on tiny imperfections and debris in the glass. Perfectly clean glass produces almost no bubbles. Your celebration is powered by impurity. Happy New Year.
Despite it being called a ‘bean’, coffee is actually a fruit. The ‘beans’ grow on a bush and are found in the centre of a berry, known as a coffee cherry.
More coffee knowledge on Nescafe.com →