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14/09/2022

According to a study conducted by researchers at the Osservatorio Astronomico di Padova and published in Nature Astronomy in 2021, a quarter of sun-like stars have a habit of swallowing up the planets around them. However, it's not likely that Earth will have to deal with this issue as the study focused on systems that have binary pairs of stars instead of a single one like our own

14/09/2022

These days, the Olympic Games are where top athletes from all over the world come together to compete. However, between 1912 and 1948, the international event also handed out medals for creative practices, such as painting, sculpture, architecture, literature, and music. This tradition ended, though, when it was decided that the artists' professional pursuits conflicted with the nature of the competition

14/09/2022

Cleopatra was an incredibly powerful ruler who could indulge in the kind of luxuries others could never even imagine. For example, when she was vacation on Sedir Island in Turkey, she wasn't satisfied with the beaches. So her lover Mark Antony had the white sand that she preferred brought all the way from Egypt so that she could enjoy it on foreign shores. Sedir is now known as Cleopatra's Island for this reason

14/09/2022

Geocaching is an international game that involves players deciphering clues and going on stash-seeking adventures, using GPS and a geocaching app—kind of like a digital/analog combination scavenger hunt. As of 2008, there's even a geocache target to be found on the International Space Station.

14/09/2022

The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign horticulture educator Martha Smith notes in a 2011 article that, back in the 1620s, "tulips were worth more than gold." Why were these particular plants so pricey? "Initially the tulip was a rarity only the very wealthy could afford," she further explains. Indeed, at the time, a single "Rembrandt-type bulb reached the equivalent of $1,500," which "was 10 times the annual income of a skilled craftsman or the price of a large house

14/09/2022

When you fall asleep at night, do you prefer to be in a fetal position, flat on your back, or sprawled out on your stomach? There may be more to how you sleep than just what makes you comfortable. According to The Telegraph (via Dreams.co.uk), sleep experts have found a correlation between a person's preferred nightly position and their personality. For instance, director of the Sleep Assessment and Advisory Service Chris Idzikowski explained that people who opt for the fetal position "may appear tough but are actually sensitive souls right to their core

14/09/2022

There are a lot of things happening in our bodies that we have no control over. For instance, most of us can't control the size of our pupils unless we do something like alter the amount of light that is directed into our eyes. However, in a study published in the International Journal of Psychophysiology in 2021, researchers observed a man who can apparently change the size of his pupil on command. Currently, he is the only individual known to be able to do this—although you could give it a try if you want

14/09/2022

You remember from grade school that all humans are made up mostly from water, but never more so than right after we're born. Newborn babies are 78 percent water, according to NASA, while adults drop down to around 55 percent to 60 percent

14/09/2022

It's likely horses you picture bounding across a landscape, not something scaly and low to the ground. However, a study published in Nature in 2019 noted that crocodiles have the "full range of quadrupedal footfall patterns used by mammals," meaning that they have the ability to gallop like a horse—and occasionally do!

14/09/2022

The key ceremony is a (perhaps now not-so-very) secretive meeting of some powerful people who have a staggering amount of control over the internet. As reported by The Guardian, these seven keyholders are handpicked security experts who meet quarterly and whose individual digital keys "create a master key, which in turn controls one of the central security measures at the core of the web.

12/09/2022