Mono S

12/01/2022

Actually, you can chill any canned drink from room temperature with just water, ice, and salt. Pour some water in a medium-sized bowl and add as much ice as you can—two full trays, if possible. Add two spoonfuls of salt and stir well. Nestle the canned beverage down into the mixture and let sit for two minutes, stirring gently about halfway through. Of course, you could always just pour the drink over ice, but this method prevents a watered-down beverage.

12/01/2022

Native to Mesoamerica, chocolate—or the cacao bean from which it comes—wasn't discovered by Europeans until the late 1500s. Explorer Francisco Hernandez observed the Aztecs using cacao as, among other things, a medicine. When chocolate came to Western Europe soon after, the Church was suspicious of its stimulating properties, but since it could be used for medical applications, it was deemed acceptable. European doctors prescribed it for everything from fevers to indigestion to melancholy.

12/01/2022

Those short previews of coming attractions have been around since 1913, but they used to play after the feature film, hence the name "trailer." However, it was obviously harder to make the audience hang around after the movie had ended, so they were shifted to the beginning, but the name stuck. Incidentally, that deep male voice you probably think of when you think of movie trailers belonged to Don LaFontaine, who voiced more than 5,000 movie trailers before his death in 2008.

12/01/2022

Although the very first refrigerators were manufactured by General Electric in 1911, the coolants they used to keep the insides frosty were very toxic. In fact, leaking refrigerator coolant killed a sleeping family in Berlin in the 1920s. None other than Albert Einstein read about this tragedy in the paper and set about devising a solution. Together with his former student Leo Szilard, he created a refrigerator design with no moving parts, so there were no seals with the potential to leak. Though their design was abandoned in the 1950s for newer technological developments, Stanford scientists are revisiting it today as a way to bring refrigeration to areas without electricity.

12/01/2022

"Busy as a bee" is a saying for a reason—colonies of bees work tirelessly to convert nectar into honey to eat when the flowers aren't blooming. However, each bee certainly can't do it alone. An individual bee will only make about one-twelfth of a teaspoon of honey in its entire lifetime. Luckily, a single colony usually contains between 20,000 and 60,000 bees and honey is a very high-energy food. It contains natural preservatives, meaning that honey is one of the very few foods that, if stored properly, will never go bad.

12/01/2022

Botanists provide us with a very specific definition of a berry. It must have three layers: a protective outer layer, a fleshy middle, and an inner part which holds the seeds. It must also have two or more seeds and come from a flower with only one o***y. By this definition, blueberries and cranberries are berries, but strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, and cherries aren't. Things that are berries? Bananas, kiwis, watermelons, peppers, tomatoes, and even eggplants. But don't stress about it—the scientific classification came after the coining of words like "strawberry." Plus, nobody wants eggplant on top of their pancakes!

12/01/2022

Nowadays, people use FaceTime and Skype to see and chat with friends all over the world. However, we**am technology originated with a slightly less ambitious goal. In 1993, researchers at the computer science department at the University of Cambridge just hated getting up from their chairs to check the coffee pot only to find that it was empty. They wired up a system that would stream images—three per minute—from the Trojan Room where the pot was kept to the internal computer network. By the end of the year, the stream made it onto the new World Wide Web and the Trojan Room coffee pot briefly attained international fame.

12/01/2022

Mike Nesmith of The Monkees, a pop quartet on television in the late 1960s and one of the original "boy bands," was the son of an unsung inventor. While Betty Nesmith was working as an executive secretary at a bank in 1951, she began using white tempera paint to cover up typing mistakes. After perfecting the formula and naming it "Liquid Paper," she offered to sell her invention to IBM, but they passed, so she began marketing it herself. It wasn't until the mid-'60s that she started making substantial money from it; then, when she sold the rights to the Gilette Corporation in 1979, she received a $47.5 million paycheck, plus royalties on future sales.

12/01/2022

Next time you're looking at a cheap, mass-produced ballpoint pen—the Bic Cristal, in particular, with its clear barrel and cap the color of the ink inside—take a closer look at the top of the cap. There's a hole. While some conspiracy theorists thought Bic did this on purpose to dry out the ink so you'd have to buy more pens, the truth is much more thoughtful. In case a small child should happen to swallow the small, brightly-colored cap, the hole ensures that the cap doesn't block off the airway completely, preventing choking.

12/01/2022

Though you may have heard the myth that dogs don't see colors, the truth is that they do, but in a more limited spectrum than humans. They can see yellows, blues, and violets very well, but have a harder time distinguishing reds, oranges, and greens. However, decreased vision of color allows dogs to have more of the receptors that let them see well in low light and track movement. If you're thinking of redecorating your dog house, stick to blue and purple

17/12/2021

Your dog can smell your feelings. In fact, your dog’s sense of smell is approximately 100,000 times better than yours. So it shouldn’t be shocking that they can in fact, smell things such as fear. When a human is fearful, they perspire, and a dog is easily able to pick up on this change.

29/11/2021

29/11/2021

29/11/2021

29/11/2021