When Marsh Supermarket cashier Sharon Buchanan rang up a 10-pack of Juicy Fruit on June 26, 1974, and heard a telltale beep, her face must have registered relief. Buchanan’s co-workers at the grocery store in Troy, Ohio, had placed barcodes on hundreds of items the night before, as the National Cash Register Company installed the shop’s new computers and scanners. Buchanan’s “customer” for that first purchase was Clyde Dawson, the head of research and development at Marsh Supermarkets, Inc. For that fateful checkout, Dawson chose the gum, made by the Wrigley Company, because some had wondered if the machine would have trouble reading the item’s very small barcode. It didn’t. Today, one of Marsh’s earliest scanners is part of the Smithsonian Museum of American History.

Retired New York Yankees center fielder Bernie Williams helped set a gum-related world record.

fact

FIB

Ready to reveal?

Confirm your email to play the next question?

sign up!

Please enter valid email.

Sign up

Oops, incorrect!

It's a fact

To raise awareness for idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, Williams hosted the largest meetup of people blowing a chewing gum bubble simultaneously. All 881 participants held their bubbles for at least 30 seconds. The 2018 event took place at a Minor League Baseball park in New Jersey.

The origins of the barcode, meanwhile, date back to January 1949. That’s when a young mechanical engineer, N. Joseph Woodland, came up with the idea for the tool while drawing in the Miami Beach sand. Bernard “Bob” Silver — a postgraduate student at Woodland’s alma mater, Drexel Institute of Technology — had told Woodland about a supermarket manager who approached the school, desperate for a way to check out shoppers at a faster pace. The duo collaborated on a patent for a bullseye-shaped barcode, which was approved in 1952. Yet they couldn’t come up with a practical device for reading the information it held — the laser wasn’t invented until 1958, and initial versions of the scanner were huge and cumbersome — so they sold their patent for $15,000. Woodland later moved to IBM, and in 1973, his colleague George Laurer succeeded in perfecting the scannable barcode, in part by finally putting a printer-friendly, rectangular model into production. Today, more than 5 billion barcodes are scanned daily, and some of them are still Juicy Fruit gum.

• Share to Facebook
• Share to Twitter
• Share to Email

The next time you get cut off in traffic, think twice before honking — the other driver could be none other than a tiny rat. Well, not really, but scientists have trained them to drive cars — and if the adorable videos are any indication, the rodents seem to love it. 

The pint-sized vehicles aren’t Fords or Hondas but rather custom-made cars made of plastic cereal containers and small wires. Though the rats were originally motivated to get behind the wheel by the promise of Froot Loops, scientists were surprised (and, one assumes, delighted) to discover the creatures loved going for joy rides.

Rats' teeth never stop growing.

fact

FIB

Ready to reveal?

Confirm your email to play the next question?

sign up!

Please enter valid email.

Sign up

Oops, incorrect!

It's a fact

The reason they don’t appear to be vampire-length is because rats are constantly nibbling on things, which wears them down.

This was confirmed when two of three rats at Virginia’s University of Richmond chose the scenic route rather than driving directly toward their precious Froot Loops. “Rather than pushing buttons for instant rewards, they remind us that planning, anticipating and enjoying the ride may be key to a healthy brain,” wrote Kelly Lambert, a professor of behavioral neuroscience who took part in the research, in a reflection on the study for the BBC. “That’s a lesson my lab rats have taught me well.” It’s a welcome reminder that sometimes it really is about the journey, not the destination.

• Share to Facebook
• Share to Twitter
• Share to Email

The most expensive movie ever made is Star Wars: The Force Awakens, which cost between $447 million and $533 million, according to various estimates. That’s a pretty penny to be sure, but it’s half a percent of the most expensive human-made object in history: the International Space Station, whose price tag comes in at $100 billion. Launched in 1998 after more than a decade of careful (and often difficult) planning, the ISS is a collaboration between five space agencies: NASA (United States), Roscosmos (Russia), JAXA (Japan), ESA (Europe), and CSA (Canada). It has been continuously occupied since 2000, with a full-time international crew conducting microgravity experiments and other research.

You can see the International Space Station from Earth.

fact

FIB

Ready to reveal?

Confirm your email to play the next question?

sign up!

Please enter valid email.

Sign up

Oops, incorrect!

It's a fact

Despite appearing quite small at an average distance of 250 miles above us, the ISS can indeed be spotted by the naked eye. It’s actually the third-brightest object in the night sky and looks similar to a plane, albeit an extremely fast one.

For all that, the ISS almost didn’t exist in the first place. “There was never really a strong push to abandon it, but there were threats,” according to Valerie Neal of the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. “It was very nearly killed by a single vote at one of the committees of the U.S. Congress.” Getting five space agencies representing the interests of 15 countries to work together was no easy feat, but few would argue that the results — including insights on disease treatments and drug delivery systems, the development of new water purification systems, and a better understanding of how bodies work in space — haven’t justified the financial investment.

• Share to Facebook
• Share to Twitter
• Share to Email

If humans hope to one day colonize the moon, a few things are absolutely necessary for our survival. Chief among these necessities is water; we can’t live very long without it. Because Earth is nestled in the life-supporting comfort of our sun’s Goldilocks zone (not too hot, not too cold), water can be found on its surface in abundance — but what about the moon? In the late 2000s, various space missions discovered hydration on the moon, but it wasn’t clear if it was water or a related molecule called hydroxyl. In 2020, NASA finally confirmed that water is distributed across the lunar surface. But a potentially game-changing discovery arrived in 2023, after the Chinese Chang’e-5 lunar mission discovered that small glass spherules, also known as impact glasses or microtektites, contained H2O — possibly some 330 billion tons of it — on the lunar surface. 

Lunar dust smells like rotten eggs.

fact

FIB

Ready to reveal?

Confirm your email to play the next question?

sign up!

Please enter valid email.

Sign up

Oops, incorrect!

It's a fib

While moon dust generally doesn’t smell like anything on Earth, Apollo astronauts specifically reported that it smelled like “burnt gunpowder,” likely the result of oxidation in the cabin of the lunar lander.

These water-filled beads are formed in a complex process of space chemistry that’s kick-started by meteorites slamming into the moon at hundreds of miles per hour. The spheres contain oxygen that reacts to ionized hydrogen in solar winds to form water. This is potentially a huge boon for future astronauts — whether NASA or otherwise — who hope to establish a moon base, as these widespread, water-filled spheres can be boiled and then cooled to extract potable water vapor. And so while the moon’s dull and lifeless surface may seem inhospitable to human habitation, with every new discovery, our celestial neighbor is looking more and more welcoming.

• Share to Facebook
• Share to Twitter
• Share to Email