Facts Archive - Page 5 of 78 - Interesting Facts

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Time seems like a simple enough concept — 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, and so on. That is, except for a little something called “gravitational time dilation.” First explored in Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity, the idea is almost confusingly simple — the farther away you are from a massive object (e.g., a planet), the faster time travels. The more massive the object, the slower time travels, which is why things get very wonky around supermassive black holes like the one at the center of our galaxy.

Albert Einstein first proposed the idea of time travel.

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The concept of time travel was popularized by early science fiction. The first mention of it (at least as a voyage controlled by technology) comes from H.G. Wells, whose 1895 novel “The Time Machine” was published years before the arrival of Einstein’s famous theory of relativity.

These differences in how time flows are minuscule on Earth, so they don’t really affect us — the top floor of the Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building, does not operate with a special time-dilated clock. Yet technically, even our heads experience time just a bit differently than our feet. In 2010, the U.S. National Standards and Technology (NIST) even performed an experiment using optical atomic clocks that could measure a change in time dilation within less than 1 meter.

Although imperceptible to our minds, precision technologies such as GPS need to factor in time dilation in order to work at all. So the next time you use Google Maps, consider giving a shout-out to Einstein and his mind-bending theory of the universe.

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Numbers Don't Lie

Numbers Don't Lie

Speed (in mph) Doc Brown’s DeLorean needs to reach before traveling through time in “Back to the Future”

88

Speed of light (in miles per second), which makes for an eight-minute journey from the sun to Earth

186,000

Year Stephen Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time” was published

1988

Satellites in the Global Positioning System constellation

31

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You can see inside your own eye.

Woolly mammoths were still around when the Great Pyramid of Giza was built.

U.S. ‘paper’ money is actually 75% cotton and 25% linen.

You’re taller in the morning.

Thomas Edison’s last breath is on display at the Henry Ford Museum.

The massive object at the center of our galaxy is a supermassive black hole named ______.

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The massive object at the center of our galaxy is a supermassive black hole named Sagittarius A*.

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Scientists used a total solar eclipse to prove Einstein’s general theory of relativity.

Today Albert Einstein is known best for his general theory of relativity, a conception of gravity that revolutionized physics. But when he published the theory in 1916 in the German science journal Annalen der Physik, the idea got its fair share of pushback. At the time, Einstein wrote, “Every coachman and every waiter is debating whether relativity theory is correct. Belief in this matter depends on political affiliation.” Then came Arthur Eddington, a British astronomer, who conducted an amazing experiment only months after World War I ended. On May 29, 1919, Eddington observed a solar eclipse — more specifically, a star cluster called Hyades in the Taurus constellation visible during the darkness of totality — to see how the starlight was affected by the sun’s mass. After spending months crunching the numbers, Eddington proved Einstein correct; the starlight had been bent in the manner he predicted. The German physicist soon became a scientific rock star the world over, and our perception of the universe was never the same.

Darren Orf

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Darren Orf lives in Portland, has a cat, and writes about all things science and climate. You can find his previous work at Popular Mechanics, Inverse, Gizmodo, and Paste, among others.

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It’s likely that at some time in your life, a certain smell, whether the earthy aroma of freshly cut grass or the unmistakable fragrance of your grandparents’ house, triggered a powerful and strangely detailed memory. Well, there’s a biological reason for that. Unlike our four other best-known senses, whose electrical impulses are first sent to our thalamus before being sent to appropriate areas for memory, such as the hippocampus, our sense of smell takes a different route. Instead of being sent to the thalamus, scents go straight to the smell center known as the olfactory bulb. The fact that this bulb is directly connected to the hippocampus and the amygdala (which is responsible for emotional processing) is likely why smell evokes such powerful memories compared to our other senses. These memories can be extremely distinct, and they’re often linked to our childhood, likely because they were first stored when we experienced the scent at a young age.

Most of our sense of taste comes from our sense of smell.

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Smell is by far the most important facet of taste. The gustatory nerve cells located in taste buds can sense only sweet, sour, bitter, salty, and umami (savory). Because smell accounts for 80% of taste, without it, humans would be limited to only those five basic tastes.

According to a 2017 study, a part of the olfactory bulb known as the piriform cortex is what allows certain smells to be deposited in our long-term memory, though this cortex requires other parts of the brain to pull this off. The olfactory bulb essentially consults our orbitofrontal cortex, an area of the brain responsible for higher-level taste and smell functions, about whether a smell should be stored in long-term memory.

Companies are very aware that smell can be a powerful reminder of memory and emotion, which is why some of them have even trademarked certain scents (yes, you can do that). Verizon, for example, owns the rights to the “flowery musk scent” used in its stores, and olfactive branding companies work with clients like Nike to leverage the power of smell. Because when it comes to unlocking human emotions and memories, it might be the strongest sense we have.

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Numbers Don't Lie

Numbers Don't Lie

Year the company 3M received a patent for “microcapsule-containing paper,” also known as “scratch and sniff”

1970

Distance (in miles) that a polar bear has been known to track seals by scent

20

Estimated number of scents the human nose can smell

1 trillion

Variations of the 400 gene codes for smell, which is why people rarely experience smell the same way

900,000

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Thomas Edison’s last breath is on display at the Henry Ford Museum.

A heightened sense of smell, sometimes causing nausea, is called ______.

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A heightened sense of smell, sometimes causing nausea, is called hyperosmia.

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Humans can smell fear.

Human communication is usually associated with sight, hearing, and touch. But our sense of smell also plays an unrecognized role in how we interact, and several scientific studies have discovered a latent human ability to detect chemical signals in human sweat. One study in 2008 collected sweat from novice skydivers about to jump out of a plane, as well as sweat from the same participants when they were running on a treadmill. Then, another batch of participants sniffed the “fear” and “non-fear” sweat pads while inside a brain scanner. Although the subjects could not consciously differentiate between the smells of the two pads, the scanners detected increased activity in the amygdala, the region of the brain associated with emotional processing, when sniffing the “fear” sweat pad. Many other studies have since reproduced similar conclusions, but scientists remain stumped as to what chemical is triggering this response. While some people have what’s called a “vomeronasal organ,” which in other animals detects the scent of prey and sex pheromones, the organ is vestigial in humans (meaning it once played a role in our primate past but is no longer functional, sort of like the appendix). Despite this, some scientists argue that the ability to sense chemosignals provides significant advantages for animals that thrive in groups (like humans), and could also explain the mostly noncommunicative bond between a mother and newborn. In other words, there’s still some lingering mystery around what the nose knows.

Darren Orf

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Darren Orf lives in Portland, has a cat, and writes about all things science and climate. You can find his previous work at Popular Mechanics, Inverse, Gizmodo, and Paste, among others.

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For those of us not blessed with a green thumb, it’d certainly be helpful if our plant friends could tell us when they need attention. Well, it turns out they do — we just can’t hear them. In early 2023, scientists from Tel Aviv University revealed the results of an investigation into whether plants make sounds in ultrasonic frequencies. Previous studies had established that plants can hear sounds, despite not having ears, so it seemed possible that they could create sounds without mouths. After isolating plants in a soundproofed acoustic chamber and a greenhouse and then recording them, the researchers were able to train a machine learning algorithm to differentiate sounds among three disparate plant states: unstressed, cut, or dehydrated.

All types of tea are made from the same plant.

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Camellia sinensis is an evergreen shrub native to East Asia, whose leaves produce all types of tea. The differences among green, black, oolong, and white teas come from the ways they’re processed. Drinks like rooibos or herbal infusions are technically not tea, but tisanes.

Unstressed plants made little noise and continued along in their usual happy routine of photosynthesizing, but cut and dehydrated plants let out frequent small pops and clicks in a range too high for humans to hear. Stressed plants produced up to 40 of these clicks per hour, while dehydrated plants increased clicks as they got more and more parched. Although only tomato and tobacco plants were originally tested, other crops were found to produce similar noises. It’s possible some animals that can hear in frequencies beyond human capabilities could respond to these noises. If a moth were trying to find a suitable plant to lay its eggs, for example, it might skip one that’s popping in distress. But big mysteries remain: For one thing, scientists don’t know how plants are making these sounds in the first place. All we know for sure is that the quiet lives of plants are not nearly as quiet as they seem.

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Numbers Don't Lie

Numbers Don't Lie

Debut year of the musical “Little Shop of Horrors,” featuring a talking plant

1982

Maximum range (in kilohertz) of human hearing (everything above this threshold is ultrasonic)

20

Trees cut down every year to make pencils

82,000

Estimated amount that stress-related illness cost the U.S. health care system in 2022

$190 billion

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Thomas Edison’s last breath is on display at the Henry Ford Museum.

Plants appeared on land 460 million years ago during the middle of the ______ period.

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Plants appeared on land 460 million years ago during the middle of the Ordovician period.

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Trees can “talk” to one another.

Since the mid-19th century, naturalists have often regarded trees as solitary, monolithic figures, but recent research refutes this idea and suggests that trees are remarkably social. That’s because trees in a forest can communicate via a symbiotic relationship known as mycorrhiza. The name, which is Greek for “fungus” and “root,” essentially explains how it works. Fungal threads called mycelium provide nutrients to trees, which in turn deliver sugars generated from photosynthesis. Because mycelium is ubiquitous throughout a forest, it essentially networks trees together — in what some scientists refer to as a “wood-wide web.” Trees can communicate when they are stressed, share information about potential threats, or deliver nutrients to struggling members of the web, especially if they’re in the same family. One study analyzed six different 10,000-square-foot stands of Douglas fir in British Columbia and discovered that nearly all the trees were connected to each other by at most three degrees of separation. They also discovered that one “hub tree,” an older specimen, was connected to at least 47 other trees (and likely many more), including cross-species trees such as the paper birch.

Darren Orf

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Darren Orf lives in Portland, has a cat, and writes about all things science and climate. You can find his previous work at Popular Mechanics, Inverse, Gizmodo, and Paste, among others.

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Soap is an everyday essential, but this incredibly useful (and lifesaving) cleanser hasn’t always existed. The earliest known mention of soap dates back 4,500 years, found on a cuneiform tablet unearthed from Girsu, in ancient Mesopotamia (modern Iraq). But even then — and for centuries afterward — humans likely weren’t using the slippery substance for handwashing. Bars of soap made from rendered fat and wood ash were primarily used to clean dirty clothing and raw fibers that were being prepped for weaving. Instead of soap, many ancient peoples (such as the Greeks) used scented olive oils and other substances — including coffee — to clean their bodies.

Soap and detergent are the same thing.

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The words “soap” and “detergent” are used interchangeably, but there is a difference. Soaps are made from oils or fats, and bond with dirt particles, making the latter slippery enough to slide away while washing. Detergents are made from dirt-removing enzymes, and don’t contain any soap.

Historians believe the practice of drinking coffee originated in Ethiopia and slowly spread to the Middle East and Europe, becoming popular around the 15th century. Before then, some cultures relied on the brew not as a beverage, but as a cleanser. Around the 10th century, physicians and botanists in the Middle East began writing in Arabic about “bunk,” a compound similar to modern brewed coffee that could be used for handwashing. Surviving texts from the time credited bunk with removing strong odors from hands without drying out the skin, and recipes for the substance sometimes included spices such as cloves, cinnamon, and fruit peels. Bunk also may have been incorporated into other products, like body oils and perfumed powders. However, little is known about the compound. It appears the practice fell out of popularity as coffee became valued less for its odor-eliminating properties and more for the same thing modern consumers appreciate: that caffeinating buzz.

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Numbers Don't Lie

Numbers Don't Lie

Seconds the CDC recommends scrubbing your hands when handwashing

20

Year Purell, the gel-based hand sanitizer, became available in stores

1997

Estimated species of bacteria that live on human hands at any given time

150

Estimated cups of coffee consumed in the U.S. each day, as of 2023

440 million

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Doctor shining flashlight in patient's eyes

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Woolly mammoths were still around when the Great Pyramid of Giza was built.

U.S. ‘paper’ money is actually 75% cotton and 25% linen.

You’re taller in the morning.

Thomas Edison’s last breath is on display at the Henry Ford Museum.

The chemical process of creating soap is called ______.

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The chemical process of creating soap is called saponification.

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Soap carving was a popular hobby during the Great Depression.

How do you convince children to like soap? That was manufacturer Procter & Gamble’s big question in the early 1920s, when company executives were looking to draw in a younger demographic of shoppers. Believing that children familiar with the company’s Ivory soap would be future consumers, advertisers launched a marketing campaign that introduced the floating soap bars as art materials. In 1924, Procter & Gamble held its first National Soap Sculpture Competition, promoting the brand’s soap bars as the perfect medium for artistic carvings and awarding amateur artists with cash, trips, and other prizes. Soap carving exploded in popularity for more than a decade to follow, in part because of the Great Depression. Out-of-work Americans with more downtime sought out hands-on hobbies such as carpentry, gardening, and crafts — and with Ivory soap priced at just 25 cents for a six-pack (less than $5 today), soap carving became an inexpensive amusement.

Nicole Garner Meeker

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Nicole Garner Meeker is a writer and editor based in St. Louis. Her history, nature, and food stories have also appeared at Mental Floss and Better Report.

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Our diversity is part of what makes human beings special. Yet as far as our genes are concerned, we’re all fairly similar: Humans share 99.9% of their genes with one another. To put this into perspective, bonobos and chimpanzees — the closest relatives to humans in the animal kingdom — share approximately 98.8% of their genes with humans. Clearly, even small differences in genetic similarity can have a major impact.

Modern humans still have traces of DNA from other human species.

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Some 70,000 years ago, at least four species of humans coexisted on Earth — Homo sapiens, Neanderthals, Homo floresiensis, and Denisovans. Evidence of this coexistence can be found in human genetics, with small percentages of Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA embedded in our genes.

That may be especially true when it comes to human health. According to the National Institutes of Health, nine of the 10 leading causes of death in the U.S. (barring accidental deaths) are influenced by our genetics, and variations among individuals can mean significantly varying health outcomes.

In the 21st century, advances in our understanding of the human genome — thanks to the completion of groundbreaking scientific studies including the Human Genome Project — have pushed medicine into the genetic frontier. Now doctors can screen newborns for genetic abnormalities and sometimes use gene-based therapies, while nutritionists are using genomics to tailor diets to specific genetic dispositions. According to some, the future of medicine is in our genes.

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Numbers Don't Lie

Numbers Don't Lie

Estimated number of human genes (by one count)

20,000

People who had their DNA sequenced by 23andMe as of 2022

12 million

Year the Human Genome Project (mostly) finished sequencing the human genome

2003

Distance (in miles) a person’s DNA would stretch if unwound and linked together

110 billion

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You’re taller in the morning.

Thomas Edison’s last breath is on display at the Henry Ford Museum.

The ancestor of all life is a single-celled organism called ______.

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The ancestor of all life is a single-celled organism called Luca (Last Universal Common Ancestor).

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The woman who discovered DNA’s double helix was denied the Nobel Prize.

Photo 51 is one of the most famous images in science history. Taken by British chemist Rosalind Franklin in 1952, the image revealed the now-famous double helix structure of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). The photo was shared with scientists Francis Crick and James Watson at the Cavendish Laboratory, likely without Franklin’s knowledge. In 1953, the two scientists, along with Franklin’s colleague Maurice Wilkins, published their DNA work alongside Franklin’s photo without crediting her. A decade later, the three scientists received the Nobel Prize — and Franklin was once again neglected. (Sadly, she had died in 1958 of ovarian cancer.) Thankfully, in the decades since, the scientific community has honored Franklin’s contribution to science. In 2019, the European Space Agency even named its new Mars rover the Rosalind Franklin.

Darren Orf

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Darren Orf lives in Portland, has a cat, and writes about all things science and climate. You can find his previous work at Popular Mechanics, Inverse, Gizmodo, and Paste, among others.

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Honey is often credited as a multiuse wonder, known to soothe sore throats, heal burns, and add a little sweetness to drinks and desserts. But if a bottle in the back of your pantry has been collecting dust, you might be wondering if it’s safe to eat. Don’t worry: As long as it’s stored properly, honey will never expire. Honey has an endless shelf life, as proven by the archaeologists who unsealed King Tut’s tomb in 1923 and found containers of honey within it. After performing a not-so-scientific taste test, researchers reported the 3,000-year-old honey still tasted sweet.

All bees make honey.

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Earth is home to more than 20,000 species of bees, the vast majority of which do not produce honey. Less than 4% of all bees — around 800 species — are known to turn nectar into honey; in the U.S. that job is most commonly undertaken by Apis mellifera, aka the European honey bee.

Honey’s preservative properties have a lot to do with how little water it contains. Some 80% of honey is made up of sugar, with only 18% being water. Having so little moisture makes it difficult for bacteria and microorganisms to survive. Honey is also so thick, little oxygen can penetrate — another barrier to bacteria’s growth. Plus, the substance is extremely acidic, thanks to a special enzyme in bee stomachs called glucose oxidase. When mixed with nectar to make honey, the enzyme produces gluconic acid and hydrogen peroxide, byproducts that lower the sweetener’s pH level and kill off bacteria.

Despite these built-in natural preservatives, it is possible for honey to spoil if it’s improperly stored. In a sealed container, honey is safe from humidity, but when left open it can absorb moisture that makes it possible for bacteria to survive. In most cases, honey can be safely stored for years on end, though the USDA suggests consuming it within 12 months for the best flavor.

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Numbers Don't Lie

Average annual honey harvest (in pounds) from one commercial U.S. bee colony, 2010-2020

57

Types of honey found in the U.S.

300+

Estimated pounds of honey consumed per person in the U.S. in 2020

1.51

Worker bees needed to gather 1 pound of honey

556

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Ancient conqueror ______ was reportedly embalmed with honey.

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Ancient conqueror Alexander the Great was reportedly embalmed with honey.

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Nearly 500 containers of ancient butter have been found in Ireland.

Finding food offerings inside burial chambers and tombs isn’t unusual in the archaeological world — and can be a useful tool for researchers to understand how people of the past ate. But not all ancient foods are found as grave goods. Take, for example, a barrel of 3,000-year-old butter found in an Irish bog. In 2009, workers in a peat deposit unearthed a wooden barrel in eastern Ireland; the barrel was revealed to be around 3,000 years old, with the butter inside perfectly preserved. While it was an unusual find, the 77-pound bucket of dairy isn’t the first — or possibly last — to be unearthed; nearly 500 similar containers have been found in Ireland. Historians have dubbed the preserved spreads “bog butter,” and believe they were likely packed and sunk into cool bogs to preserve or protect against theft at a time when butter was so valuable that it could be used to pay taxes.

Nicole Garner Meeker

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Nicole Garner Meeker is a writer and editor based in St. Louis. Her history, nature, and food stories have also appeared at Mental Floss and Better Report.

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The human body has 206 bones — unless you’re talking about babies, in which case the number is closer to 300. Many of a newborn’s bones are actually made of cartilage, which is much more malleable and allows fetuses to curl inside the womb as they develop. As children grow, cartilage turns into bone in a process called ossification, and the excess bones fuse together. (If you’ve ever wondered how those “soft spots” on an infant’s head — technically known as fontanelles — become stronger, bone fusion is the answer.) This is also a big part of why calcium is so important for babies: New bone tissue can’t grow without it.

Newborns don’t cry tears.

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For the first weeks of their life, babies don’t technically cry. They may make a lot of noise when expressing their displeasure, but because tear ducts don’t fully form for a month or so, their eyes will remain dry while they do so.

Ossification doesn’t happen overnight, however — it continues until a person reaches their mid-20s, which is around when humans reach their peak bone mass. In much the same way that we’re constantly shedding our skin, our bones are constantly changing as well, with old bone gradually destroyed and new bone material formed. The process is called remodeling, and it helps keep the skeletal system healthy long after we’ve settled down at 206 bones.

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Numbers Don't Lie

Babies born worldwide every minute

250

Bones in the human foot

26

Most babies born to a mother at once

9

Pounds of compressive force the adult male femur can support

6,000

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Doctor shining flashlight in patient's eyes

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Woolly mammoths were still around when the Great Pyramid of Giza was built.

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You’re taller in the morning.

Thomas Edison’s last breath is on display at the Henry Ford Museum.

The smallest bone in the human body is the ______.

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The smallest bone in the human body is the stapes.

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Humans and giraffes have the same number of neck bones.

Despite having the longest necks in the animal kingdom — they can reach a length of 8 feet, twice as long as the neck of any other creature — giraffes have the same number of cervical vertebrae as humans: seven. The key difference is that giraffes’ vertebrae are much longer, with each of them measuring close to 10 inches in length; in humans, the entire vertebral column is around 28 inches for men and 24 inches for women. We have the same number of neck bones as our tall, spotted friends for the simple reason that we’re both mammals — sloths and manatees are the only members of this particular class that don’t have seven.

Michael Nordine

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Michael Nordine is a writer and editor living in Denver. A native Angeleno, he has two cats and wishes he had more.

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Some love it and some hate it, but few know what causes it. “New car smell” is a familiar scent to anyone who’s ever sat in a car fresh from the lot, and many consider it an olfactory perk of the car-shopping experience. This distinctive aroma is caused by a chemical process known as off-gassing, which is just what it sounds like: chemicals being released into the air from all that leather, plastic, and various other interior materials. Many of these are volatile organic compounds (VOCs) such as formaldehyde and benzene, which release a potent scent.

Dogs have the strongest sense of smell of any animal.

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Per a 2014 study, elephants put their noses — the largest in the world — to better use than any other creature on Earth. They have 2,000 genes coded for nasal receptor proteins, as many as rats (1,200) and dogs (800) combined.

If that sounds mildly unsettling, some researchers agree — VOCs can potentially cause eye or nose irritation, though the chemicals likely aren’t released in volumes high enough to do much more than that. Anyone who’d prefer to err on the safe side — or who simply has an aversion to the smell — can accelerate the off-gassing process by rolling down their windows or ensuring their air conditioner is sourcing air from outside the car. Those who’d rather immerse themselves in the aroma long after their car is new, meanwhile, can always invest in air fresheners meant to emulate the scent.

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Numbers Don't Lie

Numbers Don't Lie

Individual parts in a new car

30,000+

Motor vehicles produced globally in 2023

93.5 million

Average cost of a new car in January 2024

$47,401

Top speed (in mph) of the Koenigsegg Jesko Absolut, the world’s fastest car

330

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Doctor shining flashlight in patient's eyes

You can see inside your own eye.

Woolly mammoths were still around when the Great Pyramid of Giza was built.

U.S. ‘paper’ money is actually 75% cotton and 25% linen.

You’re taller in the morning.

Thomas Edison’s last breath is on display at the Henry Ford Museum.

The word “car” comes from “karros,” a Gaulish word meaning “______.”

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The word “car” comes from “karros,” a Gaulish word meaning “two-wheeled Celtic war chariot.”

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A man once put 3 million miles on a single car.

If you get an exceptionally well-made car and maintain it to the best of your abilities, there’s a decent chance of getting up to 250,000 miles on it. While that might sound like a lot, it nonetheless pales in comparison to the world record: 3,250,257 miles, which an American man named Irv Gordon put on his Volvo P1800 over the course of 52 years. For those crunching the numbers, that averages out to a whopping 60,000 miles per year for more than half a century. Gordon bought the vehicle in 1966 on a Friday, and by the end of the weekend he’d already racked up 1,500 miles. Contributing factors to these impressive numbers included Gordon’s 125-mile daily commute to the Long Island middle school where he taught, his love of spending time behind the wheel, and his unfailing dedication to the vehicle’s upkeep.

Michael Nordine

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Michael Nordine is a writer and editor living in Denver. A native Angeleno, he has two cats and wishes he had more.

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Cats certainly aren’t unknown in the world of physics. Isaac Newton had a cat named Spithead (and supposedly created a cat door for him), while Albert Einstein once said that only two things provided refuge from the misery of life: “music and cats.” Of course, the most famous example is Schrödinger’s cat, a thought experiment devised by Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger to explain the complexity of quantum superposition. But none of these cats, whether real or allegorical, has ever written an influential physics paper. That distinction belongs solely to F.D.C. Willard, a Siamese cat otherwise known as Chester.

The CIA tried using cyborg cats as spies in the 1960s.

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As part of Operation Acoustic Kitty, the CIA implanted a microphone and a radio transmitter inside a cat to spy on Cold War adversaries. But the project quickly hit a dead end, with a now-unclassified document stating the obvious problem: “Cats are not especially trainable.”

While it’s fun to imagine Jack H. Hetherington — the paper’s very human author — working alongside his cat to explore atomic behaviors at different temperatures, the reason for the feline’s inclusion was actually a matter of pronouns. Before submitting his paper for publication in the journal Physical Review Letters back in 1975, Hetherington noticed that he’d used the royal “we” throughout his work, and a colleague informed him that the journal used such verbiage only when a paper had multiple authors. Unwilling to go back and change the entire paper (these were typewriter days after all), Hetherington instead invited Chester, under the more official-sounding pseudonym F.D.C. Willard, to be his collaborator. Hetherington’s deception was baked right into the name: Felis Domesticus Chester Willard (Felis domesticus being the genus and species of the common house cat, and Willard being Chester’s father’s name). According to Hetherington, the journal’s editors didn’t find the feline contribution especially amusing, but time heals all wounds. In 1980, Willard even went on to become the sole “author” of a scientific paper in French. And in 2014, Physical Review Letters granted free access to all cat-written physics papers as an April Fools’ Day joke.

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Numbers Don't Lie

Numbers Don't Lie

Animals (including one cat named Simon) who’ve received Britain’s Dickin Medal for wartime animals

75

Estimated households in the U.S. that have a feline family member

43.1 million

Year Erwin Schrödinger devised the thought experiment Schrödinger’s cat

1935

Ship sinkings a cat nicknamed “Unsinkable Sam” survived during World War II

3

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Doctor shining flashlight in patient's eyes

You can see inside your own eye.

Woolly mammoths were still around when the Great Pyramid of Giza was built.

U.S. ‘paper’ money is actually 75% cotton and 25% linen.

You’re taller in the morning.

Thomas Edison’s last breath is on display at the Henry Ford Museum.

The Norse goddess of fertility ______ rode in a chariot pulled by two tomcats.

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The Norse goddess of fertility Freyja rode in a chariot pulled by two tomcats.

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In 1963, France sent the world’s first (and still only) cat to space.

On October 18, 1963, a Parisian stray cat named Félicette began her spacefaring journey aboard a French rocket launched from the Sahara Desert. The black-and-white cat was chosen from a crew of 14 cats trained for the mission, and she quickly traveled from the surface nearly 100 miles skyward, far beyond the Kármán line that separates Earth’s atmosphere and outer space. After becoming the first cat to escape the gravitational embrace of Earth, Félicette parachuted back to the planet’s surface. There, she was recovered by helicopter (still very much alive); the entire trip lasted only 15 minutes. Today, few people know about Félicette’s epic journey, as it’s often overshadowed by the 1957 flight of the Soviet space dog Laika. To commemorate the one and only astrocat’s achievements, a 2017 Kickstarter campaign raised £43,323 to create a memorial to Félicette. Today, the bronze statue — featuring Félicette perched atop the globe — resides at the International Space University in Strasbourg, France.

Darren Orf

Writer

Darren Orf lives in Portland, has a cat, and writes about all things science and climate. You can find his previous work at Popular Mechanics, Inverse, Gizmodo, and Paste, among others.

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Original photo by RealPeopleGroup/ iStock

Sunlight tends to be good for us. It helps our bodies create vitamin D and mood-lifting serotonin, and even syncs our circadian rhythms. However, some people experience an unexpected side effect after glancing into the sun: sneezing. As many as one in four people have the reaction, appropriately called ACHOO syndrome (short for autosomal dominant compelling helio-ophthalmic outburst). The sun isn’t the only thing to blame — the reaction can occur when moving from dark to light settings, after seeing bright lights, or even from witnessing a camera flash.

It’s impossible to sneeze with your eyes open.

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It's a fib

Keeping your eyes open during a sneeze might feel uncomfortable — and difficult — but it can be done. However, some doctors suspect there’s a good reason our bodies reflexively close our eyelids: Doing so helps protect your eyes from the irritants being expelled from your nose.

ACHOO syndrome — also called “photic sneeze reflex” or “sun sneezing” — isn’t an allergy. While researchers aren’t entirely sure why it happens, one theory is that it’s caused by a nervous system misfire involving the trigeminal nerve, which connects the eyes and nose with the brain. Within seconds of seeing bright light, the pupils of the eyes contract and stimulate this nerve, possibly causing the nose to accidentally sneeze. People who experience ACHOO syndrome may get a runny nose and watery eyes, too, though these symptoms tend to disappear within a few minutes. Sun sneezing also has a genetic component; children of parents who have the photic sneeze reflex have a 50% chance of experiencing the same phenomenon.

Some people diagnosed with ACHOO syndrome also reflexively sneeze when undergoing anesthesia, though for the most part the condition is more of an annoyance than a health concern. While there’s no treatment for sun sneezing, it is possible to reduce occurrences of the involuntary reaction with a few handy accessories, like hats and sunglasses, which block sudden bursts of light.

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Numbers Don't Lie

Numbers Don't Lie

Estimated number of times the average person sneezes a day

4

Max speed (in mph) of a sneeze

100

Record (in days) for the world’s longest sneezing fit, held by a British woman

976

Number of droplets that leave your nose when sneezing

100,000

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Doctor shining flashlight in patient's eyes

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Thomas Edison’s last breath is on display at the Henry Ford Museum.

“______” is the medical term for sneezing.

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“Sternutation” is the medical term for sneezing.

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Marine iguanas sneeze salt.

Humans aren’t the only beings on Earth that sneeze — elephants, whales, and even fish do it, too. Marine iguanas, however, may be one of the only animals whose sneeze particles are mostly made up of salt. Found in the Galapagos Islands, they are the only kind of lizard that can survive in aquatic conditions, swimming in the ocean and feasting on algae. To thrive in their salty habitat, which would prove fatal to other lizards, marine iguanas are able to filter the excess salt from their blood, then excrete it via forceful snorts and sneezes.

Nicole Garner Meeker

Writer

Nicole Garner Meeker is a writer and editor based in St. Louis. Her history, nature, and food stories have also appeared at Mental Floss and Better Report.

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