Facts Archive - Page 73 of 79 - Interesting Facts

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You know your head, shoulders, knees, and toes (knees and toes), but has anyone ever introduced you to the glabella? This isn’t some hidden-away body part like the back of the elbow or something spleen-adjacent — it’s smack dab in the middle of your face. Latin for “smooth, hairless, bald,” the glabella is the small patch of skull nestled in the middle of your two superciliary arches (also known as your eyebrow ridges). Many people know of the glabella because of the wrinkles, or “glabellar lines,” that can appear in the area.

Humans are the only primates with eyebrows.

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Eyebrows are a uniquely human feature. As the forehead ridge of Homo sapiens receded to make room for our brain, eyebrows developed to keep moisture out of our eyes while also blocking sunlight.

Although smooth and hairless today, the glabella wasn’t always so. Our human ancestors, including Neanderthals, instead sported formidable brow ridges that likely evolved to display social dominance. As the brain of Homo sapiens grew, this brow receded until only the smallest of ridges survived — along with the smooth bit of bone in between. But the fortunes of this little piece of anatomical real estate weren’t just tied to evolution. Women in ancient Greece saw the unibrow as a beautiful feature, so much so that they’d paint soot on their glabellas to form a faux unibrow. Throughout the following centuries, fashion’s notion of the ideal eyebrow changed, but the glabella remained more or less true to its smooth, hairless name. Unless Frida Kahlo’s famous unibrow becomes a modern fashion trend, it’ll likely stay that way.

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Numbers Don't Lie

Average number of hairs per eyebrow

250

Number of the chromosome where the PAX3 gene regulates the presence of a unibrow

2

Decade in which the punk subculture invented the eyebrow piercing

1970s

Amount Frida Kahlo’s “Diego y Yo” self-portrait, featuring her distinctive unibrow, sold for at auction in 2021

$34.9 million

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John Tyler, the 10th president, had a living grandson until 2025.

One state’s coastline is longer than all other states’ combined.

Guinness World Records started out as a promotion to help settle bar bets.

The sky looks bluer in the fall.

Cats sleep around 15 hours per day.

In Japan’s Heian era (794 to 1185 CE), some women removed their eyebrows and repainted them with ______.

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In Japan’s Heian era (794 to 1185 CE), some women removed their eyebrows and repainted them with ink.

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Eyebrows played a crucial role in the rise of Homo sapiens.

Eyebrows are an often-overlooked asset of human beauty. Folks write poetry about gorgeous eyes and ballads on beautiful smiles, but eyebrows, while certainly an obsessed-over feature in modern beauty trends, rarely receive as much adoration. Yet according to anthropologists, the fuzzy caterpillars on our foreheads are vital to the survival of our species. A study in 2018 found that eyebrows figure prominently in human social interaction and aided early humans in forming large, complex social groups. One of these interactions occurs when people see each other at a distance — in that situation, people unconsciously raise their eyebrows in a way that apparently shows they’re not a threat. Eyebrows similarly raise toward the middle to signal sympathy, and their micro-movements can also play a key role in expressing trustworthiness or deception. With this ability to convey subtle emotions in only an “eyebrow flash,” humans formed larger and more diverse social groups on our journey toward becoming the dominant animal on the planet.

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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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The wheel is credited as one of humankind’s most important inventions: It allowed people to travel farther on land than ever before, irrigate crops, and spin fibers, among other key benefits. Today, we often consider the wheel to be the ultimate civilization game-changer, but it turns out that creating the multipurpose apparatus wasn’t really on humanity’s immediate to-do list. Our ancient ancestors worked on other ideas first: boats, musical instruments, glue, and even alcohol. The oldest evidence of booze comes from China, where archaeologists have unearthed 9,000-year-old pottery coated with beer residue; in contrast, early wheels didn’t appear until around 3500 BCE (about three millennia later), in what is now Iraq. But even when humans began using wheels, they had a different application — rudimentary versions were commonly used as potter’s wheels, a necessity for mass-producing vessels that could store batches of brew (among other things).

Vodka is the world’s most-consumed spirit.

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The potato-based alcohol is popular, but baijiu, a traditional Chinese liquor, accounts for nearly 25% of all spirits sold globally. Brewed from sorghum or rice, baijiu (meaning “clear liquor”) has an alcohol content of 50% to 65% and is meant to be imbibed as a shot.

Some researchers believe our long-standing relationship with alcohol began 10 million years ago thanks to a genetic mutation that allowed our bipedal ancestors to consume overly ripe fruit. Alcohol consumption eventually transitioned from a snack-time byproduct to a purposefully crafted, fermented beverage, and different cultures began to create their own brews independently. After China’s beer and wine appeared around 7000 BCE, early vintners in the Caucasus Mountains followed 1,000 years later. Sumerian brewers crafted beer around 3000 BCE, while Indigenous communities in the Americas, such as the Aztecs and Incas, later made their own alcoholic drinks from agave and corn. It may seem surprising that ancient humans were so fermentation-focused, but early alcohols played a major role in prehistoric communities: Booze was often the center of religious and social celebrations, and could serve as a go-to cure for illness and pain. In some cases, it even acted as a nutritious, probiotic boost during times of food scarcity. With their many uses, both lifesaving and life-enhancing, brewed beverages have withstood the test of time.

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Numbers Don't Lie

Numbers Don't Lie

Weight (in pounds) of the “Wheel of Fortune” TV game show wheel

2,400

Tons of steel required to build the world’s largest Ferris wheel, in Dubai

11,200

Gallons of whiskey purchased for the Lewis and Clark expedition in 1804

120

Year the 21st Amendment was ratified, officially repealing Prohibition in the U.S.

1933

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John Tyler, the 10th president, had a living grandson until 2025.

One state’s coastline is longer than all other states’ combined.

Guinness World Records started out as a promotion to help settle bar bets.

The sky looks bluer in the fall.

Cats sleep around 15 hours per day.

The world’s oldest wooden wheel was uncovered from a marsh in ______.

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The world’s oldest wooden wheel was uncovered from a marsh in Slovenia.

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It takes eight years to grow agave plants for tequila.

When European colonists first encountered Mexico’s native agave plants, they were intrigued by the succulents the Aztecs had been using to make clothing, rope, and intoxicating drinks. The spike-tipped plants, which grow as tall as 20 feet, were dug up and transplanted to greenhouses and botanical gardens throughout Spain, Portugal, and other parts of Europe starting in the 16th century. But most agave plants struggled to flourish in areas lacking their natural arid climate; in cooler countries, they were dubbed “century plants,” because those that survived the overseas journey didn’t bloom for nearly 100 years. Agave plants mature much faster when left in their natural habitats, but growing the crop for today’s tequila production is still a time investment. It traditionally takes about eight years before the plants are ready to harvest, though some agave crops are left to grow even longer.

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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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Three Midwestern babies born in 1958 grew up to change the course of pop music and culture forever. Prince Rogers Nelson was born on June 7 in Minneapolis, Minnesota; Madonna Louise Ciccone was born on August 16 in Bay City, Michigan; and Michael Joseph Jackson was born on August 29 in Gary, Indiana. Each of the future genre-busting superstars was welcomed into a big family: Eventually, Prince had eight siblings, Madonna had seven, and Jackson had 10. Jackson was the first to begin his performing career, at age 5. Six years later, he made his television debut as the youngest member of the Jackson Five when the group sang “It’s Your Thing” at the Miss Black America Pageant. Prince debuted at 21 on American Bandstand, singing "I Wanna Be Your Lover" and "Why You Wanna Treat Me So Bad?”; Madonna made one of her earliest TV appearances on the same show four years later, performing “Holiday,” and telling Dick Clark of her wish to “rule the world.”

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In addition to exhilarating music, era-defining music videos, and various business ventures, all three made films. Precocious Jackson appeared in the first movie of the group, 1978’s The Wiz, a straight-from-Broadway reimagining of The Wizard of Oz featuring an all-Black cast (Jackson played the Scarecrow). In 1985 — the year Prince and Madonna briefly dated — Prince won an Oscar for Best Music, Original Song Score for his first film, the semi-autobiographical Purple Rain. Meanwhile, shortly after Madonna (in a Marilyn Monroe-inspired look) took Jackson as her plus-one to the 1991 Academy Awards, she shot A League of Their Own, a tribute to the all-female baseball teams that entertained fans during World War II. (The so-called Queen of Reinvention has also appeared in dozens of other films over the years.)

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Numbers Don't Lie

Combined Grammys won by Prince, Michael Jackson, and Madonna, out of 104 nominations

27

Cost to tour Paisley Park, the 65,000-square-foot Minnesota estate where Prince lived and worked for decades

$48–$160

Madonna’s estimated concert grosses 2000–2020

$1.3 billion

Approximate number of copies sold of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” (1982), the bestselling album of all time

67 million

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John Tyler, the 10th president, had a living grandson until 2025.

One state’s coastline is longer than all other states’ combined.

Guinness World Records started out as a promotion to help settle bar bets.

The sky looks bluer in the fall.

Cats sleep around 15 hours per day.

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Madonna holds the world record for the most costume changes by a character in a film.

Costume designer Penny Rose dressed Madonna in 85 outfits when she portrayed Argentinian actress, activist, and First Lady Eva Perón in the 1996 film Evita. Those clothes were accessorized with 45 pairs of shoes, 56 pairs of earrings, and 39 hats. In a savvy branding tie-in, Bergdorf Goodman began selling Perón-inspired hairpieces, and Madonna — pregnant with her first child, Lourdes Leon, during filming — even channeled her alter-ego for the cover of Vogue. Madonna won a Golden Globe for her performance in director Alan Parker’s musical biopic (an adaptation of the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical), and Rose received a BAFTA nomination for her costumes.

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By the time most of us reach age 20 or so, the bones in our body are pretty much done growing. The growth plates that cause us to put on inches in our youth are now hardened bone, and in fact, adults tend to drop an inch or two in height as worn-out cartilage causes our spines to shrink over time. However, there are a few bones that buck this biological trend. Skulls, for example, never fully stop growing, and the bones also shift as we age. A 2008 study from Duke University determined that as we grow older, the forehead moves forward, while cheek bones tend to move backward. As the skull tilts forward, overlying skin droops and sags.

The largest skull ever discovered belongs to a T. rex.

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The world’s largest skull does belong to a dinosaur — just not a T. rex. The record-breaking skull, standing some 10 feet, 6 inches tall, belongs to a Cretaceous Period Pentaceratops, currently on display at the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History.

The skull isn’t the only bone that has a positive correlation with age. Human hips also continue to widen as the decades pass, meaning those extra inches aren’t only due to a loss of youthful metabolism. In 2011, researchers from the University of North Carolina School of Medicine discovered that hips continue to grow well into our 70s, and found that an average 79-year-old’s pelvic width was 1 inch wider than an average 20-year-old’s. So while it’s mostly true that humans stop growing after the age of 20, nature always likes to throw in a few exceptions to the rule.

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Numbers Don't Lie

Number of bones in an adult human skull, including eight cranial bones and 14 facial bones

22

Max amount of time (in months) it takes for the anterior fontanelle in a baby’s skull to close

26

Year the band Grateful Dead created their famous blue-and-red skull logo

1969

Estimated number of skulls discovered in 2001 at the now-famous Brno Ossuary in Czechia

50,000

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John Tyler, the 10th president, had a living grandson until 2025.

One state’s coastline is longer than all other states’ combined.

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The sky looks bluer in the fall.

Cats sleep around 15 hours per day.

The pirate flag bearing a skull and crossbones is famously known as the ______.

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The pirate flag bearing a skull and crossbones is famously known as the Jolly Roger.

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The idea that your ears and nose never stop growing is a myth.

It’s a common misconception that our ears and noses continue to grow throughout our lifetime — though they sometimes do appear to take on almost cartoonish proportions toward the end of our lives. So what’s going on here? Turns out, it’s not really the cartilage in our nose and ears that’s to blame. Instead, the culprit is decades of experiencing gravity. This constant gravitational pull — along with general degradation due to age — causes the collagen and elastic fibers in our ears and nose to droop and elongate. The surrounding skin supporting these structures also breaks down and droops over time while simultaneously losing volume. Studies have shown that the average human ear elongates approximately 0.22 millimeters a year. It’s a process that’s so reliable, ears can actually be used as a tool for determining a person’s age.

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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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While books are a fixture of today’s libraries, humans long constructed great centers of learning without them. That includes one of the oldest known significant libraries in history: the Library of Ashurbanipal. This library, established in modern-day Mosul, Iraq, by the Assyrian King Ashurbanipal in the seventh century BCE, contained nothing we would recognize today as a book. Instead, it was a repository of 30,000 clay tablets and writing boards covered in cuneiform — the oldest writing system in the world. Much like your local public library, this royal collection covered a variety of subjects, including legislation, financial statements, divination, hymns, medicine, literature, and astronomy.

Ancient Greeks invented paper.

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The ancient Greeks can be thanked for a great many things, but paper isn’t one of them. On March 11, 105 CE, court official Cai Lun presented his papermaking process to Emperor He of the Han dynasty in China. It’d take many centuries, but the idea transformed the world.

While we know when this library flourished, defining the appearance of the earliest book is slightly murkier. The Egyptians, for example, are known to have written on papyrus scrolls; when the Library of Alexandria in Egypt burned in the first century BCE, 40,000 priceless scrolls were lost. By about the second century CE, Romans began using bound codexes, a kind of proto-book that consisted of papyrus or parchment sheets between wooden covers. The arrival of Christianity made the codex immensely popular, and it basically replaced the scroll by the sixth century CE. Block-printed books showed up in China around 700 CE, although Europe didn’t see anything similar until Johannes Gutenberg invented mechanical movable type around 1448. So while libraries haven’t always housed books, they have been repositories of human knowledge — in whatever form it might take.

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Numbers Don't Lie

Number of items in the Library of Congress

173 million

Size (in square feet) of Portland, Oregon’s Powell’s Books, the largest bookstore in the world

68,000

Year William Caxton published “The Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye,” the first book printed in English

1473

Number of characters in Marcel Proust’s novel “À la recherche du temps perdu,” the world’s longest novel

9,609,000

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The oldest surviving literary work is thought to be “______,” composed 4,000 years ago.

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The oldest surviving literary work is thought to be “The Epic of Gilgamesh,” composed 4,000 years ago.

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The Library of Congress has burned twice.

The U.S. Library of Congress contains the largest collection of published books in world history — but it wasn’t an easy journey getting there. During the War of 1812, the British set fire to the Capitol building, which contained the 3,000-volume Library of Congress. It was completely consumed in the conflagration. To reestablish the library, Congress purchased former President Thomas Jefferson’s book collection — the largest in the U.S. at the time — for $23,950. Sadly, a second fire, on Christmas Eve 1851, consumed a large portion of that library, including many of Jefferson’s original volumes. Two years later, Congress constructed a new library, this time made from flame-resistant cast iron.

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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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The Library of Congress has one of the largest collections of books in human history — and that includes comic books. With more than 12,000 titles stretching across 140,000 issues in its collection, the library holds the largest public collection of comic books in the United States. There’s a little bit of everything — Golden Age superheroes like Superman and Captain America, translated reissues of Japanese manga, foreign translations of American comics, underground comics from the ’70s and ’80s, bande dessinées (French comics) from the ’60s, and much more. The library also has many older comics available on microfiche, including the always-elusive Action Comics #1 (the first appearance of Superman), and it regularly adds comics electronically as they become available.

The Library of Alexandria is one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.

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The Egyptian city of Alexandria does make the list, but it’s their famous lighthouse that nabs the accolade — not the library. Both were built around 280 BCE. The lighthouse was a ruin by the 14th century, but its remains were rediscovered in the 20th century.

Of course, this isn’t a collection you can simply peruse at your leisure. Due to the fragility of the comics (the oldest issue is nearly 90 years old, after all), these specimens are only available to “researchers under special conditions” — but that includes people such as scriptwriters, pop culture historians, avid collectors, and graphic artists. The Library of Congress has also put on several public comic-centric exhibitions to showcase some of the most intriguing artifacts in its collection.

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Approximate number of items the Library of Congress adds to its collection every day

10,000

Purchase price of Thomas Jefferson’s personal library, which formed the foundation of the library in 1815

$23,950

Year the library’s oldest comic, “Popular Comics,” was published

1936

Price “Amazing Fantasy #15,” the first appearance of Spider-Man, sold at auction in 2021

$3.6 million

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John Tyler, the 10th president, had a living grandson until 2025.

One state’s coastline is longer than all other states’ combined.

Guinness World Records started out as a promotion to help settle bar bets.

The sky looks bluer in the fall.

Cats sleep around 15 hours per day.

The first comic book is often said to be 1897’s “______.”

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The first comic book is often said to be 1897’s “The Yellow Kid in McFadden’s Flats.”

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The Library of Congress used to have a book-delivering conveyor belt.

In 1897, the Library of Congress moved out of the Capitol building and into new digs across the street. Congressmen grumbled at having to cross the street to get books, so the Army Corps of Engineers created a tunnel between the two buildings, and Boston’s Miles Pneumatic Tube Company designed a “book conveying apparatus.” Requests for books came to the library via pneumatic tube, after which the requested edition was whisked away in a tray that rode the rails at a speed of about 10 feet per second. Once at the Capitol, the book would travel up three stories until it arrived near the House floor. The whole trip took about a quarter-mile, and lasted only five minutes. The library built updated conveying systems in the following years to connect annex buildings constructed in 1939 and 1980, but the original tunnel conveyor system was dismantled in the 2000s to make way for a subterranean visitor center, and the other belts have since been abandoned due to high repair costs. Today, though most senators and representatives just use the internet to get the books they need, a Library of Congress staffer can still sometimes be seen hand-delivering books to the Capitol.

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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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The Earth has been around for a while — about one-third as long as the universe itself. By comparison, Homo sapiens are the new kids on the block. Earth’s story began at the outset of the Hadean eon, about 4.6 billion years ago. It took 600 million years just for the Earth’s crust to take shape, another 300 million years for the first signs of microbial life to pop up, and about 3.2 billion years after that for life to really get going thanks to the evolutionary burst known as the Cambrian explosion. Several mass extinction events and some 465 million years later, mammals finally took center stage, but modern humans didn’t enter the biological limelight for another 65 million years. With the first Homo sapiens appearing around 300,000 years ago, humans have only been on planet Earth for 0.0067% of its existence.

Pangea is the only supercontinent in Earth’s history.

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Before Pangea, there was Rodinia (which formed about 1 billion years ago), and geologic evidence suggests that another supercontinent called Nuna formed around 1.6 billion years ago. Scientists believe supercontinents occur in cycles stretched across hundreds of millions of years.

In those 300,000 years, humans have been pretty busy. For a couple thousand years, we harnessed fire and lived a nomadic existence, until around the fourth millennium BCE, when the very first civilizations began to take shape. Since then, humans have been on a meteoric trajectory, going from hunter-gatherer to spacefarer in less than 6,000 years. Carl Sagan famously displayed the universe’s history on a 365-day calendar, with the Big Bang on January 1 and our current moment starting at 12:01 a.m. the next year. On that timeline, it’s only at 10:30 p.m. on December 31 that humans first appear, and all of recorded history is squeezed into just a few seconds — but what a few seconds it’s been.

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Numbers Don't Lie

Age (in years) of the oldest known cave painting, in Spain

65,000

Length (in years) of the current Holocene epoch

11,700

Average amount of genes a modern human shares with ancient Neanderthals

0.3–2%

Number of human species that have lived on Earth (debated)

21

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John Tyler, the 10th president, had a living grandson until 2025.

One state’s coastline is longer than all other states’ combined.

Guinness World Records started out as a promotion to help settle bar bets.

The sky looks bluer in the fall.

Cats sleep around 15 hours per day.

Scientists think the moon formed when the Earth collided with a planet named ______ 4.5 billion years ago.

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Scientists think the moon formed when the Earth collided with a planet named Theia 4.5 billion years ago.

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A growing number of scientists want to declare a new epoch because of humanity’s impact on the Earth.

Geologists divide the life of the Earth into various categories of time. First, there are eons, which stretch for millions and sometimes billions of years. Then come eras, followed by periods, epochs, and finally ages. For the past 11,700 years, since the end of the Paleolithic ice age, the rise of humanity has coincided with the Holocene Epoch (which is part of the Quaternary period of the Cenozoic era). For most of this epoch, the world’s climate remained stable, but with the rise of modern society, the Earth has undergone rapid changes in a very short time. That’s why many scientists believe that a new epoch, called the Anthropocene (meaning “recent age of humans”), should be adopted, beginning around 1950 and the dawn of the nuclear age. For the Anthropocene to become official, both the International Commission on Stratigraphy and then the International Union of Geological Sciences need to sign off. Despite support within these groups, the epoch has yet to be officially recognized.

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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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Juneteenth is a more recent addition to most American calendars, and the first new federal holiday in nearly four decades. So it might come as a surprise that the celebration already has a flag of its own, and one that’s been around for more than 25 years. Designed back in 1997, the flag came about at a time when advocates were rallying for the holiday — which celebrates the end of slavery in the U.S. — to gain federal recognition. In the years since, the design (originally crafted by activist Ben Haith) has undergone minor changes but remains heavy with symbolism. The banner’s solid white star represents freedom and nods to Texas (aka the Lone Star State) for its role in the creation of Juneteenth; on June 19, 1865, enslaved people were officially emancipated in Texas more than two years after President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation to abolish slavery in Confederate states. Also featured on the flag is a white sunburst, portraying new beginnings. Both stars sit atop an arching blue and red horizon that signifies optimism for the future. The three-toned flag purposely uses the same colors as the American flag as a reminder that formerly enslaved people and their descendants are Americans, too, despite the country’s history of unequal rights.

The last enslaved people in the U.S. were set free on Juneteenth.

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Juneteenth honors a date when enslaved Americans in Texas were liberated, but it wasn’t the true ending of slavery. Despite Lincoln’s famous decree, some areas (such as Delaware and Kentucky) permitted the practice until the 13th Amendment ending slavery was ratified in December 1865.

Juneteenth’s official flag is raised alongside the Stars and Stripes above government buildings, on college campuses, and in front yards around the country, but it also sometimes appears next to the Pan-African flag at reunions, block parties, and other Juneteenth festivities. Introduced in 1920 by a group led by political activist Marcus Garvey, the three-striped banner of the Pan-African flag is identifiable by its horizontal red, black, and green bands, which represent the blood, people, and growth of the African diaspora. Both flags are meant as inspiring symbols of unity and remembrance — ideas worth celebrating on America’s second Independence Day.

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Numbers Don't Lie

Approximate number of enslaved people in the U.S. in 1860

4 million

Number of handwritten pages containing the Emancipation Proclamation

5

Year Mississippi became the final state to ratify the 13th Amendment, which ended slavery

2013

Year Juneteenth was designated an American federal holiday

2021

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John Tyler, the 10th president, had a living grandson until 2025.

One state’s coastline is longer than all other states’ combined.

Guinness World Records started out as a promotion to help settle bar bets.

The sky looks bluer in the fall.

Cats sleep around 15 hours per day.

______ was the first state to make Juneteenth an official holiday, in 1980.

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Texas was the first state to make Juneteenth an official holiday, in 1980.

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The Emancipation Proclamation is rarely on display.

The United States’ most famous founding documents are relatively easy to see in person. Take the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, for example, which are on permanent display at the National Archives Museum in Washington, D.C. But despite its historical significance, the original Emancipation Proclamation is seldom showcased. That’s because the handwritten, double-sided document hasn’t aged well (physically). Archivists attribute its deterioration to the paper used back in 1863, which hasn’t withstood time as well as some older documents such as the Constitution, which were penned on animal-skin parchments. In addition, the U.S. Department of State had custody of the original Emancipation Proclamation until transferring it to the National Archives in 1936, by which point it had sustained considerable damage from handling and light exposure. Today, the Emancipation Proclamation is stored in an environmentally controlled vault and viewable on rare occasions; the pages never leave storage all at once, and are always displayed under extremely low light for short periods of time to maximize their life span.

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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While you might associate the development of modern universities with intellectual movements like the Renaissance or the Enlightenment, the first universities predate those major periods in history — not by years but by centuries. One of the oldest universities in the world is Oxford University, where teaching began back in 1096. That’s much older than Harvard (established in 1636) or Yale (1701), and it’s even older than some well-known Indigenous civilizations in the Americas, including the Incas, who lived in the Andean region of South America from around the 13th century CE to the mid-16th century. (Other groups and empires have occupied the Andes since at least 10,000 BCE.)

The oldest university in the world is in Europe.

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The University of al-Qarawiyyin in Fez, Morocco, was built by Fatima al-Fihri, the daughter of a rich merchant, in 859 CE. By the 10th century, it had evolved into the largest Arab university in North Africa. Today, it is the oldest continually operating university in the world.

The first universities were not like the sprawling campuses of today. Instead, they were more like guilds devoted to certain subjects or crafts. Slowly, the influence of these schools grew throughout the High Middle Ages (1000–1300), and many of them became hot spots during future intellectual movements. Meanwhile, as Europe was busy cementing the importance of its universities (and fighting in half-a-dozen Crusades), the Incas were building sprawling road networks and reliable postal systems — they even had highly skilled brain surgeons.

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Numbers Don't Lie

Numbers Don't Lie

Population of the Inca empire at its height

12 million

Year J.R.R. Tolkien, author of “Lord of the Rings,” graduated from Oxford

1915

Approximate length (in miles) of Qhapaq Ñan, an Incan roadway

18,600

Languages spoken in the Inca empire

30+

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Machu Picchu means “______” in the Quechua language.

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Machu Picchu means “old hill” in the Quechua language.

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The Incas used string and knots to record information.

Although the Incas had no known written language, they weren’t without a means of recording important information. Quipu were Andean textiles that used a system of colored string and knots to record data. These textiles were both recorded and read by officials known as “quipucamayocs.” Evidence suggests that quipu were first developed by the Wari civilization, who lived in Peru between about 450 and 1000 CE. Scholars believe the Incas used quipu both to record hard data — such as census figures, inventory, and other administrative information — and as a way to encode Incan myths and histories. Because of the Andes’ arid climate, the quipu were well-preserved for centuries. Today, hundreds of quipu are displayed in museums around the world, with the biggest collection now residing at the Ethnological Museum of Berlin in Germany.

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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In the 1950s, Americans were looking for ways to spend less time in the kitchen. Generations of home cooks, the overwhelming majority of them women, had made food preparation the focus of their day; historians estimate that in 1900, an average household spent 58 hours per week on housework. But a few decades later, postwar innovations such as affordable appliances created more free time — and so did a new wave of commercially prepared and processed foods, an emerging industry fueled by scientists such as William A. Mitchell. While Mitchell’s name isn’t widely known today, his most popular inventions are major name brands, including Cool Whip, Pop Rocks, and Tang.

Tang was developed for NASA astronauts.

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The vitamin-infused powder is forever linked with space exploration, but General Foods originally planned Tang as a travel-friendly drink mix for consumers. NASA, looking for easier ways to transport beverages to space, took notice and first stocked it on the 1962 Friendship 7 mission.

Growing up in Minnesota, Mitchell spent his teenage years as a farmhand and carpenter, working to fund his college tuition. It took a few years for the future inventor to venture into food production after graduation, chemistry degree in hand; he worked at Eastman Kodak creating chemical developers for color film, as well as at an agricultural lab. He then went to work at General Foods in 1941, contributing to the war effort by creating a tapioca substitute for soldier rations. (Overseas, GIs renamed the gelatin and starch blend “Mitchell’s Mud.”) The postwar years saw Mitchell churn out a few flops, like carbonated ice, as well as now-iconic hits. In 1956, his quest to create a self-carbonating soda led to the accidental invention of Pop Rocks. A year later, he developed Tang Flavor Crystals, which skyrocketed to popularity after NASA used the powder in space to remedy astronauts’ metallic-tasting water. And by the time he’d retired from General Foods in 1976, Mitchell had developed a quick-set gelatin, powdered egg whites, and a whipped cream alternative — the beloved Cool Whip that now dominates grocery store freezers.

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Numbers Don't Lie

Numbers Don't Lie

Year inventor William A. Mitchell was born in Raymond, Minnesota

1911

Approximate number of inventions Mitchell patented during his career

70

Percent of the RDA for vitamin C in one serving of Tang

100

Year astronaut Buzz Aldrin publicly admitted that he hated Tang

2013

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One state’s coastline is longer than all other states’ combined.

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Cats sleep around 15 hours per day.

Pop Rocks were originally named ______.

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Pop Rocks were originally named Gasified Confection.

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Pop Rocks were briefly discontinued because of safety concerns stemming from a notorious urban legend.

Pop Rocks are known as a totally rad treat of the 1980s, but the candy’s first release in the 1970s was a dud. General Foods initially released the candy in 1975, hoping to capitalize on its innovative appeal. But soon after the confection hit stores, rumors began to spread that it was dangerous, even deadly — supposedly, the carbon dioxide that caused the miniature explosions could mix with carbonated soda and cause children’s stomachs to explode. General Foods and inventor William Mitchell tried to combat the unfounded stories with newspaper ads, a telephone hotline, and by sending letters to 50,000 school principals around the U.S. But amid persistent rumors and slumping sales, General Foods stopped marketing the candy and sold the brand to Kraft in 1985, who marketed it as “Action Candy” — though today’s sweet tooths can once again find the candy under its original name.

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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