Every year, Britons use enough wrapping paper to wrap the Moon

According to waste statistics, the United Kingdom uses approximately 226,800 miles of wrapping paper every Christmas. The Moon's circumference is about 6,786 miles. That means Britons consume enough wrapping paper annually to wrap the Moon more than 33 times over. Most of th…

The palm trees in Los Angeles are the result of a job-creation scheme in the 1930s

Los Angeles is famous for its palm trees, but almost none are native. The iconic rows of palms, particularly along boulevards like Hollywood's Sunset Boulevard, were planted as part of a Great Depression-era jobs program. The Works Progress Administration (WPA) employed thou…

On a single day in 2018, volunteers in India planted 66 million trees

On July 2, 2018, over 1.5 million volunteers in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh planted more than 66 million tree saplings in just 24 hours. The event broke world records and was part of India's pledge to reforest 12% of its land and meet Paris Agreement goals. The chosen…

Rats with low social status drink more than those with high social status

In behavioral studies, researchers found that subordinate rats those lower in the social hierarchy consume significantly more alcohol than dominant rats. The low-status rats also showed greater anxiety and stress levels. When given the opportunity to drink, they self-medicated t…

The Hitler Youth only drank decaf coffee.

Under Nazi Germany, the Hitler Youth organization banned caffeinated coffee for its young members. The reasoning was twofold: caffeine was considered "unhealthy" for growing bodies, and Nazi leadership feared that stimulants would lead to restlessness and moral decay. …

All Olympic curling stones come from one uninhabited island 10 miles from Glasgow.

Every curling stone used at the Winter Olympics comes from Ailsa Craig, an uninhabited granite island in the Firth of Clyde, Scotland, about 10 miles off the coast of Glasgow. The island produces two unique types of granite: blue hone (for the running surface) and common green (…

The word for ‘the inside of the elbow’ is chelidon.

That small, sensitive patch of skin on the inner bend of your elbow opposite the olecranon (the bony tip) is called the chelidon (pronounced KEH-lih-don). The term comes from the Greek word chelidōn , meaning "swallow" (the bird). The name likely refers to the shape or t…

There is enough room in the human memory for 300 years of television.

Neuroscientists estimate the brain’s storage capacity at roughly 2.5 petabytes that’s about 2.5 million gigabytes. To put that in perspective, one petabyte can hold roughly 200,000 two-hour movies. A full day of TV (24 hours) compressed reasonably would take about 0.008 petabyte…

An altered state of consciousness can be achieved by staring into someone’s eyes for 10 minutes.

In a 2015 Italian psychology experiment, participants who stared into each other’s eyes for 10 uninterrupted minutes reported dissociative experiences feeling detached from time, space, and their own bodies. Some saw monsters, relatives, or their own faces morphing. The effect, …