“Welcome to Crazy Queries of the Cosmos”! Alright alright enough. Why do bottles of
water have grooves and ones with soft drinks have 5 rounded bumps on the bottom? What do
handshakes mean and where did they come from? And more answers to questions we all keep
googling for no apparently good reason: Here, let’s save you some time!
Soft-drink bottles are made of PET polymer, which is strong and can hold a ton of pressure.
The carbonated beverage inside tends to swell, and a flat bottom would curve outwards, which
wouldn’t let the bottle stand. So, 5 rounded bumps have been carefully engineered to solve
that problem.
Water bottles are made of thinner plastic. The grooves allow bottles to be pressed in
a way that they’ll become useless and unable to be refilled and resold. That’s why it’s
recommended to squash the bottle vertically to dispose of it properly.
In 2016 a law was passed in France forbidding supermarkets from wasting food. They either
turn it into compost, feed the animals, or send it to charities.
The Library of Congress in the US constantly receives requests for books that don’t even
exist. That’s because people see the books in the movies and think they’re real.
Marie Curie was the first person to win 2 Nobel prizes and one of two people to get
them in two separate fields: physics and chemistry.
There are thousands of news stories published every day. But on the 18th of April 1930,
absolutely nothing happened. BBC announced there had been no news that day and they played
piano music instead. What a great idea! Think we should go back to that sometimes? Tell
me in the comments.
Continents never stop moving. Right now, we’re headed towards a new supercontinent formation,
but it won’t happen soon. They’re moving slower than your nails are growing.
Avocadoes don’t ripen while they’re on trees. So, farmers store them on branches
for up to 8 months.
Salvador Dali avoided paying the tabs by drawing on the checks. His guess was that restaurants
would never cash out such a treasured art piece, and he was correct.
The difference between jam and jelly is that in jelly, the fruit comes as fruit juice with
smooth texture, while in jam, the fruit is in the form of pulp.
Contrary to popular belief, the Great Wall of China can’t be seen from space with an
unaided eye.
Handshakes comes from the ancient times of sword fights. Warriors wore their sword on
their left side, and they’d use their right hand to draw it out. Shaking hands became
an indication that one had peaceful intentions and wouldn’t use their right arm to draw
out the sword.
Pasta was considered a dish for the wealthy during renaissance, and a single strand of
spaghetti is called a spaghetto. True.
Even though pandas love munching on bamboo, their closest relatives are carnivores. During
their evolution, they stopped eating meat and their meat liking receptors became non-functional.
Which reminds me…
When giant pandas are born, they’re as big as small rats. Just some Panda Facts.
While buzzing around, bees use the sun as a fixed reference point and despite their
tiny brain, they can do minimal math and understand the concept of zero.
According to fossil records, beavers used to roam the Earth during the ice age and they
were bigger than bears. Those were called giant beavers, (really?) and the last time
they shared a common ancestor with the beavers we know today was 24 million years ago. I
wasn’t around then.
The infamous baked beans aren’t actually baked, they’re stewed. They’re called
baked beans because centuries ago, they were dried out, soaked overnight, simmered and
then slowly baked in a ceramic beanpot.
Hummingbirds are the only birds that fly backwards, they have no sense of smell, and they weigh
less than a sheet of paper.
Fish also get coughs, but not like humans. It happens when their ventilation cycle gets
interrupted, like when they want to clean their gills.
Contrary to popular belief, babies can’t breathe and swallow at the same time. But
they’re born with an advanced instinct that allows them to alternate swallowing and breathing
so fast that it looks like they can do it. Though, as they grow older, that ability disappears.
People who lack iron in their system can crave things that aren’t food – these could
be ice, clay, or chalk.
The anonymous artist Banksy once sold a $1.4 million painting that self-destructed as soon
as it was sold during an auction. The painting was shredded to pieces, and the collector
still wanted it.
When Play-Doh first came out, it was intended to be a wallpaper cleaner, it wasn’t until
a year later that it came out as a toy.
There’s an official league for rock, paper, scissors where people from all over the world
can participate in tournaments and win prizes. Well, at least if they make it to the finals.
There’s a hummingbird species that’s so small, people mistake it for an insect. It’s
as big as a golf ball, and it’s the smallest bird on the planet.
Statistics say, you’re more likely to win an Olympic gold medal without any training
than winning the lottery jackpot. Your chances of winning the medal are 1 in 9 million, and
1 in 14 million for the lottery. And you’re right, none of those are good odds.
The average waiter takes 22,000 steps per day, and the average nurse takes 16,000. Someone
who works in an office walks only 7,000 steps a day. Hey I’m behind this microphone all
day, so I take about – hmmm -- no steps.
Only 15% of the Sahara Desert consists of sand. The other 85% is a luxurious oasis --- nah
– it’s is made of stone and gravel.
If your body could survive in lava, you wouldn’t be able to sink into it. Lava is incredibly
dense and if you fell into a volcano you would float on its surface, looking rather like
a charred marshmallow. In fact, if you tried to walk on lava, it’s safe to say that you’d
be incredibly dense too, and not in a good way. So let’s move on…
The word “orange” refers to the fruit, not the color. The shade wasn’t mentioned
until people started talking about the juicy fruit in the 1300s. “Orange” you glad
to know that? Yes, that’s an old joke.
95% of the jellyfish’s body consists of water, and the rest is solid matter. That
means if you leave a jellyfish in the sun, it will evaporate.
Water bottles have an expiration date not because the water goes bad, but because that’s
the time the plastic will begin to disintegrate into the water.
London Taxi drivers must take a knowledge test in which they have to memorize 60,000
streets and 100,000 places within 6 miles around Charing Cross. It takes them 2 – 4
years to get their license.
The Hubble space telescope consumes a little more power per minute than an average kettle.
Researchers have found that your intestine replaces its lining every 5 to 7 days. I have
nothing to add to that.
The acid in your stomach is so strong that it can dissolve metal, and you have enough
iron in your body to produce a large nail. So aren’t you something?
Earthquakes used to be measured on the Richter Scale. But now the magnitude scale is more
accurate because it calculates the tremor based on the energy it disperses. Anything
below the 2.0 or even 3.0 magnitude will likely go unnoticed.
It took more than 10 years to complete the International Space Station and 40 flights
to assemble it. It was completed in 2011, though new changes are added all the time.
Astronauts at the International Space Station spend 2 hours every day working out to prevent
muscle loss – since they’re floating in zero gravity the rest of the day.
It’s believed that Picasso produced more than 50,000 unique pieces of artwork. Around
1,000 of them were believed to be stolen and art detectives are on the hunt for them.
The velociraptors that were around more than 70 million years ago were just a little bigger
than turkeys.
Facebook engineers were going to call the “like” button an “awesome” button
and instead of the infamous “thumbs up” they discussed of giving it a star or plus-sign
shape.
Human fingers are so sensitive that if the tip of your finger was the size of the Earth,
you’d feel the difference between a car and a house.
A hummingbird’s heart beats 1,260 times per minute. Your heart, for comparison, can
only beat around 100 times a minute, or so. Nope I wouldn’t even try to compete with
that.
There are more atoms in a shot-glass of water, than glasses of water in the Earth’s oceans.
And finally, there’s this: Neptune was first drawn by Galileo in 1613 when he mistook it
for a star. In 1846, it was discovered through calculations by three independent scientists.
That led to wide dispute on who discovered it first since it couldn’t be seen without
a telescope. Good luck!