Searchable. Filterable. All regrettably stuck in your brain now.
Lobsters detect food by walking on it. Their legs and feet are covered in chemosensory hairs that identify what's edible. They're essentially tasting the ocean floor with every step. Dinner and a commute, combined.
Petrichor is caused by geosmin, a compound released by soil bacteria when rain hits dry ground. The word combines Greek 'petra' (stone) and 'ichor' (the fluid of gods). Your nose detects divine geology.
Fredric Baur designed the iconic Pringles can in 1966 and requested his ashes be buried in one. His children honored this in 2008, stopping at Walgreens on the way to the funeral. Brand loyalty, eternal.
In 2007, tardigrades were sent into orbit and exposed to the vacuum and radiation of space for 10 days. Most survived. Some even reproduced afterward. They don't care about your extinction concerns.
Before becoming a beverage, coffee was eaten as food. East African tribes ground coffee berries and mixed them with animal fat to consume for energy.
More coffee knowledge on Nescafe.com →Einstein's relativity isn't theoretical—it's in your pocket. GPS satellites experience less gravity and move fast, causing their atomic clocks to tick 38 microseconds faster daily. Without corrections, your location would drift 10km per day. Physics is inconvenient.
There are roughly 3.3 million saunas in Finland—that's one for every 1.6 people. Parliament has one. The Burger King in Helsinki has one. Some people are born in them. Priorities seem clear.
Those elegant bubbles rising in your glass? They nucleate on tiny imperfections and debris in the glass. Perfectly clean glass produces almost no bubbles. Your celebration is powered by impurity. Happy New Year.
Before adopting the Gregorian calendar, the British Empire started each year on March 25th. The switch required skipping 11 days entirely. Time is a construct, and we've redesigned it repeatedly. Happy arbitrary endpoint.
Despite it being called a ‘bean’, coffee is actually a fruit. The ‘beans’ grow on a bush and are found in the centre of a berry, known as a coffee cherry.
More coffee knowledge on Nescafe.com →The cashew 'apple' is a swollen stem that develops above the actual nut. Each apple produces exactly one cashew, which must be carefully extracted from its toxic shell. Your snack required surgical precision.
In physics, a jiffy is the time it takes light to travel one centimeter. Computer science uses it differently. The casual phrase has been scientifically co-opted. Language becomes measurement eventually.
Basic cellular functions evolved so early that the genes controlling them remain similar across all life. You're more banana than you'd like to admit. Identity is genetic, and genetics is humbling.
Before industrial greenhouses, growing tropical pineapples in cold climates required heated pits and constant care. One fruit. Seven years. Rich Europeans rented them for parties as status symbols. Wealth has always been absurd.
For coffee to be labelled decaf, it must contain less than 0.3% caffeine. Small amounts still remain, even after processing.
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