Made with timber from Koki msoav trees and using traditional methods that go back to when dragon boats first originated more than 2, years ago, the boat measured feet and 5 inches, which is nearly as long as the height of the Statue of Liberty. If you've ever seen a "face" in the features of a building or the wood grain of a door, you've experienced pareidolia: the illusion of seeing facial features in inanimate objects. As it turns out, humans aren't the only ones who have this ability.
Rhesus monkeys do, too. According to one study published in Current Biology , they act similarly to human infants presented with a picture of, for example, a fruit or vegetable that appears to have a face. Scientists hypothesize that this ability helps monkeys—just as it helped our human ancestors—detect potential hidden dangers. America has a bit of a reputation as the land of frivolous lawsuits, and it's hard to argue when you hear about cases like this one.
In , a California woman sued Quaker Oats, the makers of Cap'n Crunch's Crunchberry cereal, for tricking her into believing that it contained real fruit. There is a law stating that a company's advertising can't be "likely to deceive a reasonable consumer.
The court ruled that, as "crunchberries" aren't real and since the box lists the ingredients, the cereal packaging wasn't deceptive. While you might assume that you'd need your native tongue to fully comprehend all aspects of a problem, one study published in Psychological Science found that thinking it over in a different language might actually improve your rationality.
Using a non-native language , no matter what it is, requires you to be deliberate in your word choice and less reactive to emotionally charged words, giving you a more accurate ability to perceive risk. The effect even extended to bets, with participants who considered the rationality of the bet in a second language more likely to take the more profitable option.
Dog owners often encounter a number of unusual odors emanating from their beloved pets, but there's one, in particular, that's described as smelling like "corn chips or old popcorn. Regular bathing and trimming fur between your dog's foot pads will cut down on foot sweatiness and thus that weird corn chip odor.
The odds of picking the correct numbers in the Mega Millions are one in For comparison, your odds of winning an Olympic gold medal are just 1 in ,, according to Forbes. For anyone under 60, the American flag has always had the same iconic design: 50 stars and 13 stripes. However, the United States didn't include 50 states until Hawaii joined in , necessitating a new flag design. High schooler Robert G. Heft submitted such a design as part of a class assignment, and though he wasn't the only one to suggest the alternating rows of five and six stars, he was the only one who actually sent in a prototype.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower chose Heft's flag to become the official national symbol—but his teacher only gave it a B-. This urban legend even had Ann Landers urging couples not to give out rice to throw at their weddings, asserting it was dangerous for birds to eat.
The rumor states that uncooked rice, particularly instant rice, will expand in birds' stomachs, killing them. However, rice must be boiled before it can expand, and birds eat plenty of uncooked, wild rice anyway, according to Snopes. So, rice won't harm birds, but it might harm your wedding guests if they slip and fall, and the venue might charge you extra for the difficult cleanup.
They trained 37 such cats, fastening messages to their collars in waterproof bags and sending them throughout the city, The New York Times reported. It worked about as well as you'd expect: The fastest cat delivered its cargo in five hours, but most took a full day to reach their destinations.
There's a reason we don't use Kitty Express. There's more protection for spectators these days, but every baseball fan knows there's still a small chance of a foul ball flying your way. During one Phillies-Giants game in , Richie Ashburn fouled off a ball into the stands that smacked Alice Roth right in the face, breaking her nose.
As the medics led her out in the stands, Ashburn hit another foul ball off the very next pitch—hitting Roth once again, in the leg this time. Fortunately, she recovered, and the Phillies treated her and her family, per reports, "like royalty.
However, the reigning experts in mummy preservation lived in France, and the Egyptian authorities worried that the Europeans would simply keep the mummy.
Anyone who's visited the British Museum knows this isn't an idle fear. To give Ramses II some legal protection, Egyptian authorities issued him a passport , listing his occupation as "King deceased. Lily pads seem like delicate things, floating across the surface of the water, and many of them are. Even the Victoria amazonica , the world's largest lily pad , is very susceptible to puncture if you drop a sharp object into it.
However, because of the leaves' spectacular size—up to 3 meters, or 9. In this hypothetical situation, you'd need to lay a sheet of plywood across it first, but then you could set a young child on it as though it were an inflatable raft. While most of us would interpret the word "unfriend" as a verb meant to indicate that someone has severed an internet relationship , the word itself was first used in the s to describe someone who was no longer a friend.
By the 17th century, however, "unfriend" had become a verb that meant essentially the same thing it does today, minus the internet. In , Thomas Fuller wrote : "I hope, sir, that we are not mutually un-friended by this difference which hath happened betwixt us. If they put it in a movie, you'd never believe it: Robert Todd Lincoln was saved from a gruesome train accident by the brother of the man who would later assassinate his father. Lincoln the younger, traveling to D.
He pressed himself against the train to let other people pass, but when the train began to move, he fell between the train and the platform. He might have been squashed if not for then-famous stage actor Edwin Booth , who pulled Lincoln up by the collar and back onto the platform. Though you may experience some difficulty wrestling it away from your cat , catnip contains an essential oil that is 10 times better at repelling mosquitos than the active ingredient in commercial bug repellent.
At high doses, catnip repels 49 to 59 percent of mosquitos, while DEET diethyltoluamide repels only about 10 percent at the same dose.
The problem with catnip oil, or nepetalactone, is that it loses potency quickly and is difficult to grow commercially. But researchers at Rutgers University are currently trying to develop new strains of the plant to fix these issues and potentially create a better bug spray. The current recommended vaccine schedule for children includes 14 different vaccines spread out over childhood and longer, in some cases. A single scientist named Maurice Ralph Hilleman is responsible for an astonishing 8 of those 14 vaccines: measles, mumps, hepatitis A and B, chickenpox, meningitis, pneumonia, and a strain of bacteria called Haemophilus influenzae.
He also discovered that chlamydia was caused by a bacterium, not a virus. You've probably never heard his name, but he's likely saved the lives of more children than any other single person in history.
If you're an undergraduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, you've worked hard to get there, and you finally have a chance to fulfill your dream: becoming a pirate. Though the university doesn't offer a full major in piracy, if you pass courses in sailing, fencing, pistols, and archery, you can receive a certificate asserting your status as a scourge of the high seas. While the status was unofficial for nearly as long as the school has offered all the classes, MIT made it official in , offering documentation to aspiring Anne Bonnys and Edward Teaches.
No matter how bad you are at geography, you'll be able to identify Western Australia's Hillier Lake by sight. That's because the water in the lake is an unmistakable pink. Scientists aren't entirely sure why it's pink, but they suspect that a combination of microalgae in the water and bacteria in the salt crust form the color.
Though the lake is too salty to support any life bigger than algae, it's safe to swim in. But you have to be quite a dedicated swimmer, because the island is only accessible by airplane or cruise ship. Before they became part of punk and goth fashion in the s , dog collars with protruding spikes actually served an important purpose. Though the Ancient Egyptians were the first to put collars on dogs for domestication purposes, Ancient Greeks added the spikes.
They would put these spiked collars on their herding dogs before sending them out into the fields so that any attacking wolves couldn't get a hold of their necks or throats. So, the spikes protected the dog, and the dog protected the sheep.
Though it seems inconceivable that any contemporary business could operate without the aid of computers, this practice has barely been around for 60 years. It was actually an English tea shop called J. The LEO Lyons Electronic Office , unveiled in , was the size of a large room and could calculate sales, invoices, supplies, orders, and payroll. It's rather remarkable that the owner of a restaurant and catering business with no electronics experience had the foresight to invest in such an innovative machine.
Power plants have a surprising but extremely numerous marine opponent: jellyfish. Nuclear, gas, and wind plants alike require a large amount of water to cool their machinery, and the only source for that much water is the ocean. However, jellyfish blooms around oil platforms and wind farms in the ocean mean that sea water isn't the only thing the cooling pipes are pulling in. Power plants in Scotland, Sweden, Japan, the Philippines, Israel, and the United States have all experienced jellyfish-related clogs in the last few years.
Um, why? Well, it can't hurt. Before refrigerators, some Europeans and Americans practiced the tradition of once a year sticking their linens in their pantry or larder as a way of inviting wealth and good luck to the home.
This superstition has updated with the times, so now placing your pillow atop your fridge on the designated day each year May 29th should fulfill the requirement.
If you have the space, you could also try cramming the pillow in your fridge, though we have yet to determine whether or not this brings any extra luck. The scientific name for the branching, tree-like shape of a lightning bolt is a Lichtenberg figure , a pattern that can be found wherever electricity discharges through non-conductive matter. Sometimes, this pattern imprints on insulating materials like acrylic or wood, but it can also form on human skin. Some people who have been struck by lightning develop a rash in the shape of a tree where the bolt hit, bursting capillaries in the path of the electricity.
Though the rash will fade, the person will bear the lightning's signature on their skin for good. So that whole Harry Potter lightning-bolt forehead thing was actually based in science! Though many of us associate all things tea with the British, the portable tea bag was a purely American invention. Before , tea only came in loose leaf form and needed to be steeped in a metal diffuser to brew.
However, when a New York tea merchant sent out samples of his tea in small silk bags , some of his customers assumed that the bag could take the place of the diffuser—so they just dunked the whole thing in boiling water. The Brits turned up their noses at this American practice—until after World War II, when the portability factor won them over. Since it refracts sunlight, you can only use this Moser lamp named for its creator, Alfredo Moser during the day, but it can be a boon for simple homes without electricity.
All you need to do is fill a 2-liter plastic bottle with water, and add a little bleach to prevent algae from growing. You then drill a hole in your roof to access sunlight, but if you insert the bottle and then seal the opening, the room below will get about 60 watts of illumination while the sun is out. In , a Michigan man named Darryl See was walking along a set of train tracks, listening to music so loud that he didn't hear the oncoming train.
The Chicago-bound train hit See straight-on at mph, throwing him 20 feet, breaking bones, and crushing some of his vertebrae. Amazingly, though, he survived, needing surgery only to put a plate in his neck. The year-old reportedly remembers nothing about the accident, and lifelong train engineers claim they've never seen anyone survive this kind of accident before. Do communities with high numbers of immigrants have higher rates of violent crime? Did Russia interfere in the U.
Predictably, expert opinion regarding such matters is treated by partisan media as though evidence is itself inherently partisan. Denialist phenomena are many and varied, but the story behind them is, ultimately, quite simple. Human cognition is inseparable from the unconscious emotional responses that go with it. Under the right conditions, universal human traits like in-group favoritism, existential anxiety and a desire for stability and control combine into a toxic, system-justifying identity politics.
When group interests, creeds, or dogmas are threatened by unwelcome factual information, biased thinking becomes denial. And unfortunately these facts about human nature can be manipulated for political ends. This picture is a bit grim, because it suggests that facts alone have limited power to resolve politicized issues like climate change or immigration policy.
But properly understanding the phenomenon of denial is surely a crucial first step to addressing it. See Subscription Options. Discover World-Changing Science. Facts are so last century. Get smart. Sign up for our email newsletter. Sign Up. Read More Previous. Support science journalism. Knowledge awaits. See Subscription Options Already a subscriber?
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