Fact-based Cosmic Questions
Why Can Nobody Remember Being a Baby?
You learned to walk, talk and recognise your family in your first years of life, and yet you cannot recall a single moment of it, which is a very strange thing for a brain to do.
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Cosmic Questions
Tiny ponderings about a very big universe.
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Fact-based Cosmic Questions
Why Does Ice Cream Give You Brain Freeze?
One enthusiastic spoonful too many and a sharp ache shoots into your forehead, and it turns out the pain has more to do with warm blood rushing in than with anything freezing.
Fact-based Cosmic Questions
Why Does Your Stomach Rumble?
That loud growl in a silent room is not really your stomach complaining about lunch, but your gut running a cleaning cycle through pipes that happen to be empty and echoey.
Fact-based Cosmic Questions
Why Does the Moon Look Bigger Near the Horizon?
A rising full moon can look enormous, yet a camera shows it is no wider than when it rides high in the sky, which means the giant moon is being built inside your head.
Fact-based Cosmic Questions
Why Do Your Fingers Wrinkle in the Bath?
It looks like your skin has simply soaked up too much water, but the wrinkles are made on purpose by your nervous system, and they may be there to help you hold on.
Fact-based Cosmic Questions
Why Do We Get Goosebumps?
A cold breeze, a scary film and a favourite song can all raise the same tiny bumps on your arms, which is a lot of effort for hair we barely have.
Fact-based Cosmic Questions
Why Do Onions Make You Cry?
An onion sitting on the counter is perfectly harmless, but the moment a knife goes in it starts building a tiny chemical weapon aimed straight at your eyes.
Fact-based Cosmic Questions
Why Can't You Tickle Yourself?
The same finger that makes a friend squeal does nothing at all on your own ribs, because a part of your brain reads the script before the tickle arrives.
Fact-based Cosmic Questions
Why Does Your Own Voice Sound So Strange on a Recording?
Hearing yourself played back is like meeting a stranger who has borrowed your words, and part of the reason is that you have spent your whole life listening from inside your own head.
Fact-based Cosmic Questions
Why Is the Other Side of the Pillow Always Cooler?
Flipping your pillow to the cool side is the smallest holiday there is, and the reason it works is a lovely bit of physics hiding in the fluff.