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.
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Fact-based Kitchen Science
Why a Bag of Ice and Salt Can Turn Milk Into Ice Cream
Ice on its own is not cold enough to freeze ice cream, but add a few handfuls of salt and the mixture drops far below freezing, all because salt gets in the way of water trying to become ice.
Fact-based Kitchen Science
Why a Pot of Pasta Boils Over When a Pot of Water Never Does
Plain water can bubble away for an hour and stay politely in its pot, but drop in some pasta and a white foam climbs the sides, because starch turns ordinary bubbles into a stretchy blanket.
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 Do We Blow on Food That Has Already Gone Cold?
Blowing really does cool hot food, through convection and evaporation. On soup that is already lukewarm, it does almost nothing, and we do it anyway.
Fact-based Weird Facts
Crush a Wintergreen Mint in the Dark and It Sparks
Bite a hard wintergreen sweet in a pitch-dark room and your mouth will flash blue — a real, repeatable phenomenon with a properly serious name.
Fact-based Weird Facts
There Is No Such Thing as a Raw Cashew
The bag says raw, the shop says raw, and it is not raw — because the shell it came out of holds an oil that irritates skin much like poison ivy does.
Fact-based Cosmic Questions
Why Does a Sandwich Taste Better When Someone Else Makes It?
You used the same bread, the same butter and the same cheese, and theirs is still unmistakably better, which suggests the flavour is not kept in the sandwich.
Fact-based Weird Facts
Why Honey Keeps Almost Forever
Honey is too dry, too acidic and too sugary for most microbes to survive in, which is why a jar at the back of the cupboard is almost always still good.