Fact-based Cosmic Questions
Why Does the Moon Always Show Us the Same Face?
The Moon does spin, but exactly once for every trip round the Earth, so one side always faces us, and the side we never see is not dark at all.
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Fact-based Cosmic Questions
Why Does Déjà Vu Feel So Real?
That sudden certainty that you have lived this exact moment before is one of the strangest tricks a healthy brain plays, and psychologists have found a way to switch it on in the lab.
Fact-based Cosmic Questions
Can You Hear Whether Water Is Hot or Cold?
With your back turned you can usually tell a hot pour from a cold one, and the tidy explanation everybody repeats may have the whole thing the wrong way round.
Fact-based Cosmic Questions
Why Do Songs Get Stuck in Your Head?
Nine in ten of us get a tune stuck on repeat at least once a week, and researchers have worked out which songs do it, when they strike, and why a stick of gum can help.
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.
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 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.