Next time you go to Titan—one of Saturn’s moons—remember this cool factoid: "The atmosphere is so thick and the gravity so low that humans could fly through it by flapping ‘wings’ attached to their arms" as pointed out in Robert Zubrin’s Entering Space: Creating a Spacefaring Civilization. How awesome would that be?
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Our obsession with hacking life to become more efficient beings of human knows no end. We bookmark links that promise to make picnicking more enjoyable, we scour the internet for kitchen tricks and watch endless videos that promise anywhere from 7 to 101 life changing tips. But how often do these life hacks actually stick? 1 out of every 100? Every thousand? It’s like sifting for gold.
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We’re wasteful people. Maybe not you and maybe not me but definitely "we". Some of us try to live as consciously as possible but it hardly matters when the rest of us are inconsiderate and lazy. The United States wastes about $165 billion in food every year. Half of the food produced in the US is wasted between the farm and the fork! This video reveals the numbers behind the food we waste. It’s pretty rough and it doesn’t get much better. [Visual.ly via FoodBeast]
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Staring at the periodic table of elements was pretty much all I did in science classes but I learned absolutely nothing from it other than Bromine and Barium (but that’s more because of a Google search on Breaking Bad). Anyways! Elements on that periodic table aren’t all created equal. Especially Astatine (At). That’s pretty much the hardest thing to find anywhere.
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Being an enlightened individual means understanding basic scientific information about how the world works. Sure, we have teachers and parents there to fill our brains with knowledge, but the sad truth is that there are certain facts that take on a life of their own as they pass from ear to ear, eventually etching themselves into our collective brain-mass in twisted forms that are, well, just plain wrong.
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Traveling this summer? Don’t forget to pack the suntan lotion. And check in to your flight online. And check if your flight is delayed using your flight number. Speaking of, how the hell do airplanes come up with flight numbers? Apparently there’s a system! Like did you know flights that go east or north are usually given even numbers while west and south flights have odd flight numbers.
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When the App Store was fresh and new, you’d see different apps pop up in the Top Apps list. Those Top Apps lists were actually usable. But ever since Angry Birds and Fruit Ninja and whatever else decided to squat down, it’s the same damn apps over and over. So how popular does an app have to be to crack these lists?
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It’s 2013. We should all know that there are clear differences between calling something a nerd and calling someone a geek. This is a fact! Slackpropagation created this nifty graph that shows the dividing line on what defines a geek and what defines a nerd. The easiest way to tell the difference? Geeks are fans of a certain subject, nerds are practitioners of that subject. But fret not, geeks can be nerds and nerds can be geeks too!
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You drink martinis and manhattans and mint juleps and pina coladas and tom collins and hell, so much more. Have you ever stepped back and wonder how these cocktails were named? Mental Floss’ resident genius John Green shares the origin stories of 26 different cocktails so you can learn some. Warning: he’s really good at this rapid fire brain melting session
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As small businesses grow into large corporations that have to deal with mergers and hostile takeovers, their identities and branding similarly grow, evolve, and often end up being a mish-mash of various names which are then shrunk into acronyms and initialisms to make them easier to remember. A similar thing is done for companies named after their founders, so the folks at Mental Floss did their homework and discovered what several popular acronyms actually stand for. Would Allen & Wright root beer really taste the same? [YouTube via Tastefully Offensive] More »
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