Fact-based Cosmic Questions
Do Plants Get Bored?
A houseplant spends its life in one pot, but it is far from idle: plants sense light, gravity and even touch, and can switch on touch-response genes within minutes.
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Fact-based Weird Facts
Snow Falls in the Sahara
At the desert's edge in Algeria, snow has settled on the dunes more than once, and NASA satellites have photographed it from space.
Fiction Animal News — Fiction
Badger Denies Involvement in Missing Garden Gnome
The gnome went from the rockery on Tuesday night. The badger was in the garden on Tuesday night. The badger describes this as a coincidence of a very ordinary kind.
Fact-based Weird Facts
Cows Have Best Friends
Cows build preferred relationships, groom the herd-mates who groomed them, and calves raised with a companion do better at learning.
Fiction Made-Up Words
Bramblewait
(n.) The pause with your hand already in the hedge, spent deciding that the blackberry you can reach is not the one you deserve.
Fiction Animal News — Fiction
Snail Completes Six-Metre Crossing, Declines to Comment
Four days, one flagstone path, sixteen hours under a leaf — and at the finish the snail had nothing to say to the assembled woodlice.
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 Weird Facts
That Fresh Rain Smell? You're Actually Sniffing Bacteria
The earthy smell of rain has a name, petrichor, and a key ingredient is geosmin, made by soil bacteria, which the human nose can detect at about one hundred parts per trillion.
Fact-based Weird Facts
Polar Bears Are Not Actually White — They're Transparent
Polar bear fur has no white pigment at all: the guard hairs are transparent and hollow, the white comes from scattered light, and the skin underneath is black.