Fact-based Odd Places
The Giant Eye in the Sahara Is Not a Crater
From space, a bull's-eye about 40 kilometres wide stares up out of the desert in Mauritania, and the way it formed is slower and stranger than any falling rock from the sky.
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Fact-based Cosmic Questions
Why Is the Sky Blue but the Sunset Orange?
The same sky and the same sunlight give us a blue afternoon and an orange evening, and the difference comes down to how tiny air molecules toss light around.
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 Weird Facts
A Fluffy White Cloud Weighs About as Much as a Hundred Elephants
The small cumulus drifting over your garden is carrying roughly five hundred tonnes of water, and it stays up there for a reason that has nothing to do with being light.
Fact-based Nature Did It First
A Lotus Leaf Taught Paint How to Wash Itself
A lotus leaf is far too bumpy for dirt to hold on to, and once a microscope explained why, the same trick went onto building walls, fabrics and glass.
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 Do We Get Hiccups?
Almost everyone gets hiccups, yet nobody is sure why the reflex exists, and the best clues come from unborn babies and tadpoles.
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 Weird Facts
Some Bamboo Can Grow Almost a Metre in a Single Day
Certain bamboos have been measured growing about 91 centimetres in 24 hours, roughly a millimetre every ninety seconds, which is fast enough that you could almost watch it happen.