Mad honey
Honey takes on the chemical properties of nectar gathered by bees. This fact turns out to be quite useful if you’re fighting the ancient Romans.
Freud’s dream
Sigmund Freud’s famous work The Interpretation of Dreams began with a single dream he had on the night of July 23, 1895.
Human hamster
What does the golden hamster have to do with human fertility tests?
Lunar quarantine
When the Apollo 11 astronauts arrived back on Earth, no-one knew whether they were contaminated with secret space viruses or not – so the astronauts stayed in an Airstream trailer under quarantine for three weeks.
Boiling saliva
There is a point not more than 20km away from you right now where your normal body temperature is enough to boil the saliva off your tongue and the moisture out of your lungs.
Bicycle Day
The creator of LSD, Albert Hofmann, first purposefully took a dose on April 19, 1943. Unfortunately, he took twelve times too much and then went for a bicycle ride.
Rainbow fluids
A common migraine medication has an uncommon side-effect: it can turn blood green. People with urinary catheters can sometimes produce purple pee.
Camera pill
There’s a pill you can swallow with a little camera inside. It’s great for identifying gastrointestinal damage, and usually comes out the other end in a day or two. Usually.
I ate a glass piano
Princess Alexandra of Bavaria was a noted author and translator in the mid-19th century. She also firmly believed that as a young child she had swallowed a grand piano made of glass.
Earworm cure
An earworm is a piece of repetitive memorable music that gets stuck in your head. How do you cure it? Chew gum.
Gut brains
The human gastrointestinal tract has half a billion neurons embedded in its lining. Often described as the “second brain,” it can act and react autonomously, and even has its own supply of serotonin and dopamine.
Handed, footed, eyed
Everyone is born either left- or right-handed (or, rarely, mixed-handed or ambidextrous). But everyone also has a dominant foot, and a dominant eye.
Placebo surgery
When trialling a new medicine, it’s standard practice to test it against a placebo medicine. But what do you do if you’re trialling a new surgery instead?
The king, the twins, and coffee vs. tea
King Gustav III of Sweden was so convinced that coffee was bad for you that he enlisted two criminal twins to prove his case scientifically.
Kidney stone paradox
Statistics are tricky. Consider this: of two treatments for kidney stones, Treatment A is better on average for large stones and small stones. But consider all stones together and Treatment B is better. This is Simpson’s paradox.
