Can’t opener
The first tin cans of food were manufactured around 1813. The first can openers arrived more than thirty years later.
Category: Sciences
Cuckoo bees and cuckoo fish
Cuckoos are not the only animal to have their young raised by other species. Bees, wasps, and fish also exhibit the same parasitic behaviour.
The Thing in the polar night
Every year in late February and early March, at the South Pole research station, the last flight leaves and the last sun sets. Neither will return for months. How do you mark such an occasion? With a horror film festival, of course.
Australian tablespoons
If you’re using an Australian recipe book, watch out for the tablespoon, or your baking will turn out all wrong.
Boring numbers
What is the smallest boring number? There’s no such thing, because the title of smallest boring number automatically makes that number interesting.
Light bulb conspiracy
In 1925, staff from Osram, General Electric, Philips, and others met in Switzerland to artificially fix the life expectancy of light bulbs worldwide. For the next 14 years, the Phoebus cartel controlled the world supply of light.
Earworm cure
An earworm is a piece of repetitive memorable music that gets stuck in your head. How do you cure it? Chew gum.
Smelly code
In computer programming, how do you know when a program is going bad? First, it begins to smell.
Metric martians
The Mars Climate Orbiter space probe cost 327 million US dollars – and it crashed because of a mix-up between the metric and imperial systems.
Learned pig
Before television, people had to make their own fun. So they trained pigs to read.
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.
Tiniest car
The Peel P50, manufactured in the Isle of Man, is the smallest car ever to go into mass production. It’s really, really small.
Original cabbage
What’s your favourite green vegetable? Kale? Broccoli? Cabbage – regular, red, or savoy? Brussels sprouts? Cauliflower? Trick question. They’re all the same species.
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 queen’s duck
Have you ever had a boss who just had to contribute to your project in order to prove their worth? There’s an easy way to counteract that: just add a duck.
The Generalist Academy 