Bluetooth is such an ordinary part of modern life that its name barely sounds strange anymore. We tap an icon and headphones connect to a phone, a keyboard finds a computer, or a car starts playing music wirelessly. But judged as the name o...
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Pour cornflakes into a bowl. Add cold milk. Pick up a spoon. You have made breakfast — unless, according to one of the internet’s most persistent culinary arguments, you have accidentally ma...
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It is one of those rules that millions of Americans seem to remember learning without remembering who taught it: you cannot drive a car barefoot. Maybe a parent said it. Maybe a driving inst...
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Look down at almost any laptop, desktop keyboard or smartphone in the English-speaking world and the first six letters are the same: Q-W-E-R-T-Y. The arrangement feels so inevitable that it...
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Dog owners become experts in noticing small mysteries. One week the mystery is a dog that seems unable to stop licking its front paws. The next it is the same animal stepping onto the lawn a...
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Few breakfast foods come with a better internet story than Corn Flakes. According to the version repeated across social media, Dr. John Harvey Kellogg invented the famously plain cereal in t...
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You are walking past a town hall, courthouse, school or government building when something looks slightly wrong: the flag is not at the top of its pole. It is hanging lower, leaving an unmis...
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Few animals have contributed to modern medicine in a way quite as improbable as the horseshoe crab. It looks prehistoric because, in evolutionary terms, it is. Horseshoe-crab relatives were...
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Every email address contains a tiny piece of computing history. Between a person's name and the domain sits a character that most of us type without thinking: @.It seems inevitable now. We r...
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Open the Voynich Manuscript and almost everything about it looks tantalizingly close to comprehension. Lines of neat handwriting run from left to right. Words are separated by spaces. Paragr...
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