April 30, 2024

Gray squirrels are ""scatter hoarders,"" collecting and burying one nut at a time throughout home ranges up to 7 acres in size. It's impossible for them to keep an eye on all their caches at once. Other gray squirrels, as well as other animals such as blue jays, take advantage of these widely dispersed stashes to score a free meal. By some estimates, certain squirrels may lose as much as 25 percent of their cached food to thieving members of their own species. That amounts to a lot of nuts--mature squirrels eat as much as two pounds of nuts weekly and hide thousands throughout the year, particularly in late summer and early fall.

- National Wildlife Federation (October 1, 2008)

April 29, 2024

Excalibur is the sword of King Arthur in Sir Thomas Malory's iconic work Le Morte D'Arthur published in in 1485 CE. The sword was originally introduced in Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain (1136 CE) as Caliburnus (or Caliburn) and further developed by later writers before Malory immortalized it in his work. The sword, from its first appearance, is a powerful weapon in the hands of a skilled warrior and retains that reputation in every story which features it.

- WorldHistory.org (May 17, 2017)

April 28, 2024

In 2004, the American Ornithologists’ Union split the Canada Goose into two species: Canada Goose and Cackling Goose. Once considered a Canada Goose subspecies, the Cackling Goose looks almost identical to the Canada save for its smaller size, stubbier bill, and other key distinguishing features.

- Audubon.org (December 14, 2022)

April 27, 2024

Classified ad revenue for daily papers peaked in 2000, just shy of $20 billion. By 2012, classified advertising was just $4.6 billion — a drop of 77%.

- Businessinsider.com (May 17, 2019)

April 26, 2024

A waterfall is a river or other body of water's steep fall over a rocky ledge into a plunge pool below. Waterfalls are also called cascades. The process of erosion, the wearing away of earth, plays an important part in the formation of waterfalls. Waterfalls themselves also contribute to erosion.

- National Geographic

April 25, 2024

An icon of style from Hollywood to hip-hop, the Wayfarer never stands still. Forever embraced by the next generation of culture makers, now its journey continues with AI-enhanced wearable tech. Ray-Ban Meta Wayfarer smart glasses enable you to live in the moment and share how you see the world. Listen, call, capture and livestream features are seamlessly integrated within the classic frame – so you can stay connected to the world around you.

- Ray-ban

April 24, 2024

Unsurprisingly, many flowers emit scents to aid reproduction. Some flowering plants are generalists and use their odors to entice a host of insects and birds to fertilize their flowers. Others specialize, releasing scents that only appeal to a particular insect. The Soaptree yucca, for example, emits an aroma that attracts a single, aptly named species of yucca moth. As pollinators travel from flower to flower, they collect and deposit pollen, fertilizing the plants.

- Scienceline.org (January 3, 2013)

April 23, 2024

Cursive may seem like just a different way of writing, but studies have found that it activates different neurological pathways than typing or manuscript writing. And reading cursive also activates different parts of the brain than printed text—one study found that in all cases they studied, when they presented information to the left hemisphere of the brain fewer errors occurred than when it was presented to the right hemisphere. But when reading cursive, this advantage was much smaller, indicating that the right hemisphere plays a much larger in reading cursive than in printed form.

- Mental Floss (June 10, 2019)

April 22, 2024

The average person only brushes their teeth for 45 to 70 seconds at a time when the recommended brushing time is 2 minutes each go. Even with cutting corners, the average person spends a total of 38.5 DAYS brushing their teeth over a lifetime.

- MooGooUSA.com (April 14, 2022)

April 21, 2024

Doodle dogs did not originate from a single breed of dogs; instead, they were created from crossbreeding between two different breeds. The first Doodle dog appeared in the USA in the 1980s, which was a mix between a Poodle and a Golden Retriever. They were initially bred to create hypoallergenic dogs that could be used by people with allergies. Because Poodles possess a non-shedding coat, breeders would mate them with other breeds with the hope of producing puppies that have a low shedding rate.

- BestFriendsPetCare.com

April 20, 2024

People have been assembling different combinations of instruments for thousands and thousands of years. The origins of orchestras date back to Ancient Egypt. However, only during the last 400 years have musicians begun to form groups that are known today as orchestras. During Mozart’s time, around 1770, orchestras underwent a dramatic change. Composers, for the first time, began writing for specific combinations of instruments.

- JacksonSymphony.org

April 19, 2024

Pop megastar Taylor Swift sold 2.61 million album and streaming units of "The Tortured Poets Department" during its first week of release in the U.S. Traditional album sales totaled 1.91 million in the week ending April 25 between digital download albums, CDs, cassettes and also included 859,000 vinyl sales, Billboard said, citing data from Luminate. The album generated 891.34 million on-demand official streams.

- Reuters (April 29, 2024)

April 18, 2024

Long before Dyson’s DC-07 vacuum cleaner appeared on the U.S. market in 2002, Dyson said he went through 5,127 failed prototypes before he got the bagless, cyclonic system to work properly. “You learn from failures. You don’t learn from successes,” Dyson said. “You’ve got to go through that failure to learn how to succeed. So although I had 5,126 failures, I don’t regret any of them because I learned so much from them and it got me to the final solution.” Today, Dyson’s empire is worth an estimated $4 billion, ranking him among the 300 richest people in the world.

- JonesVacuumCenter.com (January 10, 2015)

April 17, 2024

There are few things tastier for a kid than a non-alcoholic cocktail like the Shirley Temple, a refreshing concoction of grenadine and lemon-lime soda garnished with a maraschino cherry. What does the drink have to do with the child star, though? The Royal Hawaiian Resort in Waikiki, one of Temple's favorite haunts at the height of her fame, claimed to have invented the drink and named it in honor of the hotel's frequent customer during the 1930s. Like most any famous foodstuff, the Royal Hawaiian's claim of creating the drink is debated, though; Hollywood's legendary Brown Derby restaurant maintained that it invented the drink during the same time period. While the drink's origins are murky, Temple was clearly protective of the drink that shared her name. In 1988 a California company tried to market Shirley T. Sparkling Soda; the former child star took umbrage at what she felt was the misappropriation of her name and told The New York Times, "I will fight it like a tigress. All a celebrity has is their name."

- Mental Floss (April 22, 2019)

April 16, 2024

Spring was formerly referred to as lent, which was changed to springtime around the 1300s, and eventually was shortened to spring. Spring is derived from the time of year when plants begin to grow again or spring from the earth.

- 1800flowers.com

April 15, 2024

Grass blades absorb and disperse the sun’s rays and prevent the ground from absorbing and storing the sun’s radiant heat. In turn, this makes your house cooler by making the surrounding ground cooler. Grass cover can keep the ground cool at temperatures anywhere between 30 – 40 degrees Fahrenheit.

- TheGrassOutlet.com (September 26, 2017)

April 14, 2024

While it is estimated that the average US home has about 8 windows, the White House boasts a crazy 147. This is no match for the Buckingham Palace, which has approximately five times as many windows, coming in at a whopping 760!

- CC Sunscreens (January 13, 2017)

April 13, 2024

One of the most notable heralds of spring in the eastern United States is the profuse blooming of ornamental pear trees in front yards and along city streets. The Callery pear (Pyrus calleryana), and particularly its many cultivars such as ‘Bradford’, ‘Cleveland Select’, and ‘Aristocrat’, has become one of the most popular ornamental trees in North America. However, its commercial success has now become overshadowed by its tendency to spread along roadways and into natural areas through reseeding. Today this tree is considered invasive in many states, in stark contrast to how it grows in its native range in Asia.

- Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University (February 18, 2017)

April 12, 2024

In addition to that sweat, Johnson says, your body produces on average each day: 10 grams of salt, 40 grams of grease and sebum, and 10 grams of skin cells and flakes, equivalent to 2 billion skin cells. Most of that winds up on your clothes and sheets. As a result, each eight-pound load of laundry contains 53 grams of grime—about the size of a candy bar.

- Reader's Digest (April 12, 2024)

April 11, 2024

The umbrella was invented over 4,000 years ago and used in early civilizations in Egypt, Assyria, Greece, and China. They were initially employed as parasols to provide shade from the sun. The term comes from the Latin root word umbra that means shadow. The Chinese invented the first waterproof umbrella as protection from rain when they waxed and lacquered their paper parasol.

- TheCottonLondon.com

April 10, 2024

Twenty-nine percent of the U.S. population lived in an HOA community as of 2021.

- “2021-2022 U.S. National and State Statistical Review.” Foundation for Community Association Research. 2022

April 09, 2024

Art experts say forged antiquities are extremely common in museums and private art collections: Former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art Thomas Hoving estimated 40% of artworks for sale at any given time were fake. The task of determining what art is real and what art is fake falls to scientists, who use tools like X-rays and carbon dating to get accurate readings of time and place of origin for artifacts.

- ScienceFriday.com (January 27, 2023)

April 08, 2024

A solar eclipse occurs when the Moon passes between the Sun and Earth, casting the Moon's shadow on Earth. A solar eclipse can only happen during a New Moon. The Moon's orbit is titled 5 degrees to Earth's orbit around the Sun. Therefore a solar eclipse is a relatively rare phenomena and a Total or Annular eclipse even more rare, with the Hybrid eclipse the rarest of all.

- National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration | National Weather Service

April 07, 2024

Solar eclipse glasses are made of a black polymer or silvery mylar that blocks 100% of infrared and ultraviolet light. They only transmit about one millionth of the sun's visible light. Black polymer glasses make the sun look orange, and mylar glasses make it appear bluish-white.

- WebMD (August 30, 2022)

April 06, 2024

After losing to Stanford in the beginning of the 2014 season, UConn won 111 straight games over four seasons, along with two National Championships in that span. The Huskies lost in the 2017 Final Four but won 126 straight regular season games before losing to No. 8 Baylor in the first game of 2019. Both streaks are Division I records regardless of gender.

- dailyorange.com (March 10, 2021)

April 05, 2024

As bizarre as it sounds, basketball was originally played with a soccer ball and peach baskets, with referees having to retrieve the ball each time a player made a basket. In 1900, the string baskets we know today were introduced to the game and, later, backboards were attached to prevent spectators from blocking a shot.

- Red Bull (May 12, 2020)

April 04, 2024

A huge range of elements including Tolkien's Christianity, epic Old English works like Beowulf and ancient architecture and languages he knew about from his academic studies were influences on the world of Middle Earth and the mythology of The Lord of the Rings. He also has said that his personal experiences growing up in a beautiful area of the English countryside which was subsequently urbanized, and his time fighting in the trenches in World War I, influenced the stories he told in the world of Middle Earth.

- Redbook Magazine (December 8, 2022)

April 03, 2024

When raindrops fall on clay or dusty soils, they trap small air bubbles on the surface which raise upward and burst out of the droplet. As a result, pockets of scent burst into the air where they are then carried by wind. This is what causes the familiar smell of rain, called ‘Petrichor’.

- Weather.com (April 10, 2018)

April 02, 2024

"Dozens of reports have been published on microplastics but the scientific community is still only scratching the surface of understanding just how much plastic we consume and how harmful it could be. People could be ingesting the equivalent of a credit card of plastic a week, a recent study by WWF International concluded, mainly in drinking water but also via sources like shellfish, which tend to be eaten whole so the plastic in their digestive systems is also consumed."

- Reuters.com (December 31, 2019)

April 01, 2024

Historians have also linked April Fools' Day to festivals such as Hilaria (Latin for joyful), which was celebrated in ancient Rome at the end of March by followers of the cult of Cybele. It involved people dressing up in disguises and mocking fellow citizens and even magistrates and was said to be inspired by the Egyptian legend of Isis, Osiris and Seth.

- History.com (March 18, 2024)