When did people start eating cereal for breakfast? Technically in the 1850s, but it didn’t catch on until the early 1900s. The first breakfast cereal (albeit hot) was invented by Ferdinand Schumacher, a German immigrant living in America. He used a hand grinder to grind oats that he then sold for oatmeal. The oats were […]
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I learned this today. Why are some places more humid than others? It is because they are closer to a large, warm body of water, which causes warm winds and warm air can carry more water vapor than cold air. What is humidity? Humidity is the concentration of water vapor in the air. The air
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I learned this today. When was the first passenger train? The first passenger train was Locomotion No. 1. It departed on the Stockton and Darlington Railway on September 27th, 1825. Railways go back thousands of years, but they haven’t always been used to carry people. The earliest railway ever discovered was in Greece, built in
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I learned this today. Why do horses need horseshoes? They only need horseshoes if they are going to be walking on hard or rough surfaces for a long time. The hoof of a horse consists of several different parts. The part that we can see is called the wall. This is up to two centimeters
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I learned this today. How does fly spray work? By blocking the insect from using its nerves to move its muscles. There are two kinds of fly spray. There are repellents, which are sprays you apply to your body to stop insects landing on you and biting. Then there are insecticide fly sprays that kill
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I learned this today. How does a virus infect the body? By replicating itself inside the body’s living cells. A virus is not a cell. It is called a virion. A cell has a cell membrane, a nucleus, and cytoplasm. A virion doesn’t have any of that. It is made up of a set of
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I learned this today. How does a desalination plant work? A desalination plant makes freshwater from seawater by using reverse osmosis. Humans and animals obviously cannot drink salt water. Fish have adapted to be able to do it, but we have not. There is about 35g of salt in every liter of sea water. If
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I learned this today. Instant coffee was technically invented in 1771, but this wasn’t really instant. Instant coffee that we would recognize today was invented in 1890. These days, instant coffee is coffee that has either been freeze-dried or spray dried. The two methods differ slightly, and freeze-drying is more expensive. When coffee is freeze-dried,
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I learned this today. Mosquitoes come out at dusk and are active throughout the night because the temperature is lower than during the day, it is easier to find food, and there are fewer predators around. It is not true to say that all mosquitoes come out at night. There are more than 3,000 species
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I learned this today. High energy radiation or long exposure to radiation can damage the DNA in cells and cause radiation sickness. What is radiation? Radiation is energy that radiates from a source and travels through space at the speed of light. It travels as a wave or as particles and has an electric field
#275 How does radiation sickness happen? Read More »
