I learned this today

#976 Can insects fly in the rain?

Can insects fly in the rain? They pretty much all can, but many of them choose not to. Some do fly during the rain. It depends on their size, the temperature, and their ability to resist water. Interestingly, larger insects have more need to hide than smaller insects do. When the day is warm, insects […]

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#975 Were gunslingers real?

Were gunslingers real? There were people in the Wild West who were employed to shoot people, or who did it for other reasons, but they weren’t called gunslingers. That term didn’t come into existence until 1920. The image we have of gunslingers is pretty much entirely a myth that we can thank the Spaghetti Westerns

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#971 What do tonsils do?

What do tonsils do? The tonsils contain a lot of white blood cells and they are one of the body’s first lines of defense against infection. Firstly, do you know where your tonsils are? For the whole of my life, I thought the thing hanging down at the back of my throat, just behind the

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#970 What causes dyslexia?

What causes dyslexia? It is caused by a difference in the brain parts that process reading, but nobody knows exactly what causes that difference. As an aside, there is a common joke that the word for people who cannot read or spell very easily, dyslexia, is one of the hardest words to read or spell.

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