How do our organs stay where they are when we stand up? Pieces of tissue called fascia hold our organs in place, along with a membrane called the serous membrane. I need to define this question a little more succinctly because organ has a surprisingly broad definition. The Oxford English Dictionary defines “organ” as “a […]
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Is “I think therefore I am” true? Probably. “I think therefore I am” is probably the most famous philosophical quotation of all time. It is probably the only one that most people will have heard of. It was coined by René Descartes in 1637. He was born in France in 1596 and he was a
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Why do woodpeckers peck wood? They are trying to find food, mark their territory, find a mate, or make a nest. There are 240 different species of woodpecker, and they live in most countries except for Australasia, Madagascar, and Antarctica. Other than their pecking and the adaptations they have to enable it, they are normal
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How can opera singers sing so loud? By training their diaphragm, their lungs, using their mouths to amplify the sound as much as possible, and adjusting the frequency of the sound they are making. Opera singers are louder than the average person, but they also have a way of making their voices easier to hear,
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How did a pterodactyl fly? By jumping 2.5 meters into the air and then flapping. These days, we use pterodactyl to refer to any of the flying dinosaurs that looked similar, but pterodactyl is only one species. The family is called pterosaur. In Greek, “pteron” means winged and “sauros” means lizard. Pterodactyl comes from “pteron”
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Why do we say “hack writer” and “quack doctor”? Hack comes from Hackney and quack comes from quacksalver, the Dutch for a seller of medicines. A hack has a negative image, but there is no reason why it should. The word was first used in about 1700 to refer to someone who is hired to
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Why did Michelangelo hide in a cellar? He had been sentenced to death by Pope Clement VII. Michelangelo was born near Florence in 1475. At the time, Florence was a Republic and not part of Italy. Italy wasn’t unified until 1848 and between the fall of the Roman Empire and unification Italy was made up
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How does cold reading work? It is a method of reading a person you don’t know in order to get information. It is the opposite of hot reading, where the person already either knows the target or has a lot of information about them to start with. Cold reading is a method employed by psychics
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What is the steepest railway track a train can go up? The steepest track is the Calçada de São Francisco in Portugal, and it has an incline of 13.8%. This question has several parts because there are different ways that trains connect to a track. The most common type of train attaches to the track
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Why was the First World War fought in trenches but the Second World War wasn’t? Amongst many other reasons, because in World War 1, the armies were faced with weapon technology that had advanced too far, but they didn’t have the other necessary technology to counter that. World War 1 started on 28th July, 1914
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