Who painted the Isleworth Mona Lisa? This is a difficult question. It is either completely painted by Leonardo da Vinci, partially painted by him, or not painted by him at all, depending on what expert is asked. However, it does appear unlikely that this painting is by da Vinci. Let’s try and break it down. […]
#883 Who painted the Isleworth Mona Lisa? Read More »
Norman Ernest Borlaug was known as the father of the Green Revolution because of the new strain of wheat he developed and the millions, possibly billions, of people he saved from starvation. He is said to have saved more lives than any person who has ever lived. There have been numerous agricultural revolutions over human
#882 Norman Ernest Borlaug – father of the Green Revolution Read More »
What happened to the Aral Sea? The Soviet Union diverted the rivers that fed it in the 1960s and it has almost completely dried up. The Aral Sea was located between Kazakhstan in the north and Uzbekistan in the south. It formed between 23 and 2.3 million years ago. It was a fairly shallow lake,
#881 What happened to the Aral Sea? Read More »
What does paint primer do? It helps paint stick to the surface, it helps the paint last longer, and it protects the material you are painting. Humans have been using paint for tens of thousands of years. The earliest cave paintings were found in caves in Spain and they have been dated to 64,000 years
#880 What does paint primer do? Read More »
Why do we have a leap year? We have a leap year because the calendar year doesn’t exactly match the solar year. Earth orbits the sun at an average distance of 149,600,000 km. We travel around the sun in a clockwise direction and we travel about 940 million km with every orbit. One orbit of
#879 Why do we have a leap year? Read More »
Why does a golf ball have dimples? They make the ball go further. Golf balls didn’t always have dimples. The game was invented in Scotland in the 15th century, but it could be connected to a game called paganica that was played in Rome. It could also be connected to a Chinese game called chui.
#878 Why does a golf ball have dimples? Read More »
What happened to Detroit? Detroit declared bankruptcy in 2013, with debts of $18 billion. Detroit was the fourth largest city in the United States at one point and so large that nobody could ever have imagined that it would fail. Indigenous people have lived in the area for thousands of years and the first Europeans
#877 What happened to Detroit? Read More »
Where does cork come from? Cork comes from the bark of the cork oak tree. The primary use of cork is to stop up wine bottles. About 20 billion bottles of wine are produced a year and about 80% of those bottles have cork stoppers in them. That is a huge amount of cork and
#876 Where does cork come from? Read More »
Henrietta Lacks developed cervical cancer and the cells taken from a tumor biopsy have formed the HeLa cell line, named after her. Ms. Lacks didn’t know that her cells had been taken and she died in October 1951, before the significance of her cells was known. She was only 31 years old. She did not
#875 Henrietta Lacks – the source of the HeLa cell line Read More »
Why does dry ice fog sink? The gas from dry ice is more dense than air and therefore it sinks. Dry ice is solid carbon dioxide. It is called dry ice because when it melts it turns into a gas rather than a liquid. Regular ice would be wet ice because when it melts it
#874 Why does dry ice fog sink? Read More »
