Fact-based Cosmic Questions
Why Does Ice Cream Give You Brain Freeze?
One enthusiastic spoonful too many and a sharp ache shoots into your forehead, and it turns out the pain has more to do with warm blood rushing in than with anything freezing.
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Fact-based Cosmic Questions
Why Does Your Stomach Rumble?
That loud growl in a silent room is not really your stomach complaining about lunch, but your gut running a cleaning cycle through pipes that happen to be empty and echoey.
Fiction Made-Up Words
Sneezelimbo
(n.) The long, undignified pause with your eyes half shut, mouth open and one hand raised, waiting for a sneeze that has clearly announced itself and then changed its mind.
Fact-based Weird Facts
Flamingos Are Not Born Pink
A baby flamingo hatches fluffy and pale grey, and it only turns that famous pink because of what it eats, a colour its parents can lose again while feeding it.
Fact-based Cosmic Questions
Why Do Your Fingers Wrinkle in the Bath?
It looks like your skin has simply soaked up too much water, but the wrinkles are made on purpose by your nervous system, and they may be there to help you hold on.
Fiction Made-Up Words
Yawnrelay
(n.) The single yawn that sets off at one end of a meeting table and travels, person by person, all the way to the other end, where the dog lying under it yawns too.
Fact-based Cosmic Questions
Why Do We Get Goosebumps?
A cold breeze, a scary film and a favourite song can all raise the same tiny bumps on your arms, which is a lot of effort for hair we barely have.
Fact-based Cosmic Questions
Why Can't You Tickle Yourself?
The same finger that makes a friend squeal does nothing at all on your own ribs, because a part of your brain reads the script before the tickle arrives.
Fact-based Weird Facts
Tardigrades Spent Ten Days in Open Space and Lived
Three thousand microscopic animals were bolted to the outside of a spacecraft, the lids were opened, and most of them came back perfectly fine.
Fact-based Cosmic Questions
Why Does Your Own Voice Sound So Strange on a Recording?
Hearing yourself played back is like meeting a stranger who has borrowed your words, and part of the reason is that you have spent your whole life listening from inside your own head.