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Everything filed under myth or fact.
Fact-based How It Started
The tea bag is said to have been born by mistake, when customers dunked silk sample pouches around 1908, but two women in Milwaukee had already filed a patent for one in 1901.
Fact-based Cosmic Questions
The Moon does spin, but exactly once for every trip round the Earth, so one side always faces us, and the side we never see is not dark at all.
Fact-based Cosmic Questions
The yellow in an autumn leaf was hiding there all summer, the red is made fresh in its last weeks, and the frost that usually gets the credit actually spoils the show.
Fact-based Weird Facts
Everest wins only if you measure from sea level: a Hawaiian volcano is taller from foot to top, and a peak in Ecuador stands farther from the centre of the Earth.
Fact-based Kitchen Science
A bar forgotten at the back of a cupboard can come out dusty and grey, and the reason is that the same fat inside it can set in at least six different ways.
Fact-based Cosmic Questions
The stars are not flickering at all: their light is being nudged about by the air above your head, and a planet looks calm for a surprisingly simple reason.
Fact-based Weird Facts
The internet loves sleeping otters holding paws, but in the wild it is a rare sight, and the anchor most otters trust for a nap is a strand of kelp.
Fact-based Word Journeys
A popular story says kangaroo means I don't understand, but the word was a real name for a big grey kangaroo, written down beside a river in 1770.
Fact-based Kitchen Science
Heat a pan of sugar and it seems to melt into a golden pool, but the molecules are already breaking down, which is why good caramel depends on time as much as on heat.
Fact-based Odd Places
From space, a bull's-eye about 40 kilometres wide stares up out of the desert in Mauritania, and the way it formed is slower and stranger than any falling rock from the sky.