Four Different Mountains Are the Tallest on Earth What’s the highest point on our planet? This bit of trivia is likely known by many humans, not just fans of mountains. If you went into Final Jeopardy! with the lead, you would confidently scrawl “What is Mount Everest?” on your lectern and toast yourself to becoming a […]
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Giving Tuesday Since the 1950s, we’ve called the day after Thanksgiving “Black Friday.” After gathering to offer orisons for all the things we value, we kick off the holiday gifting season with a bang. On the surface, Thanksgiving and Black Friday are compatible; giving gifts to loved ones is a wonderful way to give
Mashed Potatoes As humans gather around Thanksgiving tables in late fall, their feasts often include a common palette of foodstuffs, from turkey to corn to cranberry sauce to pumpkin pie. Uncle Jimmy might put a personal spin on a dish, but, odds are, he’s making it with a traditional ingredient list. Most years, Uncle Jimmy whips up a batch of mashed potatoes. Sometimes
Periwinkle There is a cornucopia of oddly named, obscure colors out there – incarnadine, filemot, and smaragdine, for example. As a toddler begins to amass a vocabulary, these hues likely won’t beat blue, red, or green into the stable. Some colors with strange monikers are more familiar, perhaps because they found a spot in Crayola’s box at some
Haz Simp Despite the common perception of the wayward weatherperson, meteorology has evolved into a robust scientific discipline. For a system as large as Earth or a continent, the prognosticative abilities of the forecaster have become impressively accurate. Still, we love to kvetch about a misinterpretation of the sky’s tea leaves, perhaps because we’re actually
We Rate Dogs On 15 November 2015, a student at Campbell University in North Carolina, majoring in golf management, launched a Twitter account based on a simple premise: rate dogs on a scale of 10.Eight years of doggos, puppers, and floofs later, Matt Nelson’s online undertaking has 9.1 million followers.We Rate Dogs had a lot
The First Untethered Spacewalk On 20 February 1984, astronaut Hoot Gibson peered out of Challenger at something rare and sensational. He grabbed a camera, took a light meter reading three times, checked the focus four times, and snapped one of the starkest, most indelible images in the history of photography.Bruce McCandless II floated 300 feet away, blanketed
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The Mad Hatterpillar In 1820, Washington Irving popularized the character of the Headless Horseman, a ghost who terrorizes the countryside looking for his missing head. Though the myth reaches farther into time – Irish folklore, for example, features the Dullahan (“dark man”) who carries his head by horseback – Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hallow destined this character
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Skeleton Lake In northern India, the world’s 23rd-highest peak – Nanda Devi – is surrounded by an eponymous national park. In Hinduism, Nanda Devi is a manifestation of the utmost goddess of the religion, Parvati. Nanda Devi means “Bliss-Giving Goddess.” Looking at this imperious mountain, one can see why the deity and this rock were paired. Nanda
Spontaneous Hay Bale Combustion Many people declare autumn their favorite season. With its colorful leaves, jack-o-lanterns, pumpkin spice, costumes, and crisp weather, what’s not to love? Lurking in the background of many Halloween landscapes are seemingly innocuous rectangular prisms or cylinders. Sitting in fields along country roads, providing seats for tractor rides at pumpkin patches, outlining mazes at fall festivals,
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