Discover

Budapest

Budapest is Hungary's capital

Naypyidaw

Naypyidaw replaced Yangon as Myanmar's capital in 2005

The capital of Turkey is Ankara, not Istanbul

Did you know Ankara has more skyscrapers than Istanbul?

Brasília

Brasília was founded in 1960

Canberra

Canberra is the capital of Australia

Federal Capital Territory (Nigeria)

Why did Nigeria move its capital to Abuja?

Astana

Astana is the capital city of Kazakhstan

Mongolia

Can you imagine living in a place with 2 people per square kilometer?

Time in Europe

Russia spans 11 time zones — from Kaliningrad to Kamchatka

Caspian Sea

The Caspian Sea is the world's largest inland body of water

Lesotho–South Africa border

Lesotho is an enclave entirely surrounded by South Africa

List of countries and territories by number of land borders

Did you know there's a border shorter than a football field?

Beer

Beer was first brewed around 5,000 BC in Mesopotamia

List of poisonous plants

Tomatoes were considered poisonous in Europe for 200 years — they're in the nightshade family

Culture of Ethiopia

Did you know coffee's discovery was a happy accident involving dancing goats?

Hot chocolate

Chocolate was a bitter drink in Mesoamerica for 3,000 years before Europeans added sugar

List of The Whitest Kids U' Know episodes

Ever wondered why sandwiches are called sandwiches?

Champagne

Did you know champagne's bubbly surprise was once a flaw?

Sushi

Did you know sushi's rice was once thrown away?

Ketchup originated in China as a fermented fish sauce called kê-tsiap

Did you know ketchup started as a fermented fish sauce?

Croissants are not French

Croissants originated in Vienna, not France, as a celebration of defeating the Ottoman siege

Red Hot Chili Peppers

Chili peppers are native to the Americas

History of the Hindu–Arabic numeral system

Why did ancient scholars invent a new way to count?

The word 'salary' comes from 'salarium'

Ever wondered why Roman soldiers got paid in salt?

The word 'quarantine' comes from 'quaranta giorni'

Did you know a simple word helped save lives during plagues?

OK gesture

Why is OK the most universally recognized gesture?

Longest word in English

Did you know there's a super long word without repeats in English?

Mandarin Chinese

Mandarin's the most spoken language worldwide — why?

Sorbian languages

How many languages disappear every two weeks?

English alphabet

Did you know the Hawaiian alphabet is super simple?

Basque language

Basque is a language isolate — unrelated to any other known language on Earth

Rosetta Stone

The Rosetta Stone features three scripts: hieroglyphic, demotic, and Greek

Ray Tomlinson

Ray Tomlinson invented the first email program in 1971

Photograph

First photograph took 8 hours of exposure — taken by Niépce in 1826

Text messaging

Did you know the first text message was sent in 1992?

1991 Soviet coup attempt

Did you know the first website was born amidst a failed coup?

1910s in air cargo

Ever wondered how air travel began?

Colossus computer

Did you know the first computer was built to crack secret codes?

Printing press

Gutenberg invented the movable-type printing press around 1440

Euronext Amsterdam

The first stock exchange opened in Amsterdam in 1602

Discovery of penicillin

Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin by accident in 1928

Smallpox vaccine

Edward Jenner created the first vaccine in 1796

Your body has about 37.2 trillion cells

Did you know your body has more cells than stars in the Milky Way?

You shed about 1.5 million skin cells per hour

Ever wondered how much skin you lose every day?

List of common misconceptions about science, technology, and mathematics

Did you know your brain uses a lot of energy but weighs very little?

Boric acid

Did you know your stomach can dissolve metals?

Concrete

Human bones are stronger than concrete — ounce for ounce, bone is stronger than steel

I Miss You (Blink-182 song)

You blink about 15-20 times per minute — roughly 1,200 times per hour

The human nose can detect about 1 trillion different scents

Human nose detects ~1 trillion scents

Your DNA stretched end to end would reach the Sun and back over 600 times

Did you know your DNA could stretch to the Sun and back over 600 times?

Blood vessel

Did you know there's a part of your body that breathes air directly?

Skeletal muscle

Did you know the jaw muscle is the strongest relative to size?

Googol

A googol is 10^100 — Google was named after it (misspelled)

There are more possible chess games than atoms in the observable universe

How many chess games could there be compared to atoms in the universe?

Pi

Pi has been calculated to over 100 trillion digits

Zero was invented independently in Mesopotamia, India, and by the Maya

Did you know zero has a secret twin?

1729 (number)

1729 is the smallest number expressible as the sum of two cubes in two ways

The Fibonacci sequence appears in sunflower seed patterns, pinecones, and galaxy spirals

Did you know math patterns can grow like plants?

Perfect number

A perfect number equals the sum of its proper divisors

Birthday problem

Only 23 people needed for a 50% chance of shared birthday

Benford's law

The leading digit '1' appears about 30% of the time in datasets following Benford's law

Monty Hall problem

Switching wins 2/3 of the time

Octopuses have three hearts, blue blood, and nine brains

Did you know an octopus has three hearts?

Honey never spoils

Edible honey preserved for 3,000 years in Egyptian tombs

List of animal names

Did you know a group of flamingos has a special name?

Tardigrades can survive in space, boiling water, and temperatures near absolute zero

Can tiny creatures survive the harshest conditions on Earth and beyond?

The mantis shrimp can punch at 50 mph

Mantis shrimp punch at 50 mph, faster than .22 bullet

Crows can recognize individual human faces and hold grudges for years

Can crows remember faces and hold grudges like humans?

Trees communicate through underground fungal networks called the 'Wood Wide Web'

Trees share nutrients via mycorrhizal fungi, forming the 'Wood Wide Web'

Vehicle registration plates of California

Blue whale's heart is the size of a small car

Sharks are older than trees

Sharks (400 million years) > Trees (350 million years)

A single teaspoon of soil contains more microorganisms than people on Earth

Did you know a teaspoon of soil teems with life?

Observable universe

There are more stars in the universe than grains of sand on all of Earth's beaches

Venus

Why does a day on Venus last longer than a Venusian year?

Footprints on the Moon (1975 film)

Moon's footprints will outlast Earthly erosion

Sun

The Sun makes up 99.86% of all mass in the solar system

Neutron stars are so dense that a teaspoon of their material would weigh about 6 billion tons

Neutron stars: teaspoon weighs ~6 billion tons

Saturn in fiction

Would Saturn float if it were in a bathtub?

Voyager Golden Record

Voyager 1 is the farthest human-made object from Earth, over 24 billion km away

Earth

Light from the Sun takes 8 minutes and 20 seconds to reach Earth

Chemistry: A Volatile History

52! ≈ 8 × 10^67 possible arrangements of a deck of cards

Software bug

Did a moth really cause a computer crash?

Keyboard layout

QWERTY was designed to prevent typewriter jamming

Bitcoin buried in Newport landfill

Fredric Baur invented Pringles can; buried in one

Nintendo

Nintendo was founded in 1889 as a playing card company

Microwave oven

Percy Spencer invented the microwave oven accidentally

Harald Bluetooth

Harald Bluetooth united Danish tribes

Alarm clock

Ever wondered how you can wake up at a specific time without setting an alarm every night?

Bubble Wrap (brand)

Did you know bubble wrap started as wallpaper?

Fax

Did you know fax machines were invented 33 years before the telephone?

Velcro was inspired by burrs sticking to a dog's fur

How can you easily remove your clothes without zippers or buttons?

Newton's laws of motion

Isaac Newton's Principia introduced three laws of motion and universal gravitation

Marie Curie

Marie Curie won two Nobel Prizes in different sciences

Othniel Charles Marsh

Did you know Charles Darwin spent over 20 years gathering evidence before publishing his groundbreaking work?

Heliocentrism

Did you know the Earth orbits the Sun, not the other way around?

Nikola Tesla

Nikola Tesla developed alternating current and over 300 patents

Rosalind Franklin

Rosalind Franklin's X-ray diffraction image, known as Photo 51, was critical to discovering the structure of DNA

Gregor Mendel

Gregor Mendel's pea-plant experiments laid the foundation for modern genetics

Periodic table

Dmitri Mendeleev arranged the periodic table by atomic weight and left gaps for elements he predicted would later be discovered

Henrietta Swan Leavitt

Henrietta Leavitt discovered the period-luminosity relation of Cepheid variables

Edwin Hubble showed galaxies recede with a velocity proportional to their distance

Did you know galaxies are moving away from us?

Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar calculated the mass limit for white dwarfs at age 19 on a boat to England

Did you know there's a cosmic weight limit for stars?

Maxwell's equations

Maxwell unified electricity, magnetism, and light into a single theory with four equations

Bohr model

Did you know light behaves differently at the atomic level?

Schrödinger's cat

Schrödinger's cat thought experiment illustrates quantum superposition

Lise Meitner co-discovered nuclear fission but was excluded from the 1944 Nobel Prize awarded only to her collaborator Otto Hahn

Lise Meitner co-discovered nuclear fission; excluded from 1944 Nobel Prize awarded to Otto Hahn

Linus Pauling

Linus Pauling won two unshared Nobel Prizes

Barbara McClintock

Barbara McClintock discovered transposons in maize

Richard Feynman's diagrams turned quantum field theory calculations from intractable algebra into picture-bookkeeping

How can a complex quantum world be simplified?

Black hole

Stephen Hawking predicted black holes radiate energy and slowly evaporate — Hawking radiation

Dark matter

Vera Rubin's galaxy rotation curves provided the strongest early evidence that most matter in the universe is invisible

Jocelyn Bell Burnell

Jocelyn Bell Burnell discovered the first radio pulsars in 1967

World Wide Web

Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web at CERN in 1989

Katalin Karikó

Katalin Karikó laid the scientific groundwork for mRNA vaccines

Évariste Galois died in a duel at 20, the night after writing the foundations of group theory in a single letter

Did a young genius die too young, changing math forever?

List of works based on dreams

Srinivasa Ramanujan claimed mathematical results came from dreams

Emmy Noether

Emmy Noether proved Noether's theorem connecting symmetry and conservation laws

Kurt Gödel

Kurt Gödel proved incompleteness theorems

Universal Turing machine

Alan Turing introduced the Turing machine in 1936

John von Neumann

John von Neumann pioneered the stored-program architecture used in nearly every computer built since

Maryam Mirzakhani

Maryam Mirzakhani became the first woman to win the Fields Medal in 2014

Paul Erdős

Paul Erdős traveled with two suitcases, collaborating with 511 mathematicians on 1,500+ papers

Wiles's proof of Fermat's Last Theorem

Andrew Wiles spent seven years working in secret to prove Fermat's Last Theorem

Sophie Germain corresponded with Gauss under a male pseudonym and made the first major progress on Fermat's Last Theorem

Did Sophie Germain secretly solve a famous math puzzle?

Grigori Perelman

Grigori Perelman solved the Poincaré conjecture

Sergey Brin

Sergey Brin and Larry Page founded Google in 1998

Mark Zuckerberg

Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook in 2004

Steve Wozniak designed the Apple I single-handedly; Jobs convinced him to sell it instead of giving the schematics away free

Did Steve Wozniak really build the Apple I alone?

Bill Gates and Paul Allen wrote BASIC for the Altair 8800 in eight weeks, founding Microsoft on the strength of one demo

Did you know Microsoft was born in just eight weeks?

Linus Torvalds

Linus Torvalds released Linux in 1991 as a hobby project — it now runs almost every server and Android phone

Jeff Bezos

Jeff Bezos founded Amazon in 1994

Elon Musk co-founded PayPal, then used the proceeds to start Tesla, SpaceX, and Neuralink in succession

Did Elon Musk become a billionaire overnight?

Blockbuster (retailer)

Did Netflix change how we watch movies?

Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs was fired from Apple in 1985

Larry Ellison

Larry Ellison founded Oracle in 1977 with $2,000

Jensen Huang

Jensen Huang co-founded Nvidia in a Denny's in 1993

Brian Acton was rejected by both Facebook and Twitter in 2009 before co-founding WhatsApp, which Facebook acquired for $19B

Did you know a tech giant's worth skyrocketed by joining forces with a smaller startup?

Hedy Lamarr

Hedy Lamarr co-invented frequency hopping technology

Grace Hopper invented the first compiler and coined the term 'debugging' after finding an actual moth in a relay

Did Grace Hopper really find a moth causing computer errors?

Margaret Hamilton (software engineer)

Margaret Hamilton wrote the on-board flight software for Apollo 11

Ada Lovelace recognized that Babbage's Analytical Engine could manipulate symbols, not just numbers

Did Ada Lovelace invent the first computer program?

Claude Shannon

Claude Shannon laid the foundations of the Information Age

John Bardeen

John Bardeen won two Nobel Prizes in physics

Norman Borlaug

Norman Borlaug's work saved over a billion people from starvation

Stephanie Kwolek invented Kevlar by accident while looking for a lighter tire fiber at DuPont in 1965

How can a lightweight, strong material revolutionize safety gear?

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

Can silence reveal more than words ever could?

The Second Sex

Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex argued: 'One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman'

Eichmann in Jerusalem

Hannah Arendt coined 'the banality of evil' during the Eichmann trial

Jorge Luis Borges went blind in his 50s but continued composing intricate labyrinthine stories entirely in his head

Did Borges write with his eyes closed?

Karl Popper

Karl Popper founded the Department of Philosophy at the London School of Economics and Political Science

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

Thomas Kuhn introduced 'paradigm shift' in 1962

John Maynard Keynes proposed in 1936 that governments should spend during recessions, inverting prevailing economic orthodoxy

Why do economies sometimes crash?

The Road to Serfdom

Friedrich Hayek warns of tyranny from central economic planning in The Road to Serfdom

Stellar black hole

Ever wondered why nothing escapes a black hole's pull?

Albert Einstein

How does light behave around massive objects like stars?

Quantum mechanics

Ever wondered how tiny particles behave differently than big objects?

Alan Turing

Can a computer solve every problem?

Francis Crick

Did you know DNA holds life's blueprint?

Erwin Chargaff

Did you know DNA's structure was a mystery solved by Chargaff's rules?

Whitfield Diffie

Did you know there's a secret handshake for computers?

List of Latin legal terms

Ever wondered why 'interest' means 'to be between'?

Quantum mind

Can quantum computers solve puzzles faster than our brains?

Vietnamese alphabet

Did you know there's a secret code for Vietnamese sounds?

Kerr–Newman metric

Ever wondered how a spinning charged black hole defies our everyday physics?

Archimedes

Ever wondered why some things float while others sink?

Schrödinger equation

Why does an electron behave like a wave in a tiny box?

Contact lens

Why can you see clearly up close and far away with just your eyes?

Fuzzy concept

Did you know zero wasn't always zero?

Agriculture in California

How can crops survive droughts better?

Supermassive black hole

How can a star's mass turn into a cosmic vacuum trap?

Sorting algorithm

How fast can you find a book in a library without a map?

Silk

Why is silk so smooth and shiny?

Deinococcus radiodurans

Ever wondered how life thrives in the most extreme conditions?

Timeline of condensed matter physics

Did you know electricity flows without resistance?

Fibonacci sequence

Did you know rabbits can help us understand math?

Industrial Revolution

Did you know a toy was born from industrial rubber?

History of the automobile

Did steam power really change the world?

Great Artesian Basin

Did you know there's a hidden water treasure beneath Australia's arid lands?

Hummingbird

How fast can a hummingbird flap its wings compared to the speed of sound?

Gravitational constant

Ever wondered why apples fall straight down instead of flying off sideways?

Ronald Fisher

Ever wondered how scientists decide if something is truly special or just random?

Alec Jeffreys

Can DNA unlock secrets hidden in our cells?

Voyager 1

Did you know Voyager 1's signals took 20 years to reach us?

Glossary of computer science

Ever wondered how computers organize data efficiently?

Human microbiome

Did you know your body is a bustling city of cells?

List of Jewish Nobel laureates

Did one person win Nobel Prizes in both Physics and Chemistry?

Glossary of physics

Ever wondered how scientists track the spread of diseases?

Languages of India

Did you know India has more languages than countries?

Algorithm

Why do we need a faster way to analyze signals?

History of the Philippines

Why did ancient calendars fail to sync with seasonal cycles?

Charles-Jean de La Vallée Poussin

Did you know math predicts how many prime numbers there are?

Enigma machine

Can you keep a secret that changes every time you whisper it?

List of Italian inventions and discoveries

Did Leonardo Pisano invent the Fibonacci sequence?

History of modern Greece

Ever wondered how cities fund big projects without a bank?

List of languages by number of native speakers

How many people speak Korean worldwide?

Invention of the telephone

Ever wondered when wireless telegraphy first blinked into existence?

Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids: A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid

Can DNA's secret be unlocked by its shape?

Apollo 11

How did humans first step onto the Moon's surface?

List of human spaceflights, 1961–1970

Did Yuri Gagarin change the game of space exploration forever?

RSA cryptosystem

Why can't you just use any number for secret codes?

Plant cell

Why do plants look green?

Quantum field theory

Did you know that tiny particles behave differently than we expect?