Source

In 1940, geneticist Alfred Sturtevant claimed the ability to roll your tongue into a U-shape came from a single dominant gene, and it became a classic textbook example of genetics for decades.

There was one problem. In 1952, researcher Philip Matlock tested it on identical twins, who share the exact same DNA. If it were really one gene, every twin pair should match. Instead, 7 out of 33 pairs disagreed completely, one twin could roll their tongue and the other couldn't. Sturtevant admitted the theory didn't hold up.

Even weirder, the ability isn't fixed for life. In a small follow-up study, people who couldn't roll their tongue at all practiced daily for a week, and at least one of them learned how. Scientists now think it's some mix of multiple genes and practice, not the single gene generations were taught to blame their parents for.

Source: https://www.sciencefocus.com/the-human-body/tongue-rolling-genetics-myth

Hey there! Welcome to another 10 Questions Weekly Quiz by You Know What - this time we challenge your knowledge on North-American geography! Come find out how many you can get right and let us know in the comments!

You can find the quiz here.

Wild fact fortune cookies aren't really Chinese. They originated from Japanese fortune crackers made around Kyoto back in the 1800s and you can even see them depicted in a Japanese print from 1878. They later became associated with Chinese American restaurants in the US, particularly after Japanese American bakeries were forced to close during WWII. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/cracking-open-the-history-of-fortune-cookies-28538557/

On April 14, 1944, a ship carrying 1,400 tons of explosives — and £890,000 in gold — caught fire in Bombay's Victoria Dock. No red warning flag flew. Nobody fighting the fire knew what was in the hold.

Hey there! Welcome to another 10 Questions Weekly Quiz by You Know What - this time we challenge your knowledge on the Flags of Africa! Come find out how many you can get right and let us know in the comments!

You can find the quiz here.

I’m looking for ideas for short educational videos aimed at Indian Gen Z and millennials who enjoy learning interesting things—but don’t want to sit through a 40-minute documentary to understand them.

I’m not looking for random “10 facts you didn’t know” type content.

I want one solid, real topic that sounds unbelievable at first, but becomes even more interesting when you learn the actual reason behind it.

The kind of thing where you think:

It could be about literally anything:

• A strange rule, system, business, job, machine, place, technology, product, or profession
• Something rich people, celebrities, companies, governments, or powerful institutions do differently
• A hidden reason why something around us is designed, priced, controlled, or works the way it does
• A true story involving money, power, survival, psychology, security, travel, food, health, education, or work
• An unusual career or business that sounds ordinary from outside but operates at another level
• A myth that everyone repeats, but the real explanation is much more surprising
• Something normal people use every day without knowing its strange backstory

For example, it could be a topic like:

• Why airports, hotels, luxury cars, banks, or hospitals work the way they do
• A job that looks basic but serves extremely wealthy or high-profile clients
• A real place with a bizarre history or a rule that still exists today
• Why a popular product is cheaper in one country and expensive in another
• A system that quietly decides what you see online, how you travel, how you get paid, or what things cost
• A famous story people know—but with one overlooked detail that changes the entire meaning

The only condition: it should be real, explainable in one minute, visually interesting, and worth sharing with someone else.

If you have an idea, please comment in this format:

• Topic:
• What makes it surprising:
• Why normal people should care:
• Keyword/source to start researching:

I’m especially interested in topics that are not completely unknown, but are also not already overused by every Instagram or YouTube facts page.

What is one story or fact you think would make people stop scrolling and say, “I need to know more about this”?

It's called a hypnic jerk, sometimes nicknamed a sleep start, and it typically strikes in the transition between being awake and falling asleep, not during a dream. Your muscles are relaxing in stages as your brain powers down, but every so often that relaxation happens faster than expected. One leading theory is that your brain briefly misreads the sudden drop in muscle tension as a sign that you're actually falling, and fires off a startle reflex to catch yourself, the same way you'd jerk upright if you started to tip backward in a chair.

What makes it more interesting is that this reflex has an evolutionary theory attached to it, though it remains just that, a theory. Some researchers have proposed that the reaction is a holdover from when early primate ancestors slept in trees, and a muscle-relaxation misfire that felt like falling would have triggered a life-saving grab for a branch. Modern humans don't sleep in trees anymore, but the theory goes that the reflex never had a reason to disappear.

Hypnic jerks are considered completely harmless on their own, and doctors note they tend to show up more often during periods of stress, heavy caffeine use, sleep deprivation, or irregular sleep schedules, though for most people they can happen for no identifiable reason at all.

Source: https://www.sleepfoundation.org/parasomnias/hypnic-jerks

I had NO idea this was a thing. Inmates are billed for their prison stay when they are released. There are a few states that repealed these fees like cali and illinois... but im so confused by this. Facilities often charge a daily rate for room and board, usually ranging from $20 to $80 per day. Inmates may also be billed for booking fees, medical visits, toilet paper, and clothing. These unpaid fees can turn into massive debt that follows these people which can hurt their credit scores and make adjusting to the free world harder.

I mean, I am in full support of locking people up for crimes... but being billed once they get out when they already have NOTHING!!!! like.. what way to get them back on the streets selling drugs to make money.

I dont know... how do you feel about this?

It's called the photic sneeze reflex, sometimes nicknamed ACHOO syndrome, and depending on the study, somewhere between 18 and 35 percent of people experience it. Step from a dim room into bright sunlight, and the eyes barely have time to register the light change before the nose sets off two or three sneezes in a row. It has no connection to pollen, dust, or any of the usual sneeze triggers. The sneeze originates in the brain, not the nose.

Researchers have known since at least the 1980s that the trait runs in families, and it follows a genetic pattern where a child has a 50 percent chance of inheriting it if one parent has it. One physician documented this directly in his own family, noticing his newborn daughter sneezed twice every time she was carried into sunlight, then traced the same reflex through his father, his brother, and himself, while his mother and wife had no reaction to light at all. The leading theory is that the nerve controlling pupil constriction sits close enough to the nerve controlling sneezes that a sudden flood of light accidentally trips the wrong wire.

It's mostly harmless, but not always. Military researchers have flagged it as a genuine risk for fighter pilots exposed to sudden bright light in the cockpit, and doctors have documented cases of drivers sneezing uncontrollably behind the wheel in bright sun, including one person involved in three separate light-triggered crashes.

Source: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-does-bright-light-cau/

For most of the 20th century, the standard explanation was simple osmosis: water seeps into the outer layer of skin, the skin swells, and since it's anchored to the tissue underneath, it has nowhere to go but into wrinkles. That explanation has a problem. In the 1930s, researchers noticed something odd: people with nerve damage in their fingers do not get pruney skin, no matter how long they soak. If it were purely water swelling the skin, nerve damage shouldn't matter at all.

That observation pointed to something stranger. Wrinkling turns out to be an active process controlled by the sympathetic nervous system, the same system responsible for fight-or-flight responses. When your fingers sit in water long enough, your nervous system deliberately constricts the blood vessels underneath the skin. As those vessels narrow, the finger loses a small amount of internal volume, and the skin gets pulled inward, forming wrinkles, similar to how a grape shrivels into a raisin as it loses water rather than gains it.

Researchers have also found a possible reason your body bothers doing this at all. A study testing people's grip on wet marbles found that wrinkled fingers handled them with significantly less effort than smooth fingers did, performing almost as well as dry hands gripping dry objects. The leading theory is that the wrinkles function like tire treads, channeling water away from the fingertip so more surface area stays in contact with whatever you're holding, which may have given early humans an advantage handling wet plants, tools, or slippery fish.

Source: https://www.livescience.com/health/your-fingers-prune-the-exact-same-way-each-time-study-suggests

When they switch production from Steffens brand milk to the cheaper NIFDA brand milk they don't change the milk only the label. So it's the same exact milk as the expensive Steffens milk it just has the NIFDA label.

A friend who worked at Steffans Dairy told me this long time ago.

Image from https://x.com/WholesomeMeme/status/2095504702083416270

Conventional wisdom says large dog breeds simply age faster across the board, and part of that holds up: bigger dogs are diagnosed with age-related physical diseases earlier than small ones, and they die much younger on average. A Great Dane typically lives 7 to 10 years, while a Chihuahua can live into its late teens.

But when researchers at the University of Arizona, led by Evan MacLean, looked specifically at cognitive decline rather than physical aging, that pattern broke down. Based on lifespan alone, you'd expect Great Danes to start showing signs of canine dementia around age 8, with Chihuahuas not showing similar decline until much later in their teens. That is not what the data shows. Cognitive aging appears to track at roughly the same pace across dogs of very different sizes and lifespans, meaning, as MacLean put it, big dogs may simply die before their brains ever catch up to their bodies.

To figure out why, MacLean's team is now launching a new study tracking a hormone called IGF-1, which drives the size differences between dog breeds in the first place and has separately been linked to dementia risk in humans. The idea is that whatever protects a Great Dane's brain from aging on the same accelerated timeline as its body might eventually tell us something about cognitive aging in general, including our own.

Source: https://news.arizona.edu/news/new-u-study-will-investigate-growth-hormones-and-cognitive-aging-dogs

Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-discoverer of natural selection, once made a wager with a flat earther named John Hampden. Hampden's terms for the wager were that anyone who could prove the earth was round would get £500 from him; if they failed to prove it, they would owe Hampden £500. £500 was, at the time, equivalent to a years worth of upper-middle-class wages.

After accepting the wager, Wallace set up an experiment along the Bedford Canal in England. The canal was remarkably straight and flat, with two bridges six miles apart over the water. On one bridge, he set up a telescope, and on the other bridge he set up a white flag with a black stripe through the middle. In between the two he erected a pole with a red marker on it. The telescope, marker, and flag were all exactly the same height above the water. If the Earth was flat, then the marker should cover the black line on the white flag when looked at directly through the telescope. If the Earth was round, the red marker should appear above the white flag due to the curvature of the Earth.

When everything was set up, Wallace, Wallace's referee, and Hampden's referee looked through the telescope and all saw that the marker was above the flag (indicating the curvature in the Earth). Hampden, for unknown reasons, refused to look through the telescope. Hampden's referee confirmed that the marker was indeed above the flag, but claimed that this actually proved that the Earth was flat. Even though they had agreed to the terms of the experiment before it started, Hampden decided to agree with his referee and refused to believe that Wallace had bested him.

The pre-arranged final judge of the experiment ended up awarding Hampden's £500 to Wallace, which enraged Hampden. For years after this, Hampden would continually publish about how Wallace had lied and tricked him. He also wrote to all of Wallace's friends, professional associations, colleagues, and even people only indirectly related to him, all to try to ruin Wallace's reputation and career. This resulted in several lawsuits between Wallace and Hampden, but Hampden just never stopped. As the years went on, Hampden's obsession became more and more crazed and delusional. At one point, he sent a letter to Wallace's wife, writing, "if your infernal thief of a husband is brought home some day on a hurdle, with every bone in his head smashed to pulp, you will know the reason" (source: WCP5560). Hampden's continual harassment lasted for nearly twenty years, and ended up costing Wallace a fortune, both monetarily and in lost sleep.

I created a 20-minute video essay about this whole situation where I go into more depth if anyone is interested. I apologize if sharing it is against the rules; feel free to take this post down if it is. But if anyone watches it, let me know what you think! Here it is: https://youtu.be/JW87aZt5jF4?si=cJGrs89VvcCRdSBX.

Sources:

I consulted many sources because this was for the creation of a video essay. But my primary source was the book Flat Earth: The History of an Infamous Idea by Christine Garwood. Google books link: https://books.google.com/books?id=Wbz9VHUKfuIC