It’s considered common knowledge now that no two people are exactly alike, and that those differences are coded right into our DNA. You may be surprised to learn, however, that all of those differences between us only appear in only 1% of our DNA. That means that in 99% of our genetic makeup, the entire human race is exactly alike. If it seems impossible that just 1% could account for the variety found among earth’s population: 97% of our DNA is exactly the same as that of an orangutan!
Though it can be assumed that horses certainly like peanut butter, don’t expect your steed to state his preference for smooth or chunky any time soon. Despite an incredibly sticky rumor, everyone’s favorite “talking” horse, Mr. Ed, learned to speak not because he was fed the stick-to-the-roof-of-your-mouth food, but through good, old-fashioned training. The PB rumor was perpetuated by Wilbur himself, Alan Young, who feared that children wouldn’t find Mr. Ed’s real, animal actor training as charming as the idea of sharing their favorite snack with him. Though at first his handlers would jiggle his lips with a piece of thread, Mr. Ed (being the professional pony he was) soon learned to move his lips independently at the touch of his hoof, and eventually, whenever his human co-actors stopped talking!
Uncommon Knowledge
Uncommon Knowledge: What was the last letter added to the alphabet?
March 14, 2013
Nope, it’s not Z! It is no coincidence that I and J stand side-by-side—for centuries they were considered the same character! The letter J started as a swash, a typographical embellishment for the already existing I used to denote the conclusion of a series of ones—as in “Henry viij” for Henry the Eighth. Both I and J were used interchangeably to express the sound of both the vowel and the consonant until 1524 when Renaissance grammarian Gian Giorgio Trissino argued for poor J’s autonomy in his “Ɛpistola del Trissino de le lettere nuωvamente aggiunte ne la lingua italiana” (“Trissino’s epistle about the letters recently added in the Italian language”). After being snubbed for nearly three more centuries, J was finally acknowledged as a full-fledged letter in the nineteenth-century, making it the baby of the English alphabet.
It’s a familiar old rhyme that we don’t take much stock in any more: “Red sky at night, sailors’ delight; red sky at morning, sailors take warning.” But, for an age before satellite imaging, the rhyme contained some solid meteorological truth. The red sky mentioned is not just sunset or sunrise. As the sun rises in the east, if the sky around it is clear enough for its rays to reach the clouds in the west, it makes them glow red. That combination of clear and cloudy sky suggests that a weather front is moving through. Since most storm systems move from west to east, a red sky at morning shows clouds moving in from the west, while red sky at night is the result of clouds rolling safely away into the east.
Nope. Someone took it from him. Albert Einstein was one of the great minds of the 20th century, and when he died in 1955 there was much curiosity about the brain behind the Theory of Relativity. Dr. Thomas Harvey, a pathologist at the University of Pennsylvania, conducted a standard autopsy, and then turned his attention to the brain. He carefully removed it, measured it, weighed it, preserved it, sent samples to other pathology experts, and then… simply took it home with him. Einstein’s brain remained in his possession for over twenty years before the theft was discovered.
It’s hard to imagine a time before the chocolate chip cookie, but the innovator who brought enlightenment to that dark age was Ruth Wakefield. Educated in food science, she left academia when she and her husband purchased a renovated toll house outside of Boston, and opened an inn and restaurant. In 1930, she was preparing a batch of chocolate cookies when she discovered she was out of cocoa powder. Thinking fast, she broke up a bar of semi-sweet chocolate and stirred it into the dough, expecting it to melt in the oven. Instead, she pulled out a new culinary innovation: the “Toll House Crunch Cookie.” The cookies were an instant hit grew so popular that when a chocolate company began producing the first chocolate chips, they asked if they could publish Wakefield’s recipe on the package. She agreed-in exchange for a lifetime supply of chocolate.
Advances in technology have certainly improved the lifespan of the humble light bulb: new LED bulbs will burn for 50,000 hours, or nearly six years of continuous use. But they still can’t compare with the longevity of some of their old-fashioned, incandescent ancestors. At a fire station in Livermore, California, there shines a bulb that has been in use for the last 110 years. The four-watt bulb was switched on before the beginning of WWI, and has almost never been turned off during the century since. Surprisingly, the low wattage and continual usage might actually have contributed to the bulb’s extended life. As incandescent lights are turned on and off, their filaments quickly heat and cool, causing the stress cracks that eventually break and leave you in the dark.
If you’re gazing into the eyes of a newborn baby, more often than not you’ll see they’re some brilliant shade of blue, whatever the color of their parents’ eyes. This happens because, when a child is born, its eyes are still building up their store of a protein called melanin. The more melanin that collects, the darker the iris will become. Not only that, melanin itself becomes darker with exposure to ultraviolet light. At around six months old, a baby’s eyes will usually reach the color they will retain for the rest of their life.