World’s Strangest

As a big Beatles fan, I sure wish I was there 46 years ago when the Fab Four appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show for the first time. Since we haven’t quite worked out that whole time travel thing yet, I’ll have to content myself (and you!) with trivia. 1. Although appearing on Sullivan was [...]

We had a hard time narrowing all your amazing captions down to 10, so… we went with 14 finalists. Remember now, only one vote per person. May the best horse win… View Poll

These days, my alarm clock is my 2 ½ year old son. But I remember the days of beeps, radios and snooze buttons like it was, well, 10 minutes ago. But here are five crazy ways to wake up that I never imagined until I went researching stuff for a post you’ll see later this [...]

A new study has revealed that people who are bored all the time are more likely to die than people who aren’t. The find was based on data collected fr…

Scientists have built a clock that is 100,000 times more accurate than the atomic clock currently used for establishing the official time around the world. It was developed by a team led by Chin-wen Chou of the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colorado: The quantum-logic clock, which detects the energy state of a [...]

By popular demand—and by “popular demand,” I mean “one guy who asked politely”—we’ll hold Office Hours again on Friday. In a newsletter last month, mental_floss co-founder Mangesh asked readers for suggestions about additions to our site. Good ideas poured in, and one person reminded me of something we used to do from time to time: “Remember when [...]

It’s time for another caption contest! To repeat the rules, the idea here is quite simple: Your job is to come up with a gag. Make us smile, make us laugh, extra-points for those who are able to drop some interesting fact or trivia along the way. We’ll narrow down the entries to our favorites [...]

In a newsletter last month, mental_floss co-founder Mangesh asked readers for suggestions about additions to our site. Good ideas poured in, and one person reminded me of something we used to do from time to time: “Remember when you used to hold Office Hours and chat with readers via Instant Messenger? You should do that again. [...]

This article at Discover Magazine has nothing to do with the science fiction stories we are so familiar with. Author Sean Carroll looks at time travel as a physicist. He says if time travel were possible (and it might be), there would be no paradox, because we cannot change what has already happened. Ever. Then [...]

It’s a terrifying scenario you may have dreamed about: falling to earth from a high altitude. A very few people have survived such an event. Popular Mechanics has a survival guide that will take you longer to read than the six mile fall would take. Things are bad. But now’s the time to focus on the [...]