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149 short, true stories behind the things you use every day. Each one names its source.
In 1943 the US banned sliced bread.
Answer to read the story.For seven weeks, partly to save on wrapping. Read the story
Hans the horse did sums only when the asker knew the answer
Clever Hans tapped out answers with a hoof, and in 1904 a commission of 13, including a circus manager and a zoo director, found no trick.
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The first platypus sent to Britain was taken for a fake
In 1799 the first scientists to examine a platypus skin suspected that someone had sewn a duck's bill onto a beaver-like body. The animal was real.
The real Smokey Bear was named after the poster
The Forest Service's fire-prevention bear first appeared on a poster in 1944.
Freud dissected hundreds of eels and never found the testes
Before Freud, Aristotle had decided that eels came from earthworms formed in mud, and fishermen never caught anything they recognized as a young eel.
This bird leads people to wild honey and waits for the wax
The greater honeyguide knows where the bees' nests are, but bees can easily kill a bird that breaks in. People with smoke and axes can open a nest, once they find it.
A submarine listening post off Bermuda recorded whale songs
In the 1950s a Navy engineer in Bermuda, listening on underwater microphones for Soviet submarines, kept recording strange moans and wails.
From one orchid, Darwin predicted a moth no one had seen
In 1862 Darwin received an orchid from Madagascar whose nectar sat at the bottom of a tube about a foot long.
A newspaper notice led to the monarchs' winter hideout
In 1937 a Toronto zoologist began tracking monarch butterflies on their way south each fall, but the trail kept vanishing in Texas.
A seabird banded in 1956 was laying eggs again in 2024
Wisdom, a Laysan albatross, got her band on Midway Atoll in 1956, when she was already old enough to breed.
A five-month-old bird flew 8,400 miles without stopping
In October 2022 a young bar-tailed godwit carrying a satellite tag left Alaska and came down in Tasmania 11 days later. It never stopped to rest or feed on the way.
149 stories. Ten free a day.
In the app these are the Learn cards.