facts

Slept badly? Had strange dreams? Blame the moon. People have more weird and wonderful dreams around the time of the full moon, a British study found. The content of our dreams doesn’t vary with the seasons or with the days of the week, it showed. But in the week or so surrounding a full moon, they are […]

Crows have a reasoning ability rivalling that of a human seven-year-old, research has shown. Scientists came to the conclusion after subjecting six wild New Caledonian crows to a battery of tests designed to challenge their understanding of cause and effect. The tasks were all variations of the Aesop’s fable in which a thirsty crow drops

Violent video games fuel aggressive behaviour as children grow up, a new report has warned. Children who repeatedly play brutal video games are learning thought patterns that will stick with them and influence their behaviour as they grow older, the study has claimed. The effect was found to be the same regardless of age, gender

Scientists have discovered a gene which increases the risk of a child having low IQ. The finding means a genetic test soon after birth could identify babies with the problem – and even paves the way for a treatment to tackle the issue. Children under seven with a common gene variant are four times as

Next time your teacher tells a bad joke and you feel compelled to laugh, beware – they can tell you’re faking it. Researchers from London have discovered our brains carry out different process when we hear genuine laughter compared to fake chuckles. When laughter is forced, for example, it activates a part of the brain

Doing more than three hours of homework per night may be making younger students sick. A study conducted by Stanford Graduate School of Education surveyed more than 4,300 students from ten high-performing public and private high schools in affluent California communities, and found that excessive homework causes high stress levels and physical health problems. ‘We

The longest recorded human neck reached 40 cm in length and was created by the successive fitting of copper coils, as practiced by the women of the Padaung or Kareni tribe of Myanmar as a sign of beauty. Their necks eventually become so long and weak that they cannot support their heads without the coils.

In our hectic, mile-a-minute existences, it’s easy to forget just how amazing our world truly is. Fortunately, the authors of the newly published 1,227 Quite Interesting Facts to Blow Your Socks Off, have made it easy for us to slow down and savor some astonishing scientific facts–about everything from the bodies we live in to

A new image released by NASA reveals a previously unseen view of Saturn and its rings using a navigation technique called a ‘pi transfer’. The picture was taken by the space agency’s Cassini probe during a flyby past the planet’s largest moon Titan when it was about 764,000 miles (1.23 million km) from Saturn. A