Children constantly bombard adults with questions about why this and why that. Of course, we can’t know everything, so we scour the internet for answers.
As adults, we are still interested and curious about new information and curiosities, but we are lazy to look up the hows and whys. The website brightside.me has compiled a bunch of these puzzles so you don’t miss them:
1. Why do we get goosebumps?
Goose bumps are nothing more than the contraction of tiny muscles under the skin’s surface and the simultaneous protrusion of hair follicles from the skin. The piloereaction is a defence mechanism of mammals against the cold or in case of emergency to make themselves look bigger, writes sympatika.hu. In humans it can also be observed in response to cold, but also during an emotional reaction. Experts explain it by an unconscious release of the hormone adrenaline.
2. Why do we sound different when we talk into a microphone?
When we hear someone else speak, the sounds come from the air and reach our eardrums. When we hear our own voice, however, the sound does not just come from outside, from the air, but the vibrations generated in the larynx inside our head, through the bones, reach the eardrum. The deeper, lower frequency vibrations of this sound from the inside are amplified by our head and this is the reason why we hear our own voice as deeper,” says the hearing-specialist.blog.hu.
3. Why do we close our eyes when eating lemons?
It’s an ancient habit, a self-protective instinct against splashing the juice of the fruit into your eyes. Acidic juice can cause unpleasant injuries, which is why it’s okay that lemons and their acidic counterparts are ‘eye-sucking’ fruits, explains brightside.me.
4. Why do raccoons rinse their food?
Raccoons used to get their food almost exclusively from water, and this instinct is so ingrained in them that to this day they have to run to the water with their food to dip it in and then take it out. They have extremely sensitive paws, which come in handy when it comes to scooping food from the bottom of the water, for example. They constantly grope while searching and it can look like they are washing, according to an article on hirnaplo.hu.
5. Why does the clock move in the same direction as the sun?
This phenomenon was observed when the first sundials were created in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, and for many centuries it was the most accurate way of measuring time. So much so that when the first mechanical clocks were created, they were adapted to the sundials to measure accurately. Because they were based on the sundial, the first mechanical clocks had only one hand. It was accurate enough, although there were problems in telling the minutes, elteonline.hu reports.
6. Where does the toilet waste from the plane go?
Airplanes have so-called chemical toilets, which means that after emptying, the faeces is placed in a special chemical liquid (usually blueish) containing Teflon, which breaks it down into a less odorous substance by chemical reactions. The closed tanks on the machines are emptied after each landing by simply parking a tanker truck next to the machine and extracting the waste. So the pipe system itself and the principle of operation is almost the same as in home toilets,” explains borsonline.hu.
