The Wise Book of Whys
Daven Hiskey, Today I Found Out.com

The Wise Book of Whys

supplementals

10 highlights

Ethylene is a hormone produced and released into the air by most plants, including from the fruit of certain plants, such as apples, bananas, pears, etc.

Sodium lauryl sulfate has been shown to act as a shark repellent. There is also evidence that it is effective as a microbicide when spread on your skin, particularly effective in helping to prevent infection from viruses like Herpes simplex and HIV, which are non-enveloped viruses.

Without this stercobilin, your poop would typically look grey-ish/white. Because of this, a sure sign you are having problems with bile production, such as a blocked bile duct by a gall stone or something more serious like pancreatic cancer, is if you notice your poop is this white/grey-ish color.

Van der Waals’ force, simply stated, is the combined attractive forces between molecules. Normally, the force between molecules is too minute to matter; however, given the light weight nature of a gecko (approximately 2.5 ounces) and the extreme number of spatulae, the combined force allows the gecko to “stick” to almost anything.

Particularly, adding salt to foods helps certain molecules in those foods more easily release into the air, thus helping the aroma of the food, which is important in our perception of taste.

The first person to suggest an eight-hour workday for everyone was a British man by the name of Robert Owen, who was also one of the founders of socialism.

Freed was encouraged to call this mix of music "Rock and Roll" by his sponsor, record store owner Leo Mintz, who was trying to boost sales on Race Records by getting white shoppers to buy them. Race Records weren't very popular at the time among white people, but by re-branding the music "Rock and Roll", it quickly became extremely popular among teenagers of all ethnicities.

As Tracy Sinclair, one-time brand manager at Oral-B stated in the book The Power of Habit, “Consumers need some kind of signal that a product is working. We can make toothpaste taste like anything — blueberries, green tea — and as long as it has a cool tingle, people feel like their mouth is clean. The tingling doesn’t make the toothpaste work any better. It just convinces people it’s doing the job.”

The word “salad” comes from the ancient Roman practice of salting leaf vegetables; “salad” literally means “salted.”

Why Police Officers Are Sometimes Called “Pigs”