Sandwich Bread Isn’t Bread, and Water Can Be Wetter

Sandwich bread is not entirely ‘real’ bread, water can boil and freeze at the same time, bananas are berries that grow in grass... Believe these or not, but let me ask you: did you know water can be wetter than it is in nature? Find it out in this article!

Bubble gum is usually pink because the first commercial gum, made in 1928, was like that. Pink simply was the only color of the food dye available at the factory. The first chewing gum ever, though, probably appeared about 9,000 years back. People chewed birchbark tar back then for its medicinal properties — for example, to fight fever.

In fact, at different periods, people used to chew on lots of stuff: for instance, the ancient Mayans made gum out of chicle — a substance made from the sapodilla tree sap. They used it to fight hunger and quench thirst. And in North America, people chewed spruce tree resin, a habit which European settlers later picked up and turned into a commercial thing in the 1840s.

You can’t name a folder CON on any version of Windows. This also applies to some other letter combinations, such as PRN, AUX, NUL, and others. It has to do with the operating system itself: it creates folders to store data in them, and if you create one of your own using one of these names, it will confuse the system.

If you shuffle a deck of cards to get every possible combination, you’ll spend billions upon billions upon billions of years just to get a third of the way there.

Think about it: there are 52 cards in a regular deck. And the possible number of combinations without repeating is 8*10 raised to the power of 67. Even if you shuffle the cards 100 times per second without repeating combinations, it will take you several hundreds of trillions of the times the Universe has existed so far.

Folding a simple sheet of paper 103 times will get you a stack 93 billion light years thick, which is more than the size of the observable Universe. But if you decide to check this on your own, you won’t be able to fold it more than 12 times — and that would require a really big sheet of paper too, as in almost a mile long. With a regular printing paper sheet, it would be even less: 7 times.

In many supermarkets, you’ll see two different bread sections: bread and bakery, and they do have different types of bread in them. The lighter, square, and most often cut in advance variety is called white pan bread, or sandwich bread, while the other is, well, just bread.

The difference is that sandwich bread is made specifically to have stuff spread on it: it has a tougher texture, which allows the slice not to fall apart and go all crumbly when you put, say, peanut butter on it. It’s also soft enough, letting you bite into your sandwich and not squeeze the contents out the sides, turning your meal into a mighty mess.

Finally, white pan bread lasts longer than regular bread because of the additives in it. They preserve the bread’s texture for a week or so in your home, allowing you to enjoy your PB&J’s for longer, while the traditional bread variety would likely go stale the next day.

There’s a state at which water can both be boiling and freezing. It’s called a triple point, and it occurs when all three states of a substance — liquid, solid, and vapor — exist all at the same time without messing with each other. For water, the triple point happens just a tiny bit over the freezing temperature and at an atmospheric pressure of 0.006 atmospheres.

The blue bird you can see on the Twitter logo has an official name! It’s Larry the Bird, and the creator of the social network named it after the former NBA basketball player Larry Bird from the Boston Celtics.

If you’ve decided to save a few bucks by charging your smartphone less often, let me disappoint you. To charge a cell phone, you use teeny amounts of electricity. That’s why the maximum amount of money you can save within a year is less than $1.

Jeep is actually an abbreviation: originally, it was called a G.P., or a general purpose vehicle. It was only much later that it became the brand we know today.

Bananas have a curved shape because they turn towards the sun. They’re also not trees but grass, by the way. The bunches grow downwards, but the fruit itself wants to get towards the sun, so it curves a bit up while it grows.

Spandex, a fiber used for making sports clothing, got its name as an anagram of the word ‘expands.’

If you were to watch every video on YouTube, you’d have to spend 1,000 years on that. And then about 1,000 times more because of all the new videos that would appear by then.

You probably know that tomatoes are technically berries, right? Well, bananas, peppers, watermelons, and eggplants are, too.

There’s a little open jar symbol on every cosmetics item packaging. It’s called PAO (Period After Opening), and it tells you how long you can safely use the product after opening it. The jar is usually accompanied by a number with the letter “M”, which stands for “months”. Just make sure you remember exactly when you opened the package so that you’ll know when 3, 6, 9, or however many months indicated have passed!

A phone jack often has several rings on it, each representing different components. One ring is for mono sound, two are for stereo, and the third one means your earphones have a microphone function built in.

To know if an egg you boiled is fully cooked, just spin it on the countertop. If the egg spins steadily without immediately falling over, it’s done!

Instead of using good old water, firefighters extinguish fires with “wet water.” They add special wetting agents to it — chemicals that reduce the surface tension that regular water has. It helps the substance to soak into objects and spread everywhere much more easily.

Your shower curtain sometimes gets a bit too clingy when you get into the shower trying to get clean. According to “the shower-curtain effect,” the hot water lowers the air pressure behind the curtain. The higher, denser pressure outside the shower pushes the curtain in, making you feel like your shower curtain is out to get you!

If you take a closer look at a regular garbage bag, you’ll probably notice that the seam is inside out. In fact, you’re not supposed to shake up the bag to open it. You gotta place the bag over a garbage can like a hat and then just push the middle of the bag down into the can. This way, the seam will end up where it should be: inside.

If you ever had problems with popping chocolates from the box, look at those little holes around them. They’re there to help you — if you push a hole right next to the candy, it’ll jump out easily.

An extra hole at the upper part of the sink has multiple hidden functions. First, in case someone forgets to close the faucet, the water won’t overflow, and the bathroom won’t get flooded. Second, thanks to that hole, the water drains faster as it gives an escape for the air helping the water flow down.

Many cups and mugs have little grooves on the bottom on purpose. They’re designed for washing machines. The grooves let the water flow and not spill over your feet when you take the cup out. Also, those grooves let the air flow, so the cup doesn’t crack even if the tea is scalding!

Take a closer look at that metal plate at the front of your stapler, known as the anvil! Turn the stapler upside down and rotate the anvil, reversing it. You’re basically changing the stapler setting to “temporary”. In this mode, you can staple the sheets without too much vigor, so they can be easily detached from each other later.