If you watched even a few minute of the Summer Olympics coverage you’ve probably noticed that despite it being 2021 right now everything still says “Tokyo 2020”. Obviously the games were postponed last year due to the pandemic. But why didn’t they change the year? The International Olympic Committee decided to keep everything as “2020”…
If you’ve been watching any of the diving events in the summer Olympics you’ve probably noticed one interesting thing that every diver does. They shower in between dives. But why?! I thought it might have been to wash the chlorine and chemicals off? But that’s not it at all. The pool water is very cold…
Let’s keep the Olympic theme going for today’s mystery… how deep are the pools in the Summer Olympics? The regular swimming pools for the swimming events in Tokyo are almost 10 feet deep. Pretty standard. The diving pools which obviously need to be deeper are between 10 and 16 feet depending on the event. The…
Keeping with our Olympics theme for Mundane Mysteries today’s question… what happens if there is a tie for gold? This obviously doesn’t happen that often since a lot of the timed events are decided by a tenth of a second, but it does happen. So they have to have a system for it. Which they do.…
If you win a gold medal at the Olympics are you actually getting a solid 100% gold medal?! The answer is actually no. In fact full gold medals haven’t been given since the 1912 Olympics. Today’s Olympic Gold Medals are actually made mostly of all silver. Then there is small thin coating of about 6…
I bet you’ve never sneezed while sleeping. Thank about it… it’s never happened! The reason is that our brain actually shuts down the ability to sneeze while you’re sleeping. If for some reason you get some dust in your nose or something physically makes you sneeze your brain will wake you up first. But other…
If you watched the opening ceremony for the Summer Olympics from Tokyo this morning you saw those famous Olympic rings a lot. But what do they actually symbolize? The five Olympic rings are meant to represent the five continents in the world. Those specific colors (blue, yellow, black, green, red) were chosen for the rings…
You’ve probably noticed this when you’re shopping in the bread aisle at the grocery store. The little plastic tags or twist ties on the bread bags are always different colors… but why? It’s actually kind of an intricate system to show how fresh each loaf is. The colors are used to tell grocers when the…
I caught myself saying this the other day and thought it would be a good mystery for today. “Read the tea leaves” means to use signs or signals to predict something that’s going to happen in the near future. It all started with the fortune telling community. Fortune tellers would use actual tea leave patterns…
Unless you’ve been living under a cardboard Amazon package lately you probably saw that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos successfully traveled to space and back this morning in just 11 minutes. He brought his brother and two others with him as they became the first human civilians to actually get into outer space by crossing the…