Octopuses don’t have tentacles; they have arms.
The most distinguishing feature about an octopus is its set of eight appendages — after all, they’re right there in the name. But don’t confuse that tangle of limbs for tentacles, because octopuses don’t have those — they have arms. For us armchair biologists, the two words seem interchangeable, but there’s an important difference. On animals such as squids, tentacles are usually longer and only have suckers on their clubbed ends; they’re primarily used for hunting. By contrast, a cephalopod’s arms have suckers that smell, taste, and feel all the way down. Squids, for example, have both eight arms and two tentacles.
It’s impossible o tickle yourself.
In the fourth century BCE, Aristotle wrote in Parts of Animals that “the fact that human beings only are susceptible to tickling is due (1) to the fineness of their skin and (2) to their being the only creatures that laugh.” Although this ancient theory misses the mark, it lies at the beginning of a long tradition of philosophers and scientists questioning the nature of tickling. Thinkers such as René Descartes, Baruch Spinoza, Galileo, and Charles Darwin have provided their own theories about this weird autonomic response. Yet despite 2,500 years of investigating the matter, scientists still aren’t sure why it’s impossible to tickle yourself.
Popsicles were reportedly invented by an 11-year-old.
A dessert accidentally created by a California kid has managed to stick around for over a century. One frigid night in the San Francisco Bay Area, young Frank Epperson took a glass of water and mixed in a sweet powdered flavoring using a wooden stirrer. He left the concoction on his family’s back porch overnight, and by morning, the contents had frozen solid. Epperson ran hot water over the glass and used the stirrer as a handle to free his new creation. He immediately knew he’d stumbled on something special, and called his treat an Epsicle, a portmanteau of his last name and “icicle.” Throughout his life, Epperson claimed that this experiment occurred in 1905, when he was 11 years old. While most publications agree, the San Francisco Chronicle’s website counters that local temperatures never reached freezing in 1905; they did, however, in nearby Oakland, where the Epperson family moved around 1907, meaning the fateful event may have happened a few years later.
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