A list of curious facts
One: Here’s a magical fact about trees. When branches or roots of different trees are in prolonged contact with one another, they often end up exposing their inner tissues—which eventually fuse together through a process called inosculation. One example of such a result we found on Twitter: “The thinner tree was cut years ago and the big one has been holding and feeding it since then. They ‘wake up’ together in the spring and ‘go to sleep’ together in the autumn.” Aww!
Two: Did you know that restaurants have the highest markups on mid-range wines on their menu? A likely reason:
“The authors aren’t quite sure why this is. But they suggest that restaurants may want to keep markups down on the cheap end (since wallet-conscious diners might otherwise not order wine at all) and at the higher end (since oenophiles might be encouraged to pay a little extra for a finer-quality bottle, but are more likely to be aware that they’re getting a bad deal).”
Bonus nugget: The most popular pick for restaurant-goers is apparently the second-cheapest wine on the list, which is perfect fodder for this hilarious vid:
Three: The new thing in skincare products: Snail slime soaps. A Frenchman ‘tickles’ snails to extract their fluid to make the bars. Why snail goo: it contains molecules of collagen and elastin, which have anti-aging and skin-healing properties—and are often used in K-beauty products. Watch the South China Morning Post report for more. Also: remarkably, no snails were hurt making this soap.
Four: This strange, strange animal is called a tarsier—one of the world’s smallest primates, usually found in the jungles of SE Asia. Also this: “Tarsier eyes are so big that they can’t rotate in their sockets, so the animal has developed the ability to swivel its head almost 180° in either direction to look around–think Baby Yoda meets The Exorcist.”
Five: Chalk this down as totally random trivia. Do you know what Earth would look like if you placed it within Saturn’s rings? It would look like this (yeah, we’re tiny):
