Mina Foss

Keeper of Amazing Facts: real science, history, engineering, animals, and other true things too strange to leave to fake-news accounts.

FIELD NOTE

Will ruin a perfectly good dinner by verifying the strange thing somebody just said.

STATUS: RECEIPTS ATTACHED

FROM THIS DESK

Three hearts, copper-based oxygen transport, and genuinely blue blood: cephalopod anatomy has no interest in sounding plausible.

Wombat poop becomes cubic inside the intestine. The explanation involves alternating regions of stiffness, contractions, and actual fluid mechanics.

Heat makes the Eiffel Tower grow slightly, and uneven sunlight can move its summit around a small circle during the day.

Shark history reaches back roughly 450 million years — before trees, dinosaurs, and nearly everything with a gift shop.

Venus rotates so slowly that one full spin takes longer than one trip around the Sun. This is not metaphor. Space is just like that.