Awesome Mental Floss

Flatulation is one of those rare forces of nature that’s both essential and the source of endless giggles. From the first fart joke ever told to the composition of your flatus, Mental Floss editor Erin McCarthy is here to school us on the finer points of our bodies’ gaseous emissions.

The core of the Scientific Method is the experiment. But not every hypothesis pans out, and failure is always an option. The Mental Floss List Show looks back at 14 times when tests failed spectacularly, including McDonald’s bubble gum flavored broccoli, which surprisingly isn’t the grossest thing on the list.

Did you know that humans are the only animals with chins? Or that the bones in our hands and feet account for half the bones in our body? What about the fact that we glow? Learn all that and more in Mental Floss’ List Show.

Mental Floss lists some of the hilarious, gross, ineffective and outright counterproductive cures that were prescribed or probably made up in old times. The list includes cigarettes, cocaine, morphine, and even dead bodies.

Did you know that the actor who played Ramsey Bolton in Game of Thrones was almost cast as Jon Snow? Or that only 5 episodes in the entire series has no one being killed? Learn all that and more in Mental Floss’ behind-the-scenes trivia on Game of Thrones.

Did you know that there’s no such thing as an alpha wolf? How about the fact that the Tyrannosaurus Rex actually had great eyesight? Or that female dogs also hump? Learn all that and more in Mental Floss’ animal list show.

Want to go down in history? You don’t need to solve an obscure problem. Mental Floss’ List Show enumerates 19 common topics that science hasn’t fully figured out, including laughing, hiccups, ice skates, and of course the common cold.

From black bears to grizzly bears to gummy bears to the Chicago Bears, we have a fascination with these wonderfully cuddly, smart, and imposing mammals. Mental Floss is here to school us on many random facts about bears in the latest episode of Scatterbrained.

Mental Floss shares a handful of facts and tips about beer and other alcoholic beverages, from the ways in which alcohol affect creativity, to how to open a beer bottle in a pinch, to the different kinds of hops used in brewing beer.

Did you know that “doom” used to refer to a judgment handed down in court? John Green of Mental Floss schools us about 27 words we use today, and their very different meanings back in the day. We love how Elmer Fudd had an influence on our vocabulary.

Mental Floss shares a handful of interesting stories and trivia about the Internet during the early 2000’s. Watch and find out about an unlucky music pirate, a brief history of Neopets, why Livejournal is still alive and more.

Mental Floss’ latest Scatterbrained dropped a ton of trivia about today’s technological and engineering marvels. Learn about the skyscraper with the biggest clocks in the world, a brief history of robots, Tesla and Panasonic’s massive battery factory and more.

For their latest episode of Scatterbrained, Mental Floss offers up a number of interesting tidbits about shopping centers, which were once the epicenter of American shopping but have dramatically changed in the years since the advent of big box and online commerce.

Mental Floss explores a bunch of tidbits and trivia about language, including some of the many quirks of English, how dictionaries work, and a serious polyglot – a man who claims to speak over fifty languages. That “whether” or “if” thing always trips us up.

The older you get, the more the years coalesce into one blob we call “the past.” But Mental Floss wants us to know exactly how ancient we’ve become with this list of things that happened or started 21 years ago, including Google, Space Jam, and A Song of Ice and Fire.

Did you know that koalas have been around 100 times longer than humans? Mental Floss fills our brains with trivia about those adorable eucalyptus-loving marsupials. They may not be as pleasant to hang out with as you might think, but we want a giant koala anyhow.

Mental Floss takes a break from sobriety and digs into their booze cabinet to school us on some 30 different liquors, and where their names came from. While many are obviously named after their creators, others have truly obscure origins.

Mental Floss trivia maven John Green is here to regale us with 26 random tidbits about everyone’s favorite plastic building blocks. We’re betting that original UCS Millennium Falcon just lost a whole lot of its resale value.

Most of what we know about America’s “Wild West” we learned from Deadwood and Hell on Wheels. But as Mental Floss‘ John Green teaches us, there’s lots of other stuff that movie and TV tropes typically leave out. Robot camels on Westworld sounds like a fun idea.

From iconic museums to a bed and breakfast shaped like a dog, Mental Floss trivia master John Green welcomes us to the salon to school us on some truly strange and wonderful structures worth visiting around the globe. Also, we just love to say the word “googie.”

Master of trivia John Green presents a look at some of the many things you may not have know about our world’s largest bodies of water, in one of the more humbling episodes of Mental Floss‘ list show. Can you imagine seeing icebergs off the Florida coastline?

Volcanoes and lightning working together? No thanks. Mental Floss‘ John Green returns to the salon to share some interesting and unusual tidbits about the fury and mystery of nature’s fiery earthmaking engines. Also, they really should think about renaming Iceland “Fire and Iceland.”

Did you know that NASA wants to make an asteroid orbit the Moon so that astronauts can explore it? Or that it helped create The Learning Channel? Or that it had its budget cut multiple times? Okay maybe that last one isn’t a secret. More in Mental Floss’ video.