Author: Ian Fortey

Head into the supermarket today, and you will find countless items on the shelf that proudly bear non-GMO labels. They’re usually located near where a product claims it’s gluten or fat-free. The display of this label, while saying nothing at all about GMOs, is clearly meant to relieve you, the consumer. It assures you that…

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At this point, if you have never seen a zombie movie or otherwise experienced a zombie fiction you may actually live in a strange trans-dimensional bubble. Whether you like the genre or not, you should at least be aware of zombie fiction and the basic tenets of it. From 1914’s Voodoo through 1932’s White Zombie…

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The universe is awash in extremes. The fastest, the oldest, the furthest, there are all kinds of things you can look into and be amazed by what nature has created. But what about the coldest? You’ve probably heard of absolute zero before, but do you know what happens when you reach it? Or why nothing…

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Somewhere between one in 20 and one in 10 people claim to have had an out-of-body experience in their lifetime. If you’ve never experienced one, it can be hard to wrap your head around exactly what it is. You may have an inclination to think that someone who has experienced one was imagining things.  To…

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Nothing lasts forever be it cold November rain or the world on which you live. One day our sun is going to die and, in terms of apocalypses, things are going to get super bad no matter what neighborhood you live in. Lucky for us that’s not scheduled to happen anytime soon. Rest assured this…

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Sleep. It’s the place where we’re all Vikings. Or donuts. Whatever it is that happens to you in your dreams. It’s the most horizontal you can be in a day, and it’s usually pretty relaxing. Man, who doesn’t love a good sleep? But what happens if you don’t get enough of it? Everyone’s probably pulled…

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As mysterious conditions go, Havana Syndrome is a relatively new one and far harder to explain than most. Unlike traditional diseases or afflictions, this one is pretty shrouded in mystery, conspiracy, and a lot of confusion. For instance, Havana Syndrome might not be a thing at all. Or maybe it’s terrorism. Could be a sonic…

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Measuring intelligence is no easy task. Humans have IQ tests but, by and large, these are dismissed as being either partially or wholly unable to gauge how smart someone is. Your IQ just doesn’t mean much about intelligence and tests are typically very biased.  Now, given the issues with a human intelligence test, one that…

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You can’t swing a cat on the internet without running into something that was made by AI these days. For a lot of people, this can be hard to detect. What we call AI can take many forms, and some of it is definitely used to cut corners, break rules, or defraud people.  Generative AI,…

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Language is incredibly diverse in our world. There are around 7,000 spoken languages in the world right now and a few dozen of them are known by just a single person. As many as 90% are spoken by less than 100,000 people. Dozens of other languages are officially extinct with no one left to speak…

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We know people have wanted to journey to the center of the Earth since at least 1864 when Jules Verne published Journey to the Center of the Earth. Likely it was a curiosity for at least a few years before that. But the practicality of digging your way to the planet’s center is not as…

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The internet seems to run on conspiracy theories. There are so many of them around that you probably have a favorite one of your own. Half of Americans believe at least one medical conspiracy theory, like the FDA, is secretly hiding a cure for cancer. Maybe yours is about who shot JFK. Or if the…

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The Marvel Cinematic Universe is arguably responsible for making “multiverse” part of the everyday vernacular of millions of people worldwide, but they didn’t create the idea. Multiverse theory, or the Many Worlds Theory as it was first known, was proposed in 1957 by a physicist named Hugh Everett. Before Everett, a man named Erwin Schrodinger…

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Technically speaking nothing is faster than light. That’s it, the story’s over, time to go home. Except that is the very simple, very basic answer to the question “is anything faster than light?”  A more complicated answer is that nothing is faster than light except for when we can come up with circumstances in which…

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Every so often the news will cover a story about UFOs. There is generally little to these stories, but sometimes there’s enough to fuel speculation amongst the devout that perhaps our world has been visited by beings from another. Speculation about alien life is certainly not a new phenomenon. It’s also not strictly the realm…

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On June 5, 2024, astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams left the Earth for the International Space Station. The mission had been delayed for seven long years thanks to various technical setbacks and other problems. The length of the mission was to be 8 days. Then something happened.  The astronauts were using something called the…

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A molecule is really just some atoms that are stuck together. Water, H2O, is a molecule. Next to a simple atom, it’s the most basic part of any chemical compound. It’s the small part of any substance you can make without breaking it into something that changes its entire composition. Most of us know the…

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Do you believe in ghosts? A majority of Americans do. In a survey of 1,000 people, over 61% said they believed in ghosts. Earlier polls suggested fewer did, at around 41%. Years before that it was 42%. Even at its lowest, that’s still 136 million people. That’s a lot of folks believing in ghosts. The…

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In 2004, then-President Bush was expected to announce a new space initiative. There would be a manned mission to Mars and our first moon base would be up and running by 2020. It was set to cost between $40 billion and $80 billion. More recent estimates suggest the cost would be around half a trillion…

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Have you ever pondered what the most painful way to die might be? It’s a morbid curiosity that’s perfectly natural and most of us have wondered it at one time or another. It’s also probably very hard to answer that question for any number of reasons.  There are all kinds of terrible ways to die,…

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