Andriychyk Top

05/08/2021

With around 950 million native speakers and an additional 200 million people speaking Mandarin Chinese as a second language, it's the most widely spoken language in the world.

05/08/2021

Castroville is a rural town in California that grows a lot of artichokes (and other vegetable crops), thanks to the fact that the area enjoys ideal weather year round. Because of this, it grows 99.9% of all commercially grown artichokes and has even been nicknamed the "Artichoke Capital of the World."

04/08/2021

No matter where you go, it's comforting to know you can always enjoy a Coca-Cola. Well, almost anywhere. While this fizzy drink is sold practically everywhere, it still hasn't (officially) made its way to North Korea or Cuba, according to the BBC. That's because these countries are under long-term U.S. trade embargoes.

04/08/2021

Around 80 percent of Greenland is covered by the Greenland Ice Sheet, which Britannica explains is the "largest and possibly the only relic of the Pleistocene glaciations in the Northern Hemisphere." But has it always been so icy? Well, at the bottom of a 1.4 km core sample, which was taken in 1966 at Camp Century during the Cold War, researchers found "well-preserved fossil plants and biomolecules," which means that the massive sheet melted and reformed at least once in the last million years. Brrrrr!

03/08/2021

Soccer—or football, depending on who you ask—is the most popular sport around the world. That's why when the FIFA World Cup games took place in both 2010 and 2014, nearly half of the world's population (around 3.2 billion people) tuned in to see who would win.

03/08/2021

Due to overfishing and disease, the oyster population in Maryland's Chesapeake Bay was seriously suffering. But thanks to dedicated work by scientists at the Horn Point Laboratory, the Army Corps, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the Nature Conservancy, the state is now home to the world's largest man-made oyster reef. Home to more than one billion oysters, the area is a no-fishing zone, which will hopefully give the population a chance to recover.

02/08/2021

Santa Cruz del Islote in the Archipelago of San Bernardo off the coast of Colombia may only be about the size of two soccer fields (two acres), but the artificial island has four main streets and 10 neighborhoods. Five hundred people live on the island in around 155 houses. With so many people packed into such a small space, it's the most densely populated island in the world, according to The Guardian.

02/08/2021

You might think twins are a rarity, but they're actually becoming more common than ever. "From about 1915, when the statistical record begins, until 1980, about one in every 50 babies born was a twin, a rate of 2 percent," writes Alexis C. Madrigal of The Atlantic. "Then, the rate began to increase: by 1995, it was 2.5 percent. The rate surpassed 3 percent in 2001 and hit 3.3 percent in 2010. [That means] one out of every 30 babies born is a twin."

30/07/2021

You might think you're accustomed to frigid air and blustery winds, but the average winter day has nothing on the coldest day ever recorded, which was -144 degrees Fahrenheit. The temperature was recorded in Antarctica during a span of research between 2004 and 2016. Just a few breaths of air at that temperature would induce hemorrhaging in your lungs and kill you.

28/07/2021

28/07/2021

When 174 world leaders signed the Paris Agreement on Earth Day in 2016 at the United Nations (UN) headquarters in New York, it was the largest number of countries ever to come together to sign anything on a single day. The agreement aims to combat climate change and accelerate and intensify the actions and investments needed to strengthen the global climate effort.

27/07/2021

The flag of Nicaragua features a rainbow in the center that includes a band of purple, while the flag of Dominica boasts a picture of a sisserou parrot, a bird with purple feathers. These elements make them the only two flags in the world that use the color purple.