“Tsundoku” is a Japanese word for the habit of buying too many books, letting them pile up in your house, and never reading them.
100 Mind-Blowing Pile Facts
Madame Tussaud used real heads for her first wax creations. Madame Anna Maria Tussaud started her waxing during the French Revolution. She would grab heads from the guillotine pile, look for the most interesting faces, and create wax masks with their faces for the revolution.
The Moon is getting farther away every year. The Moon exerts a pull on Earth, causing our planet to be slightly egg-shaped. It affects water even more, creating tides and causing the oceans to pile up towards one side of the planet, forming a ‘tidal bulge’. This bulge is dragged around with the Moon as it orbits. As Earth rotates faster than the Moon – 24 hours versus 27.3 days – the bulge moves slightly ahead of the Moon’s position in orbit. The Moon pulls back on it, effectively trying to slow it down and causing Earth’s rotation rate to gradually slow down over time as a result. As the two bodies interact through gravity, this tugging causes Earth to lose energy while the Moon gains energy. Because of this energy boost the Moon is slowly spiralling outwards, moving away from us by 3.8cm per year.
Koalas may be cute, but they’re incredibly dumb. No, they have one of the smallest brains out of all mammals, and that’s in proportion to their body weight too! Their restrictive diet of non-nutritious eucalyptus leaves may be the cause, as this diet couldn’t possibly sustain a larger brain. To give you an idea of how clueless they are, when a koala is presented with a branch with leaves and a pile of leaves on a plate, they will eat the leaves on the branch as they cannot recognise those on the plate as food.