Why Can’t We Walk Straight?

For over 80 years, scientists have been trying to resolve a great mystery: Why can’t humans walk straight? Without a visible guidepoint like the sun or the moon or a mountain top in sight, we seem to go around in circles — quite literally. Here, NPR correspondent Robert Krulwich distills decades of inconclusive research, with the help of animator Benjamin Arthur.

There are countless experiments throughout history to test this curious quirk.

In 1920s, a young scientist asked a friend to walk across a field in a straight line, blindfolded. But here’s what the friend did:

In 1928, three men left a barn on a very foggy day and set out to walk to a point a mile away, straight ahead. Instead, this is how their journey went:

Also in 1928, a man was blindfolded, then asked to jump into a lake and swim straight to the other side. Here’s what he ended up doing:

When a man was asked to get in a car and drive straight across an empty Kansas field, he did the following:

There is, apparently, a profound inability in humans to stick to a straight line when blindfolded.” ~ Robert Krulwich

And while this particular mystery might not yet have an answer, on the subject of fascinating factoids from the folks at NPR, don’t forget the excellent All Facts Considered — an answers-laden compendium of curiosities from NPR’s endearing, librarianly librarian.

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PICKED: The Solar System at Your Fingertips

Last year, author Marcus Chown took a fascinating look at what everyday objects tell us about the universe. Now, he’s back with Solar System — his first-ever iPad book, a visually stunning and remarkably knowledge-rich interactive exploration of our corner of the cosmos. Created by the team behind Theodore Grey’s acclaimed The Elements and with original music by Bjork, the $14 app is worth every cent as it puts a mesmerizing 3D model of the Solar System at your fingertips, literally.

Solar System is the sophisticated cousin to the American Museum of Natural History’s Cosmic Discoveries and is the kind of cultural artifact that gives us true pause about the technology-enabled frontiers of human knowledge and curiosity in our era.

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All Facts Considered: 276 Esoteric Facts from NPR’s Librarian

We all know the Sahara is the world’s largest desert. Well, turns out we all know wrong — Antarctica is. You’ll find this and 276 more esoteric, surprising, utterly fascinating facts about history, language, science, religion and the arts in All Facts Considered: The Essential Library of Inessential Knowledge — a new book by Kee Malesky, NPR’s lovable and totally librarianly librarian.

From the precise duration of a “New York minute” to the last building Elvis left to

The book, despite its delightful dorky promo — or perhaps even more so because of it — is a knowledge geek’s bonanza, not to mention a powerful street-cred booster for your next dinner party conversation.

All Facts Considered is Wikipedia on interestingness steroids, a compendium of what you always wanted to know — and wanted others to know you know.

In 2010, we spent more than 4,500 hours bringing you Brain Pickings — the blog, the newsletter and the Twitter feed — over which we could’ve seen 53 feature-length films, listened to 135 music albums or taken 1,872 trips to the bathroom. If you found any joy and inspiration here this year, please consider supporting us with a modest donation — it lets us know we’re doing something right.

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Words of the World: The Secret Stories of Words

What liberals and Nazis have in common, or how we define our time.

We love words. So we’re all over Words of the World — a fantastic collection of short videos about words, presented by experts from the University of Nottingham’s School of Modern Languages and Cultures.

From Nazi to avant-garde to Enlightenment, the portal explores the origin, meaning and evolution of various words, often of non-English origin but with international resonance, in a priceless piece of cultural storytelling that blends linguistics, history, politics, sociology and more.

For Goebbels, one of his main principles [of propaganda] was ‘lie until you believe your lie.’

The brainchild of British video journalist and filmmaker Brady Haran, some of his other work we raved about recently, Words of the World taps a diverse range of experts — from linguists to literary historians to political scholars to cultural anthropologists — to deliver compelling accounts of what we think we know but in fact only have a superficial understanding of.

The word ‘liberal’ gradually became a noun as well as an adjective. And this was due to a particular circumstance and that circumstance was the Spain of the 1810s.

Follow the Words of the World YouTube channel for the latest videos.

And to further indulge your love of words, don’t miss our selection of 5 must-read books for language lovers and word geeks.

Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter and people say it’s cool. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s best articles. Here’s an example. Like? Sign up.