Chopping down the Tree of Knowledge

“Henrich had thought he would be adding a small branch to an established tree of knowledge. It turned out he was sawing at the very trunk.”

Ethan Watters, Pacific Standard, on the psychology of the “ultimatum game.”

Making me bony

“The human body has 206 bones. When I’m with you I have 207.”

I Fucking Love Science, via Facebook

Hitting you in the most sensitive part of your eye

“It’s like every single AC/DC album cover came to life and punched your eyeballs right in the dick.”

Robert Brockway, Cracked.com, on the Chaiten volcano in Chile

Delusions of grandeur

“Physicists hate the term. Higgs hates the term. It’s like discovering a vital new gene in neurology and calling it the Kardashian….”

Luke McKinney, Cracked.com, on calling the Higgs boson the “God Particle.”

Hey, who can resist a hovering sandwich?

“Imagine you’re walking down the street and suddenly you see a sandwich hovering in front of you. Hovering sandwiches being your favorite kind, you reach out for it, and are instantly devoured by a nearby monster disguised as a minivan.”

Monte Richard & E. Reid Ross, Cracked.com, on angler fish.

Can we get the built-in buzz app, instead?

“The human brain is equipped with “hedonic set points” which not only establish where our base mood is (optimistic, pessimistic or indifferent); but also adapts rather quickly to our surroundings and returns to our base frame of mind. Basically, we all have a built-in buzzkill app.”

Kimmy Dee, Cracked.com, on happiness

Someone plug up that leak

“Electricity is just a flow of electrons from some place that has too many of them to some place that really wants them. But where they really want to go is to the ground. If generated power is a shipload of sailors on shore leave, the ground is a whore house that’s having a two-for-one special.”

Martin Bear, Cracked.com

Panda booty

“The giant panda is the Kim Kardashian of the animal world. It has big eyes, curves in the right places, and is ever-photogenic. It gets by on its good looks alone, while more deserving animals (the Yangtze River crocodile, hello??) are simply ignored by the world’s animators and toy-makers.”

Kristie Lu Stout, CNN.com

The building blocks of death

“When they called it ‘the building blocks of life,’ you probably pictured DNA as a series of neatly edged Legos snapping together to form a cohesive whole. When in reality, DNA is more like an old scrapbook that someone has torn up, pasted back together, filled with old newspaper clippings about murder and then taken into the bathroom with them.”

C. Coville, Cracked.com