Let there be light

Shocking Truths: 10 surprising facts about electricity you didn't know

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Thanks to electricity, we can light up cities, keep our food fresh, stay connected no matter the distance, keep our homes clean, and stay cool or warm with air conditioning, among many, many other things. But even though it's part of our daily lives, there are actually many facts about electricity that you probably didn't know. If you want to discover electrifying fun facts, join us!

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There's one creature that really qualifies as "electric," and surprisingly, it lives in the water! The famous electric eel has 3 specialized organs filled with cells that can generate huge electric charges.

But how electric are they? Well, electric eels can produce up to 800 volts of electricity. That's more than 6 times the voltage of a typical wall socket! Can you imagine the shock and surprise of the first humans who discovered this?

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While it may seem that electricity is something modern, observations related to it are actually much older than you think.

Did you know that the ancient Greeks first recorded observations of electricity as early as 600 BCE? That's right! Thales of Miletus discovered that amber, when rubbed with fur, attracted small objects: That's what we now know as static electricity! However, at that time, they didn't understand electricity as we do today, nor how it worked or its potential.

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You know when you touch someone and suddenly feel a small electric shock? That's static electricity at work, much like what Thales of Miletus observed with amber and fur.

It turns out that the human body generates electricity through the movement of charged particles, called ions, across the membranes of nerve cells (neurons). Of course, that happens on a much smaller scale and operates very differently from the huge power produced by a power plant.

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As we mentioned, the ions naturally found in your body move across nerve cell membranes, creating electrical charges.

But did you know that your brain produces about 20 watts of power when it's awake? That's enough power to light up a small light bulb! Those 20 watts are cleverly used by your brain for neural communication and to keep your body's functions running.

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Both your brain and your heart use electrical energy to communicate and keep the body working. That's right! The electrical power your body produces is essential for heart functioning, too. The Sinoatrial node in your heart is made up of cells called "pacemaker cells" and is responsible for generating electrical impulses that regulate your heart's rhythm and pace.

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Although many believe electric cars are the future, they've actually been around for quite a long time. In fact, the first electric cars appeared in the 19th century!

Believe it or not, an early electric motor was patented in the United States in the 1830s. However, it took several decades before the first practical electric car was produced. Thanks to US inventor William Morrison, the world saw a working electric car as early as the 1890s!

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As the Guinness World Records website states, there's a giant light bulb standing 13 feet tall. And it's right here in America, in the town of Edison, New Jersey!

The Thomas Edison Memorial Tower, built in 1937, celebrates the place of Edison's iconic laboratory, where he carried out many of his experiments and discoveries. The tower rises over 100 feet and is crowned with a huge 13-foot-8-inch light bulb replica made of fiberglass. While it's often referred to as "the world's largest light bulb," there are actually bigger ones around the world today.

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One thing is for sure: electrical signals move incredibly fast. But just how fast, exactly?

The speed at which electricity travels depends on several factors, including the medium it's moving through. But in general, the electrical signal moves at nearly the speed of light! That's about 186,000 miles per second. Wow!

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Lightning is as fascinating as it is terrifying, isn't it? We've all seen it, whether in person or on video, but do you know what causes it? Well, electricity has a lot to do with it.

Lightning is produced when a buildup of electrical charges occurs in the atmosphere during a thunderstorm, and this energy is then discharged into the Earth in the form of a lightning strike!

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You might be surprised to learn that Iceland is one of the countries with the highest electricity consumption per person in the entire world.

But how is this possible? Well, it turns out that this Nordic country is also the world's largest producer of green energy per capita. Icelanders have access to abundant renewable energy sources, such as geothermal and hydropower, which have a lower environmental impact and make electricity consumption much more affordable!

Language in motion

From Nerd to Robot: 10 words coined by famous writers

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As masters of language, writers sometimes find that their imagination and creativity go far beyond the vocabulary the world has to offer. In order to put their ideas into writing, they have to create new words that eventually become part of the dictionary. Here are 10 terms and expressions used in modern language that you probably didn’t know were invented by famous writers.

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Dr. Seuss’ talent for telling fantastic stories through rhymes is well known. But very few people know that the creator of The Grinch and The Cat in the Hat was also responsible for the existence of the word "nerd."

In his 1950 book, If I Ran the Zoo, a little boy daydreams about what kind of animals he would have if he were in charge of a hypothetical zoo: "a Nerkle, a Nerd and a Seersucker". Although the term described an imaginary being -and the exact origin of a slang word can never be certain- it’s believed it was later adopted by students to refer to anyone with superior intelligence but not many social skills.

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Nowadays, freelance work is very widespread, especially among young people. But did you know that the word "freelancer" originated in the 19th century? The term first appeared in the historical novel Ivanhoe by Scottish novelist, poet, and historian Sir Walter Scott.

In the book, published in 1819 but set in England in the Middle Ages, Scott refers to mercenaries free of all allegiance who offer their services to anyone willing to pay them to fight for any nation. Thus, from the mixture of the words "free" and "lancers" came the term that today is given to those who work independently rather than on a regular salary basis.

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Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines the word "pandemonium" as a "wild uproar" or "a chaotic situation". The origin of this word dates back to the 17th century. In 1667, English poet John Milton first used the term to name the capital of hell, home of the main character of his epic poem Paradise Lost.

"Pandemonium" is a combination of the Greek prefix pan-, which means "all", and the Late Latin daemonium, meaning "evil spirit". Although today we no longer use the term to refer to the actual location of Satan and the fallen angels, the word continues to describe an infernal place or situation.

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Nowadays, there is no doubt that the word "cyberspace" refers to the online world of computer networks. While it may seem that the term has been in our language forever, it was actually first used by American-Canadian speculative fiction writer William Ford Gibson in the 1982 short story Burning Chrome.

Two years later, the author expanded the concept in his novel Neuromancer to describe a fictitious computer network containing vast amounts of information that could be exploited for wealth and power. Ring a bell? "Cyberspace" has since become a widely used word in many languages.

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While the feeling of being bored must have existed since ancient times, the word for it was not put into writing until the mid-19th century. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first written record of the word "boredom" appears in Charles Dickens' 1852 novel Bleak House.

However, some historians have found antecedents that predate Dickens use of the term. Lord Byron used "bores" and "bored" in his 1823 epic poem Don Juan. And a few years later, Herman Melville used other variations of the term, like "bore" and "bored to death". While we can’t be sure who wrote the word first, its literary origin is undeniable.

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"Serendipity" is known as a fortuitous and unforeseen finding or discovery, something that happened by chance but still has value. This term was coined in 1754 by British writer Horace Walpole. It derives from a traditional Persian story in which the princes of Serendip turn to chance to find the solution to their problems.

In this case, we can be absolutely sure that "serendipity" is a Walpole creation. The author himself explains how he conceived the term in one of the countless letters he wrote throughout his life. In those letters, we can find evidence that he invented at least 200 words, although most of them aren’t used in modern everyday language.

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In 1920, when he was writing his next work, Czech playwright Karel Čapek desperately needed an original word that could define human-like machines created by a company to fulfill the hard tasks that people no longer wanted to do.

The first name that came to Čapek’s mind was "labori", from the Latin labor, meaning "work". However, his brother Josef was not very convinced and suggested "roboti", inspired by the Czech word robota, meaning "servitude" or "hard work." In 1922, the term "robot" made its way into our language when the play R.U.R. was translated into English.

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Well, maybe he didn’t invent it, but we have Mark Twain to thank for first putting in writing the term "hard-boiled" in relation to human character. As a writer of local color, Twain often used colloquialisms and regionalisms that he heard from other people and, by writing them down, made them familiar to the entire population.

In this sense, while the expression was probably known in some circles, the father of American literature was the first to use it as an adjective meaning "emotionally hardened, devoid of sentimentality".

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Although it comes from ancient Greek, the word "utopia" in its current sense was first used in 1516. Inspired by the New World, English philosopher and author Sir Thomas More imagined a fictional island society where everything worked in harmony.

"Utopia" literally translates as "no place", coming from the Greek οὐ ("not") and τόπος ("place"). The term popularized by More became so widespread that, over time, its meaning changed and is now used not only to refer to a specific place but to describe perfect scenarios or thoughts that are hard to attain.

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One of the most important pieces of English literature is also responsible for the name of a popular social network. We’re talking about The Canterbury Tales, a collection of 24 stories written by Geoffrey Chaucer in the 14th century.

In one of the tales, the English poet coined the onomatopoeia "twitter" to refer to the soft singing of a caged bird crying out for freedom. The neologism was later included by the Oxford Dictionary as a "short burst of inconsequential information". Fast forward to the 21st century, and American Internet entrepreneur Jack Dorsey uses the term to refer to the short, frequent posts on his now-famous platform. That also explains why Twitter’s logo was a bird!