Apple’s original logo featured Sir Isaac Newton.

This first logo was designed by Ron Wayne, one of Apple’s three co-founders, and was only used for the Apple I computer. More of a picture than a logo, it portrayed the famous scene in which Isaac Newton is pondering gravity beneath an apple tree. Less than a year later, Steve Jobs, another co-founder, requested a redesign because he felt it was too intellectual and far too intricate to be stamped on computers.

The newer logo, created by art designer Rob Janoff, was far more simplistic - it featured a partially bitten apple striped with the colors of the rainbow in the wrong order. This served as Apple’s primary logo for 20 years until 1997 when Jobs decided to ditch the rainbow stripes for a solid-colored fruit.

Source: The Apple Museum

McDonald's has unique menu items in every country. In Portugal, you can order soup!

More examples: in India (where much of the population does not eat beef) the restaurant offers such fare as the Chicken Maharaja Mac and the potato-patty McAloo Tikki Burger. This does not mean that McDonald’s has replaced its traditional offerings in these locations - they merely supplement their menu with a bit of localized flair in many places.

Apple used to sell a featureless iPhone app for $999.99.

The application, called “I Am Rich,” was developed to serve the purpose its name suggests - simply as a distinction that the user who purchased it is wealthy enough to do so! When activated, the app just shows a glowing red gem onscreen - that’s it. $999.99 is apparently the highest amount a web developer can sell their applications for through the iPhone’s App Store, otherwise we’re sure the program’s creator, Armin Heinrich, would have charged more!

 

Albert Einstein’s brain was stolen after he died.

Tiny metal electrodes are attached to Albert Einstein's
head to pick up impulses from his brain and to
magnify and record them for study in 1950 in
Princeton, N.J. Dr. Alejandro Arellano kneels
beside him.

The man who performed the autopsy on Einstein’s body shortly after he died was a Princeton pathologist by the name of Thomas Harvey. Harvey removed the brain for examination, as is customary during autopsies, but he never replaced it. At the cost of his job and reputation, Harvey instead placed it in a jar of formaldehyde and took it home!

Elephants are afraid of mice. (Watch the video!)

...or at least they are very careful to avoid them. The guys on Mythbusters proved this myth to be plausible - check it out in the video below!

The human nose can distinguish more than 10,000 different smells.

There are hundreds of different kinds of neurons in the nose that specialize in recognizing different odors and transmitting those signals to the brain. This occurs when molecules of the things that you can smell travel to your nose. Whatever thing you are smelling (a flower, a piece of fruit, an onion, etc.) gives off light, volatile chemicals called odorants that make their way to your nose as they evaporate. These chemicals trigger the neurons in your nose that allow you to recognize the smell. Specialized smell neurons exist to pick up on different kinds of smells, allowing us to distinguish between over 10,000 different odorants.

 
Source: How Stuff Works

The toaster was invented before pre-sliced bread.

Toasting bread has been a common practice since the time of the ancient Romans. However, it was not until 1853 that the first electric toaster was invented by a British firm called Crompton and Co. This original model only toasted one side of the bread at a time and required someone to stand by and watch to make sure the bread didn’t burn. The more contemporary pop-up timer toasters we are used to were not invented until 1919.

The world’s largest touch screen is 10 meters long and can accept up to 100 multi-touch inputs at one time. (See the video!)

The screen was developed by a group at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. In order to create the behemoth, the school modified a 3D theatre’s screen using infrared lamps and cameras. The screen is used to teach students interactivity.

Source: The Earth Times

Tablecloths were originally used as napkins in Ancient Rome.

Tablecloths were popularized by the Europeans. They originally started appearing on Roman tables in the 1st century. The first written mention of a tablecloth dated from 103 AD. Back then, the Romans considered their tables too beautiful to cover up completely, so tablecloths were smaller and intended for individual use, like a napkin.

By the 10th century, the tablecloth had evolved into the giant table covering that we know today as it spread through the Byzantine empire and feudal Western Europe. By the 14th century it became customary even for peasants to use tablecloths.


Source: Old And Interesting

Dogs do NOT see in black-and-white.

Yes, dogs are partially colorblind, but that does not mean they do not see any color at all! Man’s best friend suffers from a kind of colorblindness that is called deuteranopia in humans. Both people and dogs have three different varieties of color receptors in their eyes: one for red, one for green, and one for blue. Deuteranopes, and similarly all canines, do not have the green color receptor and therefore cannot tell the difference between shades of green and other colors!

Source: The Straight Dope

The “Invisibility Cloak” is becoming a reality. Watch the video!

Scientists in Birmingham have been designing an invisibility cloak (more precisely, a lump of crystal) that can make objects seemingly disappear. The cloak bends light to obscure small objects behind it, making it seem invisible, while also appearing to be flat. So far, the largest items that it can conceal are things like paperclips, while the cloak itself is roughly the size of a paperweight, much larger than what it is concealing.


Conceptually, a seven-meter wide cloaking crystal could by used to make something like a large dog invisible. So far this is the biggest enhancement in invisibility cloaking technology, and the technology is still improving.


You can see a video of the device in action, making a paperclip turn invisible!

Astronauts grow taller in space.

Believe it or not, this is true! On space missions of 12 weeks or longer, astronauts have been known to grow up to an additional two inches taller! For this reason, space suits are fitted to each astronaut with two inches of room to grow. The reason for this phenomenon is not known for certain, but scientists believe it is due to the lack of gravity in space. This weightlessness can also cause astronauts to lose bone mass! The lack of gravity prevents the compression of the spine which would otherwise occur on Earth. Once fully extended, the spine can apparently lengthen up to 2 full inches!

Source: Helium

Christopher Columbus did not believe the world was flat.

In fact, nearly no educated person has held this belief since the time of the ancient Greeks! The idea of a spherical Earth first appeared around the 6th century B.C. with the Greek mathematician Pythagoras and continued to permeate Greek and Roman culture, even after the advent of Christianity. The thought that Columbus held such a fallacy did not emerge until the 1830’s, when a Frenchman named Antoine-Jean Letronne and the well-known American author Washington Irving separately composed works of historical fiction which misrepresented Columbus. This myth eventually made its way into schoolbooks and is still often taught to this day! The lie is believed to have been promoted as a way of heightening the religion/science debate and giving ammunition to Darwinism over creationism.

Source: ASA