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The moving sofa problem or sofa problem is a two-dimensional idealisation of real-life furniture-moving problems and asks for the rigid two-dimensional shape of largest area A that can be maneuvered through an L-shaped planar region with legs of unit width. The area A thus obtained is referred to as the sofa constant. The exact value of the sofa constant is an open problem.

Bardcore (from the Celtic-origin word “bard” meaning ‘poet’ or ‘storyteller’) or tavernwave is a 2020 internet phenomenon consisting of medievalised remakes of hit pop songs.

This list of the oldest companies in the world includes brands and companies, excluding associations and educational, government, or religious organizations. To be listed, a brand or company name must remain operating, either in whole or in part, since inception. Note however that such claims are often open to question and should be researched further before citing them.

Potoooooooo or variations of Pot-8-Os (1773 – November 1800) was an 18th-century thoroughbred racehorse who won over 30 races and defeated some of the greatest racehorses of the time. He went on to be a sire. He is now best known for the unusual spelling of his name, pronounced 'Potatoes'.

An ant mill is an observed phenomenon in which a group of army ants are separated from the main foraging party, lose the pheromone track and begin to follow one another, forming a continuously rotating circle, commonly known as a "death spiral" because the ants might eventually die of exhaustion. It has been reproduced in laboratories and has been produced in ant colony simulations. The phenomenon is a side effect of the self-organizing structure of ant colonies. Each ant follows the ant in front of it, which works until a slight deviation begins to occur, typically by an environmental trigger, and an ant mill forms. An ant mill was first described in 1921 by William Beebe, who observed a mill 1200 ft (~370 m) in circumference. It took each ant 2.5 hours to make one revolution. Similar phenomena have been noted in processionary caterpillars and fish.

A chicken can be hypnotized, or put into a trance, by holding its head down against the ground, and drawing a line along the ground with a stick or a finger, starting at the beak and extending straight outward in front of the chicken. If the chicken is hypnotized in this manner, it will continue to stare at the line, remaining immobile for as long as 30 minutes. Other methods of inducing this state are also known. Ethologists refer to this state as 'tonic immobility' i.e. a natural state of semi-paralysis that some animals enter when presented with a threat, which is probably a defensive mechanism intended to feign death, albeit rather poorly.

The first known written reference for this method came in 1646, in Mirabele Experimentum de Imaginatione Gallinae by Athanasius Kircher in Rome.

"Uncleftish Beholding" (1989) is a short text by Poul Anderson designed to illustrate what English might look like without its large number of loanwords from languages such as French, Greek, and Latin. Written in a form of "Anglish," the work explains atomic theory using Germanic words almost exclusively and coining new words when necessary; many of these new words have cognates in modern German, an important scientific language in its own right. The title phrase uncleftish beholding calques "atomic theory."

To illustrate, the text begins:

For most of its being, mankind did not know what things are made of, but could only guess. With the growth of worldken, we began to learn, and today we have a beholding of stuff and work that watching bears out, both in the workstead and in daily life.

It goes on to define firststuffs (chemical elements), such as waterstuff (hydrogen), sourstuff (oxygen), and ymirstuff (uranium), as well as bulkbits (molecules), bindings (compounds), and several other terms important to uncleftish worldken (atomic science). Wasserstoff and Sauerstoff are the modern German words for hydrogen and oxygen, and in Dutch the modern equivalents are waterstof and zuurstof. Sunstuff refers to helium, which derives from ἥλιος, the Ancient Greek word for "sun." Ymirstuff references Ymir, a giant in Norse mythology similar to Uranus in Greek mythology.

The vocabulary used in Uncleftish Beholding does not completely derive from Anglo-Saxon. Around, from Old French reond (Modern French rond), completely displaced Old English ymbe (cognate to German um) and left no "native" English word for this concept. The text also contains the French-derived words rest, ordinary and sort.

The text gained increased exposure and popularity after being circulated around the Internet, and has served as inspiration for some inventors of Germanic English conlangs. Douglas Hofstadter, in discussing the piece in his book Le Ton beau de Marot, jocularly refers to the use of only Germanic roots for scientific pieces as "Ander-Saxon."

The Norwegian butter crisis began in late 2011 with an acute shortage of butter and inflation of its price across markets in Norway. The shortage caused soaring prices and stores' stocks of butter ran out within minutes of deliveries. According to the Danish tabloid B.T., Norway was gripped by smør-panik ("butter panic") as a result of the butter shortage.

The two capacitor paradox or capacitor paradox is a paradox, or counterintuitive thought experiment, in electric circuit theory. The thought experiment is usually described as follows: Two identical capacitors are connected in parallel with an open switch between them. One of the capacitors is charged with a voltage of ${\displaystyle V_{i}}$, the other is uncharged. When the switch is closed, some of the charge ${\displaystyle Q=CV_{i}}$ on the first capacitor flows into the second, reducing the voltage on the first and increasing the voltage on the second. When a steady state is reached and the current goes to zero, the voltage on the two capacitors must be equal since they are connected together. Since they both have the same capacitance ${\displaystyle C}$ the charge will be divided equally between the capacitors so each capacitor will have a charge of ${\displaystyle {Q \over 2}}$ and a voltage of ${\displaystyle V_{f}={Q \over 2C}={V_{i} \over 2}}$. At the beginning of the experiment the total initial energy ${\displaystyle W_{i}}$ in the circuit is the energy stored in the charged capacitor:

${\displaystyle W_{i}={1 \over 2}CV_{i}^{2}}$.

At the end of the experiment the final energy ${\displaystyle W_{f}}$ is equal to the sum of the energy in the two capacitors

${\displaystyle W_{f}={1 \over 2}CV_{f}^{2}+{1 \over 2}CV_{f}^{2}=CV_{f}^{2}=C({V_{i} \over 2})^{2}={1 \over 4}CV_{i}^{2}={1 \over 2}W_{i}}$

Thus the final energy ${\displaystyle W_{f}}$ is equal to half of the initial energy ${\displaystyle W_{i}}$. Where did the other half of the initial energy go?