Things I learned lately - 16 March

• The red breasted robin can see magnetic fields with its right eye, giving it an almost perfect sense of direction. Just to be clear, we don’t mean that a robin can sense the Earth’s magnetic field or something like that as many other birds can, it can literally see it.
• On a small island nestled between Antwerp and Ghent in Flanders, Belgium lies a hotel shaped like a giant anus. Hotel CasAnus.
• For the time being, science suggests that the water on our planet wasn't always here, nor did it get 'formed' here. It most likely arrived in the form of carbonaceous chondrites, rocks from beyond Mars.
• The chill of deep space is nothing compared to what NASA is preparing to create. Researchers are planning to generate a super-cold spot on the International Space Station to study the intricacies of quantum mechanics. It's going to be the coldest spot in the known universe. The ISS Cold Atom Lab will reach temperatures as low as 100 pico-Kelvin above absolute zero (pico = one trillionth).
• The latest fad in South Korea is "Gastronomic Voyeurism." In other words, people watch other people eat. For money. Online. They have the best broadband and some great food, what's not to love? There are about 3,500 people providing web shows like this in South Korea. One woman, Park Seo-yeon, earns $9k/month doing this.
• A factory reset of your phone does NOT delete the images and videos in memory. The data is still there, just the path data is missing. (No different from deleting a file in Windows)
• In Syria, immunizations are withheld as an act of war and polio is on the rise.
• Health Canada used to have 40 librarians. Now it has 6.
• A ton of people is really 12 - 15 people.
• Ultracrepidarian (n): "Somebody who gives opinions on subjects they know nothing about."
• Apple users are making a huge deal over the way the shift key works on the Apple iOS keyboard. Most people figure Apple missed the boat when designing the shift key because it's difficult for some to determine when shift is 'on'. Is it when there's a white arrow on a grey background or a black arrow on a white background? Here's an idea - how about you don't change the colour of the key, you just change the letters on the keyboard to upper and lower case?