Showing results by narrator "Mark Schectman" in All Categories

Did you know that stop signs weren't always red? Explore the stop sign's colorful past on this episode of Now I Know. Ask enough people to describe a stop sign and you will get some pretty common answers: it has the word STOP in white lettering (at least in the United States), it has eight sides, and – of course – it’s red. Everyone knows that.

Is zero odd or even? Find out how India drove around the problem on this episode of Now I Know. Zero is an even number. Let’s get that out of the way. But if that gave you pause, you’re not alone – it can be a little hard to internalize. That’s why Wikipedia has a surprisingly long entry discussing the subject and why, according to a study from the 1990s (as explained by the BBC), “people are 10% slower at deciding whether zero is odd or even than other numbers.”