These Are 23 of the Oldest Words Ever Spoken

Telling someone “those eyebrows are on fleek” would’ve been complete nonsense five years ago. (Maybe it’s still nonsense to you today. No judgment.) Trendy words pop into our vernacular every once in a while, but how about some of the most common words? To our ancestors, even basic phrases would seem as foreign as “on fleek.” But saying “The old man spit on the worm ashes”? They’d get that message no problem.

— Read on curiosity.com/topics/these-are-23-of-the-oldest-words-ever-spoken-curiosity

That Sunlight You Feel Might Be 50 Million Years Old

Everybody knows that nothing is faster than light. And everybody knows that it whooshes through the solar system in a matter of minutes (well, technically, it takes just over five hours for light to travel from the sun to Pluto). But here’s something you might not know — the light that reaches Earth might have been created at the center of the sun more than 50 million years ago.

— Read on curiosity.com/topics/that-sunlight-you-feel-might-be-50-million-years-old-curiosity

This NIH Project Has Diagnosed Hundreds of People with Previously Undiagnosable Diseases

Imagine waking up one morning with a strange, painful redness in your hands and feet. You take aspirin to dull the pain, but after a while, it stops working. It’s bad enough that you make an appointment with your doctor, who has no idea what’s causing your condition. He refers you to an autoimmune specialist, who refers you to a neurologist, who tries treatment after treatment to no avail. Hundreds of people across the world are dealing with frustrating, nearly hopeless medical scenarios a lot like this one. Luckily, researchers at the Undiagnosed Diseases Network are trying to help.

— Read on curiosity.com/topics/this-nih-project-has-diagnosed-hundreds-of-people-with-previously-undiagnosable-diseases-curiosity