The word 'nightmare' is instilled in us from a very young age - usually the first time a bad dream causes us to scream out for a parent or guardian. But have you ever wondered what a 'mare' actually is?

Domestic cats may have not been bred to such aesthetic extremes as all the different breeds of dogs out there, but the centuries of selective breeding have still left their mark on our feline friends. Consider this genetic weirdness: most ginger cats are boys, while calico-patterned cats can only be female.

There are few people who haven't heard of Fanta. It's one of the world's most popular soft drinks and a beloved staple at kids' birthday parties. Despite its huge brand recognition, many people don't realise that the product originated in Nazi Germany - just like the Volkswagen Beetle.

Cosplay is a pretty intense pursuit these days, with individual crafters making costumes to the same standards as entire Hollywood costume departments. Unsurprisingly, that wasn't always the case. In fact, one notorious costume back in the day was made from nothing more than pantyhose and two tubs of peanut butter - and the stench that resulted caused some heavy soul-searching for the early costuming community.

Here's another reason to hate smoking. Cigarette butts are among the most abundant types of human-produced garbage in the world's oceans - and they take decades to decompose.

People in China have been putting the heart-rate tracking Xiaomi Mi Band 3 on rolls of toilet paper and coming up with a puzzling result: the tracker found a beating heart in the plush roll. It's not only toilet paper that's supposedly come alive either, with social media users finding a pulse in everything from bananas to stuffed animals.

Best known as one of Apple's three co-founders (Ronald Wayne left the company in the early days before they made it big), Steve Wozniak, AKA Woz, is a sought after public speaker and is still heavily involved in the tech industry. And while he''s done all sorts of interesting things like spending almost a decade teaching kids about tech, playing Segway polo and being a co-founder of there EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation), he's also well known for practical jokes.

If you, like me, are one of the third of all Australians who don't own their own property, try not to get too jealous of this tree in the US that owns itself and the land it stands on.

In 2015, KFC Australia opened an 'upmarket' sit-down restaurant in Parramatta, NSW. Boasting an open kitchen and a hipster-friendly menu (red quinoa seeds, anyone?) it was envisioned as the first in a new chain of fancy KFC salad bars. Instead, it shut its doors within a year and hasn't been heard of since.

Why do witches wear tall pointy hats? You've probably never questioned it through years of Harry Potter and Hocus Pocus, but it has to have come from somewhere, right? As it turns out, that hat's probable origin, like a lot of human history, is pretty racist.

There are very few people in this world who would wonder, “what would happen if I made a jeep that could fly?” It seems more like the kind of thing you’d make a rough crayon sketch of in kindergarten than it does something someone would actually sit down and seriously draft up. But someone out there, well—they really did try it out.

Just what was inside the glowing briefcase in Pulp Fiction? It's one of the greatest mysteries in cinema. Quentin Tarantino has remained deliberately coy on the subject, vowing to never reveal the answer. "It's whatever the viewer wants it to be," he once teased.

Except that's not true. At all. The answer is explicitly spelled out in an original screenplay draft. (Spoiler: It has nothing to do with Marsellus Wallace's soul.)

Overtoun Bridge in West Dunbartonshire, Scotland was built in 1895 for ease of access to Overtoun house. While it is quite a nice looking bridge, it isn't anything special compared to most historical sites in Scotland... except for the fact that dogs crossing the bridge feel compelled to throw themselves to their inevitable demise.

This phenomenon has been occurring since the 1950s, with the bridge claiming the lives of dogs at an average rate of one per year.

We all know the sound a happy cat makes. But did you realise a bunch of other animals also purr, including big arse polar bears? Neither did I.

We've all learned about the five senses of the human body: sight, hearing, touch, smell, and taste. And that's it, right? But think about it - your body does so much more than these five things. You can sense temperature, for example. You have an innate sense of your own body and how it exists in a space. In fact we have so many senses that the number is closer to 40 than to five. Here's what we know about them.

Here's an interesting piece of trivia you won't find in your high school history book. When Captain James Cook "discovered" the southeastern coast of Australia in 1770, he wasn't actually a Captain. Furthermore, he never held this rank at any point during his naval career. Blame alliteration.

Sorry horse owners, turns out you're not actually allowed to saddle up and ride down to the local bottle-o when you've had a few too many drinks to drive. While you may not have learned about this in studying for your driving test, a horse is still considered a 'vehicle', meaning you can be charged for drink driving while riding - in Australia at least.

Roald Dahl is best known for writing a series of beloved and critically acclaimed children's books. But before Willy Wonka, Mr Fox, the B.F.G and all the rest, Dahl had a career of a very different sort - as a fighter pilot in the Royal Air Force.

During World War 2, he took part in the brutal Battle of Athens, sustained life-threatening injuries in a crash and rose to the rank of squadron leader. Oh yeah, and he also fell in love with a nurse.

The image of a witch riding her broomstick off into the night is one that we all take for granted, but do you know where the association between witches and brooms comes from? Turns out it's less to do with the occult than with ye olde experiments with homebrew hallucinogens. You'll never look at Harry Potter's Firebolt the same way again.