20 Things You Didn’t Know About… is consistently one of the most popular items on discovermagazine.com. Next week Discover is releasing 20 Things You Didn’t Know About Everything, the book based on the column; the book comprises 20 original 20 Things… columns, much like the ones in the magazine (which also run on the site) but longer and more comprehensive.
As popular as the column is, every time we publish one we get a lot of feedback that we messed up in some way and/or another—we snubbed one fact, included something that everyone knows, etc. (Sometimes the criticism gets downright malevolent.) Now that we’re expanding the 20 Things… concept to the highbrow world of books, we want to make amends for any of our previous errors. We want to know—on the record, for all of the Internets to see—what we missed over.Let us know in the comments below what amazing fact(s) should have included in any one of the previous 20 Things… columns, making sure to say which column it goes with, and revealing some source of this treasured knowledge—a link, a book, whatever. Was relativity actually invented by Trofim Lysenko? That should’ve gone in 20 Things… Relativity. Does the word robot actually come from the song, “Mr. Roboto”? That definitely should’ve gone in the column about robots. Let us know the fact, the column, and the source.
And if there are any particularly great suggestions here, we’ll award the commenters with free copies of the book. We dare ya.
