Category World

Orange is the color the US road sign manual reserves for temporary work zones, and cones must be predominantly orange. The cone itself began as a 1941 patent made from old tires.

The do-not-remove warning on a mattress tag is aimed at sellers, not buyers. California’s required wording ends with except by the consumer, and the tag shows whether the filling is new or second-hand.

Ring-shaped bread was bought for the Polish queen in 1394. The hole in a bagel has done two jobs ever since: it let sellers carry bread on strings and sticks, and it lets a dense dough cook all the way through.

There is a spot in the Pacific so far from land that the nearest people are usually astronauts overhead. It doubles as a graveyard for spacecraft.