RD201902

... AND 25 FACTS THAT ARE ACTUALLY MYTHS By Marissa Laliberte, Ashley Lewis, and Jacopo della Quercia FICTION? OR rd.com 59 Read ...

Strange but Impossibly TRUE 60 february 2019 4 The current American flag was designed by a high school student. Betsy Ross, make ...

7 The U.S. government saved every public tweet from 2006 to But starting in 2018, the Library of Congress decided to keep tweet ...

11 Astronauts can cry in space. But with no gravity to pull the tears down their faces, the water just pools into a ball on the ...

12 Nutella was invented for chocolate lovers. After World War II, chocolate supplies were low in Italy. Pietro Ferrero knew Ital ...

17 Firefighters use chemicals to make water “wetter.” The wetting agents reduce the surface tension of plain water so it spreads ...

22 Giraffe tongues can be 20 inches long. The tongues’ dark bluish-black color probably helps prevent sunburn. 25 You can’t hum ...

1 Blood is blue inside your body. Human blood is the same color inside your body as it is outside: red. Our veins look blue beca ...

7 The $ 100 bill is the biggest bill in circulation. Although the federal govern- ment stopped printing them in 1945, currency n ...

10 Lemmings will blindly join in mass suicide. Norwe- gian lemmings do mi- grate in packs, but the well-known image of their mas ...

rd.com 69 itsaret sutthisiri/shutterstock (mosquito). matthew cohen (wasabi) 15 Citronella candles are the best way to keep mosq ...

70 february 2019 andrey_kuzmin/shutterstock (ostrich). shutterstock (hope diamond) Reader’s Digest Cover Story 20 The Hope Diamo ...

Our base’s Army Ex- change Service carried a particular brand of underarm deodorant that I liked and bought for years. Then one ...

By Juliana LaBianca W henever Jane Lockshin went out to lunch with her elderly aunt Sylvia, she made a point to pick up the tab. ...

The Secretary Sylvia Bloom left $8.2 million to educational programs and a scholarship fund. Reader’s Digest ...

as full as their hidden bank accounts. “In a world that is in many ways sur- vival of the fittest, they’re certainly a special c ...

Three months later came the bomb- shell: Leonard Gigowski had passed away—and he’d left behind a $13 mil- lion scholarship fund ...

In fact, Southern out- lived Molly by several years and had her buried in her yard. But she con- tinued to worry about animals, ...

volunteering or donating money, tend to have lower blood pressure, less stress, and longer lives. One 2011 study even found that ...

The Janitor Gas station attendant and janitor Ronald Read left nearly $5 million to the local hospital, where he regularly had c ...