Admit it: Your Twitter friends just aren’t that engaging. They’re wasting your time tweeting about what they ate for breakfast or what happened to their favorite character on their favorite reality show.
You crave more from Twitter. You actually want to learn something.
You’re in luck. Mashable recently ran a list of 25 Twitter accounts that will make you smarter. Need some brain food? Then follow some of these mentally enriching Twitter accounts.
Trivia that matters
Mashable lists Mental Floss first in its list of 25 must-follow Twitter accounts. The @mental_floss account is actually an extension of Mental Floss magazine. The magazine publishes esoteric trivia on a wide range of topics. For instance, the Mental Floss Twitter example published by Mashable states that for several years fine-art competitions were part of the Olympics. Did you know that?
In the same vein is the @GoogleFacts Twitter account. Though this account isn’t actually affiliated with Google, it does provide plenty of offbeat facts to help make you at least seem smarter. Mashable’s example? “You can’t snore and dream at the same time.”
Some words from the experts
Of course, the best Twitter feeds are often from individuals. Fortunately, Mashable found plenty of smart people using Twitter to share their knowledge with the rest of us. One is Neil deGrasse Tyson. He’s an astrophysicist who answers some often strange questions. Again, Mashable provides a great example: Did you know that a fly adds weight to an airplane even if the fly never lands during the plane’s trip?
Elon Musk is plenty interesting, too. He’s the CEO of SpaceX and CEO of Tesla Motors. He usually tweets about science and statistics. For instance, Mashable points to a recent tweet in which Musk pokes fun at the tobacco industry for saying 30 years ago that scientists still disagree on whether smoking causes cancer even though 98 percent of those scientists said that it did.
The big brains
You can also find plenty of stimulating tweets from the biggest brains at the most important scientific and research organizations across the country. Mashable cited NASA as a prime example. NASA’s tweets were especially relevant during the Mars Curiosity rover landing. You might also be interested in following the Twitter account of DARPA, part of the U.S. Department of Defense responsible for developing new military technology.