You told us what you’re curious about… we scoured the web for answers.

Welcome to The Present: Curiosity Edition. Last week, we asked you what improv thinking topics you were most interested in learning about, and you gave us some pretty great answers (see chart below).

Buuuuut, we also asked you what non-improv topics you were curious about lately… and your answers sent us down a digital rabbit hole of epic proportions. Read on for our 3 favorite questions from you, our faithful readers, and the absurd and unsettling answers we found. Read on and get ready to blow your co-workers’ minds at the digital water cooler tomorrow about zombies, yogurt, and holograms. You’re welcome.

Here’s what you asked us:

“How was the first yogurt made?”

Wow, we love the way your brain works. Here’s what we found:

Yogurt through the years: The first yogurt is believed to be discovered by Central Asian herdsmen, who stored their extra milk in animal stomachs (gross) which turned thick and tangy in the sun thanks to the stomach bacteria (gross???). There is also evidence that Ghengis Khan’s troops enjoyed the dairy delight, as well as the ancient Greeks.

Old Grigorov’s brain-blast: In 1905, microbiologist Stamen Grigorov made history by producing the first yogurt cultures in a lab. Soon a Spanish dairy producer called “Danone” hit the scene — or as we know it in the States, Dannon.”

“Zombies.”

Okay, not really a question, but fair enough… let’s sink our teeth into this from a cultural perspective:

Zombies in the Zeitgeist : According to “Zombie Theory,” an interdisciplinary compilation of Zombie theoryship published by the University of Minnesota, “Zombies first shuffled across movie screens in 1932 in the low-budget Hollywood film White Zombie,” and were reimagined most famously as “undead flesh-eaters in George A. Romero’s The Night of the Living Dead almost four decades later.”

The real zombies were inside us all along: Perhaps more interesting than the zombies themselves, are what they’re used to represent. Zombie Theory points out that Zombies in books and movies are often “representative of larger cultural fears of contagion and technology, the effect of capitalism and commodification, racial exclusion and oppression, dehumanization.” We’ll let you chew on that for a while…

“How do holograms work?”

How complicated could holograms be???

Turns out, very: Invented by Hungarian physicist Denis Gabor in 1950, a hologram is basically “a cross between what happens when you take a photograph and what happens when you look at something for real.” or, more precisely, “a unique method of photography whereby 3D objects are recorded using a laser and then restored as precisely as possible to match the original object.”

So uhh…lasers are involved. And that’s about as much as we could follow. But, if anyone knows a hologram who could explain it to us, send them our info.