The Curiosity Box is a quarterly subscription box to satisfy your thirst for knowledge. Each box comes with 6-9 items that will not only entertain, but also educate you and your family. The subscription is $49.90 per quarter and a portion of all proceeds are donated to fund Alzheimer’s research.
This is their box #11! The box is filled with stuff that will feed your mind.
Each item inside the box is individually packaged.
There’s no extra packaging, just a box filled with awesome items!
The Curiosity Box has a separate information card – it’s great for quick reference and for when someone steals your Curiosity Quarterly for bathroom reading. It contains a list of all the goodies this quarter! And as always, INQ the octopus is our guide through the box.
Each box comes with the Curiosity Quarterly by VSauce.
The quarterly is loaded with interesting, short articles for the curious-minded!
The articles are truly geeky, in a good way. The musings draw from math, science, history, and culture to create fun articles with an inquisitive edge. They also encourage to show your INQ by submitting your own artwork.
For this edition, they included a fun article about Laplace’s All-Knowing Closet Demon! They have a knack for making articles about things or concepts we always use but usually ignore. We never know when these little facts and trivia can be handy in the future.
Another article talks about the English language!
Here’s a Vsauce creator’s spotlight about 12 Tone!
Everything in the box!
All the items came in cute giftable boxes.
Transfinite Cardinals T-Shirt. We can support Aleph-Null with this red wearable. According to the packaging, it was made for “mathletes.”
The box also had a brief history about the success of the Transfinite Cardinals under the leadership of Aleph-Null and coach Georg Cantor. I love how they incorporated some mathematical facts into “sports”!
Transfinite Cardinal, or a Transfinite Number, is a number that is “infinite” in a sense that it is larger than all finite numbers, but not necessarily absolute infinite.
And because this represents a “sports team,” here’s the Cardinal bird which serves as its mascot!
Aleph-Null, or Aleph-Naught, is the lowest infinite cardinal number. This shirt represents him as the heroic “player” of the team, and his name is featured at the back of the shirt! It also shows his “jersey number,” the symbol for Aleph-Zero.
INQ’s Trammel Of Archimedes.
A trammel of Archimedes is a mechanism that generates the shape of an ellipse.
The Trammel comes in a classic-looking box, which can also be used if you want to keep it after use.
The back of the box explains the original Trammel and how INQ modified it.
The Trammel of Archimedes consists of two shuttles which are confined to perpendicular channels or rails and a rod which is attached to the shuttles by pivots at fixed positions along the rod, but this version has a third channel.
As you move the shuttles back and forth, each along its channel, the end of the rod moves in an elliptical path, and the semi-axes a and b of the ellipse have lengths equal to the distances from the end of the rod to each of the pivots.
INQ’s Ink. Another interesting item in this quarter’s box is this Ferrofluid which acts as a liquid but when magnetism takes place, it works like solid!
The liquid also comes with a cool box, so when you want to share it by gifting it, you can easily do so!
The bottle looks like a perfume bottle but it actually contains a blob of ferrofluid, which is a colloidal liquid of iron-based nanoparticles. The liquid acts like a liquid but once a magnet is used, it reacts and acts like a solid.
Here is the bottle of the fluid, and see how the contents inside react with the magnets.
WARNING: These super strong neodymium magnets are a HAZARD to pets & kids. When ingested they will attract each other through the digestive tract, ripping holes in stomach & intestines. We have our magnets hidden from our dogs and children because they are dangerous.
We placed a magnet on one of its sides, and see how the blob reacted!
It actually follows the magnet!
It’s really fun to play with!
Here, it looks like it formed a certain shape! The blob looked like the Statue of Liberty!
INQ’s Double Tangram. INQ also included something that definitely tells a story about the modern world, a tangram!
A tangram is a Chinese geometric puzzle consisting of a square cut into seven pieces that can be arranged to make various other shapes.
The pieces of the puzzle are called tans. You can arrange them into shapes, and the package also includes a booklet that can also serve as your guide in arranging the pieces into shapes.
The tangram consists of 2 large triangles, 3 smaller triangles, a square, and a parallelogram. This one has double the fun – there’s two layers!
Here are the samples of shapes that you can create out of the tans.
Out of the pieces of different shapes, you can create a woman and even a cyclist!
Aside from the orange pieces, you can also take off another set of wooden shapes which are underneath the orange ones, so there are 14 pieces overall!
INQ’s Hui Stick. The “hooey stick,” as it is popularly known in English, is more known as a simple form of magic trick rather than a game.
It claims to obey your command and cures boredom which made me more curious about this thing. 
You just have to rub the dowel on the stick with the propeller, then the propeller turns. And when you say “hui,” the propeller reverses its direction.
The hui consists of a stick with notches carved into it, a propeller on the end, and a dowel to rub across those notches. The trick on this one is on how you rub the dowel along the stick, and you do it in such a way that other people can’t tell what or how you do it.
INQ also included a book about science that I’m sure will be very appealing to kids or even people of any age who loves the subject!
How To Speak Science by Bruce Benamran ($8.98)
A math-free introduction to the greatest scientific ideas of the last 2,000 years
As smartphones, supercomputers, supercolliders, and AI propel us into an ever more unfamiliar future, How to Speak Science takes us on a rollicking historical tour of the greatest discoveries and ideas that make today’s cutting–edge technologies possible.
Wanting everyone to be able to “speak” science, YouTube science guru Bruce Benamran explains–as accessibly and wittily as in his acclaimed videos–the fundamental ideas of the physical world: matter, life, the solar system, light, electromagnetism, thermodynamics, special and general relativity, and much more.
Along the way, Benamran guides us through the wildest hypotheses and most ingenious ideas of Galileo, Newton, Curie, Einstein, and science’s other greatest minds, reminding us that while they weren’t always exactly right, they were always curious. How to Speak Science acquaints us not only with what scientists know, but how they think, so that each of us can reason like a physicist–and appreciate the world in all its beautiful chaos.
The book contains a math-free introduction to some of the greatest scientific ideas of the last 2,000 years.
The book is made by the author to make learning about a lot of stuff fun!
It tackles a lot of stuff that it may be overwhelming when you try to absorb it all at once, so it’s better to read and absorb them bit by bit. It’s a good read and the kids loved it so much!
Prime Mover Steam Game.
Retrace the path of the Prime Mover to uncover the story of the Byte of Burden! Prime Mover is an open-ended puzzle game about designing circuit boards.
It is a game that lets you build circuit boards to solve a wide variety of logic and computer science inspired problems.
Artist Spotlight Postcard. This quarter’s spotlight postcard features the art of Paul Nylander.
This artwork features the inside view of a flat Euclidean dodecahedron with mirrored walls. It’s beautiful!
The back of the postcard also has a brief explanation of the art. There are also some spaces for personal notes and messages.
We’re always excited for this box because it’s always packed with fun toys and new learnings! The quarterly arrival of this box always means a long wait too, but it’s really worth it. All the contents of this quarter’s box are fun! Our favorite is definitely the How To Speak Science book. It simplifies many scientific ideas and my kids definitely found it interesting. The shirt design is good, and I like that they made it like sportswear. Discovering science is always fun with this box, and we can’t wait for the next one!
What do you think of this quarter’s box?
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