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01.
Sound travels about four times faster underwater than it does through air — which is why whale songs can travel hundreds of miles across the ocean, and why early submarine sonar operators sometimes picked up the calls of distant whales communicating from hundreds of miles away
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▲ 0 · Jun 2
02.
Oxford University is older than the Aztec Empire — teaching at Oxford began in 1096, while the Aztec capital Tenochtitlán was founded in 1325, which means Oxford was already more than two centuries old by the time the civilization that built one of the most sophisticated cities of the medieval world had even begun
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▲ 0 · Jun 2
03.
Parts of Canada are quietly short on gravity. The standard story blames an ice sheet that pressed the crust down and vanished thousands of years ago, but satellites suggest that explains less than half of it. The rest comes from something churning far deeper in the mantle.
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▲ 0 · Jun 2
04.
The Eye of the Sahara is a giant bullseye in the Mauritanian desert, up to fifty kilometres across, and astronauts were already photographing it from orbit while geologists still believed it was a meteorite impact crater, long before anyone worked out it was something else entirely.
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▲ 0 · Jun 2
05.
Anything that falls into a four-kilometre stretch of a river in the central Peruvian Amazon dies within seconds, because the water reaches temperatures of up to 100 degrees Celsius, despite the river sitting more than 700 kilometres from the nearest active volcano and in a region of the planet with no known magmatic activity.
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▲ 0 · Jun 2
06.
When Rosetta sniffed the gas around Comet 67P, it found a cloud that would have smelled of rotten eggs, ammonia and bitter almonds — and hidden in that cosmic stink were some of the chemical ingredients that may have helped life begin on Earth
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▲ 0 · Jun 2
07.
Mars was once a warmer world of rivers, lakes and a thicker atmosphere, but after its internal dynamo died and the planet lost the magnetic shield that helps protect an atmosphere, the solar wind stripped much of its air away over billions of years, leaving the cold desert we see today
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▲ 0 · Jun 1
08.
We talk about anxiety as if it starts in the mind — but for some people, the eyes may be the first place it shows up
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▲ 0 · Jun 1
09.
Thought of the day from Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius: “Each of us lives only now, this brief instant. The rest has been lived already, or is impossible to see.”
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▲ 0 · Jun 1
10.
Cats can’t taste sweetness — evolution turned off the relevant gene in their distant ancestors when they became obligate carnivores, and without working sweet receptors, a cat is as indifferent to sugar as a person is to ultraviolet light
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▲ 0 · Jun 1
11.
A particle just passed through the Mediterranean carrying 220 petaelectronvolts of energy — roughly twenty times more than any neutrino ever recorded before it, and scientists still aren’t sure where it came from
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▲ 0 · Jun 1
12.
In a 1999 experiment, people were asked to watch a short video and count how many times a basketball was passed. Around half of them completely failed to notice a person in a gorilla suit stroll into the middle of the scene
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▲ 0 · Jun 1
13.
About 63 light-years away there is a deep-blue world that looks deceptively like Earth from a distance, but on the planet HD 189733b the temperature reaches 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit and the winds scream at thousands of miles an hour
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▲ 0 · Jun 1
14.
In 2017, astronomers spotted the first object ever confirmed to have come from another star system passing through our own: a strange, elongated visitor called ‘Oumuamua that seemed to accelerate as it left, in a way scientists are still debating
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▲ 0 · Jun 1
15.
Rocket debris that has been drifting in low Earth orbit since the 1960s just helped scientists find something they had missed for decades — a specific threshold in solar activity past which space junk starts falling toward Earth measurably faster
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▲ 0 · Jun 1
16.
Tyrannosaurus rex lived closer in time to humans than to Stegosaurus — the gap between T. rex and the present day is about 66 million years, while the gap between T. rex and Stegosaurus is about 83 million years, which means T. rex would have seen Stegosaurus as an ancient creature in the same way we see T. rex now
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▲ 0 · Jun 1
17.
There is a species of jellyfish that is essentially immortal — Turritopsis dohrnii, which can revert from its adult form back to its juvenile polyp stage when stressed or injured, and then mature again, potentially repeating the cycle indefinitely, in the only known case of a complex animal that can reverse its own aging process
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▲ 0 · Jun 1
18.
Honeybees can recognize human faces — they can be trained to distinguish between individual humans by face and continue to recognize them across different viewpoints, despite having a brain smaller than the head of a pin
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▲ 0 · Jun 1
19.
There is a fish that can live more than a hundred years — the rougheye rockfish, which inhabits the deep waters of the North Pacific — and the slow rate at which it grows, breeds, and ages means that some of the individuals being caught by fishermen today were already swimming the same waters during the American Civil War
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▲ 0 · Jun 1
20.
There are about 20 quadrillion ants alive on Earth at any moment — enough that their combined biomass outweighs every wild bird and mammal on the planet combined, even though the often-repeated claim that ant biomass equals human biomass has been overturned by recent research
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▲ 0 · Jun 1
21.
Bananas are slightly radioactive — they contain potassium-40, a naturally occurring radioactive isotope, and the radiation dose from eating one banana is so consistently measurable that nuclear scientists use it as an informal unit of measurement, called the “banana equivalent dose,” for explaining low-level radiation exposure to the public
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▲ 0 · Jun 1
22.
Deep beneath our feet, Earth’s inner core is thought to be roughly as hot as the surface of the Sun — around five and a half thousand degrees Celsius — yet the crushing pressure keeps it solid.
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▲ 0 · Jun 1
23.
Bolted to Pioneer 10 is a plaque showing two humans and a cosmic map back to Earth, while the spacecraft itself is now a silent ghost ship drifting toward Aldebaran, a star it will not pass for another two million years.
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▲ 0 · Jun 1
24.
After a crippled seven-year journey Japan’s Hayabusa probe limped home in 2010 and burned up in the sky over Australia, but not before releasing the first asteroid samples ever returned to Earth.
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▲ 0 · Jun 1
25.
When the Apollo 11 crew prepared to leave the Moon, they found the circuit breaker that armed their ascent engine had snapped off after a bulky backpack knocked it, and Buzz Aldrin pushed it back into place with a felt-tip pen rather than risk putting metal into a live electrical circuit.
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▲ 0 · Jun 1
26.
Nearly four kilometres beneath the Antarctic ice sheet lies Lake Vostok, a hidden lake the size of a small sea. It has been cut off from sunlight and the atmosphere for hundreds of thousands, and perhaps millions, of years — making it one of Earth’s closest rehearsals for the buried oceans of Europa and Enceladus, where any life would also have to survive in darkness beneath a frozen shell.
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▲ 0 · May 31
27.
The Sun is not standing still. It is carrying the entire Solar System around the centre of the Milky Way, and one lap takes roughly 230 million years. The last time we were this far around the galaxy, Earth was in the Triassic Period and the very first dinosaurs were only just beginning to walk.
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▲ 0 · May 31
28.
A total solar eclipse is only possible because of a cosmic coincidence: the Moon is about 400 times smaller than the Sun but also about 400 times closer, making the two look almost the same size from Earth. But the Moon is slowly drifting away, so this alignment will not last forever. One day, hundreds of millions of years from now, the last total solar eclipse will pass across the planet, and no one will ever see the Moon fully cover the Sun again.
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▲ 0 · May 31
29.
The Moon looks white in the night sky, but its surface is closer in color to a worn asphalt road — and it appears bright enough to read by on a clear night not because the surface is bright, but because the Moon is so close and fully sunlit that even a surface reflecting just 12 percent of incoming light becomes one of the brightest objects in the sky
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▲ 0 · May 31
30.
When Zhang Chenxing, who holds a PhD from MIT, co-founded Mega Engine Technology in Xi’an in early 2024, China’s high-pressure oxygen-rich staged-combustion know-how sat almost entirely inside state propulsion houses — and by May 2026 his startup had logged 1,000 seconds of accumulated test time on a closed-cycle kerolox engine
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▲ 0 · May 31

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