spacedaily.com

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271.
Blue Origin’s New Glenn exploded on its Cape Canaveral pad on May 28 — and the costliest casualty may be the lunar timeline NASA had bet on it just two days earlier
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▲ 0 · Jun 3
272.
I’ve been studying emotion regulation for 6 years, and I think the most practical skill you can learn is to notice your nervous system before your mind starts writing tragic fiction.
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▲ 0 · Jun 3
273.
In early June 2026, the X-59 is expected to cross Mach 1 at 43,000 feet, the first sharp proof point in NASA’s fifty-year attempt to turn an overland sonic boom into a certifiable thump
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▲ 0 · Jun 3
274.
The more I work with AI, the less interested I am in whether it’s conscious and the more interested I am in what happens to human consciousness around it
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▲ 0 · Jun 3
275.
Writing a single 100-word email with ChatGPT consumes approximately the volume of a standard bottle of water, the global infrastructure processing AI queries is projected to use the equivalent of half the United Kingdom’s annual water withdrawal by 2027, and much of that water is being drawn from regions already experiencing severe drought.
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▲ 0 · Jun 3
276.
Thought of the day from French philosopher Blaise Pascal: “The sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room”
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▲ 0 · Jun 3
277.
A tongue-eating louse called Cymothoa exigua swims into a fish’s gills, latches onto its tongue, drinks the blood until the tongue withers and falls off, and then spends the rest of its life acting as a functional replacement tongue the fish uses normally to eat.
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▲ 0 · Jun 3
278.
A sloth can take up to 30 days to digest a single leaf, the slowest recorded digestion of any mammal — its stomach stays so full that its abdominal contents can account for more than a third of its body weight, and it climbs down to relieve itself only about once a week
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▲ 0 · Jun 3
279.
Neuroscientists found a region of the brain specialized for recognising faces that activates in as little as 50 milliseconds and it develops even in people who have been blind since birth
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▲ 0 · Jun 3
280.
The case for jotting down a few things we are grateful for
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▲ 0 · Jun 3
281.
The Raptor 3 was supposed to be the engine that finally ended Starship’s reliability problem — instead, on its first flight, several of them quit less than 20 seconds into the boostback burn, dropping the booster into the Gulf and grounding the whole program for a federal mishap review
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▲ 0 · Jun 3
282.
Pluto takes about 248 Earth years to circle the Sun, which means it still hasn’t completed a single orbit since we found it — and won’t finish that first lap until the year 2178
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▲ 0 · Jun 3
283.
One of the earliest great extinctions in Earth’s history may have been caused not by an asteroid or a volcano but by oxygen itself, when tiny photosynthetic microbes slowly filled the air with a gas that was poison to much of the anaerobic life that ruled the planet long before us
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▲ 0 · Jun 3
284.
The Pacific Ocean is so large that all the world’s land could fit inside it, and there would still be room left over, which is why calling Earth a “blue planet” is almost an understatement
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▲ 0 · Jun 3
285.
The first fax machine was invented in 1843 — more than thirty years before the telephone — which means that for a 22-year window in the mid-1800s, a Japanese samurai could have theoretically sent a fax to Abraham Lincoln, since the samurai class was not formally abolished until 1867 and Lincoln died in 1865
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▲ 0 · Jun 3
286.
In 1938, Harvard researchers began following a group of young men to learn what makes a good life. Almost nine decades on, the strongest finding in their data is not wealth or achievement, but something quieter.
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▲ 0 · Jun 3
287.
Almost all the gold on Earth — every wedding ring, every coin, every gram in every bank vault — was forged in the collision of dead stars billions of years ago, in events so violent that a single one can produce hundreds of Earth-masses of gold, and the heavy elements were then scattered across the galaxy before our sun was even born
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▲ 0 · Jun 3
288.
Earth has gone through five mass extinction events in its history, each wiping out the majority of life on the planet — and many biologists argue we are currently in the early stages of the sixth, caused not by an asteroid or a volcanic eruption but by a single species changing the planet’s atmosphere, oceans, and ecosystems faster than other species can adapt
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▲ 0 · Jun 3
289.
Just six grams of gold coat an Olympic “gold” medal, which is otherwise mostly silver — the last solid-gold medals were handed out at the 1912 Stockholm Games
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▲ 0 · Jun 3
290.
The asteroid that ended the dinosaurs did not just leave a crater, it turned the sky into a weapon, and the worst damage may have come after the impact itself was already over
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▲ 0 · Jun 3
291.
The Amazon’s ancient drainage system once ran the other way, carrying water and sediment westward across South America before the rise of the Andes, shifting land levels, and massive sediment buildup helped turn it into the east-flowing river we know today.
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▲ 0 · Jun 3
292.
Almost everyone assumes Venus is our nearest neighbour, but averaged across its orbit the planet closest to Earth is actually Mercury
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▲ 0 · Jun 3
293.
Much of what we know about the scale of the universe rests on a method worked out by a woman employed as a human computer at Harvard for a few cents an hour
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▲ 0 · Jun 2
294.
The conversation women aren’t having with their doctors about menopause and memory loss isn’t just overdue — it may be one of the most important health decisions of their fifties
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▲ 0 · Jun 2
295.
The light from the Andromeda Galaxy — the most distant object visible to the naked human eye — left its source about 2.5 million years ago, which means when you look at it on a clear night, you are seeing light that began its journey to Earth around the time the first members of our genus, Homo, were learning to use stone tools
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▲ 0 · Jun 2
296.
Laughter activates many of the same brain reward circuits as food and sex, and a 2025 study finds it measurably lowers cortisol and may restructure how the developing brain builds resilience to stress
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▲ 0 · Jun 2
297.
Tomatoes were considered poisonous in much of Europe for nearly two centuries after they were introduced from the Americas — not because of anything dangerous in the fruit itself, but because the plant belongs to the same botanical family as deadly nightshade, with leaves and stems that really do contain toxic alkaloids, and the misunderstanding kept the fruit out of European cuisine until the late 1700s
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▲ 0 · Jun 2
298.
Saudi Arabia imports sand — despite being a country dominated by desert, the sand of the Arabian Peninsula is too smooth and round for use in construction concrete, because thousands of years of wind erosion have polished the grains to a shape that does not bond well with cement, and most construction sand must be imported from countries like Australia
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▲ 0 · Jun 2
299.
Sequoia and redwood trees alive today were already mature when the Roman Empire was at its peak — the oldest living giant sequoias are over 3,000 years old, which means they were standing in California before the Parthenon was built in Athens, before Julius Caesar was born, and before the Roman Empire even existed
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▲ 0 · Jun 2
300.
A lost continent lies in pieces beneath southern Europe. Geologists call it Greater Adria: a Greenland-sized landmass that was crushed under Europe, leaving its scraped-off remains scattered through the mountains of Italy, Greece and the Balkans.
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▲ 0 · Jun 2