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301.
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
302.
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
303.
There is a planet 63 light-years from Earth where the rain is made of molten glass, the winds blow at 7,000 kilometres per hour, the daytime temperature is over 1,000 degrees Celsius, and the planet itself, viewed from space, is the same deep blue as Earth.
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▲ 0 · Jun 2
304.
More than 60% of the water in a wood frog’s body can freeze solid each winter: its heart stops, it stops breathing, and for more than 7 months it can lie essentially a frogsicle, before it thaws out in spring and simply hops away
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▲ 0 · Jun 2
305.
Stonehenge is widely known as one of the oldest monumental stone structures in the world, but hunter-gatherer societies in southeastern Turkey built circles of T-shaped limestone pillars 6,000 years earlier, weighing up to 50 tonnes each and predating the human invention of agriculture by approximately 4,000 years
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▲ 0 · Jun 2
306.
Drifting through the Milky Way may be billions — perhaps even trillions — of rogue planets: worlds with no sun of their own, some flung from the systems where they formed, now wandering the galaxy in darkness.
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▲ 0 · Jun 2
307.
Microsoft is canceling Claude Code licenses across its Experiences + Devices division by June 30, steering thousands of engineers toward GitHub Copilot, while Uber burned through its entire 2026 AI tools budget on Claude Code and Cursor in just four months — and Opus 4.8 launched into that exact crisis
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▲ 0 · Jun 2
308.
A single cumulus cloud — the kind that looks like a fluffy white pillow drifting across a summer sky — typically contains hundreds of tons of water by weight, suspended in the air because the water droplets are small enough that air resistance keeps them aloft against the pull of gravity
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▲ 0 · Jun 2
309.
Supermassive black holes are pointing jets of plasma directly at Earth — and a population of them may have produced the highest-energy neutrino ever recorded
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▲ 0 · Jun 2
310.
On a sunny day, the top of the Eiffel Tower slowly drifts in a small circle about six inches wide — it isn’t the wind, it’s the sun, heating one side of the iron at a time and making the whole tower lean a little away from whichever side is warmest
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▲ 0 · Jun 2
311.
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
312.
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
313.
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
314.
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
315.
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
316.
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
317.
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
318.
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
319.
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
320.
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
321.
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
322.
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
323.
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
324.
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
325.
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
326.
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
327.
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
328.
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
329.
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
330.
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