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331.
The first computer virus to spread across the global internet was released by accident in November 1988 by a 23-year-old Cornell graduate student named Robert Morris — who claimed he only wanted to measure the size of the internet, but a coding error caused his program to replicate uncontrollably, crashing roughly 10 percent of all computers connected to the network at the time and resulting in the first criminal conviction in history for cyber-misconduct
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▲ 0 · Jun 5
332.
In 1972, New Zealand researchers began following more than a thousand babies born in a single coastal city, intending to study how childhood shapes adult life — and more than five decades later, the single childhood trait that most consistently predicts adult health, wealth, and happiness is not intelligence or family income, but something much harder to teach
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▲ 0 · Jun 5
333.
Time really does run faster for your head than for your feet. According to general relativity, clocks higher in Earth’s gravitational field tick slightly faster — and physicists have now measured the effect across distances as small as a millimetre.
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▲ 0 · Jun 5
334.
Mercury is not the hottest planet in the solar system despite sitting closest to the Sun, because Venus traps so much heat under its thick atmosphere that it stays hotter day and night.
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▲ 0 · Jun 5
335.
Carl Sagan and four colleagues published the 1983 ‘TTAPS’ paper that introduced the phrase ‘nuclear winter’, and the calculations that frightened Reagan and Gorbachev into arms talks were first run not on a supercomputer but on a model originally built to study dust storms on Mars.
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▲ 0 · Jun 5
336.
Concept of the day: the Zeigarnik effect — how unfinished tasks nag at the mind more than finished ones
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▲ 0 · Jun 4
337.
The Mediterranean Sea was once completely dry — about 5.6 million years ago, the connection to the Atlantic Ocean was closed by geological shifts, and the entire sea evaporated into a massive salt-floored basin two miles below sea level, which remained empty for roughly 600,000 years before the Strait of Gibraltar reopened and the Atlantic refilled it in what may have been the largest waterfall in Earth’s history
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▲ 0 · Jun 4
338.
The icy surface of Europa is constantly crystallising and reforming in different places at different rates and the James Webb Space Telescope has only just caught it happening
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▲ 0 · Jun 4
339.
On December 3, 1992, a 22-year-old British software engineer named Neil Papworth sat at a desktop computer in his office and sent the first text message ever transmitted — two words long, reading simply “Merry Christmas” — to a Vodafone executive at an office party across town, who couldn’t reply because mobile phones at the time had no way to send texts back
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▲ 0 · Jun 4
340.
Thought of the day from Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard: “Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards”
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▲ 0 · Jun 4
341.
The “@” symbol that anchors every email address in the world was chosen in 1971 by a computer engineer named Ray Tomlinson because he wanted a character that would never appear in a person’s name — looked over his keyboard, picked the only obscure punctuation mark available, and used it to separate the user from the machine they were on — and every email sent in the half-century since has used that same arbitrary choice
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▲ 0 · Jun 4
342.
Baboons walk in single file not for safety or strategy but simply to stay close to their friends — and researchers say the pattern it produces serves no purpose at all
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▲ 0 · Jun 4
343.
On September 26, 1983, a Soviet officer named Stanislav Petrov was alone at a missile-warning station outside Moscow when his computer reported five American nuclear missiles inbound — and instead of alerting his superiors, who would have authorized a retaliatory strike, he hesitated, called it a system error, and may have prevented the end of civilization in a single judgment call.
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▲ 0 · Jun 4
344.
Every human being alive today shares a single common ancestor who lived as recently as 3,000 years ago — not a mythical figure, but an ordinary person who happened to be in the right place at the right time — meaning every emperor, every slave, every nameless laborer of the ancient world is either an ancestor to everyone now living, or to no one, and we will never know which
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▲ 0 · Jun 4
345.
The world produces approximately 460 million tonnes of plastic every year — roughly 230 times the amount produced in 1950 — and only about 9 percent of all plastic ever made has been recycled, with the remainder either burned, sent to landfills, or quietly accumulating in the environment, where researchers are now finding microplastic particles in human blood, brain tissue, and the placentas of newborns.
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▲ 0 · Jun 4
346.
The “Benjamin Franklin effect”: why doing someone a favour makes you like them more, not less
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▲ 0 · Jun 4
347.
The shortest commercial flight in the world is between two islands in Scotland’s Orkney archipelago — a flight covering just 2.7 kilometers (1.7 miles) between the islands of Westray and Papa Westray — and the entire journey, from takeoff to landing, takes about 90 seconds, less than the average time it takes to scroll through a single social media post
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▲ 0 · Jun 4
348.
The country with the most pyramids in the world is not Egypt — it’s Sudan, which has roughly 200 to 250 ancient pyramids, more than twice the number found in Egypt — built by the Kingdom of Kush between 700 BC and 300 AD, and largely overlooked by modern tourism because they sit in remote desert sites in a country most travelers cannot easily visit.
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▲ 0 · Jun 4
349.
In September 2023 a mega-tsunami in Greenland sent tremors around the entire planet for nine days and scientists have only just confirmed how
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▲ 0 · Jun 4
350.
The energy debate around AI keeps anchoring on the watt-hours behind a single prompt. The figure that actually matters is the 415 terawatt-hours the world’s data centres used in 2024, and the IEA’s projection that demand will roughly double by 2030.
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▲ 0 · Jun 4
351.
When Soviet engineers launched the N1 moon rocket from Baikonur in July 1969, it climbed about 200 metres before falling back onto Site 110 and exploding with an estimated seven kilotons of energy, destroying a launch pad in a disaster the USSR kept hidden for two decades
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▲ 0 · Jun 4
352.
It is impossible to burp in space, because in microgravity the human stomach cannot separate gas from the liquid and partially digested food it sits inside, and any attempt to burp expels a mixture of all three directly into the astronaut’s mouth.
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▲ 0 · Jun 4
353.
In December 1970, the Soviet Venera 7 probe became the first spacecraft to transmit from another planet, sending 23 minutes of faint temperature data from Venus after a torn parachute tipped it onto its side and buried its signal in what engineers first dismissed as tape noise
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▲ 0 · Jun 4
354.
A 2015 study put the planet’s tree count at more than three trillion, while the Milky Way holds perhaps 100 to 400 billion stars. The same study carried a sting, though: we have roughly halved the world’s trees since farming began.
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▲ 0 · Jun 4
355.
In 2025, NASA quietly opened the commander’s seat on private missions to the International Space Station to astronauts who never wore its patch, and the first man in line is Thomas Pesquet, a Frenchman who has commanded the station before and will return in 2027 flying for a California startup
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▲ 0 · Jun 4
356.
After analysing nearly 12,000 daily work diaries from 238 employees, Harvard researchers found that the strongest driver of a good inner work life wasn’t praise, pressure or incentives — it was making progress on meaningful work, even in small steps. They called it the progress principle.
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▲ 0 · Jun 4
357.
Seventy-three million years ago birds were nesting in the Arctic alongside dinosaurs and the same seasonal instinct that fills it every spring was already working then
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▲ 0 · Jun 4
358.
In June 2026, China rolled its brand-new Long March 12B onto a pad in the Gobi Desert, told no one, loaded the maiden flight with paying customers’ satellites — and the rocket built to land its booster never even tried.
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▲ 0 · Jun 4
359.
A 2010 Harvard study gathered a quarter of a million moments and found our minds wander about 47 per cent of waking life — and that drifting off, even to pleasant thoughts, leaves us no happier than staying with whatever we’re actually doing.
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▲ 0 · Jun 4
360.
Scientists say the gold in wedding rings, teeth, and family heirlooms was forged in cosmic catastrophes long before our sun existed
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▲ 0 · Jun 4