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451.
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
452.
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
453.
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
454.
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
455.
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
456.
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
457.
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
458.
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
459.
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
460.
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
461.
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
462.
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
463.
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
464.
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
465.
The leading explanation for how the Moon was born is that a world the size of Mars called Theia slammed into the young Earth and flung out the debris that became the Moon, and recent research suggests Theia itself never fully left, with two continent-sized blobs buried near our planet’s core possibly being the last remains of the world that struck us.
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▲ 0 · May 31
466.
Earth’s magnetic field has flipped hundreds of times, swapping magnetic north and south in a switch locked into ancient rock, and it happens on no fixed schedule, yet nothing in the record suggests a single flip ever wiped out life.
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▲ 0 · May 31
467.
Zealandia, the submerged continent geologists confirmed in 2017, is 94 percent underwater and stretches nearly two million square miles beneath the South Pacific, yet its modern name was quietly proposed by geophysicist Bruce Luyendyk in 1995
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▲ 0 · May 31
468.
New Zealand and New Caledonia are the only large fragments of Zealandia still poking above the ocean, meaning the country most travellers think of as a pair of islands is actually the exposed mountain peaks of a continent five times their size.
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▲ 0 · May 31
469.
A rainbow is not actually located in any specific place in the sky — every person watching the same rainbow is seeing a slightly different one, formed by different raindrops, and if two people stood next to each other looking at the same rainbow, the rainbows they are seeing would be technically different, with no two viewers in the world ever sharing the exact same rainbow
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▲ 0 · May 31
470.
A team led by Nick Mortimer at GNS Science in New Zealand spent two decades mapping the basalt and granite floor of the Tasman region before formally naming Zealandia in a 2017 paper, ending more than a century of arguments about whether a submerged landmass could still count as a continent.
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▲ 0 · May 31
471.
The Moon is stealing time from the Earth, and it has been getting away with it for billions of years. Our planet spins so much slower than it once did that a single day has stretched from just 19 hours to the 24 we live by, and the Moon is still creeping away from us right now.
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▲ 0 · May 31
472.
There are more trees on Earth than stars in the Milky Way. A major global estimate put the planet’s tree count at about three trillion, while NASA gives the Milky Way’s star count as roughly 100 to 400 billion.
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▲ 0 · May 31
473.
The bootprints left by the Apollo astronauts will still be sitting on the Moon a million years from now, because there is no wind and no rain to wear them away.
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▲ 0 · May 31
474.
Tyrannosaurus rex lived so much closer in time to the first humans than it did to Stegosaurus that the gap separating the two most famous dinosaurs is actually wider than the gap between T. rex and us.
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▲ 0 · May 31
475.
Venus spins so slowly that one rotation takes longer than its entire year. A Venusian day is about 243 Earth days, while a Venusian year lasts about 225 — and because the planet rotates backwards compared with Earth and most other planets, the Sun would rise in the west and set in the east.
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▲ 0 · May 30
476.
The 1518 dancing plague of Strasbourg began when Frau Troffea stepped into the street and danced without stopping, drew as many as 400 townspeople into the mania, and later chronicles claimed some died before it ended on its own
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▲ 0 · May 30
477.
The Overtoun Bridge in Scotland has seen hundreds of dogs leap from the same parapet since the 1950s, often on clear days from the right side, and one behavioural investigation pointed to the scent of mink below
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▲ 0 · May 30
478.
A single bolt of lightning can heat the air around it to roughly five times the temperature of the surface of the Sun, and it is the violent expansion of that superheated air that creates the crack of thunder.
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▲ 0 · May 30
479.
The 1965 space pen myth: NASA didn’t spend millions to build a pen and the Soviets didn’t outsmart anyone with a pencil. Inventor Paul C. Fisher quietly developed the pressurised pen on his own dime and only sold it to NASA.
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▲ 0 · May 30
480.
Almost every atom in your body heavier than hydrogen was forged inside stars that died long before the Sun was born, which means the iron in your blood and the calcium in your bones are quite literally the remains of dead stars
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▲ 0 · May 30