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481.
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
482.
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
483.
If you dropped Mount Everest into the deepest point of the ocean, its peak would still sit more than two kilometres beneath the surface, because the Mariana Trench plunges far deeper than the mountain stands tall
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▲ 0 · May 30
484.
The oxygen in Earth’s atmosphere is essential to almost every animal alive today — but when it first started accumulating in the air roughly 2.4 billion years ago, it triggered the most lethal pollution event in the planet’s history, wiping out the vast majority of species alive at the time, in what biologists now call the Great Oxidation Event
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▲ 0 · May 30
485.
The famous claim about archaeologists finding still-edible 3,000-year-old honey in Egyptian tombs is mostly folklore — but the underlying chemistry that makes honey nearly immortal in a sealed jar is real, well-documented, and perhaps even stranger than the myth
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▲ 0 · May 30
486.
There are more atoms in a single glass of water than there are glasses of water in all the world’s oceans combined — and if you marked every atom in one glass, dumped it into the sea, and waited for the oceans to mix completely, every glass of water on Earth would contain several thousand of those marked atoms
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▲ 0 · May 30
487.
The rock formations in the Scottish Highlands and western Newfoundland match each other almost exactly — because the two were part of the same mountain range hundreds of millions of years ago, before the Atlantic Ocean opened and split them across what is now an entire ocean
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▲ 0 · May 30
488.
Saturn is so light for its size that if you could find an ocean large enough, the entire planet would float, because its average density is lower than that of water.
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▲ 0 · May 30
489.
Thought of the day from Stoic philosopher Seneca: “We suffer more often in imagination than in reality.”
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▲ 0 · May 30
490.
In the 1960s an MIT scientist built ELIZA, a simple program that did little more than rephrase your words back as questions, and he was so unsettled when his own secretary asked him to leave the room so she could confide in it privately that he spent the rest of his life warning people against trusting machines with their feelings.
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▲ 0 · May 30
491.
The longest-running laboratory experiment in the world began at the University of Queensland in 1927, a funnel of pitch that drips roughly once a decade, and in nearly a century no human has ever actually witnessed a drop fall
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▲ 0 · May 30
492.
Sharks have been swimming in Earth’s oceans for roughly 450 million years — which means they predate the first tree by about 65 million years, and when sharks first appeared, the only plants on land were mosses and liverworts no taller than a few centimetres
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▲ 0 · May 30
493.
The Sun might look yellow, but seen from space without an atmosphere filtering its light, the sun is actually white — and the yellow color we see from Earth is the result of our atmosphere scattering blue wavelengths away, in the same physics that makes the sky appear blue
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▲ 0 · May 30
494.
The Pacific Ocean is so vast that it’s larger than every continent on Earth combined — and there’s a single straight line you could sail through it for nearly 20,000 miles without ever touching land
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▲ 0 · May 30
495.
Light takes about 8 minutes to travel from the sun to the Earth, but the energy carried in that sunlight was generated in the sun’s core tens to hundreds of thousands of years ago — bouncing through the sun’s interior for that entire time before finally escaping its surface and making the 8-minute trip across space
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▲ 0 · May 30
496.
A day on Earth is described as 24 hours, but the planet has been slowing down for billions of years — and growth rings in ancient coral fossils show that 380 million years ago, hundreds of millions of years before any dinosaur existed, an Earth day was only about 22 hours long
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▲ 0 · May 30
497.
The Sahara is usually described as the world’s largest desert, but because a desert is defined by rainfall rather than temperature, the entire continent of Antarctica is technically the largest desert on Earth, with parts of its interior having received no significant precipitation for nearly 14 million years
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▲ 0 · May 30
498.
The Sahara is usually depicted as the world’s largest desert, but because a desert is defined by rainfall rather than temperature, the entire continent of Antarctica is technically the largest desert on Earth, with parts of its interior having received no significant precipitation for nearly 14 million years
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▲ 0 · May 30
499.
There is a region of space called the Boötes void, around 330 million light years wide and almost completely empty, and if our galaxy sat at its centre, we might not have discovered that other galaxies existed until well into the twentieth century.
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▲ 0 · May 30
500.
The Great Pyramid of Giza is described as one of the world’s oldest landmarks, but it was already more than a thousand years old by the time Stonehenge was completed — and it was older to Cleopatra than Cleopatra is to us, with the gap between her reign and the pyramid’s construction larger than the gap between her reign and the present day
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▲ 0 · May 30
501.
The Library of Ashurbanipal in Nineveh burned down in 612 BC, but because its 30,000 tablets were made of clay, the fire actually baked and preserved them, and we can read Mesopotamian poetry today because someone tried to destroy it
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▲ 0 · May 30
502.
Frances Glessner Lee, a wealthy heiress in the 1940s, built 20 dollhouse-sized crime scenes with hand-stitched curtains and working light bulbs to train homicide detectives, and 18 of her tiny dioramas are still used in forensic training in Baltimore today
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▲ 0 · May 30
503.
The Antikythera mechanism, pulled from a Greek shipwreck in 1901, was a hand-cranked bronze computer that predicted eclipses and tracked the Olympic Games calendar around 100 BC, and nothing of comparable complexity would appear again on Earth for the next 1,400 years
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▲ 0 · May 30
504.
In the year 1054 a star exploded so brightly that Chinese astronomers recorded it shining in broad daylight for more than three weeks, and the wreckage of that blast is still expanding across the sky today as the Crab Nebula.
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▲ 0 · May 30
505.
The surface of the Sun is around 5,500 degrees, but its outer atmosphere is more than a million degrees hotter, and after decades of work physicists still cannot fully explain how the cooler layer heats the one above it.
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▲ 0 · May 29
506.
Astronomers have found a cloud of water vapour around a distant quasar holding something like 140 trillion times all the water in Earth’s oceans, the largest reservoir of water ever discovered anywhere in the universe.
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▲ 0 · May 29
507.
More than 2,200 years ago a librarian in Egypt measured the circumference of the entire planet using nothing but a stick, a shadow, and the distance between two cities, and landed within a few per cent of the right answer.
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▲ 0 · May 29
508.
Mount Everest is the highest point above sea level, but because the Earth bulges at the equator, the summit of a volcano in Ecuador sits farther from the centre of the planet, making it the closest piece of land on Earth to outer space.
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▲ 0 · May 29
509.
Between five and six million years ago, the Mediterranean Sea nearly dried out — and when Atlantic water finally broke back in near Gibraltar, one model suggests the basin may have refilled so violently that sea level rose by metres a day.
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▲ 0 · May 29
510.
There is a Japanese word, mottainai, that carries the sense of regret over discarding something still useful, and a small mountain town of 1,500 people in southern Japan has spent the past twenty years building a municipal system around it, requiring residents to sort their household waste into 45 separate categories and achieving an 81 per cent recycling rate against a national average of 20 per cent.
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▲ 0 · May 29