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511.
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
512.
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
513.
NASA’s next major space telescope, the Nancy Grace Roman, is expected to find roughly 100,000 new transiting planets in just five years — along with the largest catalogue ever assembled of rogue worlds drifting through the galaxy without a star to orbit
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▲ 0 · May 29
514.
The James Webb Space Telescope has just captured the first direct measurement of a black hole 50 million times the mass of the Sun, sitting in an ancient galaxy where it outweighs every star around it — suggesting it may have formed first
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▲ 0 · May 29
515.
The asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs may have struck a planet that was already in serious trouble — a new Johns Hopkins study has found evidence of a separate ecological crisis that began about 30,000 years before the impact, coincident with a high-volume pulse of volcanic eruptions in what is now India
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▲ 0 · May 29
516.
When NASA deliberately crashed Apollo hardware into the Moon, the seismometers left behind recorded vibrations for nearly an hour — as if the Moon itself were ringing like a bell
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▲ 0 · May 29
517.
For 70 years, two large fossil bones sat in a University of Alaska museum drawer labeled as woolly mammoth — until radiocarbon dating, isotope analysis, and DNA testing revealed they came from two whales of two different species that somehow ended up 250 miles inland from the nearest coast, in a mystery the researchers say may never be fully solved
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▲ 0 · May 29
518.
The reason the TV helps you sleep is simpler than most people think — it’s quietly masking the small environmental sounds that would otherwise wake you up, and almost any steady background sound would do the same thing
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▲ 0 · May 29
519.
A pair of American satellites built to catch the Soviets cheating on a nuclear test ban kept detecting unexplained flashes, and the flashes turned out to be the most powerful explosions in the universe coming from billions of light-years away
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▲ 0 · May 29
520.
In 1987 a star exploded in a nearby galaxy, and detectors deep underground caught the burst of neutrinos roughly three hours before any telescope on Earth saw the light arrive.
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▲ 0 · May 29
521.
A remarkable new study suggests pigeons may navigate using their liver — solving a decades-long mystery about how birds find their way home across hundreds of miles by pointing to an organ no one had been looking at
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▲ 0 · May 29
522.
The Aztecs built an agricultural system in the 14th century that produced seven harvests a year without synthetic fertiliser, irrigation pipes, or chemical inputs, fed a city of 200,000 people for two centuries, was destroyed by Spanish conquest in 1521, and is now being painstakingly rebuilt by farmers and scientists in the only part of it that survived.
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▲ 0 · May 28
523.
We have normalised filling every quiet moment with something — podcasts while walking, screens while eating, sound while falling asleep — and the exhaustion most people feel isn’t from doing too much, it’s from never once letting the mind go quiet
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▲ 0 · May 28
524.
In 1938 the average American spent 47 minutes a day doing nothing — by 2026 that number had almost vanished, and researchers say that lost time was never idle, it was when the brain did its most important work
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▲ 0 · May 28
525.
Sam Altman said he was ‘pretty wrong’ about the jobs apocalypse — and ‘roughly right’ about everything else — four days after OpenAI filed for a trillion-dollar IPO
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▲ 0 · May 28
526.
Brussels just quietly carved out two-thirds of a key satellite band for European operators, and the move is really a direct shot at Starlink’s phone-to-satellite ambitions
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▲ 0 · May 28
527.
New evidence suggests Saturn’s rings are younger than the dinosaurs — and for most of the planet’s history, the Saturn you picture may never have existed
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▲ 0 · May 28
528.
A single aspen grove in Utah called Pando is one organism sharing a 106-acre root system and 47,000 genetically identical trunks, weighs roughly 6,000 tons, and has been quietly cloning itself for somewhere between 9,000 and 80,000 years while every visible trunk above it lives and dies on a 130-year cycle.
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▲ 0 · May 28
529.
In 1965, a 30-year-old cosmonaut named Alexei Leonov became the first human to walk in space — and somewhere in the middle of the live broadcast, while the world was watching the Soviet Union’s greatest propaganda triumph, mission control quietly cut the feed, for reasons that wouldn’t be publicly known for almost thirty years
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▲ 0 · May 28
530.
The copper canisters Finland chose to seal its nuclear waste are expected by some scientists to begin corroding within centuries — but the engineers buried them anyway at 430 metres, because the 1.9-billion-year-old rock surrounding them was there before complex life existed on Earth
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▲ 0 · May 28
531.
A new meta-analysis suggests omega-3 may reduce both hot-headed reactive aggression and the cooler, planned kind — and researchers say the finding is consistent across demographics
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▲ 0 · May 28
532.
Brain scans of new fathers show measurable changes — which might explain why so many dads describe the first year of parenthood as feeling like learning to be a different person
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▲ 0 · May 28
533.
Psilocybin research is no longer just for hard-to-treat cases — a new trial targeted recurrent depression in people who had not failed standard treatment, and the results are promising
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▲ 0 · May 28
534.
Embedded in the Voyager Golden Record’s Sounds of Earth montage are the brainwaves of Ann Druyan, recorded soon after she fell in love with Carl Sagan — a private meditation on human experience now drifting through interstellar space, waiting for a listener who may never come.
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▲ 0 · May 28
535.
The gold in an ordinary wedding ring was not made on Earth, or even inside an ordinary star, but in the most violent events in the universe, the collisions of dead stars and the flares of magnetised neutron stars, long before the Sun was born and the cloud that became our solar system took shape.
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▲ 0 · May 28
536.
The science of why some people seem to age dramatically slower than others is mostly the science of one thing — cumulative sun exposure — and what looks like good genes in someone’s seventies is usually fifty years of quiet sun protection that nobody, including the person, ever consciously planned
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▲ 0 · May 28
537.
When a Scottish sheep named Dolly was born on July 5, 1996 — cloned from a single cell taken from the udder of a six-year-old Finn Dorset ewe — she became the first mammal ever produced from an adult body cell, proving something developmental biologists had spent decades insisting was impossible
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▲ 0 · May 28
538.
In a Beijing laboratory, 25 volunteers spent a week learning to fly with feathered virtual-reality wings — flapping to stay aloft, swerving through rings, swatting falling balls — and by the end, their brains were processing images of wings the same way they process images of real human limbs
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▲ 0 · May 28
539.
In 2018, a Chinese biophysicist announced he had gene-edited twin girls using CRISPR. The scientific consensus is that what he actually did was something else
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▲ 0 · May 28
540.
Thought of the day by Albert Einstein: “The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible.”
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▲ 0 · May 28