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571.
In 1961, a young chimpanzee captured in Cameroon and trained at a New Mexico air force base became the first hominin to travel into space and return alive — and the program kept him publicly nameless throughout the mission, as if to avoid the grief of losing a named chimp on national television, only calling him Ham after he came home
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▲ 0 · May 27
572.
When a young astronomer found a signal pulsing with impossible regularity in 1967, the team only half-jokingly labelled it LGM-1, for little green men — before realising they had discovered a spinning neutron star sweeping a beam past Earth like a lighthouse.
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▲ 0 · May 27
573.
In April 1970, the crew of Apollo 13 navigated home by holding the spacecraft against the terminator of the Earth, the line where day met night on the planet they were trying to reach, timing a fourteen-second engine burn with a wristwatch because their guidance computer had been shut down to save battery power for reentry
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▲ 0 · May 27
574.
The Parker Solar Probe is now flying through the Sun’s outer atmosphere at 430,000 miles per hour, fast enough to cross the continental United States in 20 seconds, and its heat shield protects the instruments behind it by keeping them at room temperature while the front face glows at 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit.
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▲ 0 · May 27
575.
The Antikythera mechanism recovered from a Roman shipwreck in 1901 turned out to be a hand-cranked bronze computer that could predict eclipses and track the irregular orbit of the Moon, and nothing of comparable mechanical complexity would appear anywhere on Earth for another 1,400 years.
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▲ 11 · May 27 · 5 comments on HN
576.
In 1919, British astronomer Arthur Eddington sailed to the island of Príncipe to photograph a total solar eclipse, measuring starlight bent by the Sun’s gravity — a result that confirmed a key prediction of Einstein’s general relativity and helped turn him into the most famous scientist in the world.
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▲ 0 · May 27
577.
For much of human history, survival did not necessarily require a day filled with labour
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▲ 0 · May 27
578.
When NASA’s 77-tonne Skylab station fell out of orbit in 1979 and scattered debris across Western Australia, the Shire of Esperance did the only reasonable thing: it fined the United States $400 for littering.
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▲ 0 · May 27
579.
Thought of the day from Stoic philosopher Seneca: ‘It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it.’
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▲ 0 · May 27
580.
Finland has spent decades building a tunnel 430 metres into 1.9-billion-year-old bedrock to store nuclear waste for 100,000 years — and the current plan is to seal it, leave no marker, and hope no future civilisation ever finds it
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▲ 0 · May 27
581.
When the Galileo spacecraft’s main antenna failed to unfurl on the way to Jupiter, engineers salvaged the mission by rewriting its software across deep space, compressing its data and squeezing a flagship science return through a low-gain antenna never meant to carry it.
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▲ 0 · May 26
582.
The geochemist who first measured the true age of the Earth kept finding lead everywhere it shouldn’t be in his samples, and the trail led him to a discovery that put him at war with industry for the rest of his career: modern lead exposure was overwhelmingly man-made.
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▲ 0 · May 26
583.
Ayisha Ashruf and her colleagues at Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre tracked seventeen pieces of 1960s-era space junk for 36 years and found that once the Sun’s sunspot count climbs past roughly two-thirds of a cycle’s peak, the upper atmosphere starts pulling debris down noticeably faster
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▲ 0 · May 26
584.
Voyager 2 flew past Neptune in 1989 and detected faint hints of auroras it couldn’t explain — because the magnetic field is tilted 47 degrees off the rotation axis and the auroras were glowing in entirely the wrong place
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▲ 0 · May 26
585.
In 1999, NASA lost a $125 million Mars spacecraft because of a metric-versus-imperial mix-up — the kind of conversion mistake most of us have made, only this one ended with a probe disappearing into the Martian atmosphere
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▲ 0 · May 26
586.
Two radio astronomers spent months trying to eliminate a faint hiss in their antenna, even scrubbing out pigeon droppings, before realising the noise they couldn’t get rid of was the afterglow of the early universe — the cosmic microwave background left behind by the Big Bang.
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▲ 0 · May 26
587.
In 1955, British historian C. Northcote Parkinson wrote a satirical essay about government bureaucracy. Seventy years later, the law that came from it may be more relevant than ever.
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▲ 0 · May 26
588.
In the 1980s, an Italian student invented the Pomodoro Technique — the popular timed focus method. He named it after the tomato-shaped kitchen timer sitting on his desk
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▲ 0 · May 26
589.
Quote by Bill Nye: “There’s nothing I believe in more strongly than getting young people interested in science and engineering, for a better tomorrow, for all humankind.”
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▲ 0 · May 26
590.
Most people are solving the wrong equation — the logic behind why some people compound their effort into results while everyone else stays flat is simple, uncomfortable, and almost never talked about
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▲ 0 · May 26
591.
In 1998 ground controllers lost contact with the Sun-watching SOHO spacecraft and feared it might be gone for good, until the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico pinged the silent, slowly tumbling craft — beginning a months-long effort to coax it back to life.
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▲ 0 · May 26
592.
In October 1957, Sputnik 1 crossed the sky every 96 minutes while two 1-watt transmitters on 20.005 and 40.002 megahertz sent a beep that radio amateurs around the world could hear on ordinary shortwave receivers
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▲ 0 · May 26
593.
In 1979, Voyager 1 flew past Jupiter’s moon Io and revealed active volcanoes erupting beyond Earth for the first time — turning a small Jovian moon into one of the most geologically surprising worlds in the solar system
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▲ 0 · May 26
594.
In 1971, Apollo 14 astronaut Stuart Roosa carried hundreds of tree seeds around the Moon in his personal kit, and the ordinary-looking seedlings that came home were planted in courthouses, schools and parks where many grew for decades with their flight history hidden in small plaques
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▲ 0 · May 26
595.
Seven villagers have been trapped inside a flooded cave in central Laos for nearly a week — sealed in by flash floods after going in to search for gold — and an international rescue team, including some of the Thai veterans of the 2018 cave rescue of the boys’ soccer team, is now racing through a 340-meter tunnel to reach them
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▲ 0 · May 26
596.
I cancelled Netflix for a month and spent the time learning Claude properly — the gap between people who use AI casually and people who actually know what it can do is bigger than I expected
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▲ 0 · May 26
597.
Tardigrades can survive being boiled, frozen to near absolute zero, blasted with radiation, and exposed to the vacuum of space, and they do it by drying themselves into a glass-like state where every cellular process stops and they wait, sometimes for decades, for water to come back.
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▲ 0 · May 26
598.
In April 2016, a mother who had lost two children to the same disease flew to Mexico to try something no one had ever done — and came home with a baby boy carrying DNA from three people, the first child ever born from a science built to spare him his siblings’ fate
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▲ 0 · May 26
599.
The Milky Way’s central black hole is almost silent today, but a collision with the Large Magellanic Cloud could feed it enough gas to wake it up — roughly two billion years from now
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▲ 0 · May 26
600.
The James Webb Space Telescope has just spotted a doomed star 40 million light-years away — wrapped in a dust shroud so thick it was invisible to Hubble — and the discovery may finally explain why the biggest stars in the universe keep vanishing before they explode
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▲ 0 · May 26