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751.
Scott Kelly spent a year in orbit while his identical twin brother stayed on Earth, and when he came home NASA discovered his gene expression had changed in ways that didn’t fully reverse
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▲ 0 · May 20
752.
Octopuses have nine brains, three hearts, and blue copper-based blood, with roughly two-thirds of their neurons spread through their arms, allowing each arm to taste, move, and react with a startling degree of local control
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▲ 0 · May 20
753.
The bacteria living in and on your body outnumber your own cells, which means that by strict cellular count you are not majority human — and the ratio shifts noticeably depending on whether you’ve just been to the bathroom
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▲ 0 · May 20
754.
In April 2019 the Israeli spacecraft Beresheet crashed into the lunar surface carrying thousands of dehydrated tardigrades inside a “lunar library” — and later impact tests put the survival cutoff for tardigrades at around 900 metres per second, almost exactly Beresheet’s crash speed, meaning we still don’t know whether Earth life is now lying dormant on the Moon with no water to revive it.
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▲ 0 · May 19
755.
Radioactive iron from an ancient stellar explosion has been found in 80,000-year-old Antarctic ice, confirming that the Solar System is passing through the remnant debris of a supernova
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▲ 0 · May 19
756.
Technology spent 15 years removing every small resistance from your day — and a growing body of research suggests that was not as good for your brain as it was for their engagement metrics
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▲ 0 · May 19
757.
In 2007 the European Space Agency exposed dried tardigrades to the open vacuum of space for 10 days aboard the FOTON-M3 mission, and most survived the combination of vacuum and cosmic radiation, with some even surviving direct solar UV — then revived back on Earth and produced viable offspring.
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▲ 0 · May 19
758.
Japan sits on the intersection of four tectonic plates and experiences roughly 1,500 earthquakes a year, which is why the country’s building codes are the strictest on Earth — and why the Tokyo Skytree, the second-tallest structure in the world, is designed to sway rather than resist
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▲ 0 · May 19
759.
People who are truly pleasant and kind but have no close friends often spent decades being the one everyone called during a crisis — and somewhere along the way noticed almost none of those calls had reversed direction
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▲ 0 · May 19
760.
Astronauts on the ISS lose about 1-2% of their bone density per month in microgravity — meaning a six-month mission costs them as much bone mass as a postmenopausal woman loses in a year — and the countermeasures NASA developed to slow that loss are now being studied as treatments for osteoporosis patients on the ground
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▲ 0 · May 19
761.
The Antikythera mechanism was recovered from a Roman-era shipwreck in 1901 with at least 30 hand-cut bronze gears inside, and no comparable machine survives for centuries after it, as if a whole engineering tradition dropped out of history
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▲ 0 · May 19
762.
China’s Chang’e 5 mission returned lunar rocks dated to 2 billion years old — 800 million years younger than anything Apollo brought back — which means the Moon was geologically active hundreds of millions of years later than every textbook had assumed, and most of those textbooks haven’t been updated yet
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▲ 0 · May 19
763.
About 60 percent of the human body’s mass is water, but a much more interesting figure is that roughly half of the cells in our bodies aren’t human at all — they’re bacteria, fungi, and other microorganisms whose collective genetic material vastly outnumbers our own, and emerging research suggests they’re influencing mood, sleep, and certain kinds of decision-making in ways we’re only beginning to map.
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▲ 0 · May 19
764.
The Mariana Trench, the deepest known point on Earth’s surface, sits about 36,000 feet below sea level — and yet there are living organisms thriving down there, including small white shrimp-like amphipods that have been found with traces of plastic in their digestive systems, in a habitat that almost no human has ever physically reached
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▲ 0 · May 19
765.
Psychology explains why nearly all intelligent people change their minds in front of others more often than the rest of us are willing to — and the reason isn’t that they care less about being right, it’s that they’ve stopped needing to look right while they’re working out what’s true
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▲ 0 · May 19
766.
Quote by Robin Williams: “Everyone you meet is fighting a battle you know nothing about. Be kind. Always.”
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▲ 0 · May 19
767.
Cognitive scientists have a name for the experience of suddenly realizing you’ve been reading a book for several minutes without absorbing any of the words — “mind-wandering” — and recent research suggests humans spend roughly 47 percent of waking life in some version of this state, which means the default condition of consciousness is mostly somewhere other than the present
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▲ 0 · May 19
768.
A European-Chinese spacecraft just launched to photograph something nobody has ever actually seen — the invisible shield that keeps the solar wind from sterilizing Earth
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▲ 0 · May 19
769.
Sunsets are red for the same reason the sky is blue, and the reason has nothing to do with the sun changing colour — it’s about how far the light has to travel through the atmosphere to reach you
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▲ 0 · May 19
770.
The Carrington Event of 1859 was a solar storm so intense that telegraph operators kept sending messages after disconnecting their batteries because the storm itself was powering the lines — and a Lloyd’s of London risk model estimates a comparable event today could cost the U.S. up to 2.6 trillion dollars
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▲ 0 · May 19
771.
The Soviet Union landed a probe on Venus in 1970 that survived only 23 minutes before being crushed, but in those 23 minutes Venera 7 became the first human-made object to transmit data from the surface of another planet, and the signal was so weak engineers nearly missed it buried in noise from a probe they thought had failed.
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▲ 0 · May 19
772.
The Pentagon is quietly betting Golden Dome on a consortium of commercial space firms — and the $1.2 trillion CBO number isn’t even the part that should worry the White House
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▲ 0 · May 19
773.
The human brain uses roughly 20 percent of the body’s total energy despite making up only about 2 percent of body weight — and most of that energy isn’t being spent on thinking, it’s being spent on the background work of maintaining the resting state, which is what most of cognition is actually emerging from
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▲ 0 · May 19
774.
Most of the matter in the universe has never been observed directly, and the existence of “dark matter” is essentially a placeholder name for the gap between what we can see and what the math requires — a placeholder we’ve been using confidently for about ninety years
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▲ 0 · May 19
775.
The human eye has a small blind spot where the optic nerve connects to the retina, and the only reason you don’t constantly see a hole in your visual field is that your brain is filling it in with educated guesses — meaning every moment of your visual experience is partly fabrication, and your conscious mind is the last to be informed.
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▲ 0 · May 19
776.
Most of what we call “memory” isn’t a recording of what happened — it’s a reconstruction that gets edited slightly every time it’s retrieved — meaning the more you remember something, the further it drifts from what actually occurred, and the most vivid memories of your life are often the least accurate
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▲ 0 · May 19
777.
The fastest object ever built by humans is the Parker Solar Probe, currently flying through the Sun’s outer atmosphere at 430,000 miles per hour — fast enough to travel from Philadelphia to Washington in about a second — protected from 2,500-degree temperatures by a heat shield about four and a half inches thick that NASA engineers spent two decades figuring out how to make.
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▲ 0 · May 19
778.
There’s a real, measurable cognitive trait called “intellectual humility” that turns out to predict accuracy on almost every kind of judgment task — and the people who score highest on it aren’t the ones who know the most, they’re the ones who hold their existing beliefs slightly more loosely than everyone around them
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▲ 0 · May 19
779.
The single oldest non-clonal living thing on Earth is a bristlecone pine called Methuselah, growing on a windswept slope in California’s White Mountains at 9,800 feet — it germinated around 2833 BCE, which means it was already a thousand years old when the Egyptians were finishing the Pyramids, and the U.S. Forest Service refuses to disclose its exact location for fear of what tourists would do to it
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▲ 0 · May 19
780.
Most professional mathematicians, when describing the moment a difficult proof finally falls into place, use language closer to discovery than to invention — and the consistency of that framing across cultures and centuries has driven philosophers of mathematics to a serious unresolved question about whether mathematical structures exist independently of the minds that find them
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▲ 0 · May 19