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781.
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
782.
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
783.
The earliest known cave paintings, recently dated to at least 45,500 years old on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, depict a wild pig and several human-animal hybrid figures — and the discovery has pushed the timeline of complex symbolic thinking back so far that most of the standard textbook narratives about when humans started being recognizably modern are now being quietly rewritten
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▲ 0 · May 19
784.
AI can now read your emotional state in a shop, adapt what it shows you in real time, and increase sales by double digits — and most shoppers have no idea this is already happening
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▲ 0 · May 19
785.
Europe and China just put a telescope in orbit to photograph something nobody has ever actually seen — the invisible shield keeping the solar wind from stripping Earth bare
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▲ 0 · May 19
786.
The Arecibo radio telescope broadcast a single 3-minute message toward star cluster M13 in 1974, and because M13 is 25,000 light-years away, any reply would take 50,000 years to arrive, meaning the people who sent it knew with certainty no one alive would ever hear an answer.
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▲ 0 · May 19
787.
Washington tried to blind the world to what’s happening over Iran — and instead handed Europe’s satellite industry the customer base it spent a decade failing to build
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▲ 0 · May 19
788.
The James Webb Space Telescope is parked a million miles from Earth at a gravitational balance point so precarious it has to fire its thrusters every three weeks just to stay there, and when its fuel runs out around 2040 it will drift away forever with no possibility of refueling or rescue.
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▲ 0 · May 19
789.
The James Webb Space Telescope has found galaxies that appear to have formed within 280 million years of the Big Bang, some containing heavy elements that shouldn’t have had time to form — and at least one peer-reviewed paper has now proposed that the universe might actually be 26.7 billion years old, almost twice the standard estimate
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▲ 0 · May 19
790.
Indigenous Amazonian shamans identified the specific combination of two plants required to make ayahuasca active orally — a pairing that stands as what may be one of the most unlikely discoveries in the history of human botany, given there are roughly 80,000 plant species in the Amazon
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▲ 0 · May 19
791.
Women’s sense of smell is roughly 50% more sensitive than men’s on average, and the gap widens during pregnancy to a degree that some evolutionary biologists think is a defence mechanism for the fetus
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▲ 0 · May 19
792.
The clearest indicator of whether a person has aged well into their seventies is not health, wealth, or relationships. It is whether they have continued to be surprised by things.
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▲ 0 · May 19
793.
Female brains have measurably more connections between the two hemispheres, and male brains have more connections within each hemisphere — and neuroscientists still argue about whether this explains anything or nothing at all
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▲ 0 · May 19
794.
Australian Aboriginal songlines encode the geography of the entire continent in song — a navigation system that predates writing by tens of thousands of years and still works today for anyone who knows the song
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▲ 0 · May 19
795.
The Opportunity rover survived on Mars for 14 years — roughly 55 times longer than its 90-day design mission — before a 2018 global dust storm so vast it turned “day into night” across the entire planet buried its solar panels, and despite NASA sending more than 1,000 recovery commands afterward, the rover never woke up
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▲ 0 · May 19
796.
Siberian, Amazonian, and Aboriginal Australian shamanic traditions developed independently across three continents — and all three describe the same basic cosmology of an upper world, a middle world, and a lower world reached through an axis at the centre
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▲ 0 · May 19
797.
Every breath you take contains atoms that were once inside the lungs of Julius Caesar, Cleopatra, and every other person who has ever lived — the math is unforgiving and it works out every time
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▲ 0 · May 19
798.
Submarine crews and astronauts experience the same set of psychological pressures and have evolved opposite ways of handling them, and the difference reveals something about how isolation actually works.
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▲ 0 · May 19
799.
Norway’s sovereign wealth fund — built entirely from oil revenue — is now the single largest investor in the global energy transition, and it owns roughly 1.5% of every publicly traded company on Earth
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▲ 0 · May 19
800.
The water in your coffee this morning is older than the Sun, formed in interstellar clouds before the solar system existed, and roughly half of every glass of water on Earth predates the planet it’s sitting on by about a billion years.
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▲ 0 · May 18
801.
The supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way has a mass of 4 million suns, and the entire solar system is orbiting it at 514,000 mph without anyone on Earth feeling a thing
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▲ 0 · May 18
802.
Roughly two billion years ago, one single-celled organism swallowed another and instead of digesting it, ended up living with it permanently inside — and the bacterium that almost became a meal became the mitochondria that now power nearly every cell in nearly every plant and animal on Earth, still carrying a small remnant of their own ancient bacterial DNA, separate from ours.
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▲ 0 · May 18
803.
Cows have best friends, get visibly stressed when separated from them, and have measurably lower heart rates when reunited — and the dairy industry has known this since at least 2011
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▲ 0 · May 18
804.
While Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the Moon, Michael Collins orbited above them alone in Columbia — and for roughly 47 minutes of each orbit, when the body of the Moon itself blocked radio contact with both Earth and the lunar surface, he was a single human being with the entire Moon between himself and every other living person
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▲ 0 · May 18
805.
There’s a version of astrology a scientist can honestly engage with — not the planetary-influence version, which has been repeatedly falsified, but the human-psychology version, which is the real reason horoscopes work, the real reason birth charts feel uncanny, and the real reason this practice has outlived nearly every empire that ever banned it
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▲ 0 · May 18
806.
The UAE didn’t have a space agency twelve years ago. It now has a probe at Mars, a seat at the UN’s new space-safety body, and a plan to be in the global top 10 by 2031.
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▲ 0 · May 18
807.
In 1982 the Soviet Union landed a probe on the surface of Venus that survived 127 minutes in heat that melts lead and pressure dense enough to crush a submarine — long enough to scan back two panoramas of flat basaltic rock under an orange-tinted sky before the heat finally ended the mission.
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▲ 0 · May 18
808.
Saturn’s rings are mostly made of water ice, and they’re slowly raining down into the planet at a rate that means they’ll be gone in roughly 100 million years — which sounds geologically long, but in the timeline of the solar system it means we’re seeing them during one specific moment of their existence, and almost any other moment we could have been born into would have seen Saturn without them
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▲ 0 · May 18
809.
The Chernobyl exclusion zone is now one of the largest wildlife sanctuaries in Europe, revealing a grim paradox: removing humans from the landscape did far more for the animals than a nuclear disaster did to harm them
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▲ 0 · May 18
810.
China installed more solar capacity in 2023 than the United States has installed in its entire history, and the panels were largely manufactured using coal-fired electricity
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▲ 0 · May 18