spacedaily.com

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61.
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
62.
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
63.
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
64.
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
65.
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
66.
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
67.
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
68.
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
69.
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
70.
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
71.
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
72.
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
73.
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
74.
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
75.
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
76.
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
77.
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
78.
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
79.
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
80.
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
81.
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
82.
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
83.
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
84.
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
85.
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
86.
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
87.
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
88.
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
89.
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
90.
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