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121.
There is a spot in the South Pacific so far from any coastline that when the International Space Station passes overhead, the nearest human beings may be the astronauts in orbit — not anyone on land.
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▲ 0 · May 27
122.
China has just sent stem-cell-grown structures resembling early human embryos to its space station — the first experiment of its kind in orbit — to find out whether humans can actually reproduce beyond Earth
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▲ 0 · May 27
123.
A new meta-analysis of 27 studies just changed what I’m most afraid of about sugar — it turns out the craving isn’t the worst part
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▲ 0 · May 27
124.
Paleontologists in New Mexico have just dug up a two-legged, beak-mouthed reptile that looks almost exactly like a small dinosaur — except it lived more than a hundred million years before any dinosaur evolved that body plan, and it wasn’t a dinosaur at all, but a distant cousin of modern crocodiles
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▲ 0 · May 27
125.
The Bronze Age civilization that built the city of Akrotiri on Santorini around 1600 BCE appears to have known a volcanic eruption was coming and evacuated almost everyone before it happened — archaeologists have found no bodies in the ruins, just abandoned belongings — and to this day nobody fully understands what warning signs they read, or where they went after they left
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▲ 0 · May 27
126.
In 1816, a French physician named René Laennec, embarrassed to press his ear against the chest of a young female patient, rolled up a sheet of paper into a tube and listened through it instead — and that improvised paper cylinder, which let him hear her heart more clearly than direct contact had, became the original prototype for the stethoscope and quietly reshaped two centuries of medicine
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▲ 0 · May 27
127.
Scientists tracked 8,000 supermassive black holes across the universe and found most slowed their growth over the same 10 billion years — not because of any force acting on them, but because the universe ran low on the cold gas they needed to keep feeding
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▲ 0 · May 27
128.
The largest known organism on Earth isn’t a whale or a tree — it’s a single fungus growing underground in Oregon’s Malheur National Forest, covering nearly four square miles, mostly invisible, estimated to be between two and eight thousand years old and slowly killing the forest above it from beneath
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▲ 0 · May 27
129.
For more than thirty years after his death in 1955, Albert Einstein’s brain was kept in a series of jars in the basement of a Kansas pathologist who had removed it during the autopsy without permission — and when researchers finally examined it in the 1980s and 1990s, one study found that a specific region called the inferior parietal lobule was about fifteen percent wider than the average brain
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▲ 0 · May 27
130.
When Soviet engineers landed Venera 13 on the surface of Venus in 1982, they expected the probe to survive maybe thirty minutes in the planet’s lead-melting heat and crushing pressure — it survived 127 minutes and sent back the first color photographs ever taken from the surface of another planet
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▲ 0 · May 27
131.
The Hubble Space Telescope launched in 1990 with a mirror so precisely ground that it was actually defective — the curve was off by about one-fiftieth the width of a human hair — producing blurry images for the first three and a half years of its mission, until astronauts on a 1993 Space Shuttle mission installed corrective optics in orbit and turned it into the most productive telescope in history
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▲ 0 · May 27
132.
The most distant human-made object in the universe is Voyager 1, currently more than 15 billion miles from Earth — and its plutonium power source is losing about four watts of output every year, meaning sometime around 2030 the spacecraft will quietly stop transmitting forever, ending the longest continuous human conversation ever conducted across cosmic distances
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▲ 0 · May 27
133.
In 1969, Apollo 11’s lunar module Eagle landed on the Moon with about 25 seconds of fuel remaining and three program alarms blaring in the cabin — and one of the engineers who built the guidance system later said the only reason it worked was a young woman named Margaret Hamilton, who had insisted the software be able to ignore tasks it couldn’t complete
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▲ 0 · May 27
134.
For thousands of years, a giant iron meteorite lay in the far north of Greenland, where generations of Inuit travelled to it as their only source of metal for knives and harpoons — until the American explorer Robert Peary spent three years hauling the 31-ton mass to a ship in the 1890s and sold it to a New York museum, where it still sits today
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▲ 0 · May 27
135.
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
136.
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
137.
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
138.
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
139.
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
140.
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
141.
For much of human history, survival did not necessarily require a day filled with labour
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▲ 0 · May 27
142.
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
143.
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
144.
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
145.
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
146.
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
147.
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
148.
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
149.
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
150.
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