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151.
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
152.
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
153.
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
154.
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
155.
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
156.
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
157.
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
158.
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
159.
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
160.
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
161.
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
162.
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
163.
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
164.
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
165.
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
166.
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
167.
Adding a banana to a berry smoothie can cancel out roughly 84% of the antioxidants the berries were supposed to deliver — and the reason is the same enzyme that turns bananas brown after they’re peeled
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▲ 0 · May 26
168.
A drilling expedition off Nantucket has confirmed a massive freshwater reservoir buried beneath the Atlantic seafloor — stretching from New Jersey to Maine, hypothesized since the 1960s, and holding enough drinkable water to supply New York City for roughly 800 years
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▲ 0 · May 26
169.
The paper that explained why every living thing on Earth exists was rejected by 15 journals before anyone took it seriously — and the idea it contained is stranger than most science fiction
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▲ 0 · May 26
170.
A genuine “once in a blue moon” event arrives this Sunday, May 31 — the only monthly Blue Moon between now and the very end of 2028 — and this one will pass right next to the bright orange heart of Scorpius in the predawn sky
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▲ 0 · May 26
171.
A space telescope orbiting Earth just picked up the same strange signature buried in every kind of cosmic ray it can detect — and it’s a fingerprint physicists have been quietly waiting on since 1912
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▲ 0 · May 26
172.
A research vessel mapping the Mediterranean floor off the coast of Sicily has just uncovered something the existing maps of the region don’t show — and it’s been sitting there, just kilometers from one of the most populated coastlines in Europe, the whole time.
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▲ 0 · May 26
173.
The human body replaces almost all of its cells over a roughly 7-10 year period — but the neurons in your cerebral cortex are almost certainly the same age as you are
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▲ 0 · May 26
174.
Microsoft built an anechoic chamber so quiet that the background noise drops below the threshold of human hearing, and nobody has been able to sit inside it for more than 45 minutes because the brain begins to hallucinate when the only sounds left are your own heartbeat and lungs
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▲ 0 · May 26
175.
For decades two spacecraft drifting out of the solar system were being nudged off course by a force no one could explain — until physicists traced it to the faint heat radiating from the probes themselves.
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▲ 0 · May 26
176.
The Opportunity rover’s famous last words — “my battery is low and it’s getting dark” — were never actually sent from Mars. The real story of where that sentence came from is stranger, and somehow sadder
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▲ 0 · May 26
177.
In 1961, Yuri Gagarin became the first human to orbit Earth — but he did not land inside Vostok 1. He ejected and parachuted to Earth separately, and Soviet officials omitted that fact from official records because aviation record rules required the pilot to land with the craft
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▲ 0 · May 26
178.
When the Soviet Union sent the dog Laika into orbit in 1957, the public was told she had survived for days — but decades later it emerged that she had actually died within hours, after Sputnik 2’s cabin overheated.
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▲ 0 · May 26
179.
On 22 October 2017, a single lightning flash crossed five US states in 7.39 seconds, travelled 829 kilometres from Texas to near Kansas City, and produced more than 116 cloud-to-ground strikes along its path, an event approximately fifty times longer than a typical lightning bolt that was missed at the time and only identified through a 2024 reanalysis of archived satellite data.
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▲ 0 · May 26
180.
A 36-year sweep of orbital debris has found the solar threshold where Earth’s upper atmosphere starts pulling space junk down faster, just as mega-constellations crowd low orbit
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▲ 0 · May 26