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211.
French scientist Michel Siffre spent two months alone in a cave with no clock, no calendar, and no sunlight — and when his team finally told him the experiment was over, he thought he still had nearly a month left underground
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▲ 0 · May 24
212.
Helium was discovered on the Sun 27 years before anyone found it on Earth — spotted as an unexplained yellow line in sunlight during an 1868 eclipse and named after Helios, the Greek sun god, long before the gas was identified in any mineral on this planet.
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▲ 0 · May 24
213.
In 1990, after years of lobbying by Carl Sagan, Voyager 1 turned its camera back toward home from about 6 billion kilometres away and photographed Earth as a pale blue speck smaller than a single pixel — an image NASA had repeatedly resisted because it offered little scientific value, but that became one of the most famous photographs ever taken.
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▲ 0 · May 24
214.
Voyager 1 is now so far from Earth that a signal traveling at the speed of light takes more than 22 hours to reach it — so when engineers send a command, they can wait nearly two days to know whether the spacecraft responded
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▲ 0 · May 24
215.
Almost half of women in their 60s and 70s in Japan now prefer getting personal advice from AI rather than another human — the only age group in the survey to make that choice — and the country’s elderly isolation crisis is the unstated context
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▲ 0 · May 24
216.
China is sending an astronaut to its space station for a full year — a national record — as Beijing races toward a 2030 crewed moon landing, two years behind NASA’s target
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▲ 0 · May 24
217.
The price tag on Trump’s “Golden Dome” missile shield just jumped to $1.2 trillion in a new congressional analysis — seven times the administration’s number — with a quiet caveat that the system may not actually do what it was pitched to do
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▲ 0 · May 24
218.
The first all-female spacewalk in history did not happen until October 2019, fifty-eight years after Yuri Gagarin orbited Earth — and an earlier all-female attempt seven months before was reassigned because only one medium spacesuit torso was ready on the station
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▲ 0 · May 24
219.
There is a moment, in most adults’ lives, when intuition turns out to have been right about something important, and another moment, often in the same lives, when intuition turns out to have been catastrophically wrong, and the neuroscience that has begun to explain the difference is one of the more useful things the cognitive sciences have done in the last two decades.
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▲ 0 · May 24
220.
The Voyager Golden Record carries greetings in 55 languages — a deliberate attempt to send a small sample of human voices into deep space long after the spacecraft fell silent.
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▲ 0 · May 24
221.
Before he climbed the ladder for the last time, the final astronaut to walk on the Moon knelt and traced his daughter’s initials into the lunar dust with one finger — three letters that, with no wind or rain to disturb them, may sit there undisturbed for fifty thousand years.
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▲ 0 · May 24
222.
A NASA satellite launched in 1976 carries a Carl Sagan–designed plaque sealed inside its core, mapping Earth’s continents 268 million years ago, at launch, and 8.4 million years from now — and that last date is no accident, because it’s roughly when the satellite is expected to fall back to Earth and finally be opened.
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▲ 0 · May 24
223.
The asteroid that ended the dinosaurs struck what is now Mexico with such force that it blasted molten ejecta high above the atmosphere before it rained back down across the planet, and many of the survivors were small, sheltered creatures — including early mammals on the line that would eventually lead to us.
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▲ 0 · May 24
224.
A tiny jellyfish can reverse its own life cycle when injured or starving, turning back into its younger self instead of dying of old age like everything else
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▲ 0 · May 24
225.
Atomic oxygen in low Earth orbit slowly eats spacecraft surfaces, and the ISS survives because engineers learned to coat, test, and replace the materials most vulnerable to it
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▲ 0 · May 24
226.
The Vela satellites were built to catch secret nuclear tests, but they accidentally recorded flashes from deep space that opened a new branch of astrophysics
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▲ 0 · May 24
227.
Webb just clocked nearly 9,000 young star clusters and found the biggest ones break from their birth clouds in 5 million years, a timing clue that could reshape how astronomers model galaxies growing up
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▲ 0 · May 24
228.
The Hubble Deep Field began as a gamble on a tiny patch of sky that had been chosen because it looked almost empty, and it ended by revealing nearly 3,000 galaxies hiding in what seemed like nothing.
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▲ 0 · May 24
229.
Titan’s atmosphere is thicker than Earth’s, its rivers and lakes are made of methane and ethane, and NASA is sending a nuclear-powered drone there because on Saturn’s largest moon, flying may be easier than driving.
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▲ 0 · May 23
230.
Enceladus is a tiny moon of Saturn that sprays water vapor and ice grains into space from an ocean hidden beneath its icy crust — meaning a spacecraft can sample material from an alien sea without ever landing.
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▲ 0 · May 23
231.
I spent years assuming my personality was fixed — then I learned what neuroplasticity actually means and realised I had been maintaining myself like a finished product instead of a living system
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▲ 0 · May 23
232.
In 1908, something exploded in the sky over Siberia with hundreds of times the energy of the Hiroshima bomb, flattening more than 2,000 square kilometres of forest. When scientists finally reached the site years later, they found no crater at all
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▲ 0 · May 23
233.
The modern 8-hour workday is usually traced to Robert Owen, a Welsh industrialist and social reformer, who in 1817 popularized the formula: ‘eight hours’ labour, eight hours’ recreation, eight hours’ rest.’ Does this split still make sense in 2026?
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▲ 0 · May 23
234.
The human genome contains traces of ancient viruses that infected our ancestors millions of years ago — and some of those viral leftovers were later repurposed into genes that help make human pregnancy possible
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▲ 0 · May 23
235.
Anthropologist Marshall Sahlins called early hunter-gatherer societies “the original affluent society” — not because they had more than us, but because they wanted less than they had, and worked the minimum required to meet what they wanted
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▲ 0 · May 23
236.
Sam Altman asked what problem people most hope AI will solve — and the answer that keeps coming up isn’t cancer or climate change
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▲ 0 · May 23
237.
Apollo 12 was struck by lightning twice less than a minute after launch, and the mission kept going only because a flight controller recognised an obscure telemetry failure pattern and told the crew to flip a switch almost nobody else in the room understood
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▲ 0 · May 23
238.
JPL’s management contract is suddenly up for grabs for the first time since the 1930s, and NASA’s own language shows why this is more than a routine procurement fight
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▲ 0 · May 23
239.
Australia keeps being described as a junior AUKUS partner — but the radar in its outback and the port in its northwest are quietly rewriting who controls orbital traffic
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▲ 0 · May 23
240.
A fossil site in North Dakota appears to have captured the day the dinosaur-killing asteroid struck Earth, right down to tiny glass beads from the impact lodged in the gills of fish that died within hours
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▲ 0 · May 23