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Biology, geology, deep ocean, evolution, and natural-world facts. Cross-domain wonder pieces.
62 articles · Curiosities
Sperm whales routinely dive nearly 2,250 metres on a single breath, using a head packed with waxy spermaceti oil that solidifies under cold and pressure to help drag them toward squid they hunt in total darkness.
Since 1990, most of the world's cheese has been made with chymosin produced by genetically modified microbes in industrial fermentation tanks — not traditional calf rennet. The switch was legal, unlabelled, and almost invisible to consumers. Now a new fight over ingredient transparency in the US is about to drag it into the open.
Greenland sharks swim at a foot per second, grow a centimeter a year, and don't reach sexual maturity until roughly 150 years old — meaning adults reproducing today were born before the American Revolution.
On April 29, 2020, a single bolt of lightning stretched 768 kilometres across Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi — long enough to force the World Meteorological Organization to rewrite what a lightning strike can be.
In 1946, six women at the Moore School of Engineering were handed the wiring diagrams for ENIAC and told to program it without manuals. The ballistic trajectory they got running became the first working software ever demonstrated on a general-purpose electronic computer — and their names were left off the press release.
On September 1, 1859, a solar flare witnessed by Richard Carrington triggered a geomagnetic storm so powerful it lit up the tropics with auroras and let North American telegraph operators send messages using only current induced by the sky.
A single Great Basin bristlecone pine growing in the White Mountains of eastern California has been alive for 4,855 years.
How a 1959 Soviet probe, loaded with captured American spy film, photographed the far side of the Moon, developed the negatives onboard, and radioed 17 grainy frames back to Earth — filling in the last blank hemisphere on the human map.
Hugh Grosvenor became the 7th Duke of Westminster at 25 with a £9.9 billion fortune built on 300 acres of Mayfair and Belgravia — land his family has leased, but never sold, since 1677.
How the Grosvenor family used a 300-year-old leasehold trick to keep the ground beneath London's most expensive addresses — and got the houses back, one 99-year lease at a time.
In the hyperarid core of Chile's Atacama Desert, weather stations have gone decades without recording a single drop of rain — yet a Pacific fog called the camanchaca sustains lichen communities found nowhere else on Earth.
What is missing from the run-up to Ankara this week is any pretence that NATO still knows what it is.
