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Biology, geology, deep ocean, evolution, and natural-world facts. Cross-domain wonder pieces.
97 articles · Curiosities
In 1965, Okinawa produced more centenarians per capita than anywhere on Earth. By 2000, its young men were dying earlier than the Japanese average. The unplanned experiment on one island reveals what the wellness industry keeps missing about longevity.
A lightning bolt heats the narrow channel of air it travels through to roughly 30,000°C — about five times hotter than the surface of the Sun. Thunder is that channel exploding outward faster than the speed of sound, then decaying into the rumble you hear seconds later.
Sperm whales dive deeply to forage. Temperature-controlled buoyancy through spermaceti was proposed in the research, rather than established as the mechanism of each dive.
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.
The 2020 flash set a distance record, but the WMO committee’s recommendation to remove a one-second definition limit had been published years earlier.
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.
What is missing from the run-up to Ankara this week is any pretence that NATO still knows what it is.
