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86 articles · Curiosities
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.
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.
The daily step goal on hundreds of millions of wrists and phones did not come out of a laboratory.
On 29 March 1974, six farmers digging a well in a drought-stricken Chinese village hit a clay head four metres down. They had punctured the roof of a 2,200-year-old pit holding more than 8,000 terracotta soldiers guarding the tomb of China's first emperor.
Radar-related interrupts contributed to overload. The software recovery was a team achievement, and NASA engineer Jack Garman helped Steve Bales assess the alarms.
Hot readings around a worm’s tube are not measurements of its body temperature. A 2013 experiment found prolonged exposure to 50–55°C lethal.
