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Biology, geology, deep ocean, evolution, and natural-world facts. Cross-domain wonder pieces.
101 articles · Curiosities
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.
The daily step goal on hundreds of millions of wrists and phones did not come out of a laboratory.
In a corner of Utah's Fishlake National Forest, 47,000 white-barked aspen trunks share a single root system and a single genome — making Pando the heaviest known living organism on Earth, possibly older than the last ice age, and quietly being eaten out of existence by mule deer.
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.
When the Apollo Guidance Computer began flashing 1202 alarms during Apollo 11's lunar descent, Margaret Hamilton's priority-scheduling code shed the low-priority tasks a stuck rendezvous radar was flooding it with — and saved the landing.
Alvinella pompejana lives on hydrothermal vent chimneys with its tail near 80°C and head at 22°C — the steepest thermal gradient tolerated by any known animal — and wears a fleece of chemosynthetic bacteria that may insulate it from the heat.
In 1994, NSW park ranger David Noble abseiled into a sandstone canyon and found Wollemi pines, a conifer the fossil record had listed as extinct for 90 million years. Three decades on, the location is still a state secret.
On October 24, 1946, a captured V-2 rocket fired from White Sands carried a 35mm camera to 65 miles up and brought back the first photographs of Earth from space — the film survived because engineers had wrapped it in steel and trusted the desert sand to catch it.
Sperm whales rest in vertical clusters near the ocean surface, silent and motionless for roughly fifteen minutes at a time — the shortest sleep cycle of any mammal yet measured, and a posture marine biologists only confirmed in 2008.
A single oil palm tree yields up to ten times more oil per hectare than soy or sunflower, which is why palm supplies over a third of global vegetable oil on less than a tenth of oil-crop land — and why its expansion into Sumatra and Borneo has become one of the hardest environmental tradeoffs on Earth.
