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Biology, geology, deep ocean, evolution, and natural-world facts. Cross-domain wonder pieces.
70 articles · Curiosities
On September 9, 1947, engineers at Harvard's Computation Laboratory pulled a moth from Relay 70 of the Mark II computer and taped it into the logbook. The word 'bug' was already 70 years old — and that's exactly why the joke worked.
On September 9, 1947, technicians on Harvard's Mark II found a moth wedged in Relay #70 and taped it into the logbook. Grace Hopper retold the story for 45 years, fixing the word 'bug' into the vocabulary of computing — even though engineers had been using it since Edison.
In 1991, Cambridge researchers wired a grey-scale camera to a coffee pot to avoid wasted trips down three flights of stairs. Two years later, they put it on the web — and invented an entire category of technology by accident.
Olympus Mons stands 21.9 kilometres above the Martian plains — nearly three times the height of Everest — but its slopes average just 2 to 5 degrees, gentler than most wheelchair ramps. The science of why a climber's vestibular system would never register the ascent.
The pistol shrimp's modified claw fires a jet of water fast enough to vaporise the sea around it. When the resulting bubble collapses, temperatures spike to nearly 4,700°C and a flash of light briefly appears — invisible to the shrimp itself.
On October 29, 1969, UCLA student Charley Kline tried to type LOGIN to a computer at Stanford. The receiving system crashed after two letters, leaving LO as the first message ever sent across what became the internet.
In 1994, a New South Wales park ranger abseiled into a hidden canyon outside Sydney and found a grove of conifers last seen in the fossil record 90 million years ago. The Wollemi pine's wild location remains undisclosed — and for biological reasons that have nothing to do with theatre.
Tardigrades survive boiling, near-absolute-zero cold and the vacuum of space by curling into a desiccated 'tun' and vitrifying their cellular interior with disordered proteins and sugars that take over water's structural jobs. Fossil evidence suggests the trick is at least 250 million years old.
Greenland sharks are the longest-lived vertebrates on Earth, with some individuals dated to the 1600s. New research reveals how they keep their retinas working for four centuries even as a copepod parasite chews at their corneas.
Pando, a single male quaking aspen in Utah's Fishlake National Forest, spans 106 acres as roughly 47,000 genetically identical trunks connected by one root system — and unchecked mule deer browsing is now eating the next generation before it can grow.
