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Biology, geology, deep ocean, evolution, and natural-world facts. Cross-domain wonder pieces.
87 articles · Curiosities
Megan Hess ran a funeral home and a body-parts brokerage out of the same Colorado building. Federal prosecutors found she sold more than 500 donated and non-donated bodies while returning concrete dust and strangers' remains to grieving families.
Bowhead whales can live more than 200 years, and a 2025 Nature paper from the University of Rochester shows their cells repair DNA breaks two to three times better than human cells — thanks to a cold-activated protein called CIRBP that may explain why tumors in these Arctic giants sometimes simply stop growing.
Beneath Paris lie around 200 kilometres of former limestone quarries holding the bones of an estimated six million people, transferred from overflowing cemeteries starting in 1786. Only about 1.5 kilometres of the network is open to visitors, twenty metres below the streets.
At nearly 8,000 metres below the Pacific surface, the Mariana snailfish survives pressures that would crush a submarine — thanks to a partly unossified skeleton, TMAO-saturated cells, and a liver rebuilt for famine.
On 29 April 2020, a single lightning bolt crossed Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi end to end — 768 kilometres of continuous discharge in under seven seconds, the longest flash ever recorded. Here is what scientists now know about how such megaflashes start.
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.
