Biology, geology, deep ocean, evolution, and natural-world facts. Cross-domain wonder pieces.
86 articles · Curiosities
Inside America's legal but largely unregulated body-broker industry, where a donated human head sells for around $300 and a single donor disassembled can generate more than $10,000 across a dozen buyers.
A 2017 Reuters investigation traced 50,000 donated American bodies through 34 brokers in just four years, with more than 180,000 individual parts shipped to buyers ranging from surgical schools to Army blast-test labs — almost none of it described on the consent forms families signed.
The 1984 National Organ Transplant Act made it a federal felony to pay a donor family for a transplantable kidney. The same law left a parallel industry — whole bodies donated to non-transplant brokers and resold in pieces for thousands of dollars — entirely untouched.
The research identified CIRBP as a contributor to DNA repair. It did not document tumours stopping for decades in living bowhead whales.
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 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.
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.
Cavitation creates the pressure pulse used against prey. The accompanying light is a by-product, and even very small juvenile snapping shrimp can snap.
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.
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.
