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Biology, geology, deep ocean, evolution, and natural-world facts. Cross-domain wonder pieces.
97 articles · Curiosities
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, 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.
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.
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.
