King Mswati III of Eswatini spent three days in late April 2026 marking 40 years on the throne.
Marcus Raichle noticed the same brain regions lighting up whenever his subjects were supposedly at rest. That accidental observation in the 1990s became the discovery of the default mode network — the system that runs your inner life and burns nearly as much fuel as focused thought.
Bluma Zeigarnik's 1927 Berlin experiments showed the mind clings to unfinished tasks about twice as tightly as completed ones — the finding that explains cliffhangers, to-do lists, and why a hard-won goal rarely stays satisfying for long.
Cornell psychologist Thomas Gilovich sent students into rooms wearing embarrassing Barry Manilow T-shirts and found the wearers predicted nearly half the room would remember — only about a quarter actually did. The spotlight effect, as he named it, is remarkably consistent: people believe others notice them at roughly twice the rate anyone actually does.
Some time around 240 BCE, a librarian in Alexandria worked out the size of the planet from the length of a single shadow.
Watch what happens when a one-year-old takes their first wobbly steps across a living room.
The promotional language around NEOM keeps returning to one idea: a clean start.
On the front panel of a limestone throne base excavated at Nimrud in 1962, two kings are shown gripping hands to seal a pact.
Press a cold pack to your forehead and (at least according to one small experiment) you become much harder to make yawn.
In 2008, the ruler of a Himalayan kingdom of roughly 600,000 people did something almost no monarch has done willingly.
In 1956, sociologist Erving Goffman argued that every social interaction is theatre — a front stage performance and a back stage self — and that the strain of company is the cost of keeping the two apart.
There is a version of this story that nearly everyone knows, and it is almost entirely a love story.
In April 1967, first-year Cubberley High School teacher Ron Jones tried to answer a student's question about how ordinary Germans went along with the Nazis by staging a one-day classroom simulation. Within four days, 200 Palo Alto teenagers were saluting him in the halls.
The five Blue Zones — Okinawa, Sardinia, Nicoya, Ikaria, and Loma Linda — share almost no genetics, no cuisine, and no religion. What they share is daily physical labor built into ordinary life: gardens, hills, and work that never quite stops.
Abraham Maslow's famous 1943 pyramid ended at self-actualisation, but in the final years of his life he added a sixth tier — self-transcendence — and argued the psychologically healthiest people are the ones who have stopped auditing themselves entirely.
Gemini 8 achieved the first docking in space in March 1966, then a stuck thruster spun the capsule up to a rotation a second. Armstrong shut down the main thrusters and used the re-entry system to save the crew, three years before Apollo 11.
