Scott Kelly and other long-duration ISS crew describe overwhelming smells, painful feet, and a driving sensation that feels remote-controlled after months in microgravity — the nervous system re-learning Earth in real time.
Tetris began as a way to test a computer that could barely draw. In June 1984, Alexey Pajitnov, a researcher at the Computing Centre of the Soviet Academy of Sciences in Moscow, was writing small programs to see what a new machine could do.
The claim arrives fully formed and easy to repeat. A person who loses their sight before about the age of five, it says, dreams without pictures at all.
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.
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.
