Two decades on, the European Huygens probe is still the only spacecraft ever to land in the outer solar system, after parachuting onto Saturn's moon Titan in 2005.
Only about 66 years separate the Wright brothers' 12-second first flight from the Apollo 11 Moon landing, well within one human lifetime. The span also held the jet engine, the sound barrier and Sputnik. Yet the Wrights themselves did not live to see the Moon.
A 2008 study led by Hans Eiberg found that blue-eyed people across distant populations share the same DNA around a switch in the HERC2 gene that dials down OCA2 and reduces iris melanin, the fingerprint of a single founder mutation perhaps 6,000 to 10,000 years old. The finding, and its caveats.
A 52-card deck has about 8 x 10^67 possible orders, against roughly 4 x 10^17 seconds since the Big Bang, so a thoroughly shuffled deck is almost certainly an arrangement never seen before. Why 'almost', and why the shuffle has to be a proper one.
Apollo 12 was hit by lightning at 36 and 52 seconds after launch, knocking fuel cells offline and scrambling its telemetry. EECOM controller John Aaron recognised the failure pattern from a test a year earlier and called 'SCE to Aux'; Alan Bean flipped the obscure switch and the mission was saved.
On July 23, 2012, a coronal mass ejection of Carrington-class intensity tore off the Sun and struck NASA's STEREO-A spacecraft head-on. Earth had been in that exact spot a week earlier. The data the probe captured remains the only direct measurement of an extreme solar storm ever recorded.
Solar storms do not electrocute people. They induce slow electric currents in long conductors — power lines, pipelines and undersea internet cables — which then channel the damage into substations and shore stations. The 1989 Quebec blackout took down a continent's grid in 90 seconds without a single direct strike from the Sun.
Marie Curie's notebooks are still radioactive, contaminated mainly with radium-226 (half-life about 1,600 years). Stored at the Bibliotheque nationale de France in lead-lined boxes, they require a waiver and protective gear to handle, and will stay hazardous until around the year 3500.
Freed from gravity, the body changes shape: a 2014 study found astronauts' hearts became about 9.4% more spherical, and spinal discs expand enough to add up to 3% in height. Both are temporary and reversible, and both reveal how much of our shape is the body bracing against gravity.
Roughly five billion. That is the number of Hiroshima-sized bombs it would take to match the energy of a single morning 66 million years ago.
A 2016 study radiocarbon-dated Greenland shark eye lenses; the largest came out at about 392 years old, with a margin of 120 years either way, making it the longest-lived vertebrate known. It would not have reached sexual maturity until around 150. The numbers, and their uncertainty.
Olympus Mons stands about 22 km tall but spans some 600 km, with flanks of only a few degrees. Wider than the Martian horizon, its summit hides below the curve of the planet, so from its slopes it barely reads as a mountain. Why it grew so large, and where the real cliff actually is.
In 1944 the US War Production Board accused De Beers of hoarding industrial diamonds and risking Allied factories rather than release stones to America at fair prices. The fight reshaped how the United States bought strategic materials and helped push General Electric to invent synthetic diamond a decade later.
The deepest hole humans have ever dug, the Kola Superdeep Borehole on the Kola Peninsula in Russia, reached approximately 12 kilometres before the heat, pressure, and engineering challenges of drilling overwhelmed the equipment.
GPS is usually described as a satellite navigation system, but the quieter truth is that it is also a clock system.
A single failed memory chip corrupted about 3% of Voyager 1's flight data subsystem in November 2023. Engineers relocated the affected 1970s code around the damage, sent the fix across 24 billion km, and got readable data back on 20 April 2024 after a 45-hour round trip.
