Human Factors
The oldest city in the world that humans have continuously lived in is not Athens…
The oldest city in the world that humans have continuously lived in is not Rome, not Athens, not Damascus, not Cairo.
Psychology
Above 26,000 feet on Mount Everest — in the death zone where the air contains…
For one or two days each spring, the wind pattern at the top of Mount Everest shifts just enough to allow human beings, for a brief and dangerous window, to reach the summit.
Science & Engineering
The first human trial of a therapy designed to partially reset the biological age…
For about twenty years now, biologists have known that a small number of specific proteins can take a fully-developed adult cell — a skin cell, a kidney cell…
Psychology
Søren Kierkegaard suggested that the deepest form of despair is not unhappiness but…
Most people who are quietly miserable do not know it. That, in essence, is what a Danish philosopher named Søren Kierkegaard tried to tell the readers of…
Human Factors
Nearly four kilometres beneath the Antarctic ice, Russian scientists in 2012…
Imagine drilling through ice for 23 years to reach a lake nobody had ever seen, in the coldest place on Earth, in a research station that holds the world…
Science & Engineering
In 1946, a captured German V-2 rocket launched from White Sands carried Clyde…
On October 24, 1946, a captured V-2 rocket carried a 35-millimetre motion picture camera above White Sands and produced the first photographs of Earth taken from space — recovered from a steel film cassette in the crater where the rocket smashed back into the New Mexico desert.
Human Factors
The average human brain now contains roughly a plastic spoon's worth of…
Hold a single-use plastic spoon in your hand — the kind that comes with takeout food and gets thrown away after one meal.
Human Factors
A Framingham study linked earlier hearing-aid use with lower dementia incidence
An observational study found a lower rate of dementia among people who began using hearing aids before age 70. It did not prove that hearing aids prevented dementia.
Space & Missions
In 1972, Apollo 17 carried the only scientist to walk on the Moon into…
{"content":"The Apollo 17 voice loops, archived by NASA and still publicly available, are full of a kind of sound most people never associate with spaceflight: nothing. Long stretches where Gene Ce
Human Factors
Seven miles beneath the Pacific Ocean, in the deepest place on Earth, American…
The deepest place on Earth, it turns out, is littered. The dive began at the surface of the western Pacific Ocean, approximately 200 miles southwest of Guam…
Space & Missions
In June 2020, auditors discovered that EUR 1.9 billion supposedly held in two…
How EUR 1.9 billion in escrow at two Manila banks turned out to be paper that the banks themselves said was fake — the forensic mechanism behind Wirecard's collapse.
Science & Engineering
On June 9, 2026, NASA named Italian astronaut Luca Parmitano as pilot of Artemis 3…
On 9 June 2026, inside a room at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, the agency named the four people who will fly Artemis 3 — and one of them was not American.
Universe
On a September night in 1999, a 25-year-old graduate student stepped into a modest…
On the evening of September 9, 1999, a Harvard graduate student named David Charbonneau drove to a parking lot in Boulder, Colorado, and let himself into a small wooden shed.
Space & Missions
Apollo astronauts trying to sleep on the way to the Moon kept seeing flashes and…
Apollo astronauts trying to rest on the way to the Moon kept noticing the same thing in the dark.
Human Behaviour
A bankruptcy can be 'annulled' rather than discharged in Australia
Australia's Bankruptcy Act 1966 contains a little-known provision that lets a bankruptcy be retroactively erased — not just ended — and high-profile debtors have used it to walk away from liabilities reported in the hundreds of millions.
Earth & Life
A 49-foot bowhead whale killed by Iñupiat hunters in May 2007 was found to have…
The discovery happened in the routine course of an Iñupiat subsistence hunt off the coast near Utqiaġvik, the northernmost settlement in Alaska.