Human Factors
The Great Pyramid of Giza is described as one of the world's oldest landmarks, but…
The Great Pyramid of Giza is one of those structures whose age has been repeated so often that the number no longer registers.
Human Factors
The Library of Ashurbanipal in Nineveh burned down in 612 BC, but because its…
When Nineveh fell in 612 BC, the fire that destroyed King Ashurbanipal's palace baked his library of 30,000 clay tablets into ceramic, preserving the Epic of Gilgamesh and most of what we know about Mesopotamian literature.
Human Behaviour
Frances Glessner Lee, a wealthy heiress in the 1940s, built 20 dollhouse-sized…
Frances Glessner Lee, heir to the International Harvester fortune, built twenty miniature crime scenes in the 1940s to train homicide detectives. Eighteen of her Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death are still used by the FBI and Harvard forensic seminars today.
Science & Engineering
The Antikythera mechanism, pulled from a Greek shipwreck in 1901, was a…
In 1901 sponge divers off the Greek island of Antikythera recovered a corroded lump of bronze that turned out to be a 2,000-year-old hand-cranked computer. It predicted eclipses, tracked the Moon's irregular orbit, and marked the Olympic Games, with no comparable machine appearing for the next 1,400 years.
Universe
In the year 1054 a star exploded so brightly that Chinese astronomers recorded it…
On 4 July 1054, astronomers in Song dynasty China recorded a new point of light near the southern horn of the constellation we call Taurus.
Constellations
The surface of the Sun is around 5,500 degrees, but its outer atmosphere is more…
The visible surface of the Sun, the photosphere, sits at around 5,500 degrees Celsius.
Universe
Astronomers have found a cloud of water vapour around a distant quasar holding…
In July 2011, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory announced that two teams of astronomers had detected an enormous mass of water vapour around a quasar called APM 08279+5255, more than 12 billion light-years away.
Science & Engineering
More than 2,200 years ago a librarian in Egypt measured the circumference of the…
Around 240 BCE, Eratosthenes of Cyrene, the chief librarian at Alexandria, produced an estimate for the circumference of the Earth.
Science & Engineering
Mount Everest is the highest point above sea level, but because the Earth bulges at…
Mount Everest is the highest point on Earth measured from sea level. Its official height, agreed by Nepal and China in 2020, is 8,848.86 metres.
Science & Engineering
Between five and six million years ago, the Mediterranean Sea nearly dried out
Between roughly 5.97 and 5.33 million years ago, the Mediterranean Sea was cut off from the Atlantic and lost most of its water to evaporation.
Asia News
There is a Japanese word, mottainai, that carries the sense of regret over…
The town is called Kamikatsu. It sits in the mountains of Shikoku, the smallest and least populated of the four main Japanese islands, about an hour's drive inland from the prefectural capital of Tokushima.
Deep Space
NASA's next major space telescope, the Nancy Grace Roman, is expected to find…
According to NASA's December 2025 announcement that construction of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope had been completed, the observatory is on track for…
Universe
The James Webb Space Telescope has just captured the first direct measurement of a…
According to the official ESA Webb announcement on 27 May 2026, two papers published the same day, one in Nature and a companion in Monthly Notices of the…
Science & Engineering
The asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs may have struck a planet that was already…
A study published in May 2026 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reports a finding that complicates the standard one-line version of the dinosaur extinction.
Space & Missions
When NASA deliberately crashed Apollo hardware into the Moon, the seismometers left…
Between 1969 and 1972, NASA deliberately steered spent pieces of Apollo hardware into the Moon.
Science & Engineering
For 70 years, two large fossil bones sat in a University of Alaska museum drawer…
In 1951, gold miners at Dome Creek, a small settlement north of Fairbanks, donated a pile of fossil bones from their excavations to the explorer and naturalist…