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Science
In the 1960s an MIT scientist built ELIZA, a simple program that did little more than rephrase your words back as questions, and he was so unsettled when his own secretary asked him to leave the room so she could confide in it privately that he spent the rest of his life warning people against trusting machines with their feelings.
The story is well known to anyone who has paid attention to the history of artificial intelligence.
Sharks have been swimming in Earth's oceans for roughly 450 million years — which means they predate the first tree by about 65 million years, and when sharks first appeared, the only plants on land were mosses and liverworts no taller than a few centimetres
The Sun might look yellow, but seen from space without an atmosphere filtering its light, the sun is actually white — and the yellow color we see from Earth is the result of our atmosphere scattering blue wavelengths away, in the same physics that makes the sky appear blue
The Pacific Ocean is so vast that it's larger than every continent on Earth combined — and there's a single straight line you could sail through it for nearly 20,000 miles without ever touching land
A day on Earth is described as 24 hours, but the planet has been slowing down for billions of years — and growth rings in ancient coral fossils show that 380 million years ago, hundreds of millions of years before any dinosaur existed, an Earth day was only about 22 hours long
The Sahara is usually depicted as the world's largest desert, but because a desert is defined by rainfall rather than temperature, the entire continent of Antarctica is technically the largest desert on Earth, with parts of its interior having received no significant precipitation for nearly 14 million years
The Antikythera mechanism, pulled from a Greek shipwreck in 1901, was a hand-cranked bronze computer that predicted eclipses and tracked the Olympic Games calendar around 100 BC, and nothing of comparable complexity would appear again on Earth for the next 1,400 years
More than 2,200 years ago a librarian in Egypt measured the circumference of the entire planet using nothing but a stick, a shadow, and the distance between two cities, and landed within a few per cent of the right answer.
Mount Everest is the highest point above sea level, but because the Earth bulges at the equator, the summit of a volcano in Ecuador sits farther from the centre of the planet, making it the closest piece of land on Earth to outer space.
Between five and six million years ago, the Mediterranean Sea nearly dried out — and when Atlantic water finally broke back in near Gibraltar, one model suggests the basin may have refilled so violently that sea level rose by metres a day.
There is a Japanese word, mottainai, that carries the sense of regret over discarding something still useful, and a small mountain town of 1,500 people in southern Japan has spent the past twenty years building a municipal system around it, requiring residents to sort their household waste into 45 separate categories and achieving an 81 per cent recycling rate against a national average of 20 per cent.
