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Science
The bootlace worm found washed up on Scottish beaches after storms can stretch more than 55 metres when relaxed, making it longer than the largest blue whale, and it secretes a mucus laced with a neurotoxin that paralyses crabs and kills cockroaches in lab tests
The longest animal ever measured on Earth is not the blue whale. It is a thin, slimy, rust-coloured ribbon worm that washes up on Scottish and Welsh beaches after storms, looking like a tangled bootlace someone dropped in the surf.
Within the first few months of life, every bottlenose dolphin invents a unique whistle that becomes its name for the rest of its life — and other dolphins learn that whistle, remember it, and use it to call out to that specific individual, making bottlenose dolphins the first non-human species ever discovered to use personal names
A Hungarian biochemist named Katalin Karikó, who smuggled her family's savings inside her daughter's teddy bear to escape communist Hungary in 1985, spent the next thirty years being demoted, defunded, and rejected for her work on messenger RNA — and her ignored research became the foundation of the COVID vaccines administered to billions of people
The coldest known place in the universe is the outflow of a dying star, chilled to one degree above absolute zero — colder than the afterglow of the Big Bang
In 1868 astronomers found a new element in the Sun's light, named it helium for the Greek word for the Sun, and no one found a trace of it on Earth for another 27 years
When a shark bites down on a hagfish, the fish floods its attacker's mouth with slime in a fraction of a second, clogging the predator's gills until it gags and lets go
In October 2024, a team of Chinese researchers at Peking University reported that a 25-year-old woman who had lived with Type 1 diabetes since childhood stopped needing insulin injections within 75 days of receiving an experimental stem cell transplant generated from her own fat cells
The Antarctic icefish is the only vertebrate known to have no hemoglobin, its blood runs clear instead of red — and it survives on oxygen dissolved straight into a watery plasma pumped by an oversized heart
Two South Korean companies named Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix now manufacture roughly two-thirds of the memory chips inside almost every digital device on Earth — produced inside a country whose 1953 per-capita income was lower than Somalia's or Haiti's
Microsoft’s experimental AI diagnostic system, MAI-DxO, correctly solved up to 85.5% of 304 difficult medical cases adapted from the New England Journal of Medicine — far above the 20% average achieved by 21 experienced physicians under benchmark conditions.
On 29 April 2020, a single bolt of lightning stretched 768 kilometres across Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi in one continuous flash, far enough to reach from New York City to Columbus, Ohio before the thunder from its first end had finished rolling
