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Science
Physics, climate, planetary science, and the research that shapes how we understand the universe and our place in it.
Sequoia and redwood trees alive today were already mature when the Roman Empire was at its peak — the oldest living giant sequoias are over 3,000 years old, which means they were standing in California before the Parthenon was built in Athens, before Julius Caesar was born, and before the Roman Empire even existed
A lost continent lies in pieces beneath southern Europe. Geologists call it Greater Adria: a Greenland-sized landmass that was crushed under Europe, leaving its scraped-off remains scattered through the mountains of Italy, Greece and the Balkans.
Parts of Canada are quietly short on gravity. The standard story blames an ice sheet that pressed the crust down and vanished thousands of years ago, but satellites suggest that explains less than half of it. The rest comes from something churning far deeper in the mantle.
The Eye of the Sahara is a giant bullseye in the Mauritanian desert, up to fifty kilometres across, and astronauts were already photographing it from orbit while geologists still believed it was a meteorite impact crater, long before anyone worked out it was something else entirely.
Cats can't taste sweetness — evolution turned off the relevant gene in their distant ancestors when they became obligate carnivores, and without working sweet receptors, a cat is as indifferent to sugar as a person is to ultraviolet light
Tyrannosaurus rex lived closer in time to humans than to Stegosaurus — the gap between T. rex and the present day is about 66 million years, while the gap between T. rex and Stegosaurus is about 83 million years, which means T. rex would have seen Stegosaurus as an ancient creature in the same way we see T. rex now
There is a species of jellyfish that is essentially immortal — Turritopsis dohrnii, which can revert from its adult form back to its juvenile polyp stage when stressed or injured, and then mature again, potentially repeating the cycle indefinitely, in the only known case of a complex animal that can reverse its own aging process
Honeybees can recognize human faces — they can be trained to distinguish between individual humans by face and continue to recognize them across different viewpoints, despite having a brain smaller than the head of a pin
There is a fish that can live more than a hundred years — the rougheye rockfish, which inhabits the deep waters of the North Pacific — and the slow rate at which it grows, breeds, and ages means that some of the individuals being caught by fishermen today were already swimming the same waters during the American Civil War
There are about 20 quadrillion ants alive on Earth at any moment — enough that their combined biomass outweighs every wild bird and mammal on the planet combined, even though the often-repeated claim that ant biomass equals human biomass has been overturned by recent research
