Time zone tripoints
At several points around the world, three time zones meet.
Glowing snails
Just one species of land snail and a few species of freshwater snail glow in the dark.
Shot by Australia’s first camel
The first camel in Australia shot its owner, the English explorer John Horrocks.
The Tamil bell
In 1836 a missionary in New Zealand learned of a strange artefact that had been in Māori possession for several generations: a bronze bell with an unfamiliar script. The script was Tamil, the bell came from Sri Lanka, and it was hundreds of years old.
Gaelic Australian football
Gaelic football and Australian Rules football teams don’t have much international competition. So they decided to play each other instead.
Pacific aurora
In 1962 the United States detonated a nuclear bomb in outer space over Hawai’i. It caused an artificial aurora in the sky over Honolulu – and another one over Samoa, more than four thousand kilometres away.
The savages of the Pacific
In 1806 the French artist Jean-Gabriel Charvet premiered one of the first multi-panel artistic wallpapers: it depicted a romanticised and colonial panorama of explorations in the South Pacific.
Reef of heaven
Between 1200 and 1500 CE, the city of Nan Madol was built on a series of artificial islands and a coral reef in what is now eastern Micronesia.
Fewest chromosomes and fatherless ants
The jack jumper ant of south-eastern Australia has a nasty sting, can jump five times its own body length, and has the fewest chromosomes of any living thing.
Dinosaur ant
In 1931 Australia, Amy Crocker discovered two worker ants from a new and strange species: Nothomyrmecia macrops. Despite extensive searches, more were not found for another forty-six years.
Electoral fairness
The Gallagher Index measures how well the makeup of a legislative body represents the proportion of votes cast to elect it. Some countries do this much better than others.
Pride vs. the cyclone
Three American and three German warships spent months in a standoff in Apia Harbour in Samoa. And then a cyclone hit.
Endless clock
A pendulum clock in Dunedin, New Zealand, has been running for 156 years without being wound.
Multi-hemisphere Olympics
The equestrian events of the 1956 Summer Olympics in Melbourne, Australia, were held in Sweden.
Fastest boat
The world water speed record has stood for more than forty years, ever since an Australian build a boat out of wood in his backyard and strapped a jet engine on its back.
The Apostles of Linnaeus
Between 1746 and 1792, seventeen students of Carl Linnaeus set out across the globe to collect plant and animal samples for his new taxonomy. Seven of these apostles died on the trip, and one would betray Linnaeus.