Living brooch
Tourists in Mexico can buy brooches made of bejewelled ironclad beetles. Still living bejewelled ironclad beetles.
Mind’s eye blind
Close your eyes and picture a bicycle. For some people, this is impossible.
Oldest Earth rock
The oldest Earth rock was not found on the Earth.
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.
Da Vinci and Machiavelli steal a river
Leonardo da Vinci and Niccolò Machiavelli once teamed up to steal the Arno river.
Telepathic snail mail
In 1850 Jacques-Toussaint Benoît claimed to be able to send messages via telepathically linked snails. He could not.
Infinite pi
The Indian mathematician Mādhava was the first to use infinite series to calculate pi, some time around 1400 CE.
Medieval clam
In 2006 scientists in Iceland caught a clam that was born eight years after Christopher Columbus sailed to America.
Endless clock
A pendulum clock in Dunedin, New Zealand, has been running for 156 years without being wound.
The end of the tower
According to a popular myth, the solution of a 64-piece Tower of Hanoi puzzle will herald the end of the world.
Thwarting the biopirates
India prevented people patenting their foods, traditional medicines, and yoga poses by recording them all in an online database: 34 million pages’ worth.
Punch a hole in the sky
Aircraft can punch cloud holes that are much larger than the plane itself.
The real touch of death
Chinese wuxia (and derivative Western) fiction describes the touch of death, a single blow that can kill an opponent. Surprisingly, this is actually possible.
Pi approximation
The closest approximation of Pi for nearly a thousand years was calculated by Chinese mathematician Zu Chongzhi around 480 CE, using an algorithm developed by Liu Hui.
Rubble moon
The Martian moon Phobos is thought to be a pile of rubble that’s nearly a third empty space inside. It circles its planet twice a Martian day, and in a few million years it will disintegrate into rings.
