Ghost in the painting
Artists sometimes change or improve paintings by painting over old versions. Through careful examination or special imaging, we can sometimes see these ghosts of lost art again.
The long winter
In Norse mythology Fimbulwinter is the great winter immediately preceding Ragnarök. It may have been inspired by the horrifying real-life events of 536 CE.
Invisible programming
The esoteric programming language Whitespace uses only three characters: tabs, spaces, and line breaks. That makes it effectively invisible to the naked eye.
The Great Attractor
Somewhere in the sky, obscured from our view by the Milky Way, an unknown anomaly called the Great Attractor pulls a hundred thousand galaxies around.
Remote control animals
Something creepy for your Friday: attaching electrodes to animals’ brains so their movements can be controlled remotely.
Black diamond mystery
Where do black diamonds come from? We don’t actually know.
Compost birds
Some Australian birds make compost heaps.
The origins of elements
Where do the elements come from? Nuclear astrophysics proposes several origins, depending on the element: the Big Bang, dying and exploding stars, and cosmic rays.
Pirates hate metric
Who keeps the metric system down? In the United States, pirates do.
Animal diseases
Animals have some of the best old-timey disease names, including heartwater, foulbrood, bluetongue, glanders, scrapie, camelpox, and bumblefoot.
The darkness between rainbows
When a double rainbow happens there’s a dark shadow between the bows. This is Alexander’s band.
Pickled tea
In Myanmar you can drink tea or you can eat it.
Medieval sleep
The historian A. Roger Ekirch has argued that in Medieval Europe, and in many places prior to the Industrial Revolution, people would habitually wake up for an hour in the middle of the night.
Stages of death
When a human dies, they go through several distinct stages. In order: pale, cold, stiff, mottled, putrefied, decomposed, skeletonized.
Bird spikes
A tree in New Zealand grows downwards-facing spikes for the first 15 or 20 years of its life; this is thought to be a remnant defence against gigantic now-extinct birds.
