Punch a hole in the sky
Aircraft can punch cloud holes that are much larger than the plane itself.
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.
Dam the Mediterranean
In 1929 Bavarian architect Herman Sörgel proposed building a dam across the Strait of Gibraltar and shrinking the Mediterranean.
Hand-woven memory
The Apollo Guidance Computer used core rope memory; the software was literally woven by hand into it.
Cities at the bottom of the sea
423,000 people live in Flevoland, a province of the Netherlands. Before 1957, the entire area did not exist.
The sun after sunset
Where can you see sunlight after the sun has set? In the zodiac or sometimes directly opposite the sun in the night sky.
The nearest planet
What’s the nearest planet to Earth? On average, it’s Mercury. What’s the nearest planet to Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune? Also Mercury.
The Amazon, reversed
The rise of the Andes reversed the direction of the Amazon River’s flow from the Pacific to the Atlantic.
Extreme heat
The Danakil Depression in the Afar Triangle, Ethiopia, is the point where three tectonic plates diverge; has the highest average annual temperature on the planet; and Lucy, the Australopithecus fossil, was found there.
Earth’s shadow
That band of deep blue in the sky opposite a sunrise or sunset? It’s the shadow of the planet.
Second human in orbit
Yuri Gagarin may have been the first person to orbit the Earth in space, but Gherman Titov was the first to orbit the Earth more than once, the first to pilot a spacecraft, and the first to throw up in space.
Exploding lake
On August 21, 1986, seventeen hundred people who lived around Lake Nyos in Cameroon suffocated overnight – victims of an extremely rare and silent natural disaster.
There be dragons
The phrase “Here Be Dragons” actually appears only once on a historical map, on the early 16th century Hunt-Lenox Globe. And actual dragons live there.
Blood rainbow
At dusk or dawn, you might someday see an all-red rainbow.
The equation of time
When a day is longer or shorter than 24 hours you need to use the equation of time to bring it back into sync.
