Iceland’s Hallgrímskirkja church took 41 years to build and was designed to echo the basalt lava columns that cool into hexagonal pillars across the island, so its concrete facade rises in stepped ridges meant to mimic the very rock the country is made of.
A tiny crustacean called Cymothoa exigua enters a fish through its gills, severs the blood vessels of its tongue until the organ withers away, and then latches onto the stub to serve as a functioning replacement tongue for the rest of the fish’s life.
In 1856, an 18-year-old chemistry student named William Perkin was trying to synthesize quinine at home over Easter when a black residue in his flask yielded mauveine, the first commercially successful synthetic organic dye, and helped launch the modern chemical industry
In 1847, Hungarian obstetrician Ignaz Semmelweis watched maternal deaths fall from 18% to about 2% after ordering doctors to wash their hands — but medicine resisted the evidence, and his life ended in an asylum
AI has already fallen into the wrong hands and they’re using it to make bombs
The Sun launches roughly a trillion kilograms of charged plasma toward Earth in a coronal mass ejection, and the fastest clouds can cross 150 million kilometres in under 18 hours
The perfect kit for all your tiny repairs
A tasty RPG that will make you very hungry
Killer whales off the Pacific Northwest speak in distinct dialects passed down through generations, and pods that never interbreed can share the same waters while sounding as foreign to each other as speakers of two unrelated human languages.
The EU says autoplay and infinite scroll are illegal. Meta has until it responds to disagree.