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Perseverance has traveled almost 26 miles on Mars—nearly a marathon

After more than five years on Mars, Perseverance has covered almost 26 miles (42 kilometers), just shy of the official marathon distance of 26.2 miles, while collecting 27 rock cores and abrading 62 rocks.

The Franks helped create the ancestor of the lowercase letters we use today

Charlemagne’s scholars wanted manuscripts to be easier to read and copy accurately. Their reforms produced Carolingian minuscule, a remarkably clear writing system with distinct letters and spaces between words. Renaissance scholars later copied this medieval script believing it was ancient Roman handwriting, and it strongly influenced the lowercase forms eventually used in European printing.

Nazi Germany secretly installed a weather station in Canada

In October 1943, the German submarine U-537 landed a crew on the remote Labrador coast and installed an automated weather station codenamed Kurt. It transmitted weather data back across the Atlantic on a regular automated schedule before failing prematurely after only a short time. Remarkably, the abandoned German equipment remained there for decades and was not recovered until 1981.

The title Blade Runner has almost nothing to do with the story

The film is based on Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, which never uses the term “blade runner.” During development, screenwriter Hampton Fancher came across William S. Burroughs’ book Blade Runner: A Movie. Producer Michael Deeley liked the phrase so much that it became the film’s title, even though the Burroughs work was unrelated to replicants or futuristic police. Early titles for the movie included Dangerous Days and Mechanismo.

Different versions of Blade Runner (1982) change what the story means

Blade Runner exists in several substantially different cuts. The original theatrical version included Deckard’s explanatory voice-over and a more optimistic ending. Later versions removed both, while the Director’s Cut introduced the famous unicorn dream more prominently. That scene strengthens the interpretation that Deckard himself may be a replicant, meaning different cuts can lead viewers toward different answers to one of the film’s central mysteries.

Jan van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait revolutionized portraiture with oil glazing in 1434.

The Arnolfini Portrait stunned fifteenth-century Europe by achieving a realism no one had seen before. Van Eyck used meticulous thin layers of oil paint, capturing dazzling details like a convex mirror, a small dog, and intricate garment stitching. This painting proved what oil glazing could do and changed the direction of portrait painting.

Flash memory stores information by trapping electrons for years

Devices such as SSDs, USB drives and memory cards can retain data even when they have no power. They do this by trapping electrical charge inside microscopic transistor structures. Reading the memory essentially involves determining whether electrons are trapped in particular locations. Over very long periods, some of that charge can gradually leak away, which is why flash storage is not necessarily permanent archival storage.

New Zealand is only the visible top of an almost completely submerged continent

New Zealand sits on Zealandia, a continental region covering around 4.9 million square kilometres. The unusual part is that roughly 94% of it lies beneath the ocean. New Zealand and New Caledonia are therefore only the highest visible parts of a much larger continental structure.

Perseverance has traveled almost 26 miles on Mars—nearly a marathon

After more than five years on Mars, Perseverance has covered almost 26 miles (42 kilometers), just shy of the official marathon distance of 26.2 miles, while collecting 27 rock cores and abrading 62 rocks.

The Franks helped create the ancestor of the lowercase letters we use today

Charlemagne’s scholars wanted manuscripts to be easier to read and copy accurately. Their reforms produced Carolingian minuscule, a remarkably clear writing system with distinct letters and spaces between words. Renaissance scholars later copied this medieval script believing it was ancient Roman handwriting, and it strongly influenced the lowercase forms eventually used in European printing.

Nazi Germany secretly installed a weather station in Canada

In October 1943, the German submarine U-537 landed a crew on the remote Labrador coast and installed an automated weather station codenamed Kurt. It transmitted weather data back across the Atlantic on a regular automated schedule before failing prematurely after only a short time. Remarkably, the abandoned German equipment remained there for decades and was not recovered until 1981.

The title Blade Runner has almost nothing to do with the story

The film is based on Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, which never uses the term “blade runner.” During development, screenwriter Hampton Fancher came across William S. Burroughs’ book Blade Runner: A Movie. Producer Michael Deeley liked the phrase so much that it became the film’s title, even though the Burroughs work was unrelated to replicants or futuristic police. Early titles for the movie included Dangerous Days and Mechanismo.

Different versions of Blade Runner (1982) change what the story means

Blade Runner exists in several substantially different cuts. The original theatrical version included Deckard’s explanatory voice-over and a more optimistic ending. Later versions removed both, while the Director’s Cut introduced the famous unicorn dream more prominently. That scene strengthens the interpretation that Deckard himself may be a replicant, meaning different cuts can lead viewers toward different answers to one of the film’s central mysteries.

Jan van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait revolutionized portraiture with oil glazing in 1434.

The Arnolfini Portrait stunned fifteenth-century Europe by achieving a realism no one had seen before. Van Eyck used meticulous thin layers of oil paint, capturing dazzling details like a convex mirror, a small dog, and intricate garment stitching. This painting proved what oil glazing could do and changed the direction of portrait painting.

Flash memory stores information by trapping electrons for years

Devices such as SSDs, USB drives and memory cards can retain data even when they have no power. They do this by trapping electrical charge inside microscopic transistor structures. Reading the memory essentially involves determining whether electrons are trapped in particular locations. Over very long periods, some of that charge can gradually leak away, which is why flash storage is not necessarily permanent archival storage.

New Zealand is only the visible top of an almost completely submerged continent

New Zealand sits on Zealandia, a continental region covering around 4.9 million square kilometres. The unusual part is that roughly 94% of it lies beneath the ocean. New Zealand and New Caledonia are therefore only the highest visible parts of a much larger continental structure.