Fact-based Cosmic Questions
Why Does the Moon Always Show Us the Same Face?
The Moon does spin, but exactly once for every trip round the Earth, so one side always faces us, and the side we never see is not dark at all.
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Fact-based Weird Facts
A Day on Venus Lasts Longer Than Its Year
Venus needs about 243 Earth days to turn once and only 225 to circle the Sun, yet the gap between two sunrises there is just 117 days.
Fact-based Odd Places
Madagascar Has a Forest Where Every Tree Is a Stone Needle
In western Madagascar, limestone stands in thousands of needles up to 100 metres tall, and much of the carving was done from underneath, by caves that later lost their roofs.
Fact-based Cosmic Questions
Why Is a Rainbow Curved?
A rainbow is really a full circle of light centred on the shadow of your own head, and the ground hides the bottom of it, which is why you only ever seem to get an arch.
Fact-based Weird Facts
Bumblebees Roll Little Wooden Balls Around, Apparently Just for Fun
Given a clear path to food and a side area scattered with small wooden balls, bumblebees in a London lab kept wandering off to roll the balls, with no reward in sight.
Fact-based Nature Did It First
A Sunflower Showed Solar Power Plants How to Arrange Their Mirrors
The florets in a sunflower head sit in a spiral that wastes no space, and engineers found that the same pattern fits a field of solar mirrors into a fifth less land.
Fact-based Weird Facts
Everest Is the Highest Mountain, but Not the Tallest
Everest wins only if you measure from sea level: a Hawaiian volcano is taller from foot to top, and a peak in Ecuador stands farther from the centre of the Earth.
Fact-based Odd Places
The Giant Eye in the Sahara Is Not a Crater
From space, a bull's-eye about 40 kilometres wide stares up out of the desert in Mauritania, and the way it formed is slower and stranger than any falling rock from the sky.
Fact-based Cosmic Questions
Why Is the Sky Blue but the Sunset Orange?
The same sky and the same sunlight give us a blue afternoon and an orange evening, and the difference comes down to how tiny air molecules toss light around.
Fact-based Cosmic Questions
Why Does Déjà Vu Feel So Real?
That sudden certainty that you have lived this exact moment before is one of the strangest tricks a healthy brain plays, and psychologists have found a way to switch it on in the lab.