Look at Earth from orbit today and you see the famous blue marble: oceans, cloud swirls, green continents. Run the clock back roughly 700 million years and an observer in…
Source: Wikipedia
In the spring of 1974, farmers working land in Lintong District, near Xi'an in Shaanxi Province, were digging a well when they hit something hard. It was a fragment…
Some scientific questions are hard because the subject is inaccessible. Others are hard because the subject is so familiar that everyone assumes it must already be settled. The zebra falls…
Source: Wikipedia
Some scientific mysteries involve exotic, hard-to-reach subjects: distant stars, deep ocean trenches, particles too small to see. The mystery of the eel is not like that. Eels are ordinary.…
Between 2009 and 2013, a space telescope stared at a single patch of sky and monitored the brightness of more than a hundred thousand stars, looking for the tiny, regular…
Source: Wikimedia Commons
In 1739, a local historian digging in a field in the English countryside turned up an odd piece of ancient metalwork alongside some Roman coins. It was hollow,…