In March 2015, astronomers at Parkes Observatory in Australia were trying to identify the source of radio signals picked up at the observatory and came up with a surprising discovery. The signals were called perytons, a type of radio signal resembling fast radio bursts (FRB) that came from somewhere else…

In 2002, astronomers at Johns Hopkins University conducted a study to determine the color of the universe from the light we see. They averaged the light emitted from a large sample of 200,000 galaxies from the Australian 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey. The galaxies emitted colors throughout the entire electromagnetic spectrum…

Pele’s Hair A curious natural phenomenon occurs on Kīlauea, the youngest and most active volcano on the Island of Hawai‘i. Around the summit, strands that resemble golden hair can be found scattered and sometimes piled up on the ground. While the strands look like hair, they are actually thin glass fibers…

Penicillin is considered one of the greatest achievements in medicine. This antibiotic allowed doctors to successfully treat and cure patients with deadly infectious diseases. Its discovery came by accident, its development involved many people, and its ability to be widely used for treating patients can be traced back to one…

In 1995, the tiny Pacific island country of Tuvalu received news that it had been assigned “.tv” by the Internet Telecommunication Union as its top-level domain country code. But at the time, the country’s officials didn’t know why that was a good and prosperous thing. A top-level domain is a…

The design of the telephone keypad didn’t happen by chance but resulted from years of research on the best position of the keys on a new telephone device, the push button phone. We’re all familiar with a telephone keypad, with its three rows and three columns starting with one, two…

A Nuclear Reactor in an Old Building It might not seem like the safest spot, but a 17th-century building in Greenwich, a town in southeast London, England, once contained a working nuclear reactor that remained largely unknown to the public. The nuclear reactor was nicknamed “JASON” and was located in the King William Building within the Old…

If you’re flying into Tokyo’s Narita International Airport, you might see something unusual between the taxiways. In the middle of the airport are patches of farmland and even houses. But these aren’t there because of a flaw in the design of the airport or terrain features. The farms are still…

In the mid-1970s, a tiny island off the Labrador coast of Canada was discovered for the first time through images a satellite far overhead had sent back to Earth. This new land was named after the technological marvel that made the discovery happen, and so it got the name Landsat…