Facts So Romantic

In a WTF with Marc Maron podcast episode from 2012, musical comedian Bo Burnham said his fortune felt unreal, as if his life were a futuristic VR game. “I could die, take off a helmet,…

You’ve been caught snooping around a spooky graveyard with your best friend. The caretaker, a bored old man fond of riddles (and not so fond of trespassers), imprisons each of you in…

This year’s World Cup has been full of surprises. Tournament mainstays such as the Netherlands and Italy didn’t even qualify, and Germany, the reigning world champions, finished last…

Astronomers can sometimes be literal to a fault. We like to call things as we see them. For example, if it’s red and it’s huge: “Red Giant.” White and small: “White Dwarf.”…

From freezing showers to ingesting prickly pear to smoking joints, everyone has a home remedy for alcohol’s notorious afterglow: the hangover. Mongolian men swear by pickled sheep…

Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine’s Abstractions blog.Like any star in its prime, the sun consists mainly of hydrogen atoms fusing two by two into helium, unleashing immense…

Archaeologist Ticia Verveer recently posted a thread on Twitter showing that customer complaints go way back. And I mean way back. Verveer referred to a letter inscribed on a 3,700-year-old…

Reprinted with permission from Quanta’s Abstractions blog.As the Milky Way was growing, taking shape, and minding its own business around 10 billion years ago, it suffered a massive…

Beneath the icy surface of Saturn’s sixth-largest moon, Enceladus, an ocean dwells. Traces of it get expelled skyward through cracks in the crust via cryo-volcanic plumes. What’s found…

In the late spring of 2010, the world watched, often in real time, a new kind of environmental disaster unfold: An oil rig operating deep under the seafloor of the Gulf of Mexico exploded,…