On October 5-6, 1923, Edwin Hubble discovered that Andromeda isn’t in the Milky Way. Before then, astronomers assumed all nebulae were in our galaxy.

The color in pink diamonds comes from a distortion of the gem’s crystal lattice under intense pressure.

Sorry, triangle fans. A recently discovered tablet reveals the Babylonians knew that a² + b² = c² more than 1,000 years before Pythagoras figured it out and got a theorem named after him.

Obadiah Bush (1797-1851) petitioned the New York Legislature to secede from the Union in a protest against slavery, after which he was accused of being an anarchist (that’s the same Bush family that later made two presidents).

Fake owls don’t scare away woodpeckers. But the decoy owls with rotating heads might do the trick.

This article appears in October 13 • 2023.

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