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Q0551Completed around AD 80, the Colosseum could hold up to 80,000 spectators for gladiator games and spectacles — Roman engineering built for mass entertainment, still standing.
Q0552The Black Death likely began in Central Asia, then travelled trade routes to Europe in the 1340s — carried, in part, along the very networks that made medieval commerce possible.
Q0553The Gutenberg Bible, printed around 1455 with movable metal type, was Europe's first major book from a press — the spark of a revolution in how knowledge spread.
Q0554In Homer's Odyssey, Mentor is the trusted friend Athena disguises herself as to guide young Telemachus — which is why a wise guide is now called a 'mentor'.
Q0555'Disaster' comes from Italian roots meaning 'bad star'. It preserves an old belief that misfortune fell from unlucky alignments of the heavens — a fossil of astrology in everyday speech.
Q0556'Nice' comes from Latin nescius, 'ignorant'. Over centuries it drifted from foolish to precise to pleasant — proof that a word's meaning can travel far from where it began.
Q0557'Clue' comes from 'clew', a ball of thread — from the myth of Theseus, who unwound thread to find his way out of the labyrinth. A hint still 'threads' us through a mystery.
Q0558'Salary' comes from Latin salarium, tied to sal, salt. Salt was so valuable in Rome that it shaped pay and trade — a word still carrying the taste of ancient economics.
Q0559'Muscle' comes from Latin musculus, 'little mouse' — Roman anatomists thought a flexing muscle looked like a small mouse moving under the skin. Anatomy named from imagination.
Q0560'Quarantine' comes from the Italian for forty days — the time plague-era Venice made arriving ships wait offshore before landing. A public-health word still counting to forty.
Q0561'Robot' entered English through Karel Čapek's 1920 play R.U.R. It comes from a Czech word for forced labour — so the very name carries the idea of machines made to toil.
Q0562The Latin root of 'science' means 'to know' — the same root behind 'conscious', 'omniscient' and 'conscience'. A family of words all circling the act of knowing.
Q0563Words are not fixed stones: 'nice' moved from 'ignorant' to 'pleasant', showing how meaning drifts with use. Language is a living thing, quietly reshaped by its speakers.
Q0565Both Voyager probes have now crossed into interstellar space, beyond the Sun's bubble of particles — the farthest human-made objects, still faintly phoning home.
Q0566By the end of 1990 Tim Berners-Lee had the first web server and browser running at CERN — the entire World Wide Web, at that moment, fit on a single desk.
Q0567On 30 April 1993 CERN placed the Web's software in the public domain, free for anyone to use — a decision that let the web explode into the shared space it is today.
Q0568Einstein won the 1921 Nobel Prize not for relativity but for the photoelectric effect — the work that revealed light's particle side and later shaped solar panels and cameras.
Q0569Marie Curie won Nobel Prizes in two sciences — Physics (1903) and Chemistry (1911) — the first person ever to do so, and still one of very few.
Q0570The Wright Flyer's first flight in 1903 lasted 12 seconds and covered 120 feet (37 m) — shorter than the wingspan of a modern airliner, yet it opened the whole age of flight.
Q0571The Voyager probes launched in 1977, but the first web server didn't run until 1990 — a spacecraft was already leaving the planets before the web was even born.
Q0572Berners-Lee's first proposal for the World Wide Web, written at CERN in 1989, was famously marked by his boss 'vague but exciting' — the understatement that launched the web.
Q0573On Earth a day is far shorter than a year, but that's not universal: on Venus a day outlasts its year, a reminder that our everyday sense of time is a local habit.
Q0574During the First World War Marie Curie built mobile X-ray units, driving them to the front herself so surgeons could find bullets and shrapnel — her science put directly to saving lives.
Q0575In 1905, his 'miracle year', Einstein published papers that reshaped physics — all while working as a clerk in a Swiss patent office, doing science in his spare time.
