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Page 57
Q1488
WonderArt

The Winged Victory of Samothrace, carved over 2,000 years ago, shows a winged goddess striding into sea wind — and it moves people despite having lost its head and both arms.

The drapery seems to press wet against her body, the wings still beating, the whole figure caught mid-motion at the prow of a ship. That so much life survives in a broken stone says something about what sculpture can hold: not just a likeness, but force and direction. Sometimes what is missing makes the movement feel even more alive.

Classical sculpture (Winged Victory)Read card
Q1489
WonderArt

Trompe-l'oeil — French for 'deceive the eye' — is a technique so precise that a painted fly, curtain or open door can trick you, for a second, into thinking it is real and three-dimensional.

Artists exploit exactly how the eye reads light, shadow and edges, painting a violin that seems to hang off a cupboard or a ceiling that appears to open onto sky. It is a playful confession about all painting: every picture is a flat surface pretending to be a world, and here the trick simply steps forward and takes a bow.

Painting technique (trompe-l'oeil)Read card
Q1490
StillnessArt

Leonardo da Vinci perfected 'sfumato', a way of blending tones so gradually that there are no hard outlines — light melts into shadow like smoke, which is what the word means.

Around the Mona Lisa's mouth and eyes, this softness leaves her expression genuinely ambiguous: the corners of the smile dissolve, so it seems to shift as you look. Leonardo is said to have built the effect from many almost-invisible glazes. The most talked-about smile in history works partly because it was painted to never quite settle.

Painting technique (sfumato)Read card
Q1491
WonderArt

The oldest surviving photograph, made by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce around 1826, needed an exposure of several hours — long enough that the sun moved across the sky and lit the courtyard's buildings from more than one side.

The blurry rooftop view, captured on a polished pewter plate coated with light-sensitive bitumen, is faint and strange, but it is the first time a real scene fixed itself onto a surface without a human hand drawing it. Every photograph since — every selfie, every satellite image — descends from that patient, hours-long stare out of a French window.

History of photography (Niépce)Read card
Q1492
WonderArt

The gleaming white marble of Michelangelo's 'David' and 'Pietà' came from the mountains around Carrara in Italy — quarries worked since Roman times and still producing marble now.

Michelangelo travelled there himself to pick blocks, reading the stone for hidden flaws before a single chisel touched it, sometimes waiting months for the right piece. The same mountains that gave Rome its temples and the Renaissance its masterpieces are still being carved into the hills, a thread of white dust running unbroken across two thousand years of sculpture.

Sculpture (Carrara marble)Read card
Q1493
StillnessLiterature

A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.

Kafka wrote this to his friend Oskar Pollak on 27 January 1904, arguing that the only books worth reading are the ones that wound and shake us. A book, he said, should not merely please; it should hit us like a misfortune, or like losing someone we love — an axe for the frozen sea within us.

Franz KafkaRead card
Q1494
DrivePhilosophy

What is now proved was once only imagined.

This line comes from the 'Proverbs of Hell' in William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Blake — poet, painter and engraver — trusted imagination as a form of knowledge, not its opposite. Every proven fact, every built bridge and tested theory, began as something someone first pictured in the mind.

William BlakeRead card
Q1496
StillnessProverbs

After rain comes sunshine.

'Efter regn kommer solskin' is a common Danish saying. Like many weather proverbs from northern Europe, it turns an ordinary fact of the sky into a quiet promise: hard spells are weather, not climate — they move through and pass.

Danish ProverbRead card
Q1498
DriveProverbs

Who risks nothing gains nothing.

The Portuguese say 'Quem não arrisca, não petisca' — literally, who doesn't risk doesn't get a bite to eat. The rhyme makes it playful, but the point is old and plain: nothing worth having arrives without some exposure to loss.

Portuguese ProverbRead card
Q1499
StillnessProverbs

What's meant for you won't pass you by.

In broad Scots, 'Whit's fur ye'll no go by ye.' It is a saying of trust rather than fatalism: you can loosen your grip on what you cannot control, because whatever is truly yours will find its way to you in time.

Scottish ProverbRead card
Q1500
DriveProverbs

Go gently and you'll go safely and far.

'Chi va piano, va sano e va lontano' — he who goes slowly goes healthily and goes far. Italy's answer to the race between hare and tortoise: pace is not the enemy of progress but its condition; steadiness outlasts the sprint.

Italian ProverbRead card
Q1501
DriveProverbs

Practice makes the master.

'Übung macht den Meister' is the German way of saying skill is earned, not granted. The word Meister carries the weight of the old craft guilds, where a master was someone who had put in the years — mastery as the far end of repetition.

German ProverbRead card
Q1502
DriveProverbs

Little by little, the bird builds its nest.

'Petit à petit, l'oiseau fait son nid.' A bird brings one twig at a time, and a home appears. The proverb is France's gentle case for small, patient effort: large things are made of many small acts that do not look like much on their own.

French ProverbRead card
Q1503
StillnessProverbs

There is no bad from which some good does not come.

'No hay mal que por bien no venga.' Spanish speakers reach for this when a setback lands: not a claim that everything is fine, but a reminder to stay open — misfortune often carries, folded inside it, a door you could not have seen from the other side.

Spanish ProverbRead card
Q1504
DriveProverbs

Patience and work wear down every obstacle.

'Терпение и труд всё перетрут' (Terpeniye i trud vsyo peretrut). The image inside the Russian is physical: patience and labour grind through, wear down, and eventually get past any obstacle — softness and time beating hardness.

Russian ProverbRead card
Q1505
StillnessProverbs

This too shall pass.

The saying is often traced to Persian Sufi poetry, where a king asks for words that would be true in every season and is given a ring engraved 'این نیز بگذرد' — in niz bogzarad, 'this too shall pass.' It steadies joy and grief alike: neither is the final word.

Persian ProverbRead card
Q1506
WonderOcean

A century after the colossal squid was named, one was finally filmed alive in the deep sea: a young, glass-clear individual about 30 cm long, drifting 600 m down near the South Sandwich Islands.

On 9 March 2025, the research vessel Falkor (too) and its robot SuBastian caught the footage; squid experts Kat Bolstad and Aaron Evans confirmed it. The species was formally named in 1925 but had only ever been known from remains in the stomachs of whales and seabirds. Adults may reach 7 m and 500 kg — the heaviest invertebrate on Earth.

Schmidt Ocean InstituteRead card
Q1507
WonderSpace

In July 2025 astronomers spotted 3I/ATLAS — a comet from another star system, only the third interstellar object ever detected passing through our Solar System.

The NASA-funded ATLAS survey telescope in Chile reported it on 1 July 2025. It was moving at roughly 137,000 mph — too fast for the Sun to hold — on a path that will fling it back out of the Solar System. It rounded the Sun just beyond Mars's orbit in October 2025 and had drifted through interstellar space for perhaps billions of years before arriving.

NASA / Minor Planet CenterRead card
Q1508
WonderSpace

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory released its first images in June 2025 — capturing roughly 10 million galaxies and spotting more than 2,000 previously unknown asteroids in about ten hours of looking.

Perched on Cerro Pachón in Chile with an 8.4-metre mirror and the largest digital camera ever built, Rubin is designed to photograph the entire southern sky every few nights for ten years. That time-lapse of the universe — the Legacy Survey of Space and Time — should catalogue billions of galaxies and reveal anything that moves or flickers.

NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin ObservatoryRead card
Q1509
WonderNature

In 2025 scientists watched killer whales tear off lengths of kelp and roll them between their bodies to groom one another — the first known tool made and shared by marine mammals.

Drone footage of southern resident orcas in the Salish Sea, off the US–Canada coast, revealed the behaviour researchers named 'allokelping.' A whale bites off a stalk of bull kelp and presses it against a partner, and the two roll it along their skin. Making a tool and using it on a companion is something very few animals are known to do.

Current Biology (2025)Read card
Q1510
WonderSpace

When NASA opened its sample from asteroid Bennu, it found amino acids and all five of the 'letters' that spell out DNA and RNA — the chemistry of life, made in space.

OSIRIS-REx returned about 120 grams of Bennu to Earth in 2023; the first deep analyses were published in Nature in January 2025. The dust held 14 of the 20 amino acids life uses to build proteins, the five nucleobases of DNA and RNA, and salty minerals left by ancient water. None of this is life — but it shows the ingredients were riding on asteroids long before Earth.

NASA (Nature, 2025)Read card
Q1511
WonderHealth

In 2025 doctors treated an infant known as 'Baby KJ' with a personalized CRISPR-based gene-editing therapy designed for his specific mutation.

KJ was born with CPS1 deficiency, a rare disorder that lets ammonia build to toxic levels. A team at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and Penn designed, tested and delivered a bespoke gene-editing therapy in roughly six months. He improved and went home — a proof of principle that treatments might one day be tailored to a patient in weeks.

Children's Hospital of Philadelphia / Penn MedicineRead card