Q0205The United Nations was created after World War II to prevent another global catastrophe.
Founded in 1945 after the Second World War, the United Nations was built to give nations a table to talk at, hoping to prevent another global catastrophe.
Ikigai DailyArt, science, history, surprise
Wonder
The world is stranger up close.
Facts, artworks and discoveries that reward a second look and open a door into something larger.
1,289 cardsPage 2 of 54Context and sources
Editor’s note
The open room
Wonder begins where familiarity loosens. This edition crosses science, art, language and history to recover the useful shock of looking closely at things we thought we already knew.
Q0205Q0206The Cold War was fought not only with weapons, but with science, sport, propaganda, cinema, and space exploration.
The rivalry shaped more than military strategy: classrooms, films, Olympic arenas, laboratories and the space race all became stages for influence.
Q0207The Space Race turned the sky into a political battlefield — and accidentally built the world we live in.
It began in October 1957, when Sputnik — a beeping metal sphere just 58 cm wide — passed over America and triggered the creation of NASA within a year. Twelve years later, Apollo 11 stood on the Moon. But the race's real legacy is under your thumb: weather and communication satellites, GPS navigation, and a young microchip industry supercharged by Apollo's demand for tiny, reliable electronics. The rivalry was political; the infrastructure it left behind became everyone's.
Q0208The first human in space was Yuri Gagarin in 1961.
On 12 April 1961 Yuri Gagarin orbited Earth once aboard Vostok 1, becoming the first human in space — a flight of about 108 minutes.
Q0209The first words spoken from the Moon were heard on Earth almost instantly, but the signal travelled across nearly 400,000 kilometres (250,000 miles).
Radio signals travel at light speed, so the Moon's words reached Earth in about 1.3 seconds — near-instant, yet still a measurable delay across 384,000 km (239,000 miles).
Q0210The Berlin Wall stood for 28 years and fell in 1989.
The Berlin Wall divided the city from 1961 until 1989, when it was opened almost overnight — a sudden end to a 28-year symbol of a divided world.
Q0211Nelson Mandela spent 27 years in prison before becoming president of South Africa.
Nelson Mandela spent 27 years imprisoned for opposing apartheid, then walked free in 1990 and, in 1994, became South Africa's first Black president.
Q0212Human history is not a straight line of progress. It is a messy chain of accidents, inventions, collapses, recoveries, and choices.
History rarely moves in a straight line. Progress comes tangled with accident, reversal and unintended consequence — less a march than a messy braid.
Q0213Every ordinary object around you has a hidden history of people who invented, traded, fought over, improved, copied, or carried it.
Everyday things carry hidden histories — the people who invented, traded, mined and shipped them. Look closely and an ordinary object opens into a whole world.
Q0214The Code of Hammurabi is one of the oldest surviving written law codes.
Carved around 1750 BC, the Code of Hammurabi set out laws and punishments on a stone pillar — among the oldest written legal codes we still have.
Q0215Ancient Egyptians used a calendar of 365 days thousands of years ago.
The ancient Egyptians used a 365-day solar calendar of twelve 30-day months plus five extra days — a strikingly modern structure, thousands of years ago.
Q0216The first coins appeared in Lydia in western Anatolia around the 7th century BC.
The first true coins were struck in Lydia, in western Anatolia, around the 7th century BC — standardised metal money that helped transform trade.
Q0217Democracy in ancient Athens excluded women, slaves, and many foreigners.
Athenian democracy let citizens vote directly — but 'citizens' excluded women, enslaved people and foreigners, so only a minority actually took part.
Q0218The Persian Royal Road helped messages and officials move across a huge empire.
The Persian Royal Road let couriers cross an empire in days rather than months — an early lesson that information moves power as much as armies do.
Q0219From 221 to 206 BC, the Qin dynasty unified China after the Warring States period and standardised script, coins, weights, and measures.
Qin Shi Huang's short-lived dynasty replaced rival regional systems with a centralised empire. Standard script, coinage, weights and measures made tax, trade, law and administration work across a newly unified China.
Q0220The Terracotta Army was built to guard China's first emperor in the afterlife.
Buried near Xi'an, the Terracotta Army of thousands of life-sized clay soldiers was made to guard China's first emperor, Qin Shi Huang, in death.
Q0221Ashoka's edicts spread moral and political messages across the Mauryan Empire.
After a bloody war, the emperor Ashoka carved edicts into rock across his Indian empire, urging tolerance and non-violence — moral messages set in stone.
Q0222The Dead Sea Scrolls preserved ancient Jewish texts for more than 2,000 years.
Hidden in desert caves and found from 1947, the Dead Sea Scrolls preserved Jewish texts over two thousand years old, including the oldest known biblical manuscripts.
Q0223Latin did not disappear after Rome. It survived in law, science, religion, education, and the Romance languages.
Latin outlived Rome, living on in law, science, medicine and the Church, and evolving into French, Spanish, Italian and the other Romance languages.
Q0224Byzantine scholars preserved and copied many ancient Greek works that might otherwise have been lost.
Byzantine scribes copied and guarded ancient Greek works for centuries. Without their patient labour, much of classical philosophy and science would be lost.
Q0225The House of Wisdom in Baghdad became a major centre for translation, mathematics, astronomy, and medicine.
Baghdad's House of Wisdom gathered scholars to translate Greek, Persian and Indian works and to advance mathematics and astronomy — a beacon of the Islamic Golden Age.
Q0226Ibn Sina's Canon of Medicine influenced medical teaching in Europe and the Islamic world for centuries.
Ibn Sina's 'Canon of Medicine' (c. 1025) organised medical knowledge so well it was taught in European and Islamic schools for some six hundred years.
Q0227Mansa Musa's pilgrimage to Mecca displayed the immense wealth of the Mali Empire.
In 1324 Mansa Musa, ruler of Mali, made a pilgrimage to Mecca so laden with gold that he reshaped economies along the way — a display of astonishing wealth.
Q0228Timbuktu became a major centre of learning, manuscripts, and trade in West Africa.
By the 14th–16th centuries Timbuktu was a hub of trade and scholarship, its libraries holding tens of thousands of manuscripts on faith, law and science.