Wonder: Ideas for closer looking. - Page 34

Editor’s note

Wonder

Selected for evidence, scale, close looking and clear explanations of unfamiliar subjects.

WonderHealth

In 2025 a man lived for a record 271 days with a gene-edited pig kidney — the longest anyone has yet been kept alive by an organ from another species.

Tim Andrews received the kidney in early 2025; it filtered his blood for about nine months before being removed. Researchers edit the pig's genes to switch off the traits that make the human body reject the organ. With human donors far too few, animal organs — xenotransplants — are moving from experiment towards carefully watched clinical trials.

Massachusetts General Hospital (2025)Read card

Q1520

WonderScience

In 2025 a fresh study argued that Nanotyrannus — long dismissed as a young Tyrannosaurus rex — was a separate, smaller predator all along.

The evidence came from a Montana skeleton in the famous 'Dueling Dinosaurs' fossil. Its growth rings showed an animal that had stopped growing at about twenty years old, not a still-growing juvenile, and it carried more teeth and longer arms than T. rex. If it holds up, some 'teenage T. rex' fossils in museums may belong to a different dinosaur entirely.

Nature (2025)Read card

Q1521

WonderSpace

In 2025 the James Webb telescope detected gases over the planet K2-18b that, on Earth, are made mostly by living things — a tantalising hint that scientists quickly cautioned is not proof.

K2-18b lies about 124 light-years away. Webb's instruments picked up possible traces of dimethyl sulfide, a gas produced on Earth by ocean algae. Within days other researchers questioned how firm the signal was, and non-living chemistry could also explain it. It is a vivid example of how the search for life abroad advances: not by a single headline, but by claim and careful challenge.

University of Cambridge / JWST (2025)Read card

Q1522

WonderScience

Weather officials confirmed in 2025 that a single 'megaflash' of lightning stretched about 829 km across the United States — roughly the distance from Dallas to Kansas City, in one flash.

The bolt crossed the southern US skies and was certified as the longest lightning flash on record, beating a 709 km event over South America. Megaflashes crawl horizontally through vast, connected storm systems rather than striking straight down. Satellite lightning mappers now let scientists measure these giants that ground observers could never trace end to end.

World Meteorological Organization (2025)Read card

Q1523

WonderScience

In 2025 geologists confirmed that rocks in northern Canada are about 4.16 billion years old — the oldest intact pieces of Earth's crust ever found.

The rocks belong to the Nuvvuagittuq Greenstone Belt on the shore of Hudson Bay, and settle a long argument about their age. They date to the Hadean, Earth's fiery first chapter, not long after the planet formed 4.5 billion years ago. To touch one is to touch a surviving fragment of the infant Earth, older than almost anything else on the surface.

Science (2025)Read card

Q1524

WonderSpace

In 2025 gravitational-wave detectors caught the most massive black-hole collision ever recorded — two giants merging into one about 225 times the mass of the Sun.

The signal, named GW231123, came from two black holes each over 100 solar masses — a size range theory struggles to explain by ordinary star death. Their merger sent ripples through spacetime itself, faint tremors that reached detectors on Earth. Each such catch tests how the universe builds its heaviest objects.

LIGO–Virgo–KAGRA (2025)Read card

Q1525

WonderSpace

In 2025 astronomers found one of the oldest black holes yet — 38 million times the Sun's mass, already grown when the universe was under 500 million years old.

Catalogued as CAPERS-LRD-z9 and spotted with the James Webb telescope, its light has travelled more than 13 billion years to reach us. Finding something so heavy so early is a genuine puzzle: black holes were not supposed to have time to bulk up that fast. It is one of the clues pushing astronomers to rethink how the first giants formed.

University of Texas / JWST (2025)Read card

Q1526

WonderHistory

Research in 2025 identified the oldest known mummies — bodies in Southeast Asia and southern China preserved over 10,000 years ago by being smoke-dried over slow fires.

These are far older than Egypt's Old Kingdom embalmed bodies, around 4,500 years old, and older than South America's Chinchorro mummies. Traces of heat and soot on the bones point to deliberate smoking, a way of keeping the dead close among ancient hunter-gatherer communities. It stretches the human impulse to preserve our dead back into the deep past.

PNAS (2025)Read card

Q1527

WonderScience

In 2025 scientists recovered the oldest RNA yet recorded from a woolly mammoth frozen about 40,000 years ago.

DNA is a creature's instruction book; RNA is a snapshot of which instructions were actually being used when it died. Reading it from a juvenile Siberian mammoth showed which genes were switched on in its muscles, and even hinted at stress in its final hours. RNA is far more delicate than DNA, so many had assumed it could never survive tens of thousands of years.

Cell (2025)Read card

Q1528

WonderNature

In 2025 a drone survey revealed the largest known nesting gathering of giant South American river turtles — more than 41,000 of them massing on a single stretch of riverbank.

The count came from the Guaporé River on the Brazil–Bolivia border, where the turtles haul out together to lay eggs. Counting nesting animals from the air, frame by frame, gives far better numbers than people on the ground and without disturbing the herd. Knowing the true size of such gatherings is the first step to protecting them from poaching and river change.

Wildlife Conservation Society (2025)Read card

Q1529

WonderOcean

When a giant iceberg broke away from Antarctica in 2025, scientists rushed in and filmed a thriving world of life on the seafloor that had been sealed under ice for centuries.

The iceberg, called A-84, calved from the George VI Ice Shelf in January 2025 and exposed seabed no human had seen. A research team reached it and found corals, sponges, icefish and a ghostly phantom jellyfish living in the cold dark. It was a rare chance to glimpse an ecosystem that had survived, unwatched, beneath the frozen lid of the continent.

Schmidt Ocean Institute (2025)Read card

Q1530

WonderNature

In 2025 researchers showed that lions have two distinct kinds of roar, and trained a computer to recognise them — and individual lions — with over 95% accuracy.

By feeding recordings into a machine-learning model, the team could pick out a full-throated roar from a shorter intermediary one, and even identify who was calling. A lion's roar can carry for kilometres, so listening posts could count and track prides without traps or tags. It is quieter, cheaper conservation — done by ear.

Bioacoustics research (2025)Read card

Q1531

WonderHistory

In 2025 researchers proposed that the mysterious 'Band of Holes' in Peru — around 5,000 pits dug in a line up a hillside — was an ancient marketplace and accounting system.

The pits at Monte Sierpe stretch for over a kilometre and have puzzled people for a century. Soil samples turned up traces of crop plants, and the layout echoes the knotted-string khipu records of the Andes. The idea is that traders laid out goods pit by pit, turning a hillside into a ledger you could walk through.

Antiquity (2025)Read card

Q1532

WonderTechnology

In 2025 scientists used artificial intelligence to design the genomes of working viruses that attack bacteria — the first time AI had written a complete viral genome that then functioned in the lab.

The targets were bacteriophages — harmless-to-humans viruses that infect bacteria. An AI model trained on natural genomes proposed new ones; in the lab, 16 of these designs assembled into phages that could kill their bacterial hosts. It is an early, carefully bounded step towards designing biology, and it arrives with real questions about how such power should be governed.

Arc Institute / Stanford (2025)Read card

Q1533

WonderSpace

In March 2025 astronomers confirmed 128 new moons around Saturn in one announcement, lifting its total to 274 — more than all the other planets' moons put together.

A team using the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope stacked many images to reveal faint specks orbiting the planet. Most of the new moons are tiny, kilometre-scale chunks, probably shards from larger moons shattered by old collisions. Saturn had already overtaken Jupiter as the Solar System's 'moon king,' and this widened its lead dramatically.

International Astronomical Union (2025)Read card

Q1534

WonderOcean

For the first time, in 2025, scientists recorded a shark actively making sound — a small rig shark producing sharp clicks when handled.

Sharks were long thought to be silent, lacking the swim bladders many noisy fish use. Researchers in New Zealand caught the clicks on tape, likely made by the shark snapping its flat, plate-like teeth together. What the clicks are for is still unknown — perhaps a startle response — but they overturn the idea that sharks move through the sea without a voice.

Royal Society Open Science (2025)Read card

Q1535

WonderScience

In 2025 a company announced pups engineered to resemble the extinct dire wolf, made by editing 20 spots in the genome of an ordinary grey wolf.

Working from DNA in a 13,000-year-old tooth and a 72,000-year-old skull, the team tweaked grey-wolf embryos to bring back dire-wolf traits like size and a pale coat, producing pups named Romulus, Remus and Khaleesi. Scientists were quick to note these are edited grey wolves, not true dire wolves brought back to life. Still, it is a striking test of how far gene editing can reach into the past.

Colossal Biosciences (2025)Read card

Q1538

WonderOcean

The mantis shrimp throws the fastest punch in the animal kingdom — so fast it boils the water around its claw for an instant.

Its club-like limb accelerates like a bullet, moving so quickly that the water can't fill the space behind it and forms a vapour bubble. When that bubble collapses it releases a flash of heat and a shockwave, so the prey is hit twice — by the strike and by the burst. Some species can shatter aquarium glass, and their eyes are among the most complex known.

Marine biologyRead card

Q1539

WonderNature

When a glass frog sleeps, it turns almost transparent by pumping most of its red blood cells into its liver — hiding the colour that would give it away.

Red blood cells are what make blood visible, so to disappear against a leaf the frog tucks up to nine-tenths of them inside a mirror-like liver while it rests. Somehow it does this without its blood clotting, a trick doctors would love to understand. At night, when it needs to move and hunt, the cells flow back out and the frog turns solid again.

Science (2022)Read card

Q1540

WonderScience

By the botanical rules, a banana counts as a berry — while a strawberry does not.

To a botanist, a berry is a fruit that grows from a single flower with one ovary and carries its seeds inside the flesh — which fits bananas, grapes and even tomatoes. A strawberry grows differently: its tiny 'seeds' on the outside are actually the true fruits, so it is not a berry at all. The everyday word and the scientific one simply drew their lines in different places.

BotanyRead card

Q1543

WonderScience

Sharks have swum the oceans for more than 400 million years — appearing before the first trees grew, and possibly before Saturn's current rings formed.

Sharks arose over 400 million years ago, while the earliest true trees came later, around 380 million years ago. Saturn's bright rings may be younger still — some evidence suggests the current ring system is only a few hundred million years old, so dinosaurs might have looked up at a ringless Saturn. Sharks have outlasted several mass extinctions, quietly persisting while the world rearranged itself around them.

PalaeontologyRead card

Q1544

WonderMind

Across decades of psychiatric records, researchers have found very few confirmed cases of schizophrenia in people born completely blind — one of the strangest open questions in medicine.

The clearest evidence comes from Western Australia, where Vera Morgan's team followed every one of 467,945 children born between 1980 and 2001. Around 1,870 went on to develop a psychotic illness — but not one of the 66 children born with cortical blindness did. The numbers are small, so nobody is calling it settled. One leading explanation is that schizophrenia involves the brain trusting its own predictions over the evidence of the senses; sight is our dominant prediction machine, so a brain that never built a visual model may be protected from that particular failure mode. It is a rare case where an absence — of cases, of vision — may be a clue.

Schizophrenia Research (2018)Read card

Q1545

WonderMind

When a song lands slightly off the beat, the brain's reward system can respond — we often enjoy music most when it bends the pattern without breaking it.

Your brain is a prediction engine: it guesses where the next beat falls, then checks. A perfectly regular rhythm is guessed correctly every time and quickly becomes dull. Syncopation — a note landing just off the expected beat — produces a small prediction error, and dopamine follows. Peter Vuust and colleagues found the effect follows an inverted U: too simple and there is nothing to be surprised by, too chaotic and the brain cannot hold a pattern to be surprised against. The sweet spot in the middle is what musicians have always called groove — and it is the reason a track that sounds slightly 'wrong' is the one you cannot sit still through.

Music neuroscienceRead card

Q1546

WonderMusic

As the story goes, Fats Waller was bundled into a car by armed men in 1926, driven to a Chicago party, and discovered he was the surprise gift for Al Capone's birthday. He played for three days and left with his pockets full of hundred-dollar bills.

Waller was leaving a gig in Chicago when four men with guns pushed him into a car — he assumed he was about to die. Instead he was marched to a piano and told to play. The guest of honour, delighted, kept him there for three days on champagne and food, and the guests stuffed cash into his pockets as tips. The tale comes chiefly from his son Maurice's account rather than any police record, so historians file it as very probably true rather than proven. Either way, Waller was one of the great showmen of the age — 'Ain't Misbehavin' is his — and he apparently went home a good deal richer than he expected to.

Jazz historyRead card

Next reading modeDriveIdeas for sustained work.