Wonder: Ideas for closer looking. - Page 51

Editor’s note

Wonder

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

Q2014

DriveHistory

In 1960–61, thirteen American women pilots passed the same physical screening tests as NASA's first astronauts, in a privately run programme that was cancelled before any of them could fly. Sixty years later, Wally Funk finally reached space at 82.

Dr Randolph Lovelace, who had designed NASA's astronaut medical exams, quietly ran the same tests on accomplished women pilots — and thirteen passed. The programme lost its facilities in 1961, and Congressional hearings the next year changed nothing. The name 'Mercury 13' came from a television producer decades on. When Wally Funk rode a rocket past the edge of space in July 2021, she carried six decades of waiting with her.

Mercury 13Read card

Q2017

DriveArt

Bill Traylor was born into slavery in Alabama around 1853. In 1939, in his mid-eighties and living rough in Montgomery, he picked up a pencil — and in roughly three years produced more than a thousand drawings on scavenged cardboard.

He worked on a sidewalk by day, drawing sharp-edged mules, dogs, dancing figures and memories from plantation life, and slept in the back room of a funeral parlour. A young artist bought him poster paints and saved hundreds of the drawings. Traylor died in 1949, almost unknown. In 2018 the Smithsonian gave him a landmark retrospective — billed as its first for an artist born into slavery.

Bill TraylorRead card

Q2023

DriveLiterature

When no publisher would take his 1935 collection, E. E. Cummings printed it with money from his mother and called it 'No Thanks'. The dedication lists the fourteen publishers who turned it down — typeset in the shape of a funeral urn.

The fourteen names — Farrar & Rinehart, Simon & Schuster, Random House and the rest — descend the page in a neat column that readers have long seen as a little urn, as if the rejections were being given a decent burial. Cummings was already a known poet; the book still could not find a home. He answered with typography instead of bitterness, and the joke outlived every refusal.

E. E. CummingsRead card

Q2029

DriveScience

Ynés Mexía took her first botany course at 51 and made her first collecting expedition at 55. In the thirteen years she had left, she gathered some 150,000 plant specimens across the Americas — with around 500 species new to science.

She came to the work after years of ill health and two difficult marriages, finding in fieldwork what clinics had failed to give her. She canoed the Amazon, camped alone in the Andes, and out-collected celebrated botanists who had started decades younger; about fifty species now carry her name. When asked about the dangers of travelling solo, she reportedly found the question puzzling — the wilderness, she felt, was the safe part.

Ynés MexíaRead card

Q2034

DriveHistory

Ernest Shackleton's Endurance was crushed by pack ice and sank in 1915. After months camped on drifting floes and an 800-mile open-boat crossing to fetch help, every one of the 28 men survived. In 2022, the wreck was found — almost intact.

The escape remains a masterclass in leadership: ice camps through the polar winter, three lifeboats to Elephant Island, then Shackleton's crossing to South Georgia in the tiny James Caird and a mountain traverse to reach a whaling station; the last men were rescued in August 1916. On 5 March 2022 — a century, to the day, after Shackleton's burial — a search team found Endurance 3,008 metres down in the Weddell Sea, upright and preserved, her name still bright across the stern.

Endurance expeditionRead card

Q2037

StillnessHistory

Before artificial light, much of Europe slept in two shifts: a 'first sleep' from nightfall, an hour or so of quiet wakefulness, then a 'second sleep' until dawn. The pattern appears in court records, prayer books and letters across languages.

Historian Roger Ekirch pieced the habit together from thousands of references — people used the waking interval to pray, talk, mend, or simply lie thinking in the dark. The rhythm faded in the nineteenth century as gaslight and industrial timetables compressed the night. Evidence suggests it ruled pre-industrial Europe rather than all humanity, so it is best read not as a prescription, but as a reminder: the eight-hour block is a recent invention, and a 3am waking was once nothing to fear.

Segmented sleepRead card

Q2038

StillnessLanguage

The English word 'noon' comes from the Latin 'nona hora' — the ninth hour of daylight, around 3pm — one of the fixed hours when monastic communities paused to pray. Over the medieval centuries, the word slid back to midday.

Before mechanical clocks, the day was sliced by bells: the canonical hours of prayer gave whole communities their shared timetable. Why 'nones' crept from mid-afternoon to midday is uncertain — historians point to shifting meal and fasting times, and to daylight hours that stretched and shrank with the seasons. Dutch made the same journey with its 'noen'. Inside one small word sits a lost world where time was something you heard, not something you checked.

Word historyRead card

Q2040

StillnessArt

In 2011, Norway's public broadcaster televised a coastal voyage in full: 134 hours, live, unedited. Roughly half the population tuned in at some point. 'Slow TV' had begun two years earlier with a seven-hour train ride that became a surprise hit.

The Bergen-to-Oslo train broadcast of 2009 drew over a million Norwegian viewers, many of whom reportedly reached for their coats at the final station announcement. The Hurtigruten voyage of June 2011 still holds the record for the longest live documentary ever aired. No plot, no commentary, no cuts — just coastline, weather and the occasional waving crowd on a pier. Its makers' theory: television had forgotten that attention can be restful rather than captured.

Slow televisionRead card

Q2045

StillnessMind

Cardiologists once played listeners six styles of music while tracking heart rate, breathing and blood pressure. Fast tempos stirred the body, slow ones settled it — but a randomly inserted two-minute silence relaxed people more than any music at all.

The silence did not merely return listeners to their starting state — measurements dipped below the pre-music baseline, as if the pause borrowed calm from the contrast. The study was small, two dozen people, half of them trained musicians; the journal's own editorial was titled 'The sound of silence is music to the heart'. Composers knew it first: the rest is not the absence of music but part of its grammar.

Bernardi study, 2006Read card

Q2046

StillnessScience

The Cloud Appreciation Society, founded in 2005 to defend 'unfairly maligned' clouds, collected members' photographs of a strange, turbulent formation. In 2017 the World Meteorological Organization added it to the International Cloud Atlas as 'asperitas'.

The trail began with a 2006 photograph from Cedar Rapids, Iowa, of a sky like a rough sea viewed from below. Founder Gavin Pretor-Pinney — whose society's manifesto pledges to 'fight blue-sky thinking' — spent years proposing the classification, and 'asperitas', from the Latin for roughness, became the first new name added to the atlas since 1951. Amateurs with cameras and patience still get to write in science's reference books.

AsperitasRead card

Q2047

StillnessCulture

Japanese has a word for falling asleep in public — 'inemuri', often glossed as 'sleeping while present'. A nap in a meeting or on a train is widely tolerated, and can even be read as proof of working to the point of exhaustion.

The sociologist Brigitte Steger, who has studied Japanese sleep habits for decades, notes that inemuri obeys unwritten rules — who may doze, where, and how visibly depends on status and situation, and the sleeper is expected to snap back the moment they are needed. It is tolerance rather than official policy. The idea unsettles cultures that treat visible rest as weakness; inemuri quietly asks why exhaustion should have to hide.

InemuriRead card

Q2050

WonderMind

The claim that human attention has shrunk to eight seconds — 'less than a goldfish' — traces to a 2015 marketing report whose cited sources could not be found. Goldfish, meanwhile, remember trained routes and feeding times for months.

When the BBC's statisticians hunted the famous numbers, the trail died at a statistics website that could not say where they came from; the psychologists cited had never measured any such thing. Attention has no single span to shrink — it stretches and collapses with the task, which is why the same person doomscrolls at noon and reads a novel till midnight. The goldfish deserves an apology: laboratories use it precisely because it learns and remembers so well.

Attention span mythRead card

Q2051

WonderMind

The 1993 study behind the 'Mozart effect' involved 36 college students and one spatial task, with a benefit that faded within about fifteen minutes. Later analyses of some forty studies found little to no lasting effect on intelligence.

The original finding was real but tiny and temporary — nothing about babies, nothing about IQ. Marketing did the rest: by 1998 the governor of Georgia had arranged for every newborn in the state to receive a classical CD, ultimately donated by a record company. The honest residue of the research is gentler and better: music can lift mood and arousal, which briefly helps some tasks — and Mozart needs no laboratory justification to be worth your evening.

The Mozart effectRead card

Q2052

WonderLiterature

Mark Twain was born on 30 November 1835, two weeks after Halley's Comet swung round the sun. In 1909 he said he expected to go out with it. He died on 21 April 1910 — one day after the comet's return.

As his biographer recorded it, Twain called himself and the comet 'two unaccountable freaks' who had come in together and must go out together. The dates in question are the comet's perihelions — its closest passes round the sun — which frame his life almost exactly: born a fortnight after one, gone a day after the next. Halley's returns roughly every 76 years; it is due again in 2061.

Mark Twain and Halley's CometRead card

Q2053

WonderArt

On Monday 12 March 1951, an American newspaper panel called 'Dennis the Menace' launched in sixteen papers — and in Britain, a comic starring a different naughty boy with exactly the same name went on sale. Neither camp knew of the other.

Hank Ketcham drew his blond, well-meaning menace in California; DC Thomson's Dundee office built its scowling, jumper-wearing one for The Beano, whose issue went on sale that same Monday under a cover date of 17 March. When the twin debuts came to light, both sides investigated and concluded it was pure coincidence — two cultures, one irresistible name. Both boys are still in print, three-quarters of a century on.

A transatlantic coincidenceRead card

Q2054

WonderHistory

On 20–21 June 1941, a Soviet team in Samarkand opened the sarcophagus of Timur, the fourteenth-century conqueror. At dawn on 22 June, Germany invaded the Soviet Union. The remains were reburied with rites in late 1942 — as the war began to turn.

The anthropologist Mikhail Gerasimov used the skull to reconstruct Timur's face, confirming the historical accounts of his lameness. The famous 'curse' — that opening the tomb would unleash an invader worse than Timur — spread later, largely through a cameraman's recollections, and belongs to folklore rather than the record. The coincidence needs no embellishment: the tomb was opened, and within two days the largest invasion in history had begun.

Gur-e-Amir, 1941Read card

Q2055

WonderLiterature

Cast in a film of 'The Girl from Petrovka', Anthony Hopkins searched London's bookshops for the novel in vain — then spotted a copy abandoned at Leicester Square station. It turned out to be the author's own, lost by a friend, notes in the margins.

The punchline arrived later, during filming, when author George Feifer mentioned he no longer owned a copy of his own novel — he had lent an annotated one to a friend, who lost it in London. Hopkins produced the station foundling; the margins matched. The story rests on the two men's own telling, repeated consistently for decades, and details shift slightly between versions — which is exactly how the best coincidence stories travel.

As told by Anthony Hopkins and George FeiferRead card

Q2056

WonderHistory

Mary Toft of Godalming appeared to deliver rabbit after rabbit in the autumn of 1726, and eminent surgeons — including an anatomist to the king — vouched for the miracle. In London, under scrutiny, the hoax collapsed within weeks.

She confessed on 7 December 1726, after a porter was caught smuggling a rabbit into her lodgings; the 'births' had been staged with animal parts. Careers were wrecked, Hogarth drew a merciless satire, and the press feasted for months. The affair's lasting gift was embarrassment of a productive kind: it sharpened the emerging habit of demanding evidence over eminence — a lesson medicine had to keep relearning.

The Toft affairRead card

Q2057

WonderHistory

The Codex Gigas, made in Bohemia in the early 1200s, stands almost a metre tall, runs to 310 calfskin leaves and weighs some 75 kilograms. Analysis of the script points to a single scribe, working for decades.

Legend calls it the Devil's Bible: a monk, walled up for his sins, supposedly wrote it in a single night with unholy help — which is folklore, though the book does contain a famous full-page portrait of the devil. The sober scholarship is stranger in its way: one patient hand, perhaps twenty to thirty years, copying an entire Bible, encyclopaedias, chronicles and cures into a single volume. Swedish troops carried it off from Prague in 1648, and it rests in Stockholm today.

Codex GigasRead card

Q2058

WonderHistory

Around 520 BC, Darius the Great had the same proclamation carved into a Persian cliff face in three scripts. Millennia later, Henry Rawlinson copied it while dangling from ladders and ropes — and the trilingual text unlocked cuneiform.

The inscription sits dozens of metres up the rock at Bisotun in western Iran, placed for the gods and posterity rather than passing readers. Rawlinson worked on the ledges through the 1830s and 1840s; for the most inaccessible panel, a local Kurdish boy scaled the cliff to press papier-mâché moulds of the signs. Once the Old Persian yielded, the other two scripts followed, and with them whole libraries of Mesopotamia — law codes, epics, shopping lists — began to speak again.

Behistun InscriptionRead card

Q2059

WonderHistory

In January 1917, Germany's foreign secretary cabled Mexico an offer: join a war against the United States and recover Texas, New Mexico and Arizona. Britain's Room 40 decrypted it, and its publication helped carry America into the First World War.

The decisive push had come from Germany's return to unrestricted submarine warfare; the telegram turned outrage personal. Its strangest twist came after publication in March 1917, when sceptics called it a British forgery — and Arthur Zimmermann himself confirmed he had sent it. The United States declared war that April. The episode founded a modern truth: signals intelligence could now move nations, quietly, from a room of linguists and puzzle-solvers.

Zimmermann TelegramRead card

Q2060

WonderScience

The Pioneer probes of 1972–73 carry gold-anodised plaques showing a man, a woman and directions to Earth — humanity's first physical message beyond the solar system. Some newspapers airbrushed the figures; readers wrote in to protest the nudity.

Carl Sagan and Frank Drake designed the plaque in weeks; Linda Salzman Sagan drew the figures. The pulsar map on it gives Earth's address in a language physics anywhere should read. Sagan later reprinted the outraged letters — one accused the space agency of spreading filth beyond the solar system — alongside his own wry defence. Both probes have long fallen silent, but the plaques sail on, built to outlast every monument on Earth.

Pioneer plaqueRead card

Q2061

WonderScience

In January 2025, a European team drilling at Little Dome C in Antarctica reached bedrock 2,800 metres down, recovering a continuous ice record spanning at least 1.2 million years — snow that fell long before our species existed.

Each layer holds bubbles of the actual air of its era, so the core is a direct archive of ancient atmospheres — and may explain why the planet's ice-age rhythm mysteriously slowed around a million years ago. The cores travelled to Europe at minus fifty degrees aboard an icebreaker, and laboratories across ten countries began reading them; the deepest, disturbed metres may prove older still. Somewhere in a freezer sits weather from before humanity.

Beyond EPICARead card

Q2062

WonderScience

In 2025, researchers fired laser micro-doses into volunteers' eyes to stimulate one cone type alone — a pattern natural light can never produce. Five people saw an unprecedentedly saturated blue-green beyond the normal human palette. They named it 'olo'.

Ordinary light always excites the eye's cone types in overlapping mixtures; the Berkeley 'Oz' system dodged that rule by targeting individual M cones with adaptive-optics precision. Participants could only match olo by mixing in white light to wash a real colour towards it. The name plays on 0-1-0 — only the middle cone on. Some vision scientists prefer 'an extreme saturation experience' to 'new colour'; either way, it is a hue no unaided eye will ever meet.

The 'Oz' experimentRead card

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