Archive

Month: August 2026

Fact The Great Wall of China is not visible from space It is long, but it is only a few metres wide and the same colour as the ground. 1 min read Fact About seven per cent of all humans who ever lived are alive now Not the majority, as the popular claim goes - but a startling share. 1 min read Fact Anaesthesia is younger than the United States Surgery before 1846 was conducted on fully conscious patients. 1 min read Fact Harvard was founded before calculus was invented 1636. Newton and Leibniz came decades later. 1 min read Fact Nintendo is older than the fall of the Ottoman Empire Founded in 1889, making playing cards. 1 min read Fact France used the guillotine in the same year Star Wars was released September 1977. The last legal execution by blade in the Western world. 1 min read Fact The fax machine predates the telephone Patented in 1843, more than thirty years before the telephone. 1 min read Fact Oxford University is older than the Aztec Empire Teaching began there roughly two centuries before Tenochtitlan was founded. 1 min read Fact Woolly mammoths were still alive when the pyramids were built A surviving population on a Siberian island outlasted them by centuries. 1 min read Fact Cleopatra lived closer to the Moon landing than to the pyramids The Great Pyramid was already ancient history to her. 1 min read