Tag: FlipFact
(Periodic) pillar of victory: The elements used in prize medals
Daniel dela Cruz Consider the three metals used in medals for various competitions and academic awards, and look at where…
Ada Lovelace: Meet the ‘Prophet of the Computer Age’
Alfred Edward Chalon To this day, people still dispute whether or not Ada Lovelace was the first computer programmer. To…
Vaccines work. That’s exactly how we eradicated smallpox
Getty Images On December 9, 1979, a global commission of scientists confirmed the eradication of a 3,000-year-old killer. Lethal, incurable,…
Meet the monotremes: a particularly peculiar group of mammals
iStock Aside from being colorful cartoon characters, Perry the Platypus and Knuckles the Echidna have one more thing in common:…
‘The Blue Marble’: the story of Earth’s most iconic photo
Eugene Cernan, Ron Evans, and Harrisson Schmitt/NASA On December 7, 1972, a space shutterbug snapped a stolen shot that shocked…
How tough is a pangolin’s keratin scale armor?
Gregg Yan/Wikimedia Commons They’re scaly, they’re small, and they can curl up into a ball: Indeed, pangolins are curious little…
How much life is in a handful of soil?
Agriland We may not realize this often, but soil, particularly the fertile kind, is teeming with life. It’s the same…
Leucism vs. albinism: What’s the difference?
Roaring Earth Have you ever seen an animal that’s almost entirely white, even though they’re typically much more colorful? What…
The mystery of Cr-17: A 430,000-year-old homicide?
Javier Trueba/Madrid Scientific Films No one could have expected that a skull fragment from a Spanish cave would unearth a…
Jaquet-Droz’s automata: Eerily lifelike 18th century ‘robots’ (that still work today)
Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0 FR) At the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire de Neuchâtel in Switzerland are three automated…
