Your first apartment on the Moon, a sun in a bottle, and the bird that flies 70,000 km a year

Every second, the Sun fuses about 600 million tons of hydrogen into helium. Fusion power plants want to copy that trick on Earth. The fuel comes from seawater and lithium, it releases no carbon, and it can't melt down like older reactors because the reaction simply stops if anything goes wrong.

The catch is heat. Fusion needs a gas hotter than 100 million °C, held in place by magnets so it never touches the walls. In 2022 a US lab got more energy out of a fuel pellet than its lasers put in, a first. The giant ITER machine in France is still being built.

An octopus runs on three hearts. Two push blood through the gills, and the third sends it around the body. That third heart pauses while the animal swims, which is one reason octopuses would rather crawl.

Their blood is blue. It carries oxygen with a copper-based molecule called hemocyanin instead of the iron-based hemoglobin that makes ours red.

About two-thirds of an octopus's neurons live in its arms. Each arm can taste, touch and grab on its own while the central brain decides where to go. They open jars, squeeze through any gap bigger than their beak, and change color and skin texture in a fraction of a second.

Picture eight hands, each with a mind of its own, all agreeing on lunch.

Deep in your brain, a cluster of about 20,000 nerve cells keeps time on a roughly 24-hour cycle. This circadian rhythm decides when you feel alert, when your body temperature drops, and when the sleep hormone melatonin rises.

Light is its main reset button. Bright morning light tells the clock that day has begun. Screens and bright lamps late at night push it later, which is why scrolling in bed can make it harder to fall asleep.

Most adults need at least 7 hours a night. Sleep is when the brain files away memories and clears out waste that builds up during the day.

Honey never spoils. Archaeologists have found jars in Egyptian tombs that are thousands of years old and still edible.

Bananas are berries. Strawberries, botanically, are not.

Venus spins backwards compared with most planets, so the Sun rises in the west there.

Your stomach lining renews itself every few days so its own acid doesn't digest it.

Sharks are older than trees. They appear in the fossil record before the first true trees.

There are more possible chess games than atoms in the observable universe.

Around 2560 BCE, workers in Egypt finished a tomb for the pharaoh Khufu. The Great Pyramid of Giza rose about 146 meters and stayed the tallest structure humans had built for roughly 3,800 years, until England's Lincoln Cathedral passed it in the early 1300s.

It holds an estimated 2.3 million stone blocks, many weighing more than a car. Its sides line up with north, south, east and west almost perfectly.

It wasn't built by slaves, as old movies claimed. Workers' villages found nearby show paid laborers who ate bread, beer and plenty of beef, and who got medical care for injuries.

The pyramid was already ancient history to Cleopatra. She lived closer in time to the Moon landing than to its construction.

In the 1440s, Johannes Gutenberg, a goldsmith in Mainz, Germany, combined metal letters you could rearrange, oil-based ink and a press adapted from wine-making. Around 1455 his shop printed a Bible. Of roughly 180 copies, fewer than 50 survive.

Before the press, a single book could take a scribe months to copy. Within 50 years, presses across Europe had turned out millions of books. Cheaper books spread reading, science and new ideas faster than kings or churches could control them.

In southern Siberia sits a crescent of water about 636 km long and up to 1,642 meters deep. You could stack the world's tallest building on itself and it would still sink out of sight. Baikal holds roughly a fifth of the planet's unfrozen fresh surface water, more than all five North American Great Lakes combined.

At around 25 million years, it is also the oldest lake we know. That long isolation produced species found nowhere else, including the nerpa, the only seal that lives entirely in fresh water. In winter the ice is so clear and thick that cars and trucks drive across it.

The Atacama in northern Chile gets so little rain that some weather stations have barely recorded any in their history. Parts of its soil are so lifeless that NASA tests Mars rovers there.

Yet the desert is busy. Flamingos feed in pink salt lagoons, the El Tatio geysers steam at sunrise, and the dry, dark sky is so clear that some of the world's largest telescopes are built here.

The Arctic tern weighs about as much as a smartphone, yet it flies from the Arctic to Antarctica and back every year. Birds fitted with tiny trackers averaged about 70,000 km a year, zigzagging to ride the winds. Over a 30-year life, that adds up to about three round trips to the Moon.

Because it follows summer from pole to pole, the Arctic tern sees more daylight than any other animal.

Elephants hear through their feet. They make deep rumbles too low for human ears, and other elephants can pick up the vibrations through the ground, possibly from kilometers away.

The tardigrade survives space. This half-millimeter "water bear" has lived through exposure to the vacuum of space, deep freezing and years without water by drying itself into a tiny barrel.

Crows remember faces. In experiments, crows that were caught by a researcher in a mask scolded anyone wearing that mask for years afterward, and taught other crows to do the same.

The mantis shrimp packs a punch. Its club strikes so fast that the water in front of it briefly forms collapsing bubbles, giving prey a second shock. Aquariums keep them in thick tanks for a reason.

A giraffe's heart is a high-pressure pump. It has to push blood about two meters up the neck to the brain, so giraffes have some of the highest blood pressure of any animal.

Vincent van Gogh didn't start painting seriously until he was 27, and he died at 37. In that single decade he made around 860 oil paintings and more than 1,000 drawings. He sold very few while alive and depended on his brother Theo for money and paint.

He painted The Starry Night in 1889 from memory, looking out of his room at an asylum in Saint-Rémy, France. Today it hangs at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and his work is among the most valuable in the world.

Thick, visible brushstrokes were his signature. You can see the paint's ridges in his canvases.

The first movie previews were shown after the main film, so they trailed it. Audiences simply walked out, so theaters moved them to the start. The name stuck anyway.

In 1927, The Jazz Singer became the first feature film with synchronized spoken dialogue. Within a few years, silent films had nearly disappeared, and many silent stars whose voices didn't suit sound lost their careers.