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88 illustrations
In January 2005, Albert Pujols was already one of the most feared hitters in Major League Baseball. He had won three Silver Slugger awards and...
In 1824, Ludwig van Beethoven stood before an orchestra in Vienna to conduct the premiere of his Ninth Symphony. He was almost completely deaf. He...
In May 1992, a mortar shell struck a bread line in Sarajevo, killing twenty-two people who had simply stepped outside to feed their families. The...
Every smartphone ships with dozens of pre-installed apps. Most of them sit untouched in folders we never open. But every now and then, you discover...
Fanny Crosby was blind from the age of six weeks, the result of a country doctor's mistake when he treated an eye infection with the...
In the 1990s, during the siege of Sarajevo, a cellist named Vedran Smailovic did something the world never forgot. After a mortar shell killed twenty-two...
In Victor Hugo's *Les Misérables*, Jean Valjean stumbles into the home of Bishop Myriel after nineteen years in prison. The bishop feeds him, gives him...
In 1962, British biologist John Gurdon made a discovery that would eventually earn him the Nobel Prize. He demonstrated that every cell in a frog's...
In 2012, biochemist Jennifer Doudna and microbiologist Emmanuelle Charpentier described something remarkable hiding inside bacteria — a molecular system called CRISPR-Cas9. It works like a...
In 1977, NASA launched Voyager 1 on a mission made possible by a rare planetary alignment that occurs only once every 175 years. Scientists had...
When NASA engineers built the James Webb Space Telescope, they didn't use a single massive mirror. Instead, they crafted eighteen individual hexagonal segments, each one...
Three minutes before Eagle touched down on the lunar surface in July 1969, alarms started blaring inside the spacecraft. The Apollo 11 guidance computer was...
When NASA launched the James Webb Space Telescope in December 2021, engineers faced an extraordinary challenge. The telescope had to travel nearly a million miles...
Every autumn, tens of millions of monarch butterflies lift off from meadows across North America and travel up to 3,000 miles to a cluster of...
In 1977, NASA launched Voyager 1 into space carrying a golden phonograph record. Carl Sagan and his team curated 115 images, greetings in 55 languages,...
For decades, scientists dismissed roughly 98 percent of human DNA as "junk." It didn't code for proteins, so they assumed it served no purpose —...
Look at your hands for a moment. Spread your fingers wide. In the earliest weeks of your development in the womb, those fingers didn't exist...
In 1857, Joseph Scriven wrote a poem for his mother back in Ireland. She was going through a difficult season, and he was thousands of...
In 2018, astronomers confirmed something remarkable about a star called S2. This star orbits the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way...
By the time Ludwig van Beethoven composed his Ninth Symphony — arguably the most celebrated piece of music in Western history — he was completely...
In 1824, Ludwig van Beethoven stood before an orchestra in Vienna to conduct the premiere of his Ninth Symphony. He was almost completely deaf. He...
In December 1995, astronomer Robert Williams made a decision his colleagues thought was foolish. As director of the Space Telescope Science Institute, he pointed the...
In 1995, astronomer Robert Williams made a decision that many of his colleagues thought was foolish. He pointed the Hubble Space Telescope at a tiny...
In Victor Hugo's masterpiece *Les Misérables*, there is a pivotal moment when Jean Valjean — a hardened ex-convict consumed by bitterness — is shown unexpected...