On the 21st July 1976, NASA released the very first colour image taken by the Viking 1 lander from the surface of Mars.

And....wait, what?

The Martian sky is BLUE?

1/ This is obviously not what anyone was expecting. Mars is...

Well, you can see it for yourself on a clear night, with your naked eye. It's noticeably red - about as red as Betelgeuse, tenth-brightest star in our night sky.

No blue. So - what? WHAT?

2/

You know the BEST thing about ancient history? All that pristine grey-white stone! SO CLASSY AND REGAL.

Look at this gorgeously monochrome scene from 'Gladiator'. Just look at how *right* it looks.

Yeah. Except - no. Get ready for a shock.

1/ In the middle of the Parthenon in Athens, the ancient Greek sculptor Phidias (480 – 430 BC) built a gigantic statue of Athena Parthenosos, about 11 metres high.

Alas, nothing remains of it today. But there are enough accounts of its construction to make a replica...

2/

When my Zanclean Megaflood thread went nuts in February, some folk said "look into a thing called Atlantropa! It's just as mindblowing!"

They weren't wrong. And now I can't get *this* story out my head either.

So, once more, here we go.

1/ It's 1928.

This is German architect Herman Sörgel. Horrified by the First World War, keen to see everyone put down their weapons & actually, properly work together for a change, he's just had a idea that would solve *everything*.

He's going to drain the Mediterranean.

2/

There's a vast patch of seagrass off the coast of Australia (3 x the size of Manhattan) - and now genetic testing has discovered it's a *single plant* around 4,500 years old:

bbc.co.uk/news/world-aus…

But incredibly, this isn't our planet's biggest living organism...

1/ Oooh. Actually, I might be dead wrong on this. Last I heard, there are single examples of honey fungus in Oregon & Russia that hold that title:

scientificamerican.com/article/strang…

(The Oregon fungus could be up to 8,650 years old, which makes us look a bit like mayflies in comparison.)

If today's a slow one, how about a stroll along the world's longest mountain chain?

No, not Himalaya (2,500km). And not the Andes (7,000km) either.

This one's....65,000km long.

But it's ok. We'll just do a bit of it.

1/ We start in Iceland. (Credit: flickr.com/photos/sackerm…)

OK, I lied. It's only really here can you walk along it: the Þingvellir National Park, where, geologically speaking, North America & Europe are slowly drifting apart.

Enjoy the sunshine! There's none where we're going.

2/

Off of the news that Twitter is banning advertisements that contradict the scientific consensus on climate change (washingtonpost.com/technology/202…) and the inevitable kerfuffle, a distinction worth noting:

Denialism is not the same as healthy, questioning criticism. Not at all.

1/ This gets incredibly complicated and tangled, but - whenever something is contradicting the consensus with *absolute certainty*, it's probably bullshit. Utter certainty is the smoking gun there.

No curiosity, no interested questions, no willingness to be proven wrong.

2/

I thought I knew the story of the "lost world" off the east coast of Britain, inhabited by Mesolithic people until rising sea waters engulfed it around 8,000 years ago...

But I didn't know about the *tsunami*.

Holy hell.

1/

(Image: bigissue.com/opinion/discov…) What follows is my imperfect grasp of things. Imperfect because I'm just an enthusiast who likes science - and also imperfect because, excitingly, *the work is happening right now*, in one of the greatest prehistoric archaeological investigations in history.

2/

I recently learned something mindblowing about the geological history of the Mediterranean Sea, and I just can't get it out of my head.

Now I'm going to make it *your* problem too. Sorry.

Hang onto your hat. This is wild.

1/ This is the Strait of Gibraltar, where Europe and Africa reach out to *almost* touch each other.

At this point there's only 13 km/ 8 miles between them - and it's where the Med feeds into the Atlantic.

Imagine if something absurdly Roland-Emmerichy happened & it closed up?

2/

The first time I saw the Northern Lights in real-time, like many folk, I was shocked. "But - I thought they moved slowly, like clouds?"

As you can see: not so much:

https://twitter.com/RomppainenJari/status/1483076545950408710

So I got curious. What else don't I know about these amazing things?

1/ Firstly: they're not just green.

Different heights of our atmosphere = different gases, & when charged particles from the sun excite gases at different altitudes, you get different colours.

*Wildly* different. Blue, pink, purple, yellow and (rarely) red.

I had no idea.

2/

With the best illusions, you can know how they're done and yet your mind's still immediately flummoxed.

This is my favourite. Those table legs? Impossible - but absolutely real. (This is a *photo*.)

An appreciation 🧵for the oldest trick in the book:

1/ Here is Professor Brian Cox CBE OBE (far right of pic) in his former p/t job (1986-1992).

I post this to illustrate that scientists still have *all sorts* of backgrounds, including in the Arts...

(And maybe also because this photo is amazing. Which it certainly is.)

2/

It’s December 4th, 2016, and American chess Grandmaster Timur Gareyev is dozens of moves into a game against his human opponents.

That's "opponents", plural. He's playing 48 people simultaneously, on 48 boards.

But that's the least wild thing going on here...

🧵1/ Gareyev is also pedalling away hard on an exercise bike.

The mind's deeply connected to the body (or indeed *is* the body). Work up a sweat to send your thinking into overdrive.

He'll do this for 19 hours.

This is still not the wildest thing.

2/

It's common for writers under terrifying deadline pressure to rely a bit too much on Wikipedia? Ahem. Easily done. It can't be TOO far wrong?

But a few months ago, researching a newsletter, I learned just how disastrous this can be.

An alarming 🧵 with good, hard LOLs:

1/ I'm old enough to remember t'days before t'Internet (black & white, everyone walked really fast, piano music etc) so I can emphatically say I love Wikipedia.

An encyclopedia edited by nearly 200,000 people - and it's *readable*? (And democratic?)

I'm a fan.

But...

2/

In January of this year, photos started bouncing round the internet of this deeply weird thing happening in the sky above Glasgow. Photoshop trickery?

The bizarre truth:
- yes, everyone really saw these
- no, they're not faked or manmade
- they absolutely don't exist.

🧵

1/ Here's the same thing happening above London (the other one, in Ontario, Canada) in 2018.

Again: these *aren't* spotlights shining upwards. They alse aren't the Northern Lights.

Also, they aren't actually there, even though everyone can see them.

Deep, deep weirdness.

2/

I just wrote a piece about pareidolia, the "you can't unsee this" bias...

everythingisamazing.substack.com/p/why-everywhe…

...and all the examples I found are delightful, ludicrous and worrying! (It's amazing how completely it hijacks our mind.)

I dare you to unsee the following examples.

1/ In 1994, Diana Duyser of Florida spotted...something in her grilled cheese sandwich (the "Holy Toast").

She immediately did what any of us would do: packed it in cotton wool & waited for eBay to be invented, so she could auction it to online casino Golden Palace for $28,000.

2/

Seeing the Northern Lights is one thing - but have you ever seen a *city* up there?

Yes, like that scene in ep. 1 of 'His Dark Materials'.

Because here's the weird thing: they exist. You can indeed see cities in the sky. There's actual science on this.

Stay with me. 🧵(1/) That’s what Jesuit priest Father Domenico Giardina saw on August 14, 1643. Looking across the Strait of Messina (Sicily), he beheld “a city all floating in the air...so splendid, so adorned with magnificent buildings, all of which was found on a base of a luminous crystal.”

2/

Last week, I got seriously obsessed with what, at first glance, looks like a really daft question:

What does the Internet actually *look* like?

All the ways to answer this are fascinating and full of surprises. Here are some in a thread:

1/ Here is the simplest, most straightforward and wrongest answer.

It looks like the box in the corner of your room that you sit in front of every day, "enjoying" its contents.

Devoid of context, that's what my senses tell me. But obviously this is absurd. Let's move on.

2/

Do you use Metric or Imperial measurements?

This week, after a lifetime of unwavering loyalty to Metric, I dug in - & now my mind’s blown. Now I get why folk cling to Imperial.

(And also why Napoleon was taller than he’s given credit for.)

Get comfy. It’s a long one.

(1/) First, let’s call Metric what it was: a sensible act of revolutionary rationalism.

Europe before the French Revolution was a pig's ear of measurement systems: at least 250,000 (!) in France alone. Every region of every country used something a bit different.

Carnage.

(2/)

Ever wondered why North is at the top of our maps?

If you're assuming there are logical, scientific, Nature-driven reasons for it - yeah, I did too.

In fact, they're whimsical, arbitrary or just plain ridiculous.

Hold onto your hat. This may turn your world upside-down.

(1/) We start in 1154 AD. Arab geographer Muhammad al-Idrisi is about to publish a very special book. A book describing the entire known world.

It's as heavy on calculations as it is on narrative.

And thanks to a map made of solid silver, just plain *heavy*.

(2/)

A deeply weird thing I learned this week:

There is a place, a tiny hamlet at a road intersection north of Roscoe, N.Y., that simultaneously & without any contradiction, does and doesn't exist.

everythingisamazing.substack.com/p/the-imaginar…

(1/) It turns out that our maps are invisibly littered with places that don't exist.

Here's a photo of one: the village of Argleton, West Lancashire.

Now, if you squint *really hard*...

No, please don't do that. It's an empty field.

(2/)

Thanks to the first volume of Michael Palin's diaries, I've just discovered the glory of one of the greatest travel pieces in British publishing history.

In early April 1977, The Guardian published a 7-page travel supplement on this "little-known" island nation:

(1/) Great attention should be paid to the place names being used here.

Also that this is 1977, and web design wasn't a thing yet.

(2/)

One thing a life in the UK poorly prepares you for: when Autumn turns to Winter in the Mediterranean, it generally does so with a BANG. Last night here in Corfu, a storm punched through, and I lost a table and nearly all my underwear.
(1/) At 5am I wake. The house is vibrating like the god-emperor of all washing machines is on spin in the basement. Something smashes outside in a twinkly way. I peer through the curtains. Rain howls past my face. Then the balcony table flips past, hits the railing and explodes.
(2/)