We all know Miley Cyrus as one of Hollywood’s strongest and most inspiring female role models. She has taught us that we don’t need a man to feel complete, that we should always stay true to ourselves, and never be afraid to try new things. But there’s one thing she never sees herself doing — having children. Let’s find out Miley’s compelling reason for staying child-free.
While choosing the best metal to use for goods exchanging, our ancestors considered many different types. Gold seemed to be a good choice since it’s resistant to corrosion, and you can melt it over a flame, which makes it easy to stamp it as a coin or work with it in any other way. Gold is not that rare but is not easy to find and extract in larger amounts with pre-industrial technology. Geologists believe most of the Gold on our planet came from space with meteorite storms more than two billion years ago. It’s one of the densest metals on our planet, and humans have mined around 180,000 tonnes of it by now. If you want to tell if the diamond you’re holding is real or fake, breathe out on it. The genuine diamond will remain transparent, while the fake one will get foggy.
The sun is rising, lighting up the trees, swamps, and massive plants of the Yucatán Peninsula. It’s 66 million years before today — the last days of the Mesozoic era. This peaceful world doesn’t know yet that a rock the size of a mountain is nearing Earth at a speed of more than 40,000 mph [(64,000 kph)]. It looks like a fireball that’s growing larger and larger with every passing minute. Soon, it already seems to be bigger than the Sun. Dinos, roaming the prehistoric Earth, don’t know that they have to run, hide, save themselves! Not that it’s going to help.
You avoid crowds of people, try to go unseen. Every night you stay in different places. You see your face on posters all over the city. You’re everywhere, and they’re after you... No, you’re not some wanted fugitive. You’re loved by every person on the planet!
You decide to go out for a morning jog for the first time in your life. You put on your headphones and get ready for something hard and unpleasant. But as soon as you go outside, you feel an extraordinary lightness. At first, you enjoy it and speed up, but then you realize that something’s wrong. You’re running too fast and too easily. You feel like you’ve just taken off a heavy backpack that you’ve been carrying all your life. You’re so fast you think you must have a superpower now. But, you notice another athlete running as quickly as you. You notice a puddle ahead of you and jump over it. You jump so far and so high it feels physically impossible. You fall to the ground, shocked.
You check under the sofa. Nope. You open the cupboard. Not there. You lie down on the floor and sneak a peek under your bed. Nah. No kitties there, just dust bunnies. Then, where’s your cat?! Oh no, could that crazy pet slip out through the back door?A wave of panic overwhelms you, and you bolt outside. Your backyard, once green and blooming, is now covered with a thick layer of rock-hard asphalt. Several large fake plants in pots make the dull landscape somewhat more upbeat.
You can feel the waves brushing up against you. You wake up and see that you’re a giant standing up on 2 feet in the sea. So much water starts dripping down like rain. You’re way taller than the Statue of Liberty. You look at your hands and compare them to a small hot dog stand below you. You pick it up and fit it on the palm of your hand before crushing it by accident. Suddenly you feel a slight sting on your ankle. You look down and see that some people are shoving you away while most people are running away in fear. Some are taking pictures of you, while others are shouting at you to go away. You take a step to the main road and crush a car with no one inside.
The most expensive stuff in the universe — yeah, grandiose — is called anti-matter. Its existence was first theorized in 1930, when the electron was discovered. Scientists thought it might mean the exact opposite should exist too, and they called this hypothetical particle “positron.” Later, antipodes of other elementary particles, protons and neutrons, were proven to exist as well.When a particle and its evil twin collide with each other, they disappear, releasing literal tons of energy — 10,000 times more than a nuclear reaction does. But there’s a catch: it takes about 100 billion years to create just 1 g of anti-matter, and it can only be created using the Large Hadron Collider. That’s why the cost of this substance is about $62 trillion bucks. And we’re not even close to getting that much!Throughout the entire history of space observation, only two objects from another star system, or maybe even another galaxy, have entered our Solar System. The first one was the Oumuamua asteroid, discovered in 2017. The second was Borisov — a comet found in August 2019. The cloud of dust that surrounds it allows scientists to learn more about substances that may have come to us from another galaxy.
The sky is burning... The world’s oceans are foaming... Thunder and lightning are shaking the air... Two of the most terrible and powerful monsters collide in a duel. A harbinger of the end of the world! Just the sight of this monster can drive anyone mad. Great and atrocious Cthulhu! And the biggest squid on the planet is fighting against it! A beast that knows no fear because it’s fear itself! The cause of a thousand shipwrecks. The mighty and hideous Kraken! Let the most epic fight in the history of the Universe begin!
If you landed on Mercury, the first thing you’d notice would be how close it is to the Sun. It’s actually the closest planet to the big ball of fire and the smallest. But it’s not the hottest planet. Venus takes credit for that. It takes Earth 365 days to orbit the Sun, and it takes Mercury more than 3 months. Well, 88 days, to be exact. The days are boiling hot, with the temperature reaching above 800 °F (425 °C). But on the other side of the planet that the Sun doesn’t reach, the temperatures drop to −300 °F (-180 °C). Mercury’s atmosphere can’t hold any heat when it’s nighttime, just like a desert. Deserts have no atmosphere, which is why they have no moisture, and no clouds or rain.If you manage to get from one end of the planet to the other and always stay in between the scorching heat and freezing cold, then you can survive. But oxygen isn’t a friend to Mercury’s atmosphere. So you’d just live for as long as you can hold your breath. Plus, there’s a magnetic field that has solar winds from the Sun that create plasma tornadoes.
The world is full of ordinary things, but every once in a while, we come across something truly bizarre that makes us question our perception of reality. We’ll explore some of the weirdest captures from around the world, showcasing just how astonishing our planet can be.
Imagine leaving your house one morning and seeing not one but 2 stars shining in the sky! The first one is our good old Sun, and the other is... Jupiter! But how has a PLANET turned into a star? And what will now happen to Earth and its inhabitants? Before we find the answer to these urgent questions, we need to revise some things we know about Jupiter. The largest planet in the Solar System is a gas giant, which means it’s made up mostly of gases. Due to the pressure and temperature differences, these gases separate into layers. This creates those red and white bands that can be clearly seen from Earth.
Humanity’s facing the greatest danger ever. Our Sun’s fading. In 500 years, the entire Solar System will be plunged into darkness and eternal cold. To save our civilization, people begin to build a huge spaceship that will accommodate the population of the whole world inside, and go into deep space. In less than 400 years, the construction of the ship is finally completed. The Sun is already nearing its end — it’s much smaller and cooler, making the climate on Earth cold and harsh. You and the rest of the inhabitants of the planet are going to board the greatest ship in history.
The hunt for interesting exoplanets and life forms somewhere out there in the vast expanse of the Universe keeps going; no stopping here! We’re basically searching for a second Earth — a planet that’s similar to our home and where we could finally find some space friends. We’re not picky, any form of life is fine, even some bacteria-sized organisms. And this search has mostly been going on in the habitable zone around other stars. We also call this the Goldilocks zone. That’s a region where conditions are “bearly” just right for liquid water to exist, whether we’re talking about the surface of a planet or a moon.
Imagine a planet where every breath you take electrifies your body like a shot of espresso. The sky above you is an intense shade of blue, while colossal trees stretch towards the heavens, their vibrant green leaves growing at an astonishing rate. Daily exercise becomes a thrill like no other. With the abundance of oxygen, you become a supercharged version of yourself. Running feels effortless as you dart across the landscape, lifting weights that would normally seem impossible. It’s as if the world itself is infused with a surge of energy. Everything is moving faster.
The Sun is rising, lighting up the trees, swamps, and massive plants of the Yucatán Peninsula. It’s 66 million years before today — and the last days of the Mesozoic era. This peaceful world doesn’t know yet that a rock the size of a mountain is hurtling toward Earth at a speed of more than 40,000 mph. It looks like a fireball. It’s growing larger and larger with every passing minute. Soon, it seems bigger than the Sun. Dinosaurs roaming the prehistoric Earth don’t know yet that they have to run, hide, save themselves! Not that it’s going to help.
Did you know that humans are real space people? You were born in Space. Heck, even I was born in Space. We all were born in Space! But for humans to be here on Earth, so many conditions have to be precisely correct that it is highly improbable that we even exist. But we do. First, we — and any other space creatures who might be out there — have to live on a planet orbiting a yellow-ish white star, not a red star or a blue star. Not a blue star because they burn out too quickly — in a few million years — there wouldn’t be time for evolution to do its relatively slow magic and produce intelligent beings. Blue stars also tend to swell up and turn red — when they collapse and explode! It makes it highly unlikely that any civilization could prosper near a blue star.
Ah, yes. February 14, 2000. Just a regular Valentine’s Day, some flowers and some candy, the beginning of the new millennium, and... A good day to make history. NEAR Shoemaker (which stands for Near-Earth Asteroid Rendezvous) spacecraft, launched in 1996 [February], finally got a date with asteroid 433 Eros. It wasn’t about swiping right but going around Eros and completing the first soft landing on an asteroid ever.NEAR almost didn’t make it there, because an engine misfire from 1998 brought it into the wrong trajectory, and it missed the target. Yet, engineers decided to let NEAR do the circle around the Sun for one more year — and it eventually made it.NEAR Shoemaker was created to find, target, and stalk some smaller space objects for around a year and collect important data about them. This spacecraft got more than 160,000 pictures of the asteroid’s surface which helped with research in the years to come — before that, some scientists took asteroids for just some random flying piles.
So you’re going on a journey to a black hole? You will need a lot of provisions because the nearest black hole is 1,011 light-years away. This black pearl was found in the solar system called HR 6819. It was hidden in orbit with two other stars, which you can see with the human eye. Scientists have been studying this system since the 80s, but this winter, it revealed its main secret. This particular black hole is considered relatively small. But despite this, its mass is four times bigger than our Sun, and it’s 2,500 light-years closer to Earth than the next nearest black hole.
If there were cataclysms on Earth every 5 minutes, living conditions on our planet would be almost the same as 4.5 billion years ago. Back then, seas and oceans boiled, lightning struck everywhere, tectonic plates changed their shape, lava flowed from volcanoes. And worse, no internet! The Earth resembled a vast, boiling cauldron, where life was gradually being created. If it starts to boil again, this cauldron could destroy almost all life on the planet.
You’re strapped in a Spaceship that’ll take you all the way to Pluto for your galaxy backpacking trip. It’s the longest journey from Earth and without any shortcuts, so you’ll have to get quite comfy. It’s recommended for everyone aboard to have at least 8 hours of sleep at night.Astronauts in the International Space Station have little rooms suitable for 1 person with special sleeping bags and enough room for personal belongings. If they don’t, they’ll float, bumping into each other.
Something’s moving towards our planet that could end all life on Earth. It’s a regular needle weighing about 5 grams. You’re probably wondering why it’s so dangerous. Can something that small really do any harm? It’s hard to say, because it’s moving at the speed of light, and we don’t really know what will happen when it hits.That’s because the idea itself is hypothetical, so it leaves us with a bunch of questions. Here’s the first one: What happens to a sewing needle in space? Could it actually accelerate to the speed of light? The short answer is no. But it’s not that simple. In our universe, nothing that has mass can reach the speed of light. It takes energy to make any object go faster. Since there can’t be an infinite amount of energy, nothing can ever accelerate that much.
Why is Australia so strangely empty? Why haven’t we discovered so much of the Ocean? Is our planet a perfect sphere? And was the Earth once more purple than green? I bet you didn’t know these facts about our planet, so let’s find it all out!
It’s there, I finally see it, for the first time in my life! A grayish body far away in the sky, hidden behind the clouds, the size of 1-4 of a full moon. It won’t be there for long, the last time it was there was 33 years ago — and we’ll have to wait for 33 years more to see it again.Tellus, the mysterious planet humankind still have so much to learn about. For a long time, Earth was the only planet quietly traveling its circular orbit around the center of our Solar System, the Sun. Our solar system was generally a pretty stable place. Jupiter, Saturn, Mars, and other planets — they all acted in a predictable way, always the same orbits. Until some time ago something unexpected happened — another planet entered the Earth’s orbit.
The ocean is turning red-hot! You try to get closer for a better look, but you start feeling the air getting hotter and hotter like reaching into an oven! And the sand is so hot that your rubber slippers start melting! The ocean’s somehow turned into steamy hot gooey lava! You start running inland and see a frenzy of people running wild. See in reality, lava is made of molten rocks from below the earth’s surface. Deep inside our planet, like the distance between New York and Philadelphia deep, the underground heat from the core melts rocks the same way the sun melts ice cream. When these rocks melt, their temperatures can reach around 2,200 °F! [(1,200 °C)]
You’ve spent your entire life researching microorganisms. The last few years, you have been creating a device that can shrink you in size. And finally, it’s ready. At first, you want to shrink yourself to the size of a thumb, so you can probably see some microbes with the unaided eye. And then, after more experimenting, you hope to shrink to the size of a bacterium yourself. To make the journey safe, you put on a special suit, similar to a space suit. It’s equipped with a life support system.You direct a beam from the device at yourself. The beam must change your mass and volume. To return to the previous state, you must stand on a round platform the size of a hockey puck. You put it near your feet, so you can easily climb on it when you get smaller, press the button, and activate the machine.
We fly away from Earth to look at it from a distance. It glows like a holiday tree! Big cities look like yellow spots at night. And during the day we see strange structures, like a palm tree-shaped island in the UAE or a dark band that runs all the way through China — the Great Wall. These are traces of human existence. Now let’s point our telescope at other planets. Mars? It’s just an empty, endless desert. Venus? Only rocks and volcanoes. Even if we look into distant space, all the planets out there are deserted and lifeless. Not a single trace of an extraterrestrial civilization.
You’re standing on the bridge of your super-modern spaceship. Today, your mission is to fly to the uncharted areas of space. You travel past beautiful nebulae, spinning pulsars, and black holes. Soon, you’ll arrive at the planet where life might exist in the most unusual forms. You’ll “shake hands” with a strange bug the size of an elephant and maybe even establish diplomatic relations with it. This might happen in the future. For now, humanity is just trying to get farther into space.People first took to the air in 1783 when French engineers built the world’s first hot air balloon. But it only rose above the ground for a third of the height of the Statue of Liberty. In 1903, the Wright brothers made the first flight in a controlled airplane. Since then, people have been reaching higher and higher. These days, modern airplanes can climb to an altitude of 8 miles! It’s like 34 Empire State Buildings stacked one on top of another.
Hey, if I said “what time is it?”, you’ll probably look at your phone, laptop screen, or wristwatch to find out. But how do these devices know the time? In your devices, the time is set automatically by the program. But how does this program know the exact time? People set up wristwatches before the sale. But then how do these people know the time? (Does anybody really know what time it is? Hey there’s a song there.) Anyway, how do we determine this time, and what happens if all the clocks in the world stop? Wait a minute! Or longer...
You’re dozing off in your window seat on a plane — it’s getting dark since it’s almost 11 PM. Suddenly, something wakes you up. You glance out of the window and see a really strange phenomenon. Something that creeps you out... There are bright red huge flashes illuminating the sky at a distance. They resemble some nightmarish jellyfish. Those are sprites — also called red sprites due to their color. They’re also known as cloud-to-space lightning. These varied visual shapes flickering in the night sky are large-scale electric discharges (which is a clever word for a lightning strike).
All over the world, 1.5 billion single-use plastic cotton buds are produced each day. Let’s start with a small step and switch to ecological substitutes for everyday products.
Did you use to make sandcastles at the beach when you were little? The structure had a moat, so you needed to dig deep. While holding a plastic shovel, you probably thought: How deep can I go? Well, this question motivated a group of scientists in the Far East. They have decided to dig the deepest hole in their home country [China].
A picture taken at the right place at the right time can send our brain onto “planet confusion.” Strange angles and hard-to-understand perspectives can really mess with our eyes and make us see things that don’t make sense. Whether it’s floating babies or seagulls carrying humans in their beaks — you might think we’re going off-topic and into fantasy scenarios, but we’re just showing things as they are.
Our planet is one big museum and Mother Nature is the primary artist. Every now and then, she creates extraordinary pieces to remind us of her incredible power. All we need to do is look around to see the “Easter eggs” she left for us to find.
Our busy lives have blinded us — hiding what’s happening around us. That’s why, in a way, satirical illustrations about the modern world can actually help us do better. They could awaken feelings of compassion and sympathy toward people and our planet. And this, in turn, might give us a push to take a step and change things in a good way.
In the modern world, it’s hard to find a person that has never heard of minimalism. To put it simply, it’s a lifestyle whose purpose is to have as few things as possible — only those that are really necessary or that make us really happy. Minimalism can be adopted as a way to show that we care about our planet, because buying fewer things or buying high-quality things leads to reducing the amount of waste we produce, and taking care of our health and our environment.
