JSC/NASA
Michael Collins, one of the three crew members of the first manned mission to the moon, has died at the age of 90.
Known as the “the loneliest man in history”, Collins was the pilot of the Apollo 11 mission, which in 1969 put humans on the moon for the first time. Although he never became a household name like his crew mates Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, Collins’ contribution to the mission was just as important.
As his colleagues Armstrong and Aldrin descended to the surface of the moon, Collins piloted the command module Columbia, spending close to 28 hours alone in orbit.
Public Domain Mark/Wellcome Collection
Marie Curie was a physicist and chemist who became the first woman to win a Nobel prize. Along with her husband Pierre, she discovered two elements: polonium and radium. She also carried out pioneering research into radioactivity. At the time no one knew about the effects of radioactivity on the body, so they handled the elements they used in their research without any of the precautions or protective clothing we would use today. Curie even kept vials of what she was working on in her pockets or her desk drawers. More than 100 years after their discoveries, the couple’s notebooks are still so radioactive they have to be kept in lead-lined boxes and handled only while wearing protective clothing.
Dmitry Epov / Alamy
Starting in 2005, Georg Steinhauser – then a chemist at the Vienna University of Technology – collected pieces of belly-button fluff from his navel and recorded their colour and weight. Over the next three years he collected 503 pieces of lint, weighing almost a gram in total.
Eventually, he sent some of his lint off for chemical analysis, and published his findings in a scientific journal. And all in the interests of answering the question: why do some people find so much fuzz in their belly buttons? The answer, it appears, depends on your clothing and how hairy your navel is.
Orcas (
orcinus orca) are aquatic mammals that can grow up to 8 metres in length, with a dorsal fin that stands up to 1.8 metres tall. But despite being commonly known as killer whales, these intelligent apex predators are actually the largest member of the dolphin family.
Highly intelligent, orcas can live in a variety of marine environments all over the world, adapting their diet and hunting habits to better suit their surroundings. It’s not just their appetite that changes, either, they communicate in distinct ‘dialects’, and animals from different populations don’t often interbreed. This makes them the only known non-human species whose culture shapes evolution.
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