History

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From 0 to 5,000 Planets in Exactly 20 Years

Twenty years ago today, an invisible object circling an obscure star in the constellation Pegasus overturned everything astronomers knew about planets around other stars. No, the fallout was even bigger than that. The indirect detection of 51 Pegasi b—the first planet ever found around a star similar to the sun—revealed that they had never really known anything to begin with.

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The oldest galaxies in the universe

More than 12 billion years ago, a sea of stars fell into orbit around a baby black hole, and became a galaxy, one of the first.

The formation of this galaxy, and others like it, was a momentous event in cosmic evolution. This galaxy and its brethren helped to clear hydrogen gas left over from the Big Bang, making our universe transparent to light.

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The Future of News Is Not An Article

Creating news for the current and future media landscape means considering the time scales of our reporting in much more innovative ways. Information should accumulate upon itself; documents should have ways of reacting to new reporting or information; and we should consider the consumption behavior of our users as one that takes place at all cadences, not simply as a daily update.

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You shouldn’t kill baby Hitler

I have often felt that most of historical Hitler’s difficulty stems from a life spent constantly fending off assassination attempts from the future, an effort that doubtless left him paranoid and exhausted. Do I have proof for this? Well, no, obviously, but it seems right, doesn’t it?

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Why ‘Mom’ and ‘Dad’ Sound So Similar in So Many Languages

The word for “mother” seems often either to be mama or have a nasal sound similar to m, like nana. The word for “father” seems often either to be papa or have a sound similar to p, like b, in it—such that you get something likebaba. The word for “dad” may also have either d or t, which is a variation on saying d, just as p is on b. People say mama or nana, and then papa, baba, dada, ortata, worldwide.

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Kitchen specs: sexist?

One of those engineers, Christine Frederick, studied women at work to create a chart pairing work-surface height with woman height; a 5-foot-6 women, for instance, would be most comfortable with her countertops and the bottom of her sink 31 inches from the floor. Correct heights, combined with efficient kitchen layouts, could make cooking slightly less of a burden, she wrote.

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Should Men Have the Vote?

At the start of 1896, Ontario’s women’s suffrage movement found itself lacking momentum. Seeking to reignite public interest, the local branch of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, with the assistance of the Women’s Enfranchisement Association, staged an unusual production at the Pavilion of the Horticultural Gardens. On the evening of February 18, 1896, seats and desks were arranged on the floor of the Pavilion so as to resemble the Ontario Legislature. The central feature of the evening’s entertainment was the staging of a satirical mock parliament, in which an all-female parliament debated whether men should be granted the right to vote.