Author: administración

In the small hours of 2 September 1859, a telegraph operator in Portland, Maine disconnected his batteries because they were throwing sparks, and then discovered he could still send a clean message to Boston using nothing but the current the aurora was pushing through the wire above his head.

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On the morning of 2 September 1859, telegraph operators along the American East Coast began arguing with their own equipment. Sparks were jumping from the keys. Paper tape was scorching. Operators reported jolts strong enough to knock them back from their desks. And then, after the batteries were disconnected, the lines kept working anyway, humming with current that had no human source. The current was coming from the sky. What the operators were feeling, and what astronomer Richard Carrington had watched erupt from the surface of the Sun the previous morning from his private observatory in Redhill, England, was the…

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The Hollywood sign originally read HOLLYWOODLAND when it was built in 1923 as a real estate advertisement for a housing development, and it was only meant to stand for 18 months, but nobody ever got around to taking it down and the city eventually adopted it as a landmark

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The Hollywood sign that crowns Mount Lee in Los Angeles started life in 1923 as a flashing real estate billboard for a suburban subdivision called Hollywoodland, a hillside tract being promoted by Los Angeles Times publisher Harry Chandler and his development partners. According to the Hollywood Sign Trust, the sign was built as a $21,000 billboard for Chandler’s upscale real estate development and was intended to last just 18 months. The original letters were huge, rough, and temporary by design. They stood about 45 feet tall, were faced with sheet metal, supported by poles and scaffolding, and were wired with…

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A Japanese man named Jiroemon Kimura, who lived to 116, was born in 1897 when Queen Victoria still ruled and died in 2013, meaning a single human life personally overlapped with the invention of the airplane, the atomic bomb, the internet, and Instagram

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Jiroemon Kimura was born on April 19, 1897, in a small village near Kyotango on the Sea of Japan coast, six years before the Wright brothers’ first powered flight at Kitty Hawk and during the 60th year of Queen Victoria’s reign. He died on June 12, 2013, at age 116 years and 54 days, in a hospital bed in the same Kyoto Prefecture where he had been born, and the family members gathered around him carried smartphones that could stream video to the other side of the planet. He held the Guinness record for the oldest verified man in recorded…

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Suzanne Simard sealed paper birch and Douglas fir seedlings inside plastic bags, fed them carbon-14 and carbon-13 dioxide, and nine days later found carbon had crossed between species through fungal threads in the British Columbia soil beneath her boots

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Suzanne Simard’s 1997 forest experiment did not show trees whispering to each other. It showed something narrower, stranger, and easier to test: carbon that began in the air around a paper birch seedling later appeared inside a neighbouring Douglas fir, after passing through roots and fungal tissue in the soil. The experiment, published in Nature in August 1997, used two carbon labels in the field. Paper birch and Douglas fir seedlings were sealed in plastic labelling chambers, exposed to carbon-14 dioxide or carbon-13 dioxide, left for a nine-day chase period, then harvested and analysed to see where the labelled carbon…

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