Browsing: Saving Tips

In November 1988, an unmanned Soviet space shuttle called Buran flew a full orbital mission and landed itself in a blizzard at Baikonur without a single human input, and three years later the country that built it no longer existed.

Saving Tips June 1, 2026

On the morning of November 15, 1988, a Soviet spacecraft named Buran lifted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan,…

When Boeing 747-400 pilots needed to update their navigation database as late as 2020, a technician would walk onto the flight deck with eight 3.5-inch floppy disks and feed them one at a time into a slot beside the captain’s seat, because recertifying anything newer than the 1989 avionics would have cost hundreds of millions of dollars.

Saving Tips June 1, 2026

As recently as 2020, updating a Boeing 747-400’s navigation database meant a technician boarding the aircraft every 28 days with…

In 1992, a container ship leaving Hong Kong lost 28,800 plastic bath toys overboard in the North Pacific, and oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer spent the next two decades tracking yellow ducks and blue turtles as they washed up in Alaska, Maine, and eventually the coast of Scotland, quietly rewriting the textbook map of ocean currents.

Saving Tips June 1, 2026

On January 10, 1992, a container ship hit a violent storm somewhere near the International Date Line on its way…

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.

Saving Tips June 1, 2026

On the morning of 2 September 1859, telegraph operators along the American East Coast began arguing with their own equipment.…

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

Saving Tips June 1, 2026

The Hollywood sign that crowns Mount Lee in Los Angeles started life in 1923 as a flashing real estate billboard…

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

Saving Tips May 31, 2026

Jiroemon Kimura was born on April 19, 1897, in a small village near Kyotango on the Sea of Japan coast,…

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

Saving Tips May 31, 2026

Suzanne Simard’s 1997 forest experiment did not show trees whispering to each other. It showed something narrower, stranger, and easier…

The Voyager 1 spacecraft launched in 1977 is now over 15 billion miles from Earth, and a radio signal from NASA takes more than 22 hours to reach it, meaning every command is really an instruction for where the probe will be by tomorrow

Saving Tips May 31, 2026

Voyager 1 is currently drifting through interstellar space at roughly 38,000 miles per hour, more than 15 billion miles from…

In 1859 a storm on the Sun struck the Earth so hard that telegraph wires threw sparks and operators were shocked at their desks, and scientists warn the same event today would knock out power grids across entire continents.

Saving Tips May 31, 2026

The historical claim in the lede is well documented. On 1 and 2 September 1859, a coronal mass ejection from…

Almost all of the world’s internet traffic does not travel by satellite but through fibre-optic cables lying on the ocean floor, a hidden web of wires crossing the deepest parts of the sea to connect the continents.

Saving Tips May 31, 2026

The great majority of data that crosses between continents travels through fibre-optic cables on the seabed, not through satellites. Estimates…

What's Hot

What Happened to Discover Student Loans? (And What to Do Now)

Student Loan Tax Bomb Calculator And Estimator

State Nonprofit Lenders Step In As Grad PLUS Loans Disappear July 1

Browsing: Saving Tips

In November 1988, an unmanned Soviet space shuttle called Buran flew a full orbital mission and landed itself in a blizzard at Baikonur without a single human input, and three years later the country that built it no longer existed.

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.

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

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

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

The Voyager 1 spacecraft launched in 1977 is now over 15 billion miles from Earth, and a radio signal from NASA takes more than 22 hours to reach it, meaning every command is really an instruction for where the probe will be by tomorrow

In 1859 a storm on the Sun struck the Earth so hard that telegraph wires threw sparks and operators were shocked at their desks, and scientists warn the same event today would knock out power grids across entire continents.

Almost all of the world’s internet traffic does not travel by satellite but through fibre-optic cables lying on the ocean floor, a hidden web of wires crossing the deepest parts of the sea to connect the continents.

What Happened to Discover Student Loans? (And What to Do Now)

Student Loan Tax Bomb Calculator And Estimator

State Nonprofit Lenders Step In As Grad PLUS Loans Disappear July 1

Top Insights

What Happened to Discover Student Loans? (And What to Do Now)

Student Loan Tax Bomb Calculator And Estimator

State Nonprofit Lenders Step In As Grad PLUS Loans Disappear July 1

What's Hot

Browsing: Saving Tips

Subscribe to Updates