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When NASA lost contact with the IMAGE satellite in 2005, an amateur radio operator in Canada named Scott Tilley picked up its signal in January 2018 while hunting for a classified spy satellite, and the spacecraft turned out to be still spinning, still powered, and still trying to phone home after 13 years of silence.

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On the night of January 20, 2018, an amateur radio operator and electrical engineer named Scott Tilley sat in his…

When Harvard astronomer Cecilia Payne submitted her 1925 doctoral thesis arguing that the Sun was made almost entirely of hydrogen, the field’s senior figure Henry Norris Russell talked her into adding a line calling the result ‘almost certainly not real,’ and then published the same conclusion himself four years later to widespread acclaim.

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In 1925, a British graduate student at Harvard named Cecilia Payne handed in a doctoral thesis that quietly upended astronomy.…