Hidden history, consciousness, sacred science, strange nature, space and the unexplained, in short cards that tell you how sure we are.
Hidden History
What the textbooks skipped
- Someone built a stone temple 6,000 years before Stonehenge.
- Woolly mammoths were still alive when the Great Pyramid was built.
- 9,000 years ago, a town of thousands had no streets. People walked on the roofs.
- The first writing wasn't poetry. It was receipts.
- The Library of Alexandria probably didn't burn in one great fire.
- Roman concrete heals its own cracks.
- There's a stone block in Lebanon heavier than four loaded jumbo jets.
- Inca stones fit so tightly you can't slide a blade between them.
- In the Pacific, there's a ruined city built on artificial islands of stone.
- A man knocked down a wall in his house and found an underground city.
- Around 1177 BCE, the ancient world's great powers fell within a few decades.
- Farmers digging a well found an army of 8,000 clay soldiers.
- You could once walk from Britain to Denmark.
- Is a hill in Java the world's oldest pyramid?
- A lost Egyptian city was found under the sea in 2000.
Lost Knowledge
Ancient minds, surprising tools
- The ancient Greeks built a pocket computer for the sky.
- Kings once asked questions of the future by cracking bones with fire.
- Did ancient people make electricity?
- There's a 600-year-old book no one can read.
- A Greek scholar measured the Earth with a stick and a shadow.
- Medieval swordsmiths made nanotubes without knowing it.
- The Byzantines had a fire that water couldn't put out. Its recipe is lost.
- A Roman cup changes colour when light shines through it.
- The Maya invented zero on their own.
- The oldest known map of the sky was recovered in a police sting.
- Is a 20,000-year-old bone our first maths homework?
- A 1,600-year-old iron pillar in Delhi has barely rusted.
- Polynesian navigators crossed thousands of kilometres of ocean with no instruments.
- The I Ching and your phone speak the same language.
- Does a map from 1513 show Antarctica?
Strange Nature
Life that breaks the rules
- An octopus tastes with its arms.
- There is an animal that can survive the vacuum of space.
- One jellyfish can turn itself young again.
- Do trees talk to each other underground?
- A brainless slime mould redesigned the Tokyo rail network.
- Crows remember your face, and tell their friends.
- The mantis shrimp punches so fast the water boils.
- The axolotl can regrow a leg, part of its heart and even its brain.
- One of the heaviest living things on Earth is a forest that is a single tree.
- Birds may see Earth's magnetic field using quantum physics.
- Bees understand the idea of zero.
- Monarch butterflies fly to a place none of them has ever been.
- There may be sharks alive today that were born before Shakespeare.
- Dolphins call each other by name.
Space & Time
The scale of everything
- A day on Venus is longer than its year.
- The light from Andromeda left before humans existed.
- A spacecraft launched in 1977 is still sending messages from interstellar space.
- A teaspoon of neutron star would weigh about a billion tonnes.
- The calcium in your bones was made inside a star.
- Saturn's rings might be younger than the dinosaurs.
- Mars has a volcano almost three times taller than Everest.
- The Moon is drifting away from us, about as fast as your fingernails grow.
- About 95% of the universe is made of something we can't see.
- It may rain diamonds on Neptune and Uranus.
- In 2019, one of the brightest stars in the sky suddenly dimmed.
- In 2017, an object from another star system flew past us.
- Perfect eclipses happen because of a cosmic coincidence.
- The sunlight on your skin began its journey thousands of years ago.
Unexplained
Open questions, honest answers
- Did a comet end the last Ice Age, then bring it back?
- Is the Great Sphinx much older than we think?
- Where did the story of Atlantis come from?
- A former intelligence officer told Congress the US has "non-human" remains.
- Navy pilots chased something they still cannot explain.
- In 1977, a radio telescope caught a signal so strong someone wrote "Wow!".
- A stone 'road' appeared off the Bahamas just when a psychic said Atlantis would rise.
- Is there a sunken pyramid off Japan?
- Some people hear a low hum that no microphone picks up.
- Nine hikers fled their tent into a frozen night. Why?
- A clay disc from Crete holds a message no one can read.
- In 1872, a ship was found sailing with no one on board.
- Glowing balls of light sometimes float through storms, and even into houses.
- In 1908, something flattened 80 million trees in Siberia but left no crater.
Consciousness
The mind and what we can't explain yet
- The US Army once wrote a report on leaving your body.
- For over 20 years, the US government paid people to spy with their minds.
- Long-time meditators produce brainwaves most people rarely reach.
- A placebo can work even when you know it is a placebo.
- Can awareness continue after the heart stops?
- Do moments of mass emotion ripple through random numbers?
- Nobody can explain why you experience anything at all.
- Scientists have talked to people while they were dreaming.
- Cutting the brain in half can create two minds that disagree.
- In a 2006 study, most volunteers ranked a single session among their life's most meaningful moments.
- Can one person send an image to another's mind?
- A psychiatrist spent 40 years studying children who described past lives.
- Your heart has its own little brain.
- Doctors switch off consciousness every day, without fully knowing how.
Sacred Science
Where pattern, sound and spirit meet
- Sound can draw geometry.
- Sunflowers count in Fibonacci numbers.
- The ancient Greeks heard mathematics in music.
- A 5,000-year-old tomb in Ireland lights up on the shortest day.
- The Earth hums at about 7.83 hertz.
- How old is the Flower of Life at Abydos?
- Can water remember what was dissolved in it?
- The Great Pyramid points to true north almost perfectly.
- On the equinox, a shadow serpent slides down a Maya pyramid.
- Is 528 Hz really the 'love frequency'?
- There's an 800-year-old meditation path on a cathedral floor.
- The Sri Yantra is so precise that drawing it perfectly is a maths puzzle.
- Stonehenge once worked like a sound chamber.
- Do ancient sites line up along energy lines?