Draining a hectare of tropical peatland for oil palm can release more greenhouse gas per year than the one-time carbon pulse of clearing the rainforest above it — because the peat holds roughly twice as much carbon as the forest, and drainage keeps it leaking for decades.
In January 1953, Maurice Wilkins showed James Watson a copy of Rosalind Franklin's Photo 51 without her knowledge — and the dark diffraction cross gave away DNA's helical shape before Franklin could publish her own analysis.
In September 2007, roughly 3,000 tardigrades rode the exterior of the European FOTON-M3 capsule through ten days of open vacuum and unfiltered solar radiation. Sixty-eight percent survived, rehydrated, and laid viable eggs — the first animals ever confirmed to live through direct exposure to space.
No spacecraft has survived Venus's surface in four decades—yet a Soviet probe from 1982 still holds the longevity record, outlasting expectations by nearly four times in conditions that liquefy metal.
Sunlight should remove Titan's methane on a geological blink. Cryovolcanism may refill the atmosphere, but Cassini never caught an eruption and the source remains unknown.
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