Esoteric Meandering Shouting Into the Void

There’s a spot on Earth that’s nearly as sunny as Venus.Compared to other planets in our solar system, Earth is filled with impressive landscapes, including snow-capped peaks, lush rainforests, and vast oceans. But some places on our planet are so extreme, they’re otherworldly — like Venus otherworldly. The Atacama Desert in Chile is one of the driest places in the world, so it makes sense that such a parched ecosystem would get its fair share of sun. But in the summer of 2023, scientists discovered that some parts of this immense plateau in fact get far more sunlight than any other place on Earth. While taking measurements of solar irradiance (light energy from the sun) on the Chajnantor plateau, researchers discovered — via a complex meteorological process known as “forward scattering” — that this area was nearly as sunny in summer as the surface of Venus.

Despite some key differences between the two planets, scientists often call Venus Earth’s twin. Venus is roughly the same size as Earth, formed in the same area of the inner solar system, and is composed of much the same material — scientists even theorize that Venus was just like Earth some 3 billion years ago. But it is definitely not Earthlike now; it’s a sweltering hell planet thanks to an atmosphere of thick carbon dioxide that traps all greenhouse gases. If you somehow found yourself on Venus, high levels of solar irradiance would be the least of your immediate worries, considering its surface temperatures of 900 degrees Fahrenheit and sulfuric acid-filled clouds.

As we celebrate the first day of 2024, consider it a testament to the longevity of one of civilization’s oldest staples: the calendar. The earliest means of measuring days and weeks dates back 10,000 years, and timekeeping techniques adopted by the ancient Babylonians, Egyptians, and Romans slowly evolved into the calendar we use today. Yet the emphasis here is on “slowly.” The evolution from charting moon phases to separating seasons to measuring fiscal years was one of controversy and chaos across centuries. Still, humans never stopped working to perfect how we mark the passage of time. Here’s a brief look at the fascinating history of calendars, just in time to start a new one.

The First Known Calendar Is From Prehistoric Scotland

In 2013, British archaeologists discovered what they consider the world’s oldest calendar, dating back to around 8000 BCE. The prehistoric calendar, located at Warren Field in Scotland, consists of 12 pits believed to have contained wooden posts representing months of the year. Positioned to chart lunar phrases, the pits are aligned with the southeast horizon and were likely used by hunter-gatherer societies to track seasons. The site precedes Stonehenge by several thousand years.

The story of the automobile is, in the grand scheme of history, fairly short — but cars have come a long way since the steam-powered horseless carriages of the early 1800s. What started as a pastime for enthusiasts and the wealthy spread quickly throughout society, unlocking all sorts of new ways and places to travel. Even as modern cars get more and more advanced, vehicles from the past still capture our imagination, conjuring up images of muscle cars, luxury convertibles, and the open road. So hop in your DeLorean and get ready for five facts from the vehicular past.

The Model-T Ford Cost $290

At the end of 2022, the average cost of a new car was a whopping $48,681, a record-setting high. So it might be hard to believe that in the 1920s, when cars were still a relative luxury item, you could get a brand-new Model T Ford for just $290, or right around $5,000 in today’s dollars. These days, that’ll barely get you a 10-year-old Ford Focus.

The price wasn’t always that low; when Model-T runabouts first hit the market around 1908, they cost $825, or roughly $17,000 today. The price was still lower than the average person’s yearly salary, though, and that was by design.

“I will build a car for the great multitude,” Henry Ford said of his design ethos for the Model-T in his 1922 autobiography. He envisioned a car that was convenient and high-quality, but “low in price that no man making a good salary will be unable to own one.”

In 1912, there were fewer than 10,000 automobile registrations in the United States. By 1927 — the last year of the Model-T — Ford had slashed the price, and automobile registrations had soared to more than 20 million.

Related:5 Inventions That Came Out of the Great Depression

The First Practical Gas Car Topped Out at 10 Miles per Hour

Steam-powered “horseless carriages” date backto the 18th century, but the first practical vehicle with an internal combustion engine was designed by engineer Karl Benz in 1885. The Benz Patent-Motorwagen had three wheels and not a lot of oomph; a journalist who drove a replica of one for Car and Driver in 1986 reported that it “gathers speed like a fog bank cresting a hill.” Its one-cylinder, four-stroke engine generated just one horsepower, and at 400 revolutions per minute, it could reach a max speed of 10 miles per hour (unless it was headed downhill). It was not hard for someone on foot to outrun the car.

Nevertheless, the Patent-Motorwagen was the first modern car to actually hit the market, and more than 25 of them were built between 1886 and 1893. Sales quintupled the following year, with more than 136 selling in 1894 alone.

Diné bizaad is an Indigenous language primarily used by the Navajo, or Diné, people of the American Southwest. Not only is the language complex, but it’s traditionally passed down orally. During World War II, the United States military used this to its advantage by recruiting Navajo people fluent in both English and Diné bizaad, dubbed “code talkers,” to transmit secret messages among Allied forces.

The U.S. military wasn’t the first to use the tactic — members of Cherokee, Lakota, and other nations used their native tongues to evade German detection in World War I. The Marines, however, established the first formal training program for code talkers, and 29 Navajo completed the training in 1942. Recruits developed and memorized a two-part secret code inside a guarded room. The first part used 26 Diné bizaad words to stand in for letters of the English alphabet. The next part was more complex, and required making up hundreds of terms for English words that didn’t have a direct translation — for example, “iron fish” for “submarine,” and “humming bird” for “fighter plane.”

Even after recruiting more trainees into the program, the Marines struggled to find enough soldiers fluent in both languages to scale the program. But where code talkers were deployed, they passed along information with incredible security and accuracy. The Navajo Marines provided a valuable and often dangerous service to the U.S. military and its allies, but ironically, many had attended government or church-run boarding schools where they were punished for speaking languages other than English. After the war, the code talkers and their service went completely unacknowledged for decades. Their mission stayed classified until 1968, in case the military wanted to use the code again. In 2001, the original 29 code talkers were finally awarded the Congressional Gold Medal, and the rest were awarded the Congressional Silver Medal.