Helios-stamped facts

Epicurus founded the Garden in Athens around 307 BCE and taught that pleasure and tranquility were the goals of a good life.

China's renminbi was added to the IMF Special Drawing Rights basket on October 1, 2016.

Sweden's krona has been the country's official currency since 1873.

Lady Ada Lovelace's notes on Babbage's Analytical Engine include what is often called the first computer program.

The Wright brothers conducted their first powered flight in a 12-second, 120-foot flight on December 17, 1903.

Mass production techniques pioneered by Henry Ford reduced the time required to assemble a Model T from over 12 hours to about 90 minutes.

ASCII art uses standard ASCII characters to create images and is commonly seen in BBSes and early Internet messaging.

Honey produced by bees is one of the few foods that does not spoil under normal storage conditions.

Paris hosted the Summer Olympics in 1900, 1924, and 2024.

Passover is a major Jewish holiday commemorating the Exodus from slavery in Egypt.

The Five Books of Moses, also known as the Pentateuch or Torah, are Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.

The Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494 divided newly discovered lands outside Europe between Portugal and Spain.

Spitfires played a crucial role in the Battle of Britain in 1940 against the German Luftwaffe.

The Marshall Plan provided financial aid to 16 European countries to rebuild after World War II.

Sweden's neutrality during World War II allowed it to avoid direct involvement in the conflict.

The Sahel is a semi-arid region in Africa lying between the Sahara to the north and Sudanian savanna to the south.

Antarctic ice covers over 14 million square kilometers and contains roughly 60 percent of the world's freshwater.

The Odyssey describes Odysseus's ten-year journey home after the Trojan War.

Hans Christian Andersen, a Danish author, wrote The Little Mermaid, The Ugly Duckling, and The Emperor's New Clothes.

William Faulkner won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1949.

The first Pulitzer Prizes were awarded in 1917, established by the will of Joseph Pulitzer.

The Epic of Gilgamesh, dating to ancient Mesopotamia, is among the oldest surviving works of literature.

The decimal numeral system, also called base-10, is the most widely used number system in the world.

Binary, base-2, is the foundational number system for digital computing.

The Roman numerals system uses combinations of letters: I, V, X, L, C, D, and M.

The Stuxnet worm, discovered in 2010, targeted Iranian nuclear centrifuges and is widely considered the first cyberweapon.

ENIAC was unveiled to the public on February 14, 1946, at the University of Pennsylvania.

The first computer virus, Creeper, appeared on ARPANET in 1971.

The C programming language standardized as ANSI C in 1989 and ISO C in 1990.

Whisper, an automatic speech recognition system released by OpenAI in 2022, was trained on 680,000 hours of multilingual audio.

The Apollo Guidance Computer, used in Apollo Moon missions, ran at 2.048 MHz with 64 KB of memory.

Reinforcement learning was famously used by DeepMind to train Atari-playing agents directly from pixel input in 2013.

Index funds, popularized by John Bogle in the 1970s, track market indexes rather than picking stocks individually.

Albert Camus's The Myth of Sisyphus introduced the concept of the absurd in philosophy and was published in 1942.

Ronaldinho was named FIFA World Player of the Year in 2004 and 2005.

Yuri Gagarin's spaceflight on April 12, 1961, lasted 108 minutes and orbited Earth once.

Plato founded the Academy in Athens around 387 BCE, considered the first institution of higher learning in the Western world.

Diogenes of Sinope, a Cynic philosopher of ancient Greece, is famous for living in a large ceramic jar in Athens.

The Allegory of the Cave appears in Book VII of Plato's Republic and explores the nature of reality and knowledge.

Vinyl record sales have seen a significant resurgence since the 2000s, with sales exceeding CD sales in some markets by 2022.

Bob Marley brought Jamaican reggae to a global audience and remains a cultural icon decades after his 1981 death.

Art Deco was an influential decorative arts style of the 1920s and 1930s emphasizing geometric forms and modern materials.

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky composed The Nutcracker, Swan Lake, and the 1812 Overture among many other works.

Code-switching is the practice of alternating between two or more languages within a single conversation.

Romaji is the romanization of Japanese, with several systems including Hepburn and Kunrei-shiki.

The Renaissance Sistine Chapel ceiling fresco was painted by Michelangelo, while The Last Judgment behind the altar was added by him later between 1536 and 1541.

Wassily Kandinsky is widely credited with painting the first purely abstract work around 1910 to 1913.

Ozempic, semaglutide, is a GLP-1 receptor agonist originally developed for type 2 diabetes and now widely used for weight management.

Penicillin allergy is the most commonly reported drug allergy, although true allergic reactions are less common than self-reports suggest.

First responders aim for the chain of survival: early recognition, early CPR, early defibrillation, and early advanced care.

CPR, cardiopulmonary resuscitation, combines chest compressions with rescue breaths to maintain circulation in cardiac arrest victims.

Defibrillators deliver electrical shocks to restore normal heart rhythm in cases of cardiac arrest.

BMI, Body Mass Index, is calculated as weight in kilograms divided by height in meters squared.

Acetaminophen is an analgesic and antipyretic, the most common active ingredient in over-the-counter pain relievers like Tylenol.

RISC-V is an open-standard instruction set architecture based on reduced instruction set computer principles.

AWS Lambda was the first major commercial Function-as-a-Service offering, launched in 2014.

Cloudflare Workers is a serverless execution environment that runs JavaScript and WebAssembly code at the network edge.

Edge computing brings computation and data storage closer to data sources to reduce latency and bandwidth use.

Microsoft Azure was announced in October 2008 and became generally available in February 2010.

Carbon nanotubes are cylindrical carbon structures with extraordinary tensile strength and electrical properties.

Saponification is the alkaline hydrolysis of fats or oils to produce soap and glycerol.

Esterification is the reaction between an alcohol and a carboxylic acid to form an ester and water.

The Periodic Table was first formulated by Dmitri Mendeleev in 1869.

Mass extinction is a significant decrease in biodiversity over a geologically short period.

The first synthetic plastic, Bakelite, was invented by Leo Baekeland in 1907.

Plate tectonics drives the formation of mountain ranges through processes including continental collision and orogenesis.

Insects make up over half of all known animal species, with approximately 1 million described species.

Spiders produce silk through specialized glands and use it for webs, egg sacs, and prey capture.

Lichens are composite organisms formed by a symbiosis between fungi and photosynthetic algae or cyanobacteria.

Ferns are vascular plants that reproduce via spores rather than seeds.

Mycorrhizae are mutualistic associations between fungi and plant roots that help plants absorb water and nutrients.

The Library of Alexandria in ancient Egypt was one of the largest and most significant libraries of the ancient world before its decline.

The Code of Hammurabi, dating to about 1754 BCE, is one of the earliest preserved written legal codes.

The Mir space station, operated by the Soviet Union and Russia, was inhabited from 1986 to 2001.

Apollo 17, in December 1972, was the last crewed mission to land on the Moon.

Singapore's Marina Bay Sands resort is known for its rooftop infinity pool spanning three towers.

The Nile Delta is one of the world's largest river deltas, located where the Nile River meets the Mediterranean Sea.

The Alaska Highway, completed in 1942, runs from Dawson Creek, British Columbia, to Delta Junction, Alaska.

Reykjavik, the capital of Iceland, is the northernmost capital city of a sovereign state.

The Empire State Building in New York City, completed in 1931, was the world's tallest building until 1972.

Burj Khalifa in Dubai is the tallest building in the world at 828 meters, completed in 2010.

Tokyo Skytree, completed in 2012, is the tallest tower in the world at 634 meters.

The Arctic Circle marks the southernmost latitude where the Sun can remain above the horizon for 24 continuous hours.

The Tropic of Cancer is the northernmost circle of latitude where the Sun can appear directly overhead.

The Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 in Beijing ended in a violent military crackdown on June 4.

The Long March of 1934 to 1935 was a strategic retreat by the Communist Red Army across China that solidified Mao Zedong's leadership.

Watergate refers to the political scandal that led to U.S. President Richard Nixon's resignation in August 1974.

The Battle of Waterloo on June 18, 1815, marked the final defeat of Napoleon Bonaparte.

The American Revolutionary War lasted from 1775 to 1783, ending with the Treaty of Paris.

The Opium Wars between China and Britain in the 19th century resulted in unequal treaties favoring Britain.

Napoleon's invasion of Russia in 1812 ended in disaster with massive losses to his Grande Armee.

The Glorious Revolution of 1688 in England replaced King James II with William III and Mary II.

The Battle of Marathon in 490 BCE saw the Athenians defeat the Persians, an iconic event in Greek history.

The Spanish Armada was decisively defeated by the English in 1588.

The Battle of Hastings in 1066 saw William the Conqueror defeat King Harold II, beginning Norman rule of England.

The Hundred Years' War saw the rise of professional armies and the decline of feudal cavalry warfare in Europe.

Hannibal Barca famously crossed the Alps with elephants during the Second Punic War.

Real Madrid has won the most UEFA Champions League titles in the tournament's history.

The UEFA Champions League is the top European club football tournament, contested annually since 1955.

The Commissioner's Trophy is awarded to the World Series champion in Major League Baseball.

The Hays Code, in effect from 1934 to 1968, was a set of self-imposed industry guidelines for major U.S. film studios.

Bollywood, the Hindi-language film industry based in Mumbai, is among the most prolific film industries globally.

Cannes Film Festival's Palme d'Or is awarded to the best film of the festival's main competition.

Schindler's List, directed by Steven Spielberg, won seven Academy Awards in 1994 including Best Picture.

The Phillips curve describes a historical inverse relationship between unemployment and inflation.

Spirited Away, directed by Hayao Miyazaki, won the 2003 Academy Award for Best Animated Feature.

The London Stock Exchange traces its history to coffee houses where stockbrokers met from 1698 onward.

Central bank independence is the principle that monetary policy decisions should be insulated from short-term political pressures.

The Nasdaq, founded in 1971, was the world's first electronic stock market.

Phonology is the branch of linguistics dealing with systems of speech sounds in particular languages.

Braille is a tactile writing system used by blind and visually impaired people, developed by Louis Braille in 1824.

The Latin alphabet is the most widely used writing system in the world.

Materialized views are database views whose results are stored and periodically refreshed for fast querying.

Database normalization is the process of organizing data to reduce redundancy and improve data integrity.

Neo4j is a graph database management system that stores data as nodes connected by edges with properties.

Indexes in databases speed up data retrieval at the cost of additional storage and slower writes.

BASE is an alternative database design philosophy emphasizing basically available, soft state, and eventual consistency.

HSTS, HTTP Strict Transport Security, prevents downgrade attacks by forcing browsers to use HTTPS for a specified period.

Argon2 is a key derivation function selected as the winner of the Password Hashing Competition in 2015.

Log4Shell, disclosed in December 2021, was a critical remote code execution vulnerability in the widely used Log4j Java logging library.

CVE, Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures, is a public reference list of known cybersecurity vulnerabilities.

Zero Trust is a security model that requires strict verification for every person and device attempting to access resources.

Passkeys are based on WebAuthn and FIDO2 standards, providing phishing-resistant authentication.

OAuth 2.1 consolidates and clarifies the OAuth 2.0 specifications and best practices.

The Louvre Museum in Paris is the world's most visited art museum.

Edvard Munch's painting The Scream was created in multiple versions starting in 1893.

Jackson Pollock was an American abstract expressionist known for his drip painting technique.

Andy Warhol was a leading figure in the Pop art movement of the 1960s.

Auguste Rodin's The Thinker, originally cast in 1880, is among the most recognized sculptures in the world.

Claude Monet was a founder of French Impressionist painting and is well known for his Water Lilies series.

Magnetism arises from the motion of electric charges and the intrinsic magnetic moments of elementary particles.

Bose-Einstein condensate is a state of matter formed when a gas of bosons is cooled close to absolute zero.

The cosmological constant, introduced by Einstein and later associated with dark energy, represents an inherent energy density of space.

Special relativity predicts time dilation and length contraction at speeds approaching the speed of light.

Aluminum is the most abundant metal in Earth's crust and is widely used due to its low density and corrosion resistance.

Glass is an amorphous solid, typically based on silica, that lacks a regular crystalline structure.

Half-life is the time required for half of a quantity of a radioactive substance to decay.

Radioactive decay is the spontaneous transformation of an unstable atomic nucleus into a more stable one, emitting radiation.

Isotopes are atoms of the same element with different numbers of neutrons.

The mole concept relates the number of particles to the mass of a substance through Avogadro's number.

Le Chatelier's principle states that a system at equilibrium will shift to counteract an applied stress.

Earth's atmosphere is mostly transparent to visible light but absorbs much of the infrared and ultraviolet radiation from the Sun.

Sea ice extent in the Arctic has declined significantly since satellite records began in 1979.

Permafrost is ground that remains at or below 0 degrees Celsius for two or more consecutive years and underlies much of the Arctic.

The Pacific Ring of Fire is a region around the Pacific Ocean basin where many earthquakes and volcanic eruptions occur.

Continental drift was first proposed by Alfred Wegener in 1912, although a full mechanism had to await plate tectonics theory.

The El Nino-Southern Oscillation is a recurring climate pattern in the tropical Pacific affecting global weather.

The Anthropocene is a proposed geological epoch reflecting significant human impact on Earth's geology and ecosystems.

Apollo 13 launched April 11, 1970, and returned safely to Earth despite an in-flight oxygen tank explosion.

The Fermi paradox is the apparent contradiction between high estimates of the probability of extraterrestrial civilizations and the lack of evidence for them.

Pulsars are rapidly rotating neutron stars that emit beams of electromagnetic radiation observable as regular pulses.

Edwin Hubble's earlier 1924 discovery established that the Andromeda nebula was a separate galaxy beyond the Milky Way.

Johannes Kepler's three laws of planetary motion describe orbits as ellipses with the Sun at one focus, equal areas in equal times, and a relationship between period and orbital semi-major axis.

The Solar System has eight recognized planets following Pluto's reclassification in 2006.

Deno is a secure runtime for JavaScript and TypeScript, also created by Ryan Dahl, first released in 2018.

V8 is Google's open-source JavaScript and WebAssembly engine, used in Chrome and Node.js.

Browser engines include Chromium's Blink, Apple's WebKit, and Mozilla's Gecko.

Let's Encrypt is a non-profit certificate authority providing free TLS certificates and was founded by the Internet Security Research Group in 2014.

Domain validated certificates, the most common TLS certificates, only verify control of the domain.

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, WCAG, are W3C recommendations for making web content accessible to people with disabilities.

WHATWG, the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group, maintains the HTML and DOM Living Standards.

ECMA-262 is the formal specification of the ECMAScript programming language, maintained by Ecma International.

Iceland has more than 30 active volcanic systems and frequent eruptions.

The Strait of Hormuz is a strategic waterway connecting the Persian Gulf to the Gulf of Oman.

The Black Sea connects to the Mediterranean Sea through the Bosporus and the Dardanelles straits.

Lake Superior is the largest freshwater lake in the world by surface area.

The Danube River flows through 10 countries, more than any other river in the world.

The Caspian Sea is the largest enclosed inland body of water by area, bordered by Russia, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Iran, and Azerbaijan.

The Mississippi River is the second-longest river in North America, flowing about 3,766 kilometers.

The Gobi Desert spans parts of northern China and southern Mongolia.

The Atacama Desert in Chile is one of the driest non-polar deserts on Earth.

The Crimean War, fought from 1853 to 1856, pitted Russia against an alliance of France, Britain, the Ottoman Empire, and Sardinia.

The Manhattan Project, the U.S. effort to develop nuclear weapons during World War II, was led scientifically by J. Robert Oppenheimer.

The Holocaust resulted in the murder of approximately six million Jews by Nazi Germany and its collaborators during World War II.

Pearl Harbor was attacked by Japan on December 7, 1941, prompting the United States to enter World War II.

The Battle of the Somme during World War I lasted from July to November 1916 and resulted in over a million casualties.

World War I was triggered by the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary on June 28, 1914.

The Republic of Turkey was proclaimed on October 29, 1923, with Mustafa Kemal Ataturk as its first president.

The blood-brain barrier limits the entry of many drugs into the central nervous system.

Antiretroviral therapy has transformed HIV from a fatal infection into a manageable chronic condition.

Hepatitis B and C are viral infections that can cause chronic liver disease and are leading causes of liver cancer.

Tuberculosis remains one of the world's leading infectious killers, with around 1.3 million deaths annually as of 2023.

Dengue fever is a mosquito-borne viral infection causing flu-like illness and occasionally severe complications.

Antidepressants such as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors are commonly prescribed for depression.

Major depressive disorder is one of the most common mental illnesses, affecting hundreds of millions of people worldwide.

Schizophrenia is a serious mental disorder affecting how a person thinks, feels, and behaves, typically with onset in late adolescence or early adulthood.

Vaccines have prevented an estimated 154 million deaths worldwide over 50 years, according to a 2024 WHO study.

Antibiotics target features unique to bacteria, including cell wall synthesis, ribosomes, and metabolic pathways.

Glycolysis is the metabolic pathway that converts glucose into pyruvate, releasing energy in the form of ATP and NADH.

Induced pluripotent stem cells were first generated by Shinya Yamanaka in 2006, leading to the 2012 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

Polymerase chain reaction, PCR, is a technique to amplify specific DNA segments, invented by Kary Mullis in 1983.

Telomeres are repetitive nucleotide sequences at the ends of chromosomes that protect them from degradation.

The mitochondrial DNA in humans is inherited almost exclusively from the mother.

Charles Darwin's voyage on HMS Beagle from 1831 to 1836 provided observations central to his theory of evolution.

Cryptocurrencies typically settle transactions on public blockchains using cryptographic proofs rather than central authorities.

Gross National Product, GNP, measures the total monetary value of goods and services produced by a country's residents regardless of location.

The phrase 'too big to fail' refers to firms whose failure would cause systemic damage to the broader economy.

The Bank for International Settlements, headquartered in Basel, Switzerland, is the central bank for central banks.

Marathon runners typically run for hours, with elite times for the 42.195 km distance under 2 hours 5 minutes for men and under 2 hours 15 minutes for women.

The U.S. dollar is the world's primary reserve currency.