The Archive
20 published files. Search the claims, or filter by how they resolved.
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Strands of volcanic glass over a metre long and under a millimetre thick, spun from lava the way sticky dough pulls into threads. The USGS advice for finding some is to leave it alone.
Highest above sea level is Everest. Tallest base to summit is Mauna Kea, by more than a kilometre. Farthest from the centre of the Earth is Chimborazo. NOAA prints all three.
Isle Royale's wolves and moose have been counted every year since 1958. The Michigan Tech project that counts them writes that what guides nature is "rich, dynamic variation, not 'balance of nature'."
The USGS computes the average interval between Yellowstone's eruptions — 725,000 years — calls it meaningless because it rests on two intervals, and notes that even if you trust it, there are about 100,000 years to go.
The suppression story attached itself to a photograph its alleged suppressor put out — six days after it was taken, in a release that pointed at the face before anybody else did.
The rock is phonolite porphyry and the columns are cooling cracks — that much is agreed. How the magma got there is not. The NPS lists four origin hypotheses and says discrepancies remain for all of them.
Gypsum dissolves. The Tularosa Basin has no outlet for surface drainage, so runoff arrives carrying it, evaporates, and leaves crystals behind — and wind builds those into dunes up to 18 metres tall.
The USGS puts the impactor at about 30 metres across and 100,000 tons, arriving at 12–20 km/sec with the force of over two million tons of TNT. The hole it left is 1.2 km wide and 180 m deep.
The Colorado broke through a half-finished irrigation headgate in 1905 and took until 1907 to put back. But the river had filled that basin on its own before, and each time the basin dried out again.
Oklahoma's 2004 relocation covered only families with children under seven. Then the Army Corps found a third or more of homes had collapse potential. Then, in 2008, an EF4 tornado hit the town.
Cyanobacteria top out near 73°C. The middle of the spring sits near boiling. No photosynthetic mat can live there — but the Park Service records abundant Archaea in it, and the blue is what deep water does to light.
US 5,356,330 was granted in 1994 for a spring-loaded arm on a wall. Its background states the problem plainly: a high five "requires the mutual hand slapping of two participants", and a solitary fan does not have two.
US 6,293,874 was granted in 2001. Its cited prior art is a run of 1900–1916 patents for secret-society initiation paddles, and the improvement it claims is that this one does not stop between blows.
US 4,022,227 was granted in 1977. Claim 3 requires an object to be held over the hair partway through the fold, and claim 4 specifies that the object is a person's hand.
US 5,443,036 was granted in 1995. Its dependent claims are the reason to read it: the light pattern must be small relative to a cat's paw, and travel at five to twenty-five feet per second.
Franz Vester patented a coffin the prematurely buried could climb out of. The detail nobody repeats is in the specification: once death was confirmed, you withdrew the escape tube and used it on the next grave.
The fire is real and the town is gone. The two details everyone repeats — the trash fire, and the 250 years — are the two the record supports least.
Leroy Chiao shot it with a 180 mm telephoto in 2004. He said afterwards that he never saw the Great Wall, and wasn’t sure his picture showed it.
Heavy rocks leave long trails across a dry lakebed and nobody has ever seen them move. That was true for seventy years. It stopped being true on 20 December 2013.
A dark object drifting over the South Atlantic, shared for a quarter of a century as a 13,000-year-old alien satellite. NASA’s public catalogue says what it is, in a field of its own.
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