OSSmile🗂️ The Whole Archive
All 8 dispatches of good news, freshest first.
- 🍿 Welcome to Snack Kingdom, Population: 35,000 Snacks ← NEW! Somewhere in Changsha there is a building the size of 30 basketball courts, and every inch of it is snacks. We need to talk about this.
- 🐧 Norway Knighted a Penguin and He Outranks Most of Us His name is Sir Nils Olav III. He is a king penguin. He is a Brigadier in the Norwegian King's Guard, and yes, he inspected the troops.
- 🗑️ Baltimore Has a Googly-Eyed Robot That Eats Garbage and the City Loves Him Mr. Trash Wheel is a solar-and-water-powered machine that scoops trash out of the harbor before it reaches the ocean. He has giant eyes. He has fans. He has a poet laureate.
- 🌳 A Guy Grows Trees That Sprout 40 Different Fruits Each An art professor named Sam Van Aken grafts so many branches onto one trunk that a single tree blooms in a dozen colors and grows forty kinds of stone fruit. They look ordinary in summer and like a fireworks display in spring.
- 🌌 We Put a Mixtape on a Spaceship and It's Still Playing to the Stars In 1977 humanity bolted a gold-plated record to two space probes — greetings in 55 languages, the sound of a kiss, whale song, and Chuck Berry. Both are now in interstellar space, carrying our greatest hits into the dark. Forever.
- 🐻 The Toughest Animal on Earth Is a Chubby Microscopic Water Bear It can survive being boiled, frozen to near absolute zero, blasted with radiation, dried out for decades, and shot into the vacuum of space. It is half a millimeter long, it walks like a tiny bear, and scientists named it the 'water bear' because they, too, were charmed.
- 🔭 We Built a Gold Telescope, Parked It a Million Miles Away, and Saw the Dawn of Time The James Webb Space Telescope unfolded itself like cosmic origami, flew to a spot four times farther than the Moon, and started sending back baby pictures of the universe from 13 billion years ago. In one tiny patch of 'empty' sky it found thousands of galaxies.
- 🌍 The Photo That Made Humanity Look at Itself On Christmas Eve 1968, three astronauts became the first humans to orbit the Moon. They went to photograph the Moon — and instead turned around, saw the Earth rising over the lunar horizon, and scrambled for a camera. That one picture helped launch the modern environmental movement.
