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J.K. Rowling

Joanne Rowling published Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone in 1997 under the pen name J.K. Rowling, adding a fictitious middle initial because her publisher feared boys might not read a book by a woman. The series went on to sell over 600 million copies worldwide, making it the best-selling book series in history.

Simba

Simba is the hero of The Lion King, a cub who flees his kingdom after his uncle Scar murders his father Mufasa and frames him for the crime. The name Simba means 'lion' in Swahili, fitting perfectly for a future king of the Pride Lands.

Ross Geller

Ross uses this defense repeatedly throughout the series after sleeping with someone during a disputed break from his relationship with Rachel. The catchphrase became so iconic that the show revisited the argument across multiple seasons, turning it into one of the defining running jokes of the entire series.

Alfred Pennyworth

Alfred has served the Wayne family for decades and is often described as the emotional backbone of Bruce Wayne's crime-fighting life. He provides everything from medical assistance to sharp-tongued wisdom, making him far more than a household servant.

A cowboy doll

Woody is a pull-string cowboy doll and the leader of Andy's toys throughout the Toy Story series, which began in 1995 as the first feature-length film made entirely with computer animation.

Green

Shrek is a large, green ogre who first appeared in the 2001 DreamWorks animated film of the same name. His swampy green skin became one of the most recognizable character designs in animation history, and the franchise went on to become one of DreamWorks' biggest properties.

Four (identical quadruplets every single time).

A single fertilized egg splits into four genetically identical embryos, all sharing one placenta. The armadillo is the only vertebrate on Earth that does this every time it reproduces, making every litter a set of perfect clones.

An embarrassment.

A gathering of giant pandas is officially called an embarrassment, which feels appropriate given how rarely they manage to reproduce. The term belongs to a long tradition of medieval 'terms of venery' invented for groups of animals that nobles hunted or kept.

A spur on each hind ankle.

The platypus is one of the very few venomous mammals alive today. Males have hollow spurs on their hind ankles connected to venom glands in their thighs. The pain from a sting is described as excruciating and can last for months, which is an astonishing feature for an animal that also lays eggs.

About 20 percent, making it the largest egg relative to body size of any bird.

One female kiwi weighing 1.7 kg has been recorded laying a 406-gram egg. For comparison, an ostrich egg is only about 2 percent of the mother's body weight. Scientists still debate exactly why the kiwi's egg never shrank along with the bird over evolutionary time.

The koala.

Scientists at the University of Adelaide found that koala fingerprints share the same loopy whorls and fine ridge details as human ones, even though koalas and primates last shared a common ancestor about 70 million years ago. It is a rare example of convergent evolution producing almost identical results.

The immortal jellyfish (Turritopsis dohrnii).

When sick, injured, or old, this tiny jellyfish can essentially rewind its own life cycle, reverting to a polyp and then maturing all over again. It is the only known complex animal capable of this, and it is roughly the biological equivalent of a butterfly turning itself back into a caterpillar.

Ophiocordyceps unilateralis (zombie-ant fungus)

The fungus does not infect the ant's brain; instead it infiltrates and directly controls the muscle fibers. When the ant reaches the correct height and orientation, the fungus causes the mandibles to lock onto a leaf vein and then produces a fruiting body that erupts from the ant's head to rain spores on ants below.

Tardigrade (water bear)

In a state called cryptobiosis, tardigrades replace their body water with a sugar called trehalose, which forms a glass-like matrix protecting their cells. Specimens have been revived from moss samples kept dry for more than 30 years, and they can also survive vacuum, radiation doses that would kill most other animals, and temperatures near absolute zero.

Barreleye fish (Macropinna microstoma)

For decades, researchers thought the barreleye's eyes faced forward because the transparent dome was destroyed by collection nets. Live observation via ROV revealed the dome is intact in the wild and the luminous green tubular eyes are completely enclosed inside the fluid-filled transparent shield, rotating upward to spot prey silhouetted against faint surface light.

Titan arum (Amorphophallus titanum)

The titan arum's central spike, called a spadix, can reach temperatures of up to 36 degrees Celsius through a process called thermogenesis, which volatilizes the odor compounds and mimics the warmth of carrion to attract the beetles and flies that pollinate it. Each plant spends years storing energy in an underground corm before expending everything on a single bloom that lasts roughly 24 to 48 hours.

Physarum polycephalum (slime mold)

Researchers placed the slime mold in mazes with oat flakes at exit points and found it explored all routes simultaneously through pseudopod networks, then eliminated dead ends to leave only the shortest efficient path. In a famous 2010 study it recreated a network almost identical to the Tokyo rail system, prompting engineers to use it as a design-optimization model.

Turritopsis dohrnii (immortal jellyfish)

When stressed by injury, illness, or old age, Turritopsis dohrnii initiates a process called transdifferentiation, converting its mature cells back into undifferentiated ones and rebuilding itself as a polyp. The cycle can theoretically repeat indefinitely, making it the only known animal capable of biological immortality under the right conditions.

Justinian I

Emperor Justinian I responded to the Plague of Justinian (541-549 AD) with isolation measures that predated the Venetian 'quarantino' by nearly 800 years. The 40-day waiting period he imposed on arrivals from Egypt and the Levant is among the earliest documented state-mandated disease containment policies in the Western world.

Elena Cornaro Piscopia

Elena Cornaro Piscopia earned a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Padua on June 25, 1678, making her the first woman in the world to receive a university degree. The Church refused to let her receive a theology degree as originally planned, so philosophy was substituted. A marble statue of her stands in the university to this day.

Vasco Nunez de Balboa

Vasco Nunez de Balboa led an expedition across the Isthmus of Panama and on September 25, 1513, climbed a peak in Darien and became the first European to see the Pacific from the Americas. He waded into the water in full armor and claimed the ocean and all lands touching it for the Spanish Crown.

The Battle of Flodden (1513)

The Treaty of Perpetual Peace, sealed by the marriage of James IV of Scotland to Margaret Tudor, was supposed to end centuries of Anglo-Scottish conflict forever. It collapsed when James IV invaded England to support France in 1513 and was killed at Flodden Field, the last reigning British monarch to die in battle.

Caligula

Suetonius and Cassius Dio wrote decades later and both had reason to blacken his name. Modern historians read the story as a joke about the uselessness of the Senate, or as invented slander.

53 cents

After parcel post service began in 1913, at least two sets of parents in rural America mailed their toddlers to relatives via the US postal service, insured as parcels. Maud Smith was mailed in 1914 from Glendale to her grandmother's home in Lewiston, Idaho, for 53 cents in postage. The Postmaster General quickly issued a clarification banning the practice.

Brazil

Brazil won the World Cup in 1958, 1962, 1970, 1994, and 2002. Through 2022, Germany and Italy were next with four titles each, and Brazil had appeared at every tournament ever held.

28

Phelps competed at five Games from 2000 to 2016 and won 28 medals, a record 23 of them gold. Gymnast Larisa Latynina is next on the all-time list with 18.

The 2009 World Championships in Berlin

Bolt lowered his own world record from 9.69 to 9.58 on August 16, 2009, at the World Championships in Berlin, the largest improvement in the record of the electronic timing era.

8

Federer won Wimbledon in 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2012, and 2017, passing Pete Sampras's Open Era men's mark of seven. It stood as the men's record when he retired in 2022.

Cassius Clay

Ali, then 18 years old, competed as Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr. and won the light heavyweight gold medal at the Rome Olympics. He changed his name to Muhammad Ali in 1964 after converting to Islam and beating Sonny Liston for the heavyweight title.

23

Williams won 23 Grand Slam singles titles in the Open Era, including seven Australian Opens, three French Opens, seven Wimbledons, and six US Opens. She held all four major titles simultaneously from 2014 to 2015, known as the 'Serena Slam.'

The mitochondria

Mitochondria produce most of a cell's supply of ATP, the molecule that powers cellular activity, through a process called cellular respiration. The 'powerhouse' nickname dates to the 1950s.

Nitrogen

Nitrogen accounts for roughly 78 percent of the atmosphere by volume, far more than oxygen at about 21 percent. Despite surrounding us, atmospheric nitrogen is largely inert and unusable by most living things until it is 'fixed' into other compounds.

Albert Einstein

Einstein published his special theory of relativity in 1905, introducing the equation E = mc^2, and his general theory of relativity in 1915. His work reshaped the modern understanding of space, time, and gravity.

Hertz

Hertz (Hz) measures cycles per second. Humans can typically hear sounds between 20 Hz and 20,000 Hz. The unit is named after German physicist Heinrich Hertz, who first conclusively proved the existence of electromagnetic waves in 1887.

The pancreas

Insulin is produced by beta cells in the islets of Langerhans within the pancreas. It regulates blood glucose levels by allowing cells to absorb sugar. Failure of this system results in diabetes mellitus, affecting hundreds of millions of people worldwide.

Gravity

Gravity is the attractive force between masses described by Newton's law of universal gravitation and later refined by Einstein's general relativity. The Sun's immense mass creates a gravitational field strong enough to hold all eight planets in stable elliptical orbits.

The Corpus Juris Civilis (Code of Justinian)

The Corpus Juris Civilis, compiled under Justinian I between 529 and 534 AD, systematised over 1,000 years of Roman legal tradition into four parts. It became the foundation of civil law in continental Europe and remains the basis for legal systems in France, Germany, Italy, and dozens of other countries today.

Timur (Tamerlane)

Timur, also known as Tamerlane, led his forces into the Sultanate of Delhi in 1398, massacring a large portion of the population. Contemporary accounts describe enormous pyres of bodies and the city left nearly depopulated for years. The raid is one of the most catastrophic events in Delhi's history and severely weakened the Tughlaq dynasty.

Italy

At the Battle of Adwa on March 1, 1896, Emperor Menelik II's Ethiopian forces decisively defeated the invading Italian army, killing or capturing about half of the Italian force. It was the most significant African military victory over a European colonial power during the Scramble for Africa and kept Ethiopia independent until Mussolini's 1935 invasion.

The Secret Additional Protocol

The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact signed on August 23, 1939 included a secret supplementary protocol dividing Poland, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Romania between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. The Soviet government denied its existence until 1989; its revelation was a key moment in Baltic independence movements.

Mehmed II (Mehmed the Conqueror)

Mehmed II, then just 21 years old, captured Constantinople on May 29, 1453 after a 53-day siege. The fall ended over 1,000 years of Byzantine rule and is conventionally used by historians to mark the end of the Middle Ages. Mehmed transformed the city into the Ottoman capital and converted the great Hagia Sophia into a mosque.

China

Led by Hong Xiuquan, who claimed to be the younger brother of Jesus, the Taiping Rebellion raged from 1850 to 1864 against the ruling Qing dynasty and is estimated to have caused 20 to 30 million deaths.