Free Trivia Maker & Live Trivia Games

Mario

Mario debuted in the 1981 arcade game Donkey Kong and has since starred in over 200 video games. Originally called 'Jumpman,' the character was renamed Mario after Mario Segale, the landlord of Nintendo of America's warehouse. He remains the most recognizable video game character in the world.

Dumbo

Dumbo, the 1941 Disney film, tells the story of a baby elephant mocked for his enormous ears who discovers they allow him to fly. The film was released during World War II and became a major commercial success at a critical time for the studio. The ears-as-wings idea made Dumbo instantly iconic.

88

The 88-key layout became standard in the late 19th century, spanning about seven and a quarter octaves. Most composers stopped writing notes outside this range because the strings required to produce lower or higher pitches would be impractical, so piano builders settled on 88 as the sweet spot.

Adele

Adele titles each album after the age she was during its writing, beginning with 19 in 2008. Her album 21 became one of the best-selling albums of the 21st century, powered by 'Rolling in the Deep' and 'Someone Like You.'

Tennis

The Wimbledon Championships, held in London each summer, is the oldest tennis tournament in the world, dating back to 1877. It is the only Grand Slam still played on grass courts, giving it a unique look and feel that sets it apart from the other major tournaments.

Wakanda

Wakanda is a technologically advanced fictional country in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, home to the rare metal vibranium and ruled by T'Challa, the Black Panther.

Netflix

Stranger Things premiered on Netflix in July 2016 and became one of the platform's biggest original hits, drawing comparisons to 1980s films like E.T. and Stand By Me. The show helped cement Netflix's reputation for prestige original programming and turned its cast of young actors into global stars.

206

Babies are born with around 270 to 300 bones, many of which fuse together as they grow. By adulthood, the total settles at 206. The smallest bone in the body is the stapes in the ear, about the size of a grain of rice, while the largest is the femur in the thigh.

Jupiter

Jupiter is so large that all the other planets in the solar system could fit inside it with room to spare. It is a gas giant with no solid surface, and its Great Red Spot, a storm that has been raging for hundreds of years, is itself larger than Earth.

Deoxyribonucleic acid

DNA carries the genetic instructions for the growth, development, functioning, and reproduction of all known living organisms. The double helix structure was famously described by Watson and Crick in 1953, and every human cell contains about two meters of DNA tightly coiled inside it.

Mercury

Mercury orbits the Sun at an average distance of about 58 million kilometers and completes one orbit every 88 Earth days. Despite being the closest planet to the Sun, it is not the hottest, because it has virtually no atmosphere to trap heat. That title goes to Venus.

Au

The symbol Au comes from the Latin word aurum, meaning gold. This is why the symbol does not match the English name. Gold has been prized for thousands of years and is element number 79 on the periodic table. Its resistance to tarnishing and chemical attack is what makes it so enduringly valuable.

Seven colors, remembered as ROY G BIV

Isaac Newton chose seven colors to describe the visible spectrum: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. The acronym ROY G BIV is one of the most memorable mnemonics in science education. In reality, a rainbow is a continuous spectrum, but seven makes for a satisfying list.

Diamond

Diamond is pure carbon in a crystal structure so tightly bonded that nothing else scratches it. The Mohs scale of mineral hardness, developed in 1812, ranks minerals from 1 (talc) to 10 (diamond). This extreme hardness makes diamonds useful not just in jewelry but in industrial cutting and drilling tools.

About 8 minutes

Light travels at about 300,000 kilometers per second, and the Sun is about 150 million kilometers from Earth on average, so the journey takes roughly 8 minutes and 20 seconds. This means that when you look at the Sun, you are actually seeing it as it was about 8 minutes ago.

The Pacific Ocean

The Pacific Ocean covers approximately 165 million square kilometers, more than all of Earth's landmasses combined. It stretches from the Arctic in the north to the Antarctic in the south and contains the Mariana Trench, the deepest point on Earth at nearly 11,000 meters below sea level.

Saturn

Saturn's rings are made primarily of chunks of ice and rocky debris, ranging in size from tiny grains to boulders several meters across. While Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune also have rings, Saturn's are by far the most prominent and can be seen through even a modest backyard telescope.

The Great Barrier Reef

Stretching about 2,300 kilometers along Queensland's northeastern coast, the Great Barrier Reef is large enough to be visible from space. It is home to thousands of species of fish, corals, and marine life, and was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1981.

Carbon dioxide

During photosynthesis, plants use sunlight to convert carbon dioxide and water into glucose and oxygen. This process is the foundation of almost all life on Earth, producing the oxygen we breathe and the food that sustains most ecosystems. It is one of the first scientific processes taught in school for good reason.

Canada

Canada is home to roughly 60 percent of all the natural lakes on Earth, estimated at well over 800,000 lakes larger than 10 hectares. This staggering number is the result of glaciers that carved out the Canadian Shield over thousands of years and then melted, filling the depressions with water.

Neil Armstrong

Neil Armstrong stepped onto the lunar surface on July 20, 1969, as commander of NASA's Apollo 11 mission and spoke the famous line 'That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.' Buzz Aldrin joined him shortly after, while Michael Collins orbited above in the command module.

1989

The Berlin Wall fell on November 9, 1989, after East Germany announced that citizens could cross the border freely. Crowds gathered and began physically dismantling the wall that had divided the city since 1961. Germany was officially reunified less than a year later, in October 1990.

Canberra

Many people guess Sydney or Melbourne, but Canberra was purpose-built as a compromise between those two rival cities. The site was selected in 1908, and the city was formally named Canberra in 1913. It was designed by American architects Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin, who won an international design competition.

The 1889 World's Fair (Exposition Universelle)

Designed by Gustave Eiffel, the tower was built as the entrance arch for the 1889 World's Fair, which celebrated the 100th anniversary of the French Revolution. It was intended to be a temporary structure and was nearly demolished in 1909, but was saved because its antenna was useful for telegraph communications.

Just three.

Despite this overwhelming visual hardware advantage, research shows mantis shrimp actually distinguish fewer colors than humans do. Their system appears to work more like a fast color barcode scanner than a painter's palette, prioritizing speed over subtle distinctions.

Kelp.

Rather than anchoring themselves with anchor chains or tiny otter anchors, sea otters drape themselves in kelp fronds to stay in place while sleeping on the water's surface. Mothers also wrap their pups in kelp so the babies do not float away while mom is diving for food.

The wolverine.

Wolverines have an upper molar set at a right angle to the rest of their teeth, allowing them to shear through frozen meat and bone in conditions that would defeat most other predators. Despite being about the size of a medium dog, wolverines routinely steal kills from wolves and bears.

A bloat.

A gathering of hippos is called a bloat, which is both accurate and unflattering. Hippos also produce a reddish oily secretion from their skin that people once mistook for blood sweating, earning them an even more alarming reputation than their collective noun already provides.

The tardigrade, also known as the water bear.

In 2007, dehydrated tardigrades were sent into low Earth orbit and exposed directly to the vacuum of space and solar radiation. More than 68 percent survived and were successfully rehydrated back to life within 30 minutes. They can also endure being frozen near absolute zero and absorbing 500 times the X-ray dose that would kill a human.

Handling a salmon in suspicious circumstances.

Section 32 of the Salmon Act 1986 makes it illegal to receive, handle, or dispose of salmon that you have reason to believe was illegally obtained. The phrase 'suspicious circumstances' is genuinely written into the statute, and the law was later expanded to cover trout, eels, lampreys, and freshwater fish as well.

Guinea pigs.

Switzerland's 2008 Animal Protection Ordinance requires that anyone keeping guinea pigs must have at least two, because a single guinea pig is considered socially deprived and legally mistreated. A rental service even exists for people who lose one guinea pig from their pair and need a temporary companion while they find a permanent one.

Being in charge of a cow (or horse, carriage, or steam engine).

The Licensing Act 1872 covers more than pub hours. Being found drunk while in charge of a cow, horse, carriage, or loaded firearm is a criminal offence punishable by up to 51 weeks in jail. In 2009, a Norfolk man was actually charged under this act, while in charge of a mobility scooter.

Sheep lung.

US federal regulations prohibit the use of livestock lung in food products, partly because stomach fluids can contaminate lungs during slaughter. Traditional haggis contains sheep lung as up to 15 percent of its recipe, so authentic Scottish haggis has been kept off American shelves for over 50 years. Scotland has been lobbying for a reversal since at least 2014.

Walk their dog.

Turin's municipal ordinance requires dog owners to walk their pets at least once daily. The law is part of Italy's broader animal welfare framework and is actually enforced. Failing to walk your dog is not just bad pet ownership in Turin. It is a fineable offence.

Lutefisk.

Lutefisk is dried fish rehydrated in lye solution, creating a gelatinous dish with a smell intense enough to concern workplace safety regulators. Wisconsin's employees' right-to-know law specifically names lutefisk as exempt from toxic substance classification, suggesting the legislature had a sense of humor about the state's Scandinavian heritage.

Soda or water.

Indiana law requires stores with a liquor license to sell alcohol but prohibits them from selling refrigerated non-alcoholic drinks like soda and water. A warm Coke is technically legal to sell alongside cold beer. The regulation was intended to keep liquor stores from competing with grocery stores, but produced a wonderfully absurd result.

68 years.

Osborne holds the Guinness World Record for the longest attack of hiccups. He hiccupped roughly 40 times a minute for most of that time, accumulating an estimated 430 million hiccups in total. He finally stopped in 1990 and died the following year, presumably at peace.

Your brain actively suppresses awareness of it because it is a stable, unchanging object that carries no new information.

Your nose blocks part of both eyes' visual fields constantly, but neurons stop firing for stimuli that never change. The instant you focus on your nose, or close one eye, it pops back into view. Your brain is not blind to it; it is simply filtering it out as irrelevant, the same way you stop hearing a fan that has been running for hours.

You cannot sustain it. The hum dies within a second or two.

Humming needs a continuous flow of air out through the nose. Pinch it shut and pressure equalises almost immediately, so the sound stops even though your vocal cords keep vibrating.

Tooth enamel.

Tooth enamel is 96 percent densely packed minerals, making it harder than any bone in your body. On the Mohs hardness scale it scores about 5, roughly equivalent to steel. Despite this remarkable hardness, enamel is also brittle and, critically, your body cannot regrow it once it is gone.

Making hair stand on end to trap warm air and make the body look larger and more threatening to predators.

The tiny arrector pili muscles that cause goosebumps are still fully functional in humans; we just lost most of the body hair those muscles were meant to raise. The reflex is still triggered by cold or fear via the same adrenaline pathway, but since we are not very hairy, the result is just a pattern of small bumps that impresses no one.

The uvula, the little dangly thing at the back of your throat.

Every other mammal has only a rudimentary or absent uvula. In humans it helps close off the nasal passage during swallowing, triggers the gag reflex, and assists in producing certain speech sounds. It is also the world's most recognizable cartoon body part and the subject of more 'what even is that' questions than almost any other piece of anatomy.

ACHOO syndrome, short for Autosomal-dominant Compelling Helio-Ophthalmic Outburst.

Scientists chose to force the acronym ACHOO into existence, and it is a genuine inherited reflex. Aristotle noticed people sneezing at the sun in 350 BCE, and Francis Bacon disproved his explanation in the 17th century by staring at the sun with his eyes closed. The exact nerve-wiring cause is still debated. The acronym, however, is settled.

Increased blood flow and minor trauma from regular use stimulate faster nail growth on the hand you use more.

Studies confirm that nail growth on the dominant hand is measurably, if subtly, faster. The more active hand gets more circulation, and small repeated impacts from daily tasks send repair signals that accelerate growth. The effect is real enough to track but small enough that you would only notice it over weeks of careful measurement.

Stray clothing fibers, mostly from underwear, collected by abdominal hair. The color averages out across all garments worn.

Body hair on the abdomen grows toward the navel and acts like a conveyor belt, transporting clothing fibers inward all day. The lint's blue-gray color reflects the statistical average of all the fabric colors your clothes contain. Men with more abdominal hair collect more lint, and shaving the hair stops lint production entirely.

All three.

Axolotls regenerate limbs, heart tissue, spinal cord and parts of the brain without scarring, via dedifferentiation: adult cells revert to a stem-cell-like state. Humans carry similar genes but not the on-switch.

A tooth, specifically a canine tooth that grows through the upper lip.

Narwhals have only two teeth, both in the upper jaw. In males, the left one erupts through the lip and keeps growing throughout their life, while the right one stays embedded. The tusk contains up to 10 million nerve endings, allowing the narwhal to detect changes in water salinity. Some males grow two tusks when both teeth erupt.

Emus.

About 20,000 emus invaded Western Australian wheat farms after drought conditions pushed them toward settled land. Major Meredith and two soldiers with two Lewis guns fired thousands of rounds but found that emus absorbed bullets with alarming resilience and scattered into small groups that were impossible to herd. The campaign was officially recalled as a failure.

Mimosa pudica (sensitive plant)

Specialized cells at the base of each leaflet and leaf stem, called pulvini, rapidly lose water through ion-channel-driven osmosis when disturbed. The resulting turgor pressure drop causes the leaves to collapse inward in under a second. The response propagates electrically along the stem, and the plant reopens within minutes once the threat has passed.

Cladosporium sphaerospermum

The fungus is packed with melanin and colonised some of the most radioactive surfaces in the ruined reactor. Researchers have proposed that melanin lets it harness ionising radiation, though the mechanism is still debated.

Purple pitcher plant (Sarracenia purpurea)

The pitcher's tube is lined with waxy downward-pointing hairs that funnel insects into rainwater pooled at the base, where they drown and are digested by enzymes and bacteria. Remarkably, the plant hosts an exclusive micro-ecosystem inside each pitcher, including specialized mosquito larvae, mites, and bacteria found nowhere else on Earth.

Riftia pachyptila (giant tube worm)

Riftia can reach over 2 meters in length yet has completely lost its digestive tract during evolution. Its body contains a specialized organ called a trophosome, which is packed with billions of chemosynthetic bacteria. The worm absorbs hydrogen sulfide from vent water through its red plume and supplies it to the bacteria, which produce the organic compounds the worm lives on.

Judean date palm (Phoenix dactylifera)

In 2005, botanist Elaine Solowey germinated seeds recovered from the ancient Masada fortress in Israel, dated to between 155 BCE and 64 CE. The resulting tree, nicknamed Methuselah, grew to over 3 meters and produced pollen, proving viability after roughly 2,000 years of dormancy. Carbon dating confirmed the seeds' ancient origin.

Anglerfish (suborder Ceratioidei)

The anglerfish's esca, the glowing lure at the tip of its illicium rod, produces light through bacteria of the genus Aliivibrio. The fish cannot produce bioluminescence on its own; it acquires the bacteria from the seawater and they colonize the esca. In several species the bacteria are thought to be obligate symbionts, unable to survive outside the lure.

Thermokarst lake

When ice-rich permafrost thaws, the ground above it collapses and fills with meltwater, creating a thermokarst lake. The lake then absorbs more solar heat than surrounding tundra and drives further thaw in a self-amplifying cycle. As the decomposing organic material beneath the lake releases methane, some thermokarst lakes bubble so vigorously that their surfaces are flammable in winter.

Lake Natron, Tanzania

Lake Natron's pH can reach 10.5 and its water is saturated with natron, a sodium carbonate mineral. Animals that die in or near the lake are rapidly encrusted in mineral deposits. Counterintuitively, the same caustic chemistry that calcifies corpses also makes the lake the primary breeding ground for nearly 75 percent of the world's lesser flamingos, which nest on its toxic shores safe from predators.

Waitomo Glowworm Caves, New Zealand

The 'glowworms' are larvae of the fungus gnat Arachnocampa luminosa, found only in New Zealand. Each larva hangs dozens of mucus threads from the cave ceiling and produces a blue-green bioluminescent glow from its tail to attract midges and other insects. The entire ceiling appears star-like, giving the caves the appearance of a night sky underground.

Salar de Uyuni, Bolivia

When a thin layer of water from seasonal rains covers Salar de Uyuni's vast salt crust, the surface becomes the flattest and most reflective natural terrain on Earth. The reflectivity and extreme flatness have made it useful for remote-sensing satellite calibration. The flat extends over 10,582 square kilometers and lies at an elevation of roughly 3,656 meters in the Andes.

Socotra Island, Yemen

Socotra's most iconic tree, the dragon blood tree (Dracaena cinnabari), has an inverted umbrella shape that collects moisture from sea mist on its thick canopy and channels it to its roots. Due to millions of years of isolation, more than a third of Socotra's plant life is endemic. UNESCO designated it a World Heritage Site for its extraordinary biodiversity.

Movile Cave, Romania

Movile Cave was sealed beneath a limestone cap for over 5 million years. Its air is toxic to humans, low in oxygen and rich in hydrogen sulfide, yet it hosts a thriving ecosystem of 48 species previously unknown to science. These organisms rely entirely on chemosynthetic bacteria as a food base, with no sunlight input whatsoever, making it one of Earth's only truly isolated cave biospheres.

Dallol, Ethiopia (Danakil Depression)

Dallol sits in the Afar Triangle where three tectonic plates are pulling apart, and hydrothermal venting creates vivid yellow and green acid pools with pH values near zero, among the most acidic natural habitats on Earth. The area sits roughly 125 meters below sea level, making it one of the lowest and hottest year-round inhabited places, with average temperatures above 34 degrees Celsius.

Jellyfish Lake (Ongeim'l Tketau), Palau

Jellyfish Lake became isolated from the ocean thousands of years ago and its golden jellyfish population, Mastigias papua etpisoni, evolved in the absence of their main predators. Without selection pressure to use their nematocysts defensively, the stingers became vestigial. Millions of jellyfish migrate daily in a circuit that tracks sunlight, navigating by their symbiotic algae's need for photosynthesis.

The South Atlantic Anomaly

The inner Van Allen radiation belt dips closest to Earth here, so satellites crossing it absorb far more charged particles. Many spacecraft, including the Hubble telescope, switch off sensitive instruments while passing through.

Burning Mountain (Wingen), New South Wales, Australia

Burning Mountain is the oldest known naturally burning coal seam fire on Earth. The subsurface fire moves southward at about 1 meter per year, and its surface expression is a slowly migrating vent emitting smoke and heat. The site was considered a volcano by early European settlers. At its current pace, the coal seam could sustain combustion for thousands more years.

Moskstraumen (the Maelstrom), Norway

The Moskstraumen forms where tidal currents between the Lofoten Islands create one of the world's strongest open-water tidal whirlpool systems, with surface speeds exceeding 3 meters per second. Ancient Norse sagas described it as a bottomless abyss that could swallow ships. It is real and genuinely dangerous, though not the bottomless vortex of legend.

They hit at the same time

Galileo proposed this in the 16th century and it was dramatized famously on the Moon in 1971 when Apollo 15 astronaut David Scott dropped a hammer and a feather simultaneously. In a vacuum, gravity accelerates all objects equally regardless of mass. Air resistance is what makes a feather fall slower on Earth, not any difference in how gravity acts on it.

Average density relative to water (buoyancy)

Whether an object floats depends not on its material density but on whether its average overall density, including any trapped air, is less than water. A steel ship's hull encloses a large volume of air, making its average density less than 1 gram per cubic centimeter. A solid steel ball has a density of roughly 7.8 grams per cubic centimeter, so it sinks. Archimedes described this principle around 250 BCE.

Minus 40 degrees

The Fahrenheit scale was defined so that water freezes at 32 and boils at 212. The Celsius scale sets those points at 0 and 100. The two scales converge at exactly negative 40 degrees because of the arithmetic of their relative slopes. This is the only temperature at which the two readings are identical, and it is also cold enough to cause frostbite in under a minute.

The heated air inside is less dense than the surrounding air, making the total average density of the balloon system lower than the air it displaces

Heating the air inside the balloon causes it to expand, and since the balloon is open at the bottom, excess air spills out, leaving the interior air less dense than the surrounding atmosphere. The buoyant force on the balloon equals the weight of the air it displaces, and once that exceeds the total weight of the system, the balloon ascends. It is the same principle as a bubble rising in water.

The boiling point rises above 100 degrees Celsius

Water boils when its vapor pressure equals the atmospheric pressure pushing down on its surface. Increase that external pressure and water must be heated to a higher temperature before it can boil. A standard pressure cooker at about 15 PSI above atmospheric pressure raises the boiling point to roughly 121 degrees Celsius, which is why food cooks faster and why autoclaves sterilize at that temperature.

The amorphous (non-crystalline) atomic structure of glass allows photons to pass through without being absorbed or strongly scattered

In crystalline quartz sand, grain boundaries, impurities, and the exact crystalline structure scatter light in all directions, making it opaque. When silica is melted and cooled rapidly into glass, its atoms are arranged randomly without a repeating lattice. This amorphous structure lacks the grain boundaries that scatter light, and the energy gap in glass does not match visible photon energies, so visible light passes straight through.

The compressed spring has slightly more mass

Einstein's mass-energy equivalence (E = mc squared) means that stored elastic potential energy adds a tiny, measurable mass to the spring. The amount is absurdly small, on the order of femtograms for a typical spring, but it is a real physical effect. The same principle means a charged battery is very slightly heavier than a dead one, and a hot object is very slightly heavier than a cold one.

Victoria Woodhull in 1872

Victoria Woodhull, a stockbroker and newspaper publisher, ran for President in 1872 on the Equal Rights Party ticket, with Frederick Douglass as her running mate (without his consent). She was jailed on election day on obscenity charges and received no verified Electoral College votes, but her campaign was a landmark in American political history.

1986

No shot was ever fired and no one was hurt. The Dutch ambassador travelled to Scilly in 1986 to sign a formal peace, joking that islanders had lived in terror of an attack that never came.

A naval skirmish between the Holy Roman Empire and the Dutch Republic in which the only thing hit was a soup kettle on a Dutch ship

The Kettle War was a brief confrontation on the Scheldt River in October 1784 when Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II challenged Dutch control of the river. Austrian forces fired on Dutch ships; the only recorded casualty was a soup kettle struck by cannonball. The Dutch paid a small indemnity and the matter was closed, making it one of history's least violent armed confrontations.

George Antheil

Hollywood actress Hedy Lamarr and avant-garde composer George Antheil patented a radio guidance system in 1942 that used synchronized, rapidly changing frequencies to prevent torpedo signals from being jammed. The patent expired before the technology was widely adopted, meaning they never profited from it. The underlying concept is a direct ancestor of spread-spectrum technology used in modern wireless communications.

6939

Westinghouse sealed a torpedo-shaped capsule containing seeds, newsreels and a Sears catalogue 15 metres underground, set for retrieval 5,000 years later. A second capsule was added at the 1964 fair.

Studies of interference in serial verbal reactions

John Ridley Stroop's 1935 doctoral dissertation at George Peabody College, published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, became one of the most-cited papers in psychology. What is less known is that Stroop himself largely moved on to theology and scripture after this finding, publishing almost nothing further in experimental psychology.

The concept of 'work' (force times distance)

Coriolis was a French mathematician and engineer who studied rotating machinery such as waterwheels. In his 1829 textbook he gave the term 'work' its modern technical meaning of force times distance, years before his 1835 paper described the deflecting force that now bears his name.

A bank robber who robbed banks in broad daylight without a mask because he believed lemon juice would make his face invisible to cameras

Dunning and Kruger were inspired by the case of McArthur Wheeler, who in 1995 robbed two Pittsburgh banks without a disguise, confident that rubbing lemon juice on his face would render him invisible to security cameras. The juice, he believed, would work like invisible ink. When shown his clear image on the security footage, Wheeler was baffled.

Herbert Hall Turner in 1913

British astronomer Herbert Hall Turner proposed the term 'parsec' in a letter to the Observatory journal in 1913 as a compact alternative to writing 'the distance corresponding to a parallax of one second.' It blends 'parallax' and 'arcsecond.' Turner is largely forgotten today despite naming the unit astronomers use most for interstellar distances.

Comparing the relative brightness of red and blue flowers at dusk

In 1819, Bohemian physiologist Jan Evangelista Purkinje noticed that as evening fell, blue and violet flowers appeared brighter relative to red ones, while in daylight the red flowers seemed more vivid. This shift between photopic (cone-dominated) and scotopic (rod-dominated) vision now bears his name and explains why red colors appear to darken first at twilight.

The katal, named after the word 'catalysis' (from Greek 'katalysis')

The katal (symbol: kat) was adopted as the SI unit of catalytic activity in 1999. It is defined as the catalytic activity that raises the rate of a reaction by one mole per second. Unlike most SI units, it is named not after a person but after the abstract concept of catalysis itself, making it one of the few SI units with a conceptual rather than biographical etymology.

Frank Drake and Carl Sagan (with pulsar map designed by Frank Drake)

The binary-coded cover of the Voyager Golden Record was designed primarily by Frank Drake, the astronomer behind the Drake Equation, working with Carl Sagan's team. Drake devised the pulsar map that encodes the Sun's position relative to 14 pulsars, a solution to explaining our location to extraterrestrials without assuming any shared coordinate system.

Its nuclear transition falls in the ultraviolet range, making it theoretically usable as an atomic clock far more precise than any existing cesium clock

Most nuclear transitions release gamma rays with energies in the megaelectronvolt range, impossible to probe with lasers. Thorium-229m's transition energy is only about 8.4 eV, in the vacuum ultraviolet range where lasers can reach it. A nuclear clock based on this transition could be up to 1,000 times more stable than current cesium atomic clocks and more resistant to external electromagnetic disturbances.

Own, or characteristic

David Hilbert coined Eigenwert in his early 1900s work on integral equations. English adopted the German prefix untranslated, which is why we say eigenvalue rather than characteristic value.

James Van Allen and his team at the University of Iowa

James Van Allen himself designed and built the Geiger-Mueller tube instrument aboard Explorer 1 that detected the belts that now bear his name. When initial readings showed the counter saturating rather than registering expected counts, Van Allen correctly deduced the instrument was overwhelmed by radiation intensity, not malfunctioning, a counterintuitive interpretation that confirmed the belts' existence.

Allen's rule states that animals in colder climates have shorter, more compact limbs and appendages; Joel Asaph Allen was a 19th-century American zoologist

Joel Asaph Allen formulated his rule in 1877, noting that the protruding body parts of endotherms (ears, limbs, tails, bills) tend to be shorter in colder environments to reduce heat loss through surface area. Allen was a curator at the American Museum of Natural History and also described over 1,000 bird and mammal species, yet today he is almost entirely eclipsed by Bergmann in textbooks.

Ernst Schmidt was a German engineer who pioneered boundary layer theory applied to heat and mass transfer in the early 20th century

Ernst Heinrich Wilhelm Schmidt (1892-1975) was a German mechanical engineer and thermodynamicist at the Technical University of Munich. He developed foundational methods for analyzing simultaneous heat and mass transfer in fluid flows, particularly in evaporation and combustion. The Schmidt number, analogous to the Prandtl number but for mass transfer instead of heat transfer, encapsulates his contribution to transport phenomena.

Roman soldiers received a 'salarium,' an allowance to buy salt, not actual salt as payment

The Latin 'salarium' referred to a sum of money allocated to soldiers for the purchase of salt, which was a costly and essential commodity. Soldiers were not paid in salt itself. The English word 'salary' derives from this allowance, so the salt connection is real but the popular version of the story, that soldiers literally carried home bags of salt as wages, is an embellishment.

Skimmington (or skimmington ride)

The English version of the charivari, called a skimmington or rough music, involved a procession of neighbors banging pots and sometimes parading an effigy or a stand-in for the offending person. The skimmington specifically mocked men who were beaten by their wives or who failed to control their households, as defined by the community. It was widely practiced from the medieval period through the 18th century.

Refusing to shoot a bear that had been tied to a tree for him to kill

On a hunting trip in Mississippi in November 1902, Roosevelt's aides cornered, clubbed, and tied an American black bear to a willow tree for him to shoot, since he had not found any game. Roosevelt refused, considering it unsportsmanlike. A political cartoon by Clifford Berryman depicted the scene, which inspired a Brooklyn toy maker named Morris Michtom to create stuffed bears he called 'Teddy's bears.'

KY (from 'kuuki yomenai,' meaning 'cannot read the air')

The Japanese abbreviation KY, from 'kuuki yomenai,' describes someone who is tone-deaf to the social atmosphere of a room. The term emerged prominently in Japanese pop culture in the 2000s and has spawned a small genre of etiquette advice. It reflects the deep cultural weight Japan places on nonverbal, contextual social sensitivity as a marker of competence and consideration.

About 3,900 years old, preserved on a Sumerian clay tablet (the Hymn to Ninkasi)

The Hymn to Ninkasi, dated to approximately 1800 BCE and discovered inscribed on a Sumerian clay tablet, contains a detailed recipe for brewing beer as a praise song to Ninkasi, the Sumerian goddess of brewing. The hymn describes the entire process from making bappir (bread used as a fermenting agent) to filtering the finished beer. It is the oldest surviving written recipe of any kind.

The Medici family of Florence

The three golden balls symbol associated with pawnbroking is traditionally attributed to the Medici family, whose coat of arms featured three or more balls (originally bezants, representing coins). As Medici banking spread across Europe, the symbol became associated with money lending and eventually with pawnbroking. Some historians link it alternatively to Saint Nicholas, who reputedly tossed bags of gold through a window to provide dowries for three poor sisters.

King Jigme Singye Wangchuck, in the 1970s

Jigme Singye Wangchuck, who became Bhutan's fourth king at age 16 in 1972, coined the phrase 'Gross National Happiness' reportedly in a 1979 interview, arguing that Bhutan's development should be measured by the well-being of its people rather than economic output alone. The concept was later formalized into four pillars and nine domains and has been cited by economists and governments globally as an alternative development framework.

Jack Nicklaus

Jack Nicklaus won the Masters in 1963, 1965, 1966, 1972, 1975, and famously in 1986 at age 46, making him the oldest Masters champion. Woods won his five green jackets in 1997, 2001, 2002, 2005, and 2019.

New England Patriots and Pittsburgh Steelers

The Steelers won Super Bowls for the 1974, 1975, 1978, 1979, 2005, and 2008 seasons; the Patriots for 2001, 2003, 2004, 2014, 2016, and 2018. Both stood at six championships through the 2024 season.

Lionel Messi

Messi scored a first-half penalty and an extra-time goal against France in the Qatar 2022 final, which Argentina won 4-2 on penalties after a 3-3 draw. Messi finished the tournament with seven goals and won the Golden Ball as best player.

115

Beckham earned 115 caps between 1996 and 2009, scoring 17 goals and captaining England 59 times. His World Cup goals came against Colombia in 1998, Argentina in 2002, and Ecuador in 2006.

Paris

Paris hosted the Summer Olympics in 1900, 1924, and 2024, matching London's record of three Summer Games. London was the first city to achieve the feat, but Paris caught up with the 2024 edition.

7

Armstrong had claimed seven consecutive Tour de France victories from 1999 to 2005, then a record. On October 22, 2012, the UCI formally stripped all seven titles after the US Anti-Doping Agency published evidence of systematic doping including EPO, steroids, and blood transfusions.

Wayne Gretzky

Gretzky scored 894 regular-season goals in 1,487 games, a record that stood for 26 years after his retirement in 1999. Ovechkin broke it in April 2025. Gretzky still holds 55 other NHL records, including 2,857 career points, a mark many consider truly unbreakable.

Schindler's List

Schindler's List told the true story of Oskar Schindler saving over a thousand Jewish workers during the Holocaust and won Spielberg his first Oscar for Best Director. The film received 12 nominations in total and also won for Cinematography, Score, and Screenplay.

Stephen King

Frank Darabont adapted the film from King's 1982 novella 'Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption.' Despite bombing at the box office and losing all seven of its Oscar nominations, it climbed IMDb's user rankings and held the number one spot for years on end.

Philadelphia (1993) and Forrest Gump (1994)

Hanks won for playing an AIDS-stricken lawyer in Philadelphia at the 66th ceremony and then for the title role in Forrest Gump at the 67th. He is one of only two actors to achieve consecutive Best Actor wins, alongside Spencer Tracy who did it in 1937 and 1938.

Jonathan Demme

Demme's film won Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor (Anthony Hopkins), Best Actress (Jodie Foster), and Best Adapted Screenplay, joining It Happened One Night (1934) and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975) in the rare 'Big Five' sweep. Hopkins' Hannibal Lecter appeared for fewer than 16 minutes on screen.

Quentin Tarantino

Tarantino's non-linear crime anthology beat 22 other contenders at the 1994 Cannes Film Festival, where Clint Eastwood chaired the jury. The film was also nominated for seven Oscars, winning Best Original Screenplay, and became Miramax's first film to gross over 100 million dollars.

11

Titanic tied Ben-Hur's all-time record by winning 11 of its 14 Oscar nominations, including Best Picture and Best Director. Made on a then-record 200 million dollar budget, it went on to earn over 2.2 billion dollars worldwide, holding the global box office record for 12 years.

Francis Ford Coppola

Coppola co-wrote the screenplay with Mario Puzo, adapting Puzo's bestselling novel. At the 45th Academy Awards, the film won Best Picture, Best Actor for Marlon Brando, and Best Adapted Screenplay. Interestingly, the Best Director Oscar that year went to Bob Fosse for Cabaret.

Central Perk

Central Perk is a fictional Greenwich Village coffeehouse that served as one of the two main gathering spots for the Friends cast across all ten seasons from 1994 to 2004. The recurring barista character Gunther, played by James Michael Tyler, was cast partly because he was the only extra who could work the espresso machine.

Breaking Bad

Breaking Bad followed Walter White's transformation from a mild-mannered high school chemistry teacher into a ruthless methamphetamine producer. Gilligan also created the prequel series Better Call Saul (2015-2022). Breaking Bad ran for 62 episodes across its five seasons.

6

The final season was shorter than any previous one, with six episodes running from April 14 to May 19, 2019. Earlier seasons each had ten episodes, while season seven had seven. The final four episodes all ran over 70 minutes, with episode three reaching 82 minutes, the longest in the series.

The Simpsons

The Simpsons debuted on Fox on December 17, 1989, and surpassed the previous primetime scripted record held by the Western drama Gunsmoke in April 2018. The show has aired over 800 episodes across more than 35 seasons, making it also the longest-running American sitcom.

New York City

Mick Dundee and his companion Sue are confronted by a mugger with a small switchblade on a New York City street. Dundee laughs off the threat and produces a massive bowie knife. Paul Hogan wrote the line himself and was later surprised to find it enter popular culture worldwide.

Alex Trebek

Trebek hosted the revived version of Jeopardy! from its 1984 premiere and taped his final episode on October 29, 2020, just days before he died of pancreatic cancer at age 80. He hosted more than 8,000 episodes and became one of the most recognised faces in American television.

Around 70 million copies

Released in November 1982, Thriller won a then-record eight Grammy Awards at the 1984 ceremony, including Album of the Year. Its global sales are estimated at 66 to 70 million copies, and Guinness World Records recognises it as the best-selling album ever.

1975

Released on October 31, 1975, Bohemian Rhapsody reached UK number one on November 23 and stayed for nine weeks, taking the Christmas top spot. It returned to number one for five more weeks after Freddie Mercury's death in 1991, a second Christmas number one.

Led Zeppelin IV

The untitled fourth studio album, universally known as Led Zeppelin IV, was released on November 8, 1971, and contains Stairway to Heaven as its centrepiece. Jimmy Page wrote the guitar parts and Robert Plant wrote the lyrics during sessions at Headley Grange, Hampshire. The album has sold over 37 million copies worldwide.

Michael Jackson

Nevermind, released on September 24, 1991, surpassed all expectations and displaced Michael Jackson's Dangerous from the top of the Billboard 200 in January 1992. The lead single Smells Like Teen Spirit is credited with bringing grunge and alternative rock into the mainstream.

Global Positioning System

GPS is a satellite-based navigation system operated by the United States that lets a receiver calculate its precise location anywhere on Earth using timing signals from a network of orbiting satellites.

O negative

O negative blood lacks both A and B antigens on red blood cells and the Rh factor, so it can be transfused to patients of any blood type without triggering an immune reaction. It is critically important in emergencies when a patient's blood type is unknown.

Packet switching

Packet switching divides data into small blocks that travel independently across a network and are reassembled at the destination. Developed in the 1960s, it underpins the internet's TCP/IP protocol and is far more efficient than older circuit-switching methods.

Troposphere

The troposphere is the lowest layer of Earth's atmosphere, extending roughly 12 km above the surface. It contains about 75 percent of the atmosphere's mass and almost all its water vapour, making it the site of virtually all weather phenomena.

The Colossus of Rhodes

The Colossus of Rhodes was a giant bronze statue of the sun-god Helios, completed around 280 BC after Rhodes survived a year-long siege by Demetrius Poliorcetes. About 33 metres tall, it stood just 54 years before an earthquake toppled it in 226 BC.

The 14th century

The Black Death swept through Europe between 1347 and 1351, carried by fleas on rats aboard trading ships. Caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, it killed an estimated 30 to 60 percent of Europe's population and reshaped the continent's social, economic, and religious fabric.

The Pickwick Papers

The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club was published in monthly serial installments in 1836 and 1837, making it Dickens's first full-length novel. Its comic story of Mr Pickwick and his friends became a publishing sensation and launched one of literature's greatest careers.

The Persian (Achaemenid) Empire

The Royal Road was constructed under King Darius I around 500 BC, spanning roughly 2,700 km across the Achaemenid Persian Empire. Equipped with relay stations for royal couriers, it allowed messages to travel from Sardis to Susa in about seven days, compared to the three months it took ordinary travellers.

1813

Pride and Prejudice was published on January 28, 1813, by T. Egerton of London. Austen had written an early draft called 'First Impressions' in 1797. The novel's famous opening line about a single man in possession of a good fortune is one of the most recognised in English literature.

The Renaissance

The Renaissance, from the French for 'rebirth,' was a cultural movement spanning roughly the 14th to 17th centuries. Beginning in Florence and other Italian city-states, it saw renewed interest in classical Greek and Roman thought, leading to extraordinary advances in art, architecture, literature, and science.

Dante Alighieri

Dante Alighieri wrote The Divine Comedy between 1308 and his death in 1321. The three-part poem, comprising Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso, is considered the greatest work of Italian literature and a foundational text of Western culture, as well as a landmark in the development of the Italian language.

King John

King John sealed the Magna Carta at Runnymede on June 15, 1215, under pressure from rebellious barons. It established for the first time that the king was subject to the rule of law. Several of its clauses, including guarantees of due process, still influence constitutional law today.

Oceania

Oceania is one of three totalitarian superstates in Orwell's dystopian novel, published in 1949. Ruled by 'Big Brother' and the Party, it encompasses the British Isles, the Americas, and parts of Africa and Australasia. The novel coined terms like 'doublethink,' 'thoughtcrime,' and 'Newspeak' that remain in everyday use.

The Inca

Machu Picchu was built by the Inca emperor Pachacuti around 1450 AD and abandoned roughly a century later, probably during the Spanish conquest. Situated at about 2,430 metres above sea level in the Andes, it remained unknown to the outside world until Hiram Bingham brought it to international attention in 1911.

Budapest

Budapest, the capital of Hungary, was formed in 1873 by uniting Buda and Obuda on the west bank of the Danube with Pest on the east bank.

Russia

Russia covers about 17 million square kilometres, making it by far the largest country on Earth by area and the only nation spanning eleven time zones.

Jordan

Petra was the capital of the Nabataean kingdom more than two thousand years ago and is now Jordan's most-visited tourist attraction.

Alaska

Alaska covers about 1.7 million square kilometres, making it the largest U.S. state by area, bigger than the next three largest states combined, though one of the least densely populated.

The Sahara

The Sahara is the world's largest hot desert, covering approximately 9.2 million square kilometres across 11 African countries. The name comes from the Arabic word 'sahra,' meaning desert. Despite its arid reputation, it contains mountains, oases, and evidence that it was once far greener.

Canada and the United States

The Canada-US border stretches about 8,891 km, making it the longest international land border in the world. It runs along the 49th parallel through much of its length and is notable for being undefended, reflecting the peaceful relationship between the two nations.

The Mediterranean Sea

Crete lies in the eastern Mediterranean Sea and is the largest of the Greek islands. It was home to the Minoan civilisation, one of the earliest advanced cultures in Europe, which flourished from about 2700 to 1450 BC and gave rise to legends of the Minotaur and the labyrinth.

The Ural Mountains

The Ural Mountains run north to south through Russia for about 2,500 km and are conventionally regarded as the boundary between Europe and Asia. They are one of the world's oldest mountain ranges and are rich in mineral resources including iron ore and coal.

Sudan

Sudan has roughly 200 to 255 ancient pyramids, more than Egypt's roughly 130. They were built by rulers of the Nubian Kingdom of Kush, whose later capital was Meroe, between about 700 BC and 350 AD, and are steeper and narrower than Egyptian pyramids.

Europe and Asia

Istanbul is the only major city in the world to span two continents, sitting astride the Bosphorus strait that divides Europe from Asia. The European side was the ancient city of Constantinople, while the Asian side is known as Anatolia or Asia Minor. The city was capital of three successive empires: Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman.

Lawyer

Maximilien Robespierre trained as a lawyer in Arras, where he gained a reputation for defending the poor. Elected to the Estates-General in 1789, he rose through the Revolution to dominate the Committee of Public Safety and oversee the Reign of Terror, during which some 17,000 people were officially executed. He was guillotined in July 1794.

Berlin

The Berlin Conference of 1884 to 1885, convened by Otto von Bismarck, established the rules by which European powers would partition Africa. Fourteen nations attended; no African representatives were present. The conference led to the formalisation of colonial borders that still largely define African nations today.

The Battle of Actium

The Battle of Actium, fought on September 2, 31 BC off the coast of Greece, saw Octavian's fleet under Marcus Agrippa defeat the combined naval forces of Mark Antony and Cleopatra VII. Both Antony and Cleopatra fled to Egypt and later died by suicide. Octavian became the undisputed ruler of Rome, was renamed Augustus, and became the first Roman Emperor.

The Treaty of Tordesillas

The Treaty of Tordesillas, signed June 7, 1494 and brokered by Pope Alexander VI, drew a line 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands. Land to the west went to Spain; land to the east to Portugal. This is why Brazil, whose eastern bulge fell east of the line, was colonised by Portugal while the rest of Latin America became Spanish.

Jean-Jacques Dessalines

After Toussaint Louverture was captured by the French in 1802, Jean-Jacques Dessalines took command of the revolutionary forces and decisively defeated the French expedition sent by Napoleon. He declared Haitian independence on January 1, 1804 and renamed the colony from Saint-Domingue to Haiti, an Indigenous Taino name, making it the first Black republic and the second independent nation in the Western Hemisphere.

Athens

Cleisthenes introduced sweeping democratic reforms in Athens around 508 to 507 BC, breaking the power of aristocratic clans and giving citizens direct participation in government through the Assembly. Though limited to free adult male citizens and excluding women, slaves, and foreigners, it was the world's first direct democracy and profoundly influenced political thought for millennia.

The Tokugawa Shogunate

The Tokugawa Shogunate governed Japan from 1603 to 1868, a period known as the Edo era, during which the country maintained strict isolation from the outside world. The Meiji Restoration overthrew it and nominally restored power to Emperor Meiji, triggering rapid modernisation and industrialisation that transformed Japan into a major world power within decades.

Quantum tunnelling

Quantum tunnelling occurs because particles at the quantum scale behave as probability waves; there is a nonzero probability of finding the particle on the other side of a potential barrier. It underlies phenomena including radioactive alpha decay, the nuclear fusion reactions that power the Sun, and the operation of tunnel diodes in modern electronics.

Messenger RNA (mRNA)

Messenger RNA is transcribed from a DNA template in the nucleus and carries the coded instructions for a protein sequence out to the cytoplasm, where ribosomes translate it into a chain of amino acids. The central role of mRNA came to wider public awareness with the development of mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines by Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech.

About 1.4 solar masses; the white dwarf collapses and typically triggers a Type Ia supernova

Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar calculated in 1930 that a white dwarf cannot exceed about 1.4 times the mass of the Sun while remaining supported by electron degeneracy pressure. If it accretes enough mass to exceed this limit, electron degeneracy fails, the core collapses, and the resulting runaway nuclear fusion causes a Type Ia supernova explosion that can briefly outshine an entire galaxy.

Enantiomers

Enantiomers are pairs of molecules with the same connectivity of atoms but arranged as non-superimposable mirror images, a property called chirality. They can behave very differently biologically: one enantiomer of a drug may be therapeutic while the other is inactive or harmful, as tragically illustrated by the drug thalidomide, whose S-enantiomer caused severe birth defects.

The singularity

At the centre of a black hole, general relativity predicts that matter is compressed to a point of infinite density called a singularity, where spacetime curvature becomes infinite and the laws of physics as currently understood cease to apply. A full theory of quantum gravity, which does not yet exist, would be needed to describe what actually occurs at or near a singularity.

The proteasome

The proteasome is a large barrel-shaped protein complex that degrades misfolded, damaged, or obsolete proteins by unfolding and cleaving them. Proteins are targeted for degradation by attachment of ubiquitin chains. Aaron Ciechanover, Avram Hershko, and Irwin Rose shared the 2004 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for discovering this ubiquitin-mediated proteolysis system.

Technetium

Technetium (Tc, atomic number 43) was synthesised in 1937 by Carlo Perrier and Emilio Segre by bombarding molybdenum with deuterons in a cyclotron, making it the first artificially produced element. It has no stable isotopes, which explains why it does not occur in significant quantities in nature despite being a relatively light element.

A keystone species

The keystone species concept was introduced by ecologist Robert Paine in 1969 after he removed sea stars from a tidal zone and found the community collapsed to a monoculture of mussels. The classic terrestrial example is wolves in Yellowstone: their reintroduction in 1995 triggered cascading changes in vegetation, riverbanks, and dozens of other species through trophic cascades.

Why is the night sky dark if the universe contains infinitely many stars? The resolution is that the universe has a finite age, so light from the most distant objects has not had time to reach us.

Heinrich Olbers popularised the paradox in 1823: in an infinite, eternal, static universe uniformly filled with stars, every line of sight would eventually hit a stellar surface, making the entire night sky as bright as the Sun. Modern cosmology resolves this because the Big Bang occurred about 13.8 billion years ago, limiting how far light has travelled, and the universe's expansion redshifts distant light below visible wavelengths.

The Joule-Thomson effect

For most gases at room temperature, throttling causes cooling, the basis of refrigeration and gas liquefaction. Hydrogen and helium instead warm slightly, because room temperature lies above their inversion temperatures.

Nicolas Steno

Nicolas Steno articulated the law of superposition and the principle of original horizontality in his 1669 work Dissertationis Prodromus. These foundational principles of stratigraphy established that rock layers record time sequentially, making it possible to read geological history from cross-sections of exposed rock. Steno also correctly identified fossils as the remains of once-living organisms, a revolutionary claim at the time.

A cycloid

The brachistochrone problem was posed by Johann Bernoulli in 1696 and solved independently by Newton, Leibniz, L'Hopital, and both Bernoullis. The answer is a cycloid, the curve traced by a point on the rim of a rolling circle. The problem was foundational in the development of the calculus of variations, a branch of mathematics that optimises entire functions rather than individual values.

High-temperature superconductivity in copper-oxide ceramics

In 1986 Georg Bednorz and K. Alex Muller discovered superconductivity in a lanthanum barium copper oxide ceramic at around 35 K, far above the previous record. The discovery earned them the 1987 Nobel Prize in Physics. Subsequent cuprate compounds achieved superconductivity above 130 K, but the underlying mechanism remains incompletely understood and is one of the major open problems in condensed matter physics.

Igor Stravinsky

The premiere of The Rite of Spring (Le Sacre du Printemps) at the Theatre des Champs-Elysees on May 29, 1913 descended into chaos as the audience booed and fought over the radical dissonances, irregular rhythms, and Nijinsky's unconventional choreography. Stravinsky himself fled the theatre in distress. The work is now regarded as one of the most important orchestral compositions of the 20th century.

Quinta del Sordo (House of the Deaf Man)

Goya painted Saturn Devouring His Son and the other 'Black Paintings' directly onto the plaster walls of his home, the Quinta del Sordo, between 1819 and 1823. The name refers to a previous deaf owner, not Goya, though he too was profoundly deaf by then. The paintings were transferred to canvas in 1874 and are now in the Prado Museum in Madrid.

Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf published Mrs Dalloway in 1925, employing a radical stream-of-consciousness technique that moves fluidly between the inner thoughts of multiple characters over a single day in London. Along with James Joyce's Ulysses (published 1922), it redefined what the novel could do with interiority, time, and subjective experience.

Peter Paul Rubens

Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) was simultaneously the most influential painter in northern Europe and a skilled diplomat who negotiated a peace treaty between Spain and England, earning knighthoods from both King Philip IV and King Charles I. His studio in Antwerp was the most productive in Europe, employing dozens of assistants including the young Anthony van Dyck.