If you grew up in the 1980s, there’s a decent chance you had a novelty telephone in your home — one shaped like a football, a hamburger, or perhaps a cartoon character. Among the more popular options was a phone shaped like Garfield, the lasagna-loving, Monday-hating orange tabby from the Jim Davis comic strip, as seen above. The phone’s eyes would open when you picked up the receiver, adding a touch of whimsy to your otherwise mundane landline experience. Thousands of these phones were manufactured and sold during the decade, and today, collectors still buy and sell the vintage items online. But for residents of a French coastal town, these Garfield phones weren’t a nostalgic curiosity. They were an inescapable nuisance. Starting in the mid-1980s, pieces of orange plastic began washing up on a beach on the northwest tip of France. (Here’s a map.) At first, the debris was probably just confusing. But as the years went on, a pattern emerged: the plastic wasn’t random garbage. It was Garfield. Specifically, it was parts of Garfield phones — sometimes intact, sometimes badly coated in grime, but always unmistakably the cartoon cat. According to the BBC, this had been happening, more or [...]

If you’ve taken a high school science class, you’ve probably learned that the gravitational constant here on Earth is about 9.8 meters per second squared. In other words, things on the planet are constantly falling back to the ground, accelerating at that rate. We don’t tend to think about it much — unless you’re going to the International Space Station or on a Vomit Comet, gravity is the same wherever you are — hence the name. Except that, it actually isn’t. Gravity is a function of mass — the more massive an object, the stronger its gravitational pull. And that pull depends not just on how much mass there is, but how that mass is distributed around an object’s center. From afar, the Earth looks like a smooth, round ball, but in reality, it isn’t. Our planet isn’t a uniform sphere, and therefore, doesn’t actually have uniform density, so gravity varies slightly from place to place. In most cases, the difference is so small that it’s basically undetectable. But in one part of Canada, the difference is noticeable enough — with the right instruments — that scientists spent decades trying to figure out why. That region is near the area [...]

Pictured above is the Space Shuttle Discovery, on its way to the International Space Station on October 23, 2007. As launches go, there’s nothing particularly notable about the above — many other launch photos look generally similar. As a result, nothing looks amiss, and that’s good, because nothing is. The launch went off fine and the mission was a success. But there is something odd about the photo: everything — except the large missile-shaped object in the middle of the spacecraft — is white. That’s the external fuel tank — it is, basically, a big tank of rocket fuel, the contents of which are needed solely to get the shuttle into space. There’s nothing else in there. And, as you can see, it’s orange — a color you rarely see in consumer products, let alone massive, very visible scientific expeditions. And in fact, in the early space missions — such as STS-1 on April 12, 1981, the launch of which can be seen below, that same part was white. What gives? Well, science, of course. Getting stuff into space is hard — it takes a lot of math, and a lot of fuel. And the bigger the thing you want [...]

If you’re old enough to remember VHS tapes, you probably also remember the small anxiety that came with renting one. You’d pick up a movie, watch it, and then — ideally within a day or two — return it to the store. If you forgot, you’d rack up late fees. Annoying, sure, but not the end of the world. The worst that could happen was a few extra dollars tacked onto your account, maybe a stern look from the clerk next time you came in. It’s not going to make you unemployable… right? Unfortunately for a woman named Caron McBride, that’s exactly what happened. In 2021, McBride — having recently married — moved from Oklahoma to Texas with her new husband. She went to the Texas DMV to change the name on her driver’s license, but was told that Texas couldn’t do that. Per USA Today, she was told she had to “fix an issue in Oklahoma first” and “was given a case number and a phone number to the courthouse.” When she called the Oklahoma court, she was told the bad news: she was a wanted criminal. The crime? Failing to return a VHS tape of “Sabrina the Teenage [...]

Quitting smoking is hard. Really hard. The CDC estimates that about two-thirds of adult smokers want to quit, but only about 7% who try in any given year actually succeed. There are nicotine patches, gums, lozenges, prescription medications, hypnosis, acupuncture, and countless apps designed to help people kick the habit. Most people try multiple methods before finding one that works — if they ever do. Etta Mae Lopez tried something different. She slapped a cop. On a Tuesday in May 2013, Lopez, a 31-year-old Sacramento, California resident, stood outside the Sacramento County jail for several hours. She wasn’t there to visit anyone or post bail. She was waiting for a deputy to come outside. When Deputy Matt Campoy finished his shift and walked out of the building, Lopez — all five feet, one inch of her — blocked his path. As NBC News reported, she suddenly stepped into him and slapped him across the face. When Campoy grabbed her and brought her back inside the jail, she slapped his arm for good measure. Once safely in handcuffs, Lopez explained her reasoning. She told Campoy that she had deliberately targeted him because he was in uniform — she wanted to make [...]

When you think of a desert, the image in your head probably contains a lot of sand and… well, not much else. Maybe there’s some vegetation here or there, a snake or vulture darting cross the landscape, and maybe even the ruins of an old mining operation. Wait long enough, and you’ll probably come across a car or two. But you wouldn’t expect to see this. The image above is the winner of National Geographic’s 2018 photo contest. It shows a parking lot containing hundreds of thousands of cars (and one plane!), all of them sitting in neat rows, baking under the sun. They’re about a 90 minutes northwest from Los Angeles (here’s a map), but the cars there aren’t going to LA — or anywhere else — any time soon. They’re relegated to sit there and do nothing, much like they have for over a decade. Their story begins in 2015, when Volkswagen got caught in one of the largest corporate scandals in automotive history. The German automaker had been selling diesel vehicles marketed as clean and fuel-efficient, but as the Guardian reported, the company had rigged nearly 600,000 of those vehicles to cheat on emissions tests. The cars [...]

Hi! A friend of mine posted the image above to her Instagram earlier today, and the timing was great — because (a) I wasn’t sure what I wanted to share today and (b) oh boy, have I been on the roller coaster above lately. Outside of Now I Know, I’ve been working on another project, one where I help people who work in PR and communications adapt to a world where AI literacy is increasingly important. I started that project in January and it’s not quite followed the path above (the second, squiggly path, I mean), but it’s pretty close. I build, I get excited about what I’m doing, I share, it lands fine but not with the same degree of excitement. That causes some self-doubt to take root, which doesn’t go away until I find another way to find a solution, and then the cycle repeats itself — or, until I realize that I’ve actually made a lot of strides toward my goal already. In other words, in the moment, where I am on the chart is all that matters, but if I take a step back, I can see the progress being made since inception, and it’s a [...]