Science facts

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A Victorian woman in a dress of lace woven in a pattern of love hearts feeds punched cards into a huge brass machine. Next to her, an inventor named Babbage keeps babbling about cabbages while the engine clanks out numbers.

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A silver wolf is chewing on a glowing light-bulb filament, and it won't melt in his jaws. Around his neck hangs a tag with a giant letter W. His name, stitched on the collar: WOLFRAM.

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Deep inside your brain, a tiny seahorse is filing today's memories into drawers. A HIPPO wanders onto a college CAMPUS to help.

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A little house stands on the beach. Every hour the tide ebbs and carries off a few more of the words written on its walls, fast at first and then slower. That's the shape of a forgetting curve.

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A scientist comes back from holiday to a pile of dirty petri dishes. A pink FLAMINGO (FLEM-ing) is pecking at fuzzy mould on one, and all the bacteria around the mould have died.

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A Danish astronomer peers up at the stars through a TIE ("TEE-ko") he's wrapped around his telescope. Moonlight glints off his shiny metal nose: he lost the real one in a sword duel, and shouts "BRAH-hey!" every time it slips.

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A friar mends a hole in his robe ("MEN-del") in a monastery garden, surrounded by thousands of pea plants. He counts green peas and yellow peas, wrinkly and smooth, writing the tallies on the garden wall.

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A man in a ruddy fur coat ("RUTH-er-ford") drives a Ford past a sheet of thin gold foil. He fires tiny particles at it; almost all go straight through, but a few bounce right back, as if a shell had bounced off tissue paper.

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A scientist glows faintly in her dark laboratory, holding two Nobel medals, one for physics and one for chemistry. She names a new glowing element after her homeland, Poland: POLONIUM. She's MARIE CURIE, who CURES her homesickness this way.

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A Roman alchemist pours a puddle of shiny liquid silver into a bowl and calls it "hydrargyrum": water-silver. He writes the initials H and g on the bowl, and that's still mercury's symbol.

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A Roman goddess of the dawn, AURORA, glows gold as the sun comes up. A miner holds up a nugget and gasps "AU!" That's gold's symbol, from the Latin aurum.

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A salty sailor says "NAH, I don't like natrium" and spits out seawater (Na for sodium). His friend munches a banana, full of potassium, and gives a thumbs-up: "OK!" (K for kalium).

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During a solar eclipse in 1868, astronomers spot a strange yellow line in the Sun's light that matches no known element. They name it after the Greek sun god HELIOS, who floats by holding a HELIUM balloon.

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A Russian chemist with a wild beard plays patience with cards, one per element, until they line up in rows. He leaves gaps for elements nobody has found yet, and he's later proved right. He's MENDELEEV, who MENDS the gaps.

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A German weatherman notices that South America and Africa fit together like jigsaw pieces. "WE GO NEARer and further!" (WEGENER) he says, and pushes them back into one giant supercontinent: PANGAEA, "all the lands".

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A chemist at DUPONT mixes up a strange, cloudy liquid that her colleagues want to throw away. She insists on spinning it into fibres, and they turn out stronger than steel. She QUICKLY ("KWO-lek") files a patent: Kevlar.

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An octopus pulls open its coat to show three hearts beating in a row, like a tiny brass band. When it cuts its finger, it bleeds blue, because its blood carries oxygen with COPPER, like an old blue-green penny.

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A pink salamander with feathery gills and a permanent smile loses a leg, shrugs, and grows a new one. "AXE? A LOT? L!" (AXOLOTL) It lives only in the old canals of Mexico City, where gondola boats float past at XOCHIMILCO ("so-chee-MEEL-ko").

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A thermometer drops and drops until the atoms inside nearly stop jiggling. The display reads minus 273.15: "2, 7, 3, 1, 5", like a countdown that freezes before launch. On the KELVIN scale, that's a perfect zero.

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A scientist named ROSALIND shines X-rays through a strand of DNA and captures a ghostly X on film. Watson and Crick see the photo and realise DNA is a twisted ladder. They announce it in 1953: "19... 53 rungs!"

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A country doctor notices that milkmaids who catch cowpox never get smallpox. He scratches cowpox into a boy's arm, and a cow moos: "VACCA!" (Latin for cow). The doctor's name is EDWARD JENNER, who's GENERALLY right.

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A Greek thinker climbs into a full bath in SYRACUSE, Sicily, and the water spills over the side. "EUREKA!" he shouts, realising he can measure the king's crown by the water it pushes away, and runs naked through the streets. He's ARCHIMEDES, with his ARCH of MEDS.

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An apple bonks a young man on the head. He goes indoors and writes a fat book of PRINCIPLES (PRINCIPIA) that explains why the apple fell and why the Moon doesn't. The printer stamps it 16... 87.

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A skeleton counts its bones: "2... 0... 6." It loses count at the tiniest one, a little stirrup deep inside its ear, small enough to sit on a grain of rice: the STAPES.

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A blacksmith hammers an iron horseshoe on a ferry crossing a river. The ferry's name, painted on the side: FERRUM.

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A Roman plumber fixes a pipe made of heavy grey lead. Each pipe is stamped Pb, and the water tastes sweet, which is a bad sign.

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A silver gaucho rides across the Pampas shouting "Ag! Ag!" The country he's in, Argentina, is named after the metal itself: argentum.

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A tin soldier stands to attention on a shelf, his helmet stamped Sn. He's from Stannum Street.

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A Roman ship sails to Cyprus and comes back loaded with orange metal. The captain writes Cu on every crate: cuprum.

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A tiny balloon labelled 1 floats past, the lightest thing in the room. A Frenchman pricks it, and out spills a cup of water. He shouts "Hydro-gène! Water-maker!"

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You take a deep breath, and 78 little knights (nitrogen) march into your lungs for every 21 fire-breathing dragons (oxygen).

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A lemon and a bar of soap fight on a seesaw numbered 0 to 14. In the very middle, at 7, a glass of pure water sits perfectly balanced.

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A jeweller drops a diamond ring into a pencil sharpener. Out come pencil shavings. Both are made of the same thing: a car made of bonbons, carbon.

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A Swedish chemist reads his own obituary in a newspaper by mistake. It calls him "the merchant of death". Horrified, he sets fire to a stick of dynamite and turns the explosion into gold medals.

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A young chemist in a lab coat breathes from a silk bag and falls about laughing. His friend, the poet Coleridge, joins in. The chemist's name tag: Davy, and he's sitting on a sofa (a davenport).

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In 1938, a chemist opens a gas cylinder and finds it empty. He plunks it down, saws it open, and finds a slippery white powder inside that nothing will stick to.

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A French chemist weighs a sealed jar, burns something inside it, and weighs it again. Exactly the same. He lavishly writes in his notebook: "Nothing is lost." Then the Revolution chops his head off.

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A Quaker teacher in Manchester builds the world out of tiny wooden balls, one for each element. He paints them all, but he can't tell red from green, so they're all wrong colours.

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A Swedish astronomer hangs a thermometer upside down in his window. Water boils at 0 and freezes at 100. After he dies, everyone turns it the right way up.

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A German glassblower in Amsterdam pours silvery mercury into a thin glass tube. "Far in height!" he shouts as it climbs. Water boils at 212.

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A patent clerk in Bern stamps four papers in one year: 1905. One has a tiny equation scribbled in the corner, E = mc², and the stamp ink glows.

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Einstein shines a torch at a metal plate and electrons pop out like popcorn. A Nobel medal drops into his hand, labelled "photoelectric effect", not relativity.

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A bookbinder's apprentice pushes a magnet through a coil of wire. A needle twitches. He grins: the magnet made electricity. He's so far a day ahead of everyone.

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An Italian count stacks discs of zinc and copper with salty cardboard between them, a tall pile. He touches the top and jumps: a volt of electricity.

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A German physicist in a dark lab sees a screen glow across the room. He asks his wife to hold her hand in the beam: her bones and wedding ring appear. She gasps: "I have seen my death."

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A Frenchman leaves uranium salts on a wrapped photographic plate in a drawer because it's cloudy. Days later, the plate shows a ghostly image. A beck of querulous light: Becquerel.

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A Cambridge professor pulls a plum pudding out of a glowing glass tube. The plums are tiny negative electrons, and the pudding is positive. He's J.J., so he says it twice.

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A physicist in 1932 fires particles at beryllium and something with no charge at all comes out, like a chad with nothing on it. It's neutral: the neutron.

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Deep under the Swiss-French border, a ring 27 km long smashes protons together. In 2012, a bump appears in the data, and an old professor named Higgs wipes away a tear.

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A beam of light races round the Earth 7½ times in one second. Its number plate reads 300,000 km/s, give or take a little.

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A physicist on a speeding motorbike is pulled over. "Do you know how fast you were going?" "No, but I know exactly where I am!" His licence says Heisenberg.

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An Austrian physicist puts a cat in a box with a vial of poison and a radioactive atom. Until you open the lid, he says, the cat is somehow both alive and dead. The cat shrugs ("Shrö") and dings a bell: Schrödinger.

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An ambulance races past and its siren drops from a high wail to a low groan. Inside is a doppelgänger of the driver, an Austrian called Doppler, with a trumpet.

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A monk sits cross-legged on a wire chanting "OHM", and the electricity slows down to go around him. His mat reads V = I × R.

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A German physicist makes a spark jump across a gap on one side of the room, and a tiny spark appears in a loop on the other side. "It hertz!" he says, shaking his fingers.

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Isaac Newton holds a glass prism in a sunbeam and a rainbow spills on the wall. He names seven colours, as many as notes in a scale: Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain.

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Sunlight crashes into the air and the blue light bounces off in every direction, like rays off a lei. A bearded lord named Rayleigh stands in a field, dyed blue.

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Under the stands of a Chicago football stadium, an Italian physicist pulls out a control rod from a huge pile of graphite bricks. The counters click faster and faster: the first chain reaction. His firm grip: Fermi.

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A young naturalist is seasick on a ship with a beagle dog as its figurehead. On volcanic islands he finds finches with different beaks on each island: the Galápagos.

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A Swedish botanist walks through a meadow pinning two name tags on every flower, every bird and himself: "Homo sapiens". His own tag says Linnaeus, on a linen coat.

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A man peers through a microscope at a slice of cork and sees tiny rooms, like monks' cells. He hangs the slice on a hook: Hooke.

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A Dutch cloth merchant scrapes his teeth and puts the gunk under a tiny homemade lens. He sees little things swimming and calls them "animalcules": wee animals. His lay when hook? Leeuwenhoek.

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A French chemist gently warms a bottle of wine and milk in a pan. A cow grazes on the pasture outside: Pasteur.

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A German doctor with round glasses holds up a slide in 1882 and coughs. A cook (Koch) stirs a pot of TB soup behind him.

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A royal doctor ties a band round a man's arm and shows the veins swell one way only. A giant rabbit called Harvey chases the blood round and round a racetrack.

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In Toronto in 1921, two young men in a hot lab inject a diabetic dog and it gets up and wags its tail. One, Banting, is banging on the bench with joy; the other, Best, says "This is the best day."

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An Austrian doctor mixes drops of blood on a plate. Some clump, some don't. He sorts them into A, B and O with a land-stein (a stone from the land) as a paperweight.

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A Glasgow surgeon sprays a mist of carbolic acid over a patient. Stuck to the sprayer is a long list of germs: Lister. (The mouthwash Listerine was named after him.)

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A Hungarian doctor in Vienna makes every doctor wash their hands in chlorine before delivering babies. Deaths plummet. He's mocked anyway. His name sounds like "semolina wise".

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In 1854 London, a doctor marks every cholera death on a map. They cluster round one water pump on Broad Street. He takes off the handle. It's snowing: John Snow.

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A sheep is born in 1996 in a lab near Edinburgh. She's a copy, made from a cell from another sheep's udder, so the scientists name her after Dolly Parton.

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Two scientists hold up a giant pair of scissors that can snip a single letter out of DNA. One crunches crisps (CRISPR) as she works.

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Inside a cell, tiny mighty condors pedal exercise bikes to make energy. They have their own DNA, passed down only from your mother.

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In every cell nucleus, 23 couples dance in pairs at a ball, 46 dancers in all. Half came from mum, half from dad.

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A tailor measures a person for a suit and realises they're already wearing one: their skin, about two square metres of it, the biggest organ they have.

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A tiny horse rider no bigger than a grain of rice puts their foot in a stirrup deep inside your ear. The stirrup is a bone: the stapes, the smallest in your body.

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A female lemur swings from a giant thigh bone like a branch. It's the longest bone in your body: the femur.

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Your heart is a little house with four rooms: two small ones upstairs (the atria, like hallways) and two strong pumping rooms downstairs (the ventricles).

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A pea-sized conductor sits under your brain waving a baton at every other gland. It's a pity about its size: the pituitary.

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Prometheus is chained to a rock and an eagle eats his liver every day. Every night it grows back. Real livers can do it too.

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A leaf drinks sunlight through a straw. Inside, green pigment called chlorophyll (Greek for "green leaf") bounces the green light back at you and keeps the red and blue.

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A German mineralogist with a big moustache (Mohs) scratches rocks against each other. Baby powder (talc) is the softest at 1, and a diamond scratches everything at 10.

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In 1935 California, a seismologist watches a needle shake on a drum of paper. Each step up his scale is ten times bigger shaking. He's rich, so he can afford a lot of paper.

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Dig down 5,000 kilometres and you hit a giant ball of iron, with a few nickel coins stuck in it, as hot as the surface of the Sun.

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High up, where jets cruise above the clouds, a thin blanket of ozone catches the Sun's UV rays. The blanket hangs in a layer stratified like a cake: the stratosphere.

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An Irish admiral watches the waves from a ship's deck and grades the wind from 0, glassy calm, to 12, a hurricane that rips the sails. His bow is fortified: Beaufort.

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Lava pours into a lake and freezes instantly into black, glassy rock, sharp enough to shave with. An obsessed Aztec carves blades from it: obsidian.

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In 1883 a volcano between Java and Sumatra blows itself apart with a crack! The bang is heard 4,800 kilometres away, and sunsets around the world turn red for months.

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A shy French doctor in 1816 is too embarrassed to press his ear to a patient's chest. He rolls up a sheet of paper into a tube and listens through it: the first stethoscope. He leans in (Laennec).

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In a domed theatre in Boston in 1846, a dentist holds a glass globe of ether to a patient's face. The surgeon cuts, and the patient doesn't scream. "Gentlemen, this is no humbug."

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A doctor in Pittsburgh holds up a vial of polio vaccine. A reporter asks who owns the patent. He says: "Could you patent the sun?" Then he sulks off: Salk.

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A doctor crosses the last box off a world map in 1980 and the whole room cheers. Smallpox is gone, the only human disease ever eradicated.

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A ship's surgeon in 1747 splits scurvy-ridden sailors into groups. The ones given oranges and lemons get better. He writes it in a book with a lined cover: Lind.

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In 1951, cells taken from a young Black woman's tumour, without her knowledge, keep dividing in a lab dish, then in labs all over the world. They are labelled with the first letters of her name: Henrietta Lacks, HeLa.

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An Italian count tries to count avocados, and needs 6 followed by 23 zeros of them to make one mole. He's Avogadro.

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An Irish scientist squeezes a balloon to half its size and it pushes back twice as hard. He's about to boil over with excitement: Boyle.

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A German chemist pulls nitrogen out of thin air and turns it into ammonia for fertiliser, feeding billions. A harbour full of grain ships sails in: Haber.

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A German chemist toasts a bun over a blue flame with an adjustable collar. Bun's in! Every school lab now has one.

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A Greek doctor on the island of Kos swears an oath to the gods. A hippo in a toga crates up medicine bottles beside him: Hippocrates.

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In 1952, scientists sift through coral dust after the first hydrogen bomb test in the Pacific and find a brand-new element. They name it after the most famous physicist alive: einsteinium.

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At the very end of the periodic table, in box 118, sits a Russian physicist named Oganessian, still alive when they named the element after him.

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A London chemist in 1898 traps a gas in a tube, zaps it, and it glows bright red-orange. His 13-year-old son names it "novum", Latin for new. They settle on the Greek: neon.

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An iceberg bobs in a glass of water. Water is weird: it's densest at 4°C, so ice floats and lakes freeze from the top down, letting fish survive underneath.

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A Belfast-born physicist became a lord and named himself after the River Kelvin that ran past his Glasgow university. His temperature scale starts at the coldest possible point.

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A German physicist walks along a plank and can only step on certain boards, never between them. Energy, he says, comes in little steps: quanta.

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A Danish physicist draws an atom like a tiny solar system on a blackboard in Copenhagen. A wild boar charges through the classroom: Bohr.

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A Scottish physicist writes four equations on a blackboard, and out of them pours a beam of light. He works out it's a wave of electricity and magnetism, all from a maximum well of maths.

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Two inventors face off across New York with crackling cables. One champions direct current; the other, a Serbian-American with a moustache, makes his current alternate, back and forth, and wins.

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A Dutch doctor puts a sprig of mint under water and watches bubbles rise only when the Sun shines on it. The bubbles are oxygen.

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Inside your stomach, little proteins shaped like keys snap into lock-shaped food molecules and break them apart in seconds. They're enzymes, the body's catalysts.

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Red blood cells float like tiny doughnuts, carrying a heavy moon-shaped globe of iron that grabs oxygen: haemoglobin.

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A rhino's horn, your fingernails and a bird's feathers sit together in a jar labelled Carrot-in. They're all made of the same tough protein: keratin.

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A beetle wears a shiny suit of armour. A kite made of the same stuff flies overhead: chitin, which also makes crab shells.

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A child with bowed legs sits in a dark Victorian city. Open the curtains, let the sun in, and their skin starts making vitamin D. The bones straighten.

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Two nerve cells reach out but never quite touch. Chemical messengers leap across the tiny gap, like sin apps passed between phones: the synapse.

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A Tokyo chemist sips his wife's seaweed broth in 1908 and tastes something that isn't sweet, sour, salty or bitter. He calls it umami, "delicious", and bottles it as MSG.

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A tidy room left alone gets messier, never tidier. A tea cup cools; it never heats itself. The mess-meter on the wall is called entropy, and it only goes up.

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A ringing bell sits inside a glass jar. A pump sucks the air out, and the bell goes silent though the hammer keeps hitting. Sound needs something to travel through.

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A Serbian engineer sits in a cell in the First World War doing sums. Earth wobbles and tilts like a spinning top, and the wobble brings ice ages. Milan's cove: Milanković.

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In 1896 a Swedish chemist spends a year doing sums by hand and works out that doubling the carbon dioxide in the air would warm the Earth by several degrees. He's a rare genius: Arrhenius.

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66 million years ago, a rock the size of a city slams into the coast of Mexico. A chick shouts "sue you!" at the sky as the dust blots out the Sun: Chicxulub.

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A chubby eight-legged creature smaller than a grain of salt is fired into space, boiled and frozen. It shrugs and walks off tardily: a tardigrade, the water bear.

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A beam of light is really a hail of tiny bullets, each one a photo of the Sun, flying at you. Each bullet is a photon.

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A Danish chemist at the Carlsberg brewery wants to measure how acidic his beer is. He invents a scale from 0 to 14 and calls it pH, "power of hydrogen".