At the start of the 20th century, before the Wright Brothers finally got their famous Flyer off the ground in 1903, airships were seen as the future of human flight. The category includes a variety of dirigibles, such as zeppelins (which have a rigid structure) and blimps (which completely collapse when deflated). German zeppelins performed bombing runs in World War I, but the 1937 Hindenburg disaster — in which the Hindenburg zeppelin caught fire in New Jersey while attempting to moor, killing 36 — spelled the end of airships as commercial vehicles. While blimps found limited use during World War II, after the war, airships mostly transformed into floating advertisements.

The first nonstop transatlantic flight was by airship.

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Airplanes barely beat airships across the Atlantic. In June 1919, English aviators John Alcock and Arthur Whitten Brown flew a twin-engine biplane across the ocean. Weeks later, the British airship R-34 landed in Long Island, New York, after a 108-hour transatlantic flight.

Today, only about 25 blimps exist, and about half of them are used for advertising — including the famous Goodyear Blimp (which is now technically a zeppelin). Airships are expensive to construct and to run, in part because they require as much as $100,000 worth of helium per trip, and helium gas is the subject of frequent worldwide shortages. There’s also a dearth of people trained to fly them. Yet efforts have been made to resurrect the airship, chief among them the U.S. Army’s Long Endurance Multi-Intelligence Vehicle, which was designed to float above the battlefield, providing intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance for ground forces (the project was scrapped in 2013). Today, some experts call for a return to airships, but for now they remain part of a lighter-than-air future that never was.

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The galaxy we call home is unfathomably enormous. With enough room for an estimated 100 billion planets, the Milky Way stretches about 100,000 light-years across, although estimates of its full size vary. (A light-year is the distance a beam of light travels in one year on Earth, equal to about 6 trillion miles.) Earth is situated approximately two-thirds of the way from our galaxy’s center; we’re essentially in the suburbia of the Milky Way. When we look at celestial bodies, we’re actually looking back in time, because of how far away they are and how long their light takes to reach us. The sun we see, for example, is always about 8.3 minutes old, while the light from the North Star, aka Polaris, is about 320 years old. And while we can’t actually see the center of the Milky Way, light from the area takes nearly 25,000 years to reach our planet. That means it dates back to when humans were still in the Stone Age. 

The inventor of the Milky Way candy bar was inspired by space.

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Mars launched the Milky Way bar in 1923 under the same name as a popular malted milkshake flavor; the galaxy was not involved. Ads claimed the candy was healthier than other treats thanks to its malted milk powder, helping Mars to sell more than 16 million bars in the product’s first year.

What we know about our galaxy is ever-expanding — much like the universe itself. Early astronomy pioneers such as Aristotle believed the Earth was the center of the universe, circled by the sun, moon, and all other cosmic matter. In 1609, Galileo’s first glimpse of the Milky Way through an improvised telescope showed its wispy appearance wasn’t a layer of clouds, as previously thought, but a vast collection of individual stars. His discoveries lent credence to the idea that Earth wasn’t the center of the universe after all. Yet it would take 300 more years for scientists to confirm that we’re not even at the center of our own galaxy — it wasn’t until 1924 that astronomer Edwin Hubble confirmed that the Milky Way is just one of many galaxies in our vast universe. 

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Many of us consider blushing embarrassing, but Charles Darwin called it “the most peculiar and the most human of all expressions.” There’s a good reason for that: We’re quite literally the only species known to do it, aside from birds (although researchers are still teasing out whether our feathered friends blush for the same reasons we do). Whether the result of committing a social faux pas or just being paid a compliment, the involuntary reaction occurs in humans when the blood vessels in our face dilate and more blood flows to our cheeks. Part of our fight-or-flight response, it also entails an adrenaline rush and an increased heart rate. The reaction may be mostly unique to humans in part because our facial skin is relatively well exposed, and because embarrassment requires knowing (or imagining) what others are thinking about you — pretty complex cognitive stuff, actually.

Your stomach lining reddens when you blush.

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It isn’t just your cheeks that turn red when you blush. The same thing happens to your stomach lining, a response caused by the sympathetic nervous system increasing blood flow throughout the body.

For all that, we still don’t know exactly why we blush. Some theorize that it helps keep us honest (it can’t be faked, after all), while one study suggests that blushing after a social transgression “serves to signal the actor’s genuine regret or remorse over a wrongdoing” — in other words, it acts as physical evidence that we know we’ve made a mistake. This, in turn, makes others more likely to not only forgive our slight but also view us in a more favorable light. This is doubly true when it results from being given a compliment — who doesn’t find that reaction endearing? Maybe it’s not so embarrassing after all.

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