The Editors at Very Cool Facts

In 1432, centuries before photography existed, a Flemish artist painted the reflection of a real window inside a tiny blue gemstone. Detail from The Singing Angels panel of the Ghent Altarpiece | Jan van Eyck, 1432 The window belonged to the Vijd Chapel, where the finished work would hang. Nearly 600 years later, the illusion is still convincing. The artist was Jan van Eyck, and the jewel appears in the Ghent Altarpiece, one of the great masterpieces of European art. Think about when he...

“Mine.” It is one of those words toddlers discover with impressive enthusiasm. By around age two, children are beginning to understand that some things belong to them and other things belong to someone else. A toy can be mine. A cup can be yours. Remove the wrong object from the wrong two-year-old and the distinction can become very clear. What is interesting is how much follows from that simple idea. Once we think something belongs to us, we begin to treat it differently. Psychologists call...

A building goes up. A road is repaved. A delivery truck pulls away from another doorstep. Together, the things we build and buy are becoming one of the heaviest features of the planet. By 2020, the world’s buildings, roads, vehicles and other human-made objects still in use weighed an estimated 1.1 trillion metric tons, about equal to the weight of every living thing on Earth. Researchers pinpointed 2020, give or take six years, as the year the two lines crossed. The comparison counts living...