The Wow Info: surprising facts about science, food, travel and more

Walls weaken Wi-Fi by reducing the radio signal that reaches a device. Heavy concrete has a transmission loss of 22 dB at 2.4 GHz and 44 dB at 5 GHz.

People have long been told that the Great Wall of China is the one human-made structure you can spot from the Moon. What have astronauts actually seen, and who started the story?

Two species of dried tardigrade survived ten days in space vacuum during a 2007 orbital experiment. Solar ultraviolet radiation sharply reduced survival, showing that the result did not make tardigrades invulnerable to space.

The Altar Stone at Stonehenge weighs about 6 tonnes, and a 2024 study showed it came from more than 700 kilometres away.

ESA announced on 19 October 2026 that Euclid had found its first previously unknown comet, C/2026 S1, in images recorded the previous month.

The necktie traces back to knotted cloths worn by Croatian soldiers fighting for France in the Thirty Years' War, and the word cravat still carries their name. A US patent granted in 1924 gave the tie the shape we know today.

A solar sail is a spacecraft propulsion system that uses pressure from sunlight on a lightweight, reflective membrane. NASA’s Advanced Composite Solar Sail System unfurls a sail about 80 square metres in area from a spacecraft about the size of a microwave.

Old books smell of vanilla, almonds and mustiness because ageing paper slowly breaks down and gives off airborne chemicals, some of them close relatives of the flavourings in your kitchen.

The popular belief says Vincent van Gogh sold only one painting, The Red Vineyard, for 400 francs. Verdict: partly true, since it is the only sale documented by name, but he was neither unknown nor limited to a single sale.

On a small Pacific island, some of the world's heaviest money sits in village paths, propped against houses, and even at the bottom of the sea. The story of Yap's rai stones turns out to be one of the clearest lessons in what money really is.