Lord Howe Island, off Australia’s east coast, was once crawling with big, wingless stick insects about six inches long. Then in 1918 a shipwreck brought rats to the island, and the insects disappeared. For decades they were considered extinct. About 10 miles away stands Ball’s Pyramid, a rocky outcrop in the ocean. In 2001, scientists searching it found, in a single bush, three of the long-lost insects and a number of eggs. One scientist said it felt like being transported back to another time. A species everybody had counted as gone had been hanging on in one bush.
In November 2023, NASA’s Voyager 1, the most distant human-made object in existence, started sending home gibberish. Engineers figured out that one memory chip in an onboard computer had failed, taking some of the spacecraft’s code with it. They couldn’t fly out and replace a chip, so they rewrote the code in pieces and tucked it into other spots in the computer’s memory. Every command took about 22 and a half hours to reach the spacecraft and another 22 and a half for an answer to come back. On April 20, 2024, the team finally heard usable data again and celebrated in a conference room, and by June all four of its science instruments were working again.
Daryl Davis is a Black blues musician who first met a Klansman after a gig, when a white man came up to say he’d never heard a Black man play piano like Jerry Lee Lewis. They got to talking, and the man pulled out his Klan card. Instead of walking away, Daryl got curious. For about 30 years he went around the country sitting down with Klan members and leaders, studying up so he could talk with them, and asking one simple question: how can you hate me when you don’t even know me? Friendships grew out of those conversations, and Daryl says about 200 Klansmen have given up their robes. He’s quick to say he didn’t convert anybody. They saw the light and changed themselves.
In 2010, a rockfall trapped 33 miners about 700 meters underground at the San Jose mine in northern Chile. They were stuck in a space about the size of a small apartment, with almost no food and heat that never dropped below about 90 degrees. The worst day, one miner said, was when a rescue drill came close and missed them, and their hearts sank. One of the men, Jose Henriquez, stepped up as a kind of pastor. He told the others that even if they’d lost everything else, they hadn’t lost prayer. They formed a circle and prayed together twice a day while he shared God’s word. Up top, officials were quietly preparing for bad news, but more than two weeks in, a drill finally broke through. All 33 came out alive after 69 days, and several dropped to their knees to thank God.
