From The Atlantic Science Desk, 77 Facts That Blew Our Minds in 2024. My faves:

3. A group of butterflies flew across the Atlantic Ocean without stopping. It took them only about eight days.

7. Early space capsules lacked handholds and footholds on the outside, and some spacewalking astronauts really struggled to make it back on board.

20. You can buy a fitness tracker for your pet.

27. AI image generators have a penchant for rendering hot people.

37. When our writer ran his own dissertation through the plagiarism-detection software that was likely used to help bring down Harvard President Claudine Gay, it initially claimed that his work was 74 percent copied. The correct number was zero.

52. Dogs may be entering a new wave of domestication.

71. The 10,000-steps-a-day goal doesn’t originate from clinical science. Instead, it comes from a 1965 marketing campaign by a Japanese company that was selling pedometers.