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Perseverance is a rover that was launched end of july 2020 with Ingenuity, a helicopter drone. Going straight for Mars at a blazing speed of 39,600 km/h or 11 km/s, he weighs a ton and will be searching for signs of ancient life. Wish him luck!

Even though the 25th of december is supposed to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ, there is no mention whatsoever of this date in the Bible. Most historians agree on the fact that Jesus was probably born during spring, Christmas could in fact be an heritage of Mithra's birthday and Saturnalia, two old Roman celebrations.

In computer science, time technically exists since 1970-01-01, and is stored as a single number: how many seconds have passed since this date. However, this number is stored in a signed 4 bytes integer, and adding one to this number on the 19th of January, 2038 03:14:07 UTC, will make it go back to 1901. This is very similar to the Y2K problem.

Amused by this page, my dad told me on the phone his wish to appear in the countdown list. This date gets as precise as it gets, and was apparently chosen based on statistical variables (age, weight, wealth, country, health issues). As creepy as it sounds, I do find it kind of funny (dark humour runs in the family I guess).

Last great shake that hit Tokyo was in 1923, and killed more than 100,000 people. Sitting on 4 different crust slabs, Japan relentlessly goes through ~1,500 earthquakes a year, while the Pacific, North American, Eurasian and Filipino plates continue butting into each other, again and again. Experts say there is a 70% chance that a ~7.3 magnitude quake will hit Tokyo before 2050, hang tight Japan!

2010 RF12 is an asteroid that missed earth on the 8th of September, 2010. However, he is coming back, and has a 4.7% chance of hitting the earth between 2095 and 2113 (which is a lot, meteor-wise). Thankfully it is only 7 meters wide and will only create a big BOOM, we're not disappearing dinosaur-style... yet.

For a long time known as the the largest star by far, this red hypergiant is ~1400x wider and 250,000 to 500,000 times brighter than the sun. Its size used to be estimated at ~2000 solar radii, which was putting it outside the bounds of known stellar evolution theory, however, it is currently balooned up and will soon (astronomically speaking) collapse on itself, becoming a supernova. While a black hole forms at its core, VY Canis Majoris will eject its outer layer into space through a gigantic explosion. This will be visible from earth!