106 Fun Facts About Communication

Which book was the first major work off Johannes Gutenberg's printing press?

The Bible, in Latin, ran to about 180 copies. Around the time it was finished, Gutenberg's backer Johann Fust sued over his loans and won control of the Bible workshop.

What first message did Samuel Morse telegraph from Washington to Baltimore on 24 May 1844?

'What hath God wrought' was picked from the Book of Numbers by Annie Ellsworth, daughter of the patent commissioner who had championed Morse's invention; it ran from the Capitol to a railway depot in Baltimore.

On what date was Alexander Graham Bell awarded the first US patent for the telephone?

US Patent 174,465 was issued on 7 March 1876, a few days before Bell's famous 'Mr Watson, come here' call; Meucci, Reis, Bourseul and Elisha Gray have all also been credited with inventing the device.

Alexander Graham Bell wanted callers to say 'Ahoy'; which rival inventor made 'hello' the standard telephone greeting?

Thomas Edison argued in an 1877 letter that telephones needed no call bell because 'Hello!' could be heard 10 to 20 feet away; the first exchanges then put the word in their operating manuals.

Ray Tomlinson's 1971 test message between two computers standing side by side was the first networked what?

Email between different computers began with a note Tomlinson called entirely forgettable. He also chose the @ sign to split the user's name from the machine's, because no username contained it.

What did the very first SMS text message, sent over the Vodafone network in 1992, say?

Merry Christmas was typed on a computer by 22-year-old engineer Neil Papworth and sent to the Orbitel handset of Vodafone director Richard Jarvis, who was at his office Christmas party, on 3 December 1992.

Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989 while working at which organisation?

At CERN, the particle physics laboratory near Geneva, Berners-Lee wanted a way to share documents across a large, constantly changing lab; CERN put the Web software in the public domain in 1993.

The Pony Express cut coast-to-coast message time to about ten days, but operated for only how long?

The Pony Express ran about 18 months, from April 1860 to October 1861, closing two days after the transcontinental telegraph was completed; it was quickly romanticised into Old West legend.

Before the Penny Black, the first adhesive postage stamp, who normally paid for a letter in Britain?

The recipient paid on delivery, charged by distance and by the number of sheets. Rowland Hill's 1840 reform turned that round: the sender prepaid a flat penny, and the stamp was the proof.

Claude Chappe's 1790s chain of towers, which passed messages with pivoting arms, was what kind of system?

Semaphore towers stood a few miles apart: each operator read the next tower's arm positions through a telescope and copied them on, so a message could outrun any rider on horseback.

How many dot positions are there in a standard braille cell?

Six dots is half of what came before: Louis Braille was only 15 when he cut down the 12-dot cells of Charles Barbier's raised code, and he published his own system in 1829.

The word 'emoji' comes from Japanese words meaning what?

Picture and character is the literal meaning, from Japanese e plus moji; the likeness to the English words 'emotion' and 'emoticon' is pure coincidence.

The :-) smiley was proposed on a Carnegie Mellon message board in 1982 to mark which kind of post?

Jokes kept being taken seriously on the board, one of them as a real safety warning, so Scott Fahlman suggested :-) as a 'joke marker' and :-( for posts that were not jokes.

Which emoji was chosen as Oxford Dictionaries' Word of the Year in 2015?

Face with Tears of Joy was the first pictograph chosen; Oxford and SwiftKey found it made up about 20 per cent of all emoji used in the UK in 2015.

In the US postal system, what does ZIP stand for?

Zone Improvement Plan was a name built for its acronym, to suggest mail zipping along; the five-digit codes arrived in 1963 with a cartoon mailman, Mr ZIP, fronting a long publicity campaign to get people using them.

Which Scottish inventor patented an 'Electric Printing Telegraph', ancestor of the fax, in 1843?

Bain reproduced graphic signs in the lab by 1846; the telephone was still three decades away.

Which satellite, launched in July 1962, relayed the first live transatlantic television feed?

Telstar 1 worked for only a few months: radiation from nuclear tests in space, one of them a US blast the day before its launch, is thought to have wrecked its transistors, and it fell silent for good in early 1963.

The first ARPANET host-to-host connection, on 29 October 1969, linked UCLA with which other site?

Stanford Research Institute received just two letters: UCLA student Charley Kline was logging in when the system crashed after 'LO', which so became the first message on the network that grew into the internet.

Martin Cooper made the first handheld cellphone call in 1973 while working for which company?

Motorola's Martin Cooper rang his rival Joel Engel at Bell Labs from a Manhattan sidewalk on 3 April 1973 using a DynaTAC prototype; the phone did not reach the market until 1983.

Who first proposed using hashtags on Twitter, in a 2007 tweet?

He never tried to patent the idea, saying hashtags 'were born of the internet, and owned by no one'.

What was Twitter's original character limit per post, in force until 2017?

The limit was 140 characters, chosen so a post plus username fitted inside the 160-character SMS limit; the service had launched in July 2006 as 'twttr'.

Which invented language did eye doctor Ludwik Zamenhof publish in 1887?

Esperanto means 'one who hopes', the pen name Zamenhof signed his first book with. He grew up in multi-ethnic Białystok, then in the Russian Empire, and believed a shared language would ease the hatreds between peoples.

The Rosetta Stone carries the same decree in hieroglyphic, Demotic and which third script?

Ancient Greek, which scholars could already read, gave Champollion and Young their key; the stone was found in July 1799 by an officer in Napoleon's army in Egypt and has been displayed at the British Museum since 1802.

Cuneiform, often called the earliest writing system, was first developed to write which language?

Sumerian was the language of southern Mesopotamia, where scribes pressed a reed into wet clay; the wedge-shaped marks give cuneiform its name, from the Latin for wedge, and were later borrowed to write Akkadian.

Cai Lun, a Chinese court official, is traditionally credited with inventing which material around 105 CE?

Paper from tree bark, hemp waste, old rags and fishing nets was Cai Lun's recipe; it was far cheaper than the silk then used for writing, and although older scraps exist, his method made large-scale production possible.

Which American gunmaker put the first typewriter with a QWERTY keyboard on sale in 1874?

Remington, an arms maker looking for new products, built the Sholes and Glidden machine at its Ilion works; it typed capitals only until the Remington No. 2 of 1878 added a shift key.

The NATO phonetic alphabet (Alfa, Bravo, Charlie...) was defined in 1955-56 by which organisation?

The International Civil Aviation Organization settled the final list in 1956 after reworking a 1951 version in which C, M and N were Coca, Metro and Nectar; NATO's forces switched to the new words that March.

Which Canadian thinker coined the phrases 'the medium is the message' and 'global village' in the 1960s?

Marshall McLuhan kept a printer's mistake, by his son's account: when a typesetter turned the title of his 1967 book into The Medium Is the Massage, he said 'Leave it alone! It's great, and right on target!'

Claude Shannon's 1948 article 'A Mathematical Theory of Communication' introduced which unit of information?

The bit was not Shannon's own word: he credited colleague John Tukey, who had shortened 'binary digit' in a Bell Labs memo the year before.

In which Alabama town was the first 911 emergency call in the United States made, in 1968?

Rankin Fite, Speaker of the Alabama House, placed the call in Haleyville on 16 February 1968, answered by Congressman Tom Bevill; AT&T had announced 911 as the national number a month earlier.

Who demonstrated the first working television system to Royal Institution members on 26 January 1926?

John Logie Baird's mechanical system shared the BBC's first regular television service in 1936, but it proved a dead end: within months the BBC dropped it for an all-electronic rival.

KDKA, often called America's first commercial radio station, went on air in 1920 from which Pennsylvania city?

Pittsburgh's KDKA picked election night, 2 November 1920, for its debut, so listeners heard that Harding had beaten Cox before the result was in print.

Bluetooth is named after a 10th-century king of which country?

Denmark's Harald Bluetooth was famed for uniting Scandinavian lands, so Intel's Jim Kardach borrowed his nickname as a code name for a radio link meant to unite PCs and phones; the logo joins the runes for his initials.

The QR code was invented in 1994 by Masahiro Hara at Denso Wave to label what?

Automobile parts needed tracking through Denso's factories; the corner markers' 1:1:3:1:1 pattern was chosen as the black-and-white ratio least often found in print, and a Go board inspired the grid.

Silbo Gomero, a whistled form of Spanish used to talk across deep ravines, comes from which island group?

The Canary Islands' La Gomera saw Silbo fade from the 1950s as whistlers left to find work; it has been taught in the island's schools since 1999, and almost all islanders now understand it.

The distress call 'Mayday' is thought to echo the phrase 'm'aider', which means what?

'Help me' is the sense of m'aider. Frederick Mockford, radio officer at London's Croydon Airport, is credited with proposing the word in the early 1920s, when much of his traffic flew to and from Paris.

In the police ten-codes, what does '10-4' mean?

Message received is all 10-4 says. Charles Hopper of the Illinois State Police put 'ten' in front of every code because 1930s radios needed a moment to reach full power and often swallowed the first syllable.

AT&T's Picturephone, an early video telephone, was shown to the public in 1964 at Disneyland and which other event?

The New York World's Fair hosted one end of the first coast-to-coast video call, to Disneyland, on 20 April 1964; public booths followed, but at $16 or more a call the service flopped.

Which news agency began with pigeons flying stock prices between Brussels and Aachen?

Reuters began when Paul Reuter used pigeons to bridge a gap in the telegraph line between the two cities; in 1851 he moved to London and opened his agency there.

In 1901 Marconi reported hearing the first transatlantic radio signal: three Morse dots, standing for which letter?

The letter S was sent over and over from Poldhu in Cornwall; Marconi listened at St John's, Newfoundland, more than 2,000 miles away, with an aerial held up by a kite, and no instrument recorded what he heard.

After which ship sank were passenger liners required to keep a radio operator on watch around the clock?

RMS Titanic's distress calls went unheard by a nearby ship, the Californian, whose only wireless operator had switched off and gone to bed minutes before the collision; within months US law demanded a continuous watch.

Albert Mehrabian's often-quoted '7-38-55 rule' assigns 55% of communication to what?

Facial expressions took 55%, with 38% for tone of voice and 7% for the words, but Mehrabian himself says the figures apply only when someone is talking about their feelings or attitudes, not to communication in general.

Johann Carolus's Relation, printed weekly from 1605, is widely recognised as the world's first what?

Newspaper is the title it earns: Carolus had been copying out a weekly news-sheet by hand, then bought a print shop because, as he told the city council, the copying was slow and took too much time.

Sputnik 1 sent a radio signal back to Earth for how long before its batteries died?

Three weeks was all its batteries allowed: the beeps that radio amateurs around the world had tuned in stopped on 26 October 1957, and Sputnik circled in silence until it burned up the following January.

The US mail's unofficial motto, 'Neither snow nor rain…', comes from which ancient historian's description of Persian couriers?

Herodotus was praising the mounted relay messengers of the Persian Empire; an architect had the words carved on New York's main post office, opened in 1914, and the Postal Service has never made them an official motto.

Who led the team behind the Voyager Golden Records, calling them a 'bottle' launched into the 'cosmic ocean'?

Carl Sagan chaired the NASA committee that spent almost a year choosing music, more than 100 images and greetings in 55 languages; each disc flew with a needle, a cartridge and picture instructions for playing it.

Which country introduced the world's first emergency telephone number, 999, in 1937?

The United Kingdom began 999 in London on 30 June 1937, after a 1935 house fire in which five women died while a neighbour's call waited in the exchange's queue; a 999 call set off a buzzer and a flashing red light.

A heliograph sends messages using flashes of what?

Sunlight reflected by a mirror is aimed at a distant station, then broken into Morse dots and dashes by tilting the mirror or working a shutter; Henry Mance's design became the British Army's standard.

West Africa's talking drum mimics speech by changing pitch through what means?

Tightening leather cords under the arm stretches the two drumheads and raises the pitch, so players can copy the rise and fall of tonal languages such as Yoruba, in which pitch is part of the word.

The first transatlantic telegraph cable ran from Newfoundland to an island off which country?

Cyrus Field's Atlantic Telegraph Company landed it at Valentia Island, off County Kerry in Ireland; the 1858 cable died within a month after Wildman Whitehouse applied excessive voltage.

Which giant Brunel steamship laid the first lasting transatlantic telegraph cable in 1866?

The SS Great Eastern, the largest ship in the world, was built for 4,000 passengers and never paid its way; cable-laying finally gave it a purpose, and in 1866 it also fished up and finished the cable lost in 1865.

Which internet calling service did eBay buy for about $2.6 billion?

Skype cost eBay about $2.6 billion in 2005, but the calling service never fitted well with its auctions, and in 2009 eBay sold a majority stake to private investors.

Which country's whistled 'bird language', used across steep Black Sea valleys, joined UNESCO's urgent-safeguarding list in 2017?

Turkey's kuş dili lets farmers around the village of Kuşköy whistle messages across valleys too wide to shout over; mobile phones have since thinned the ranks of whistlers.

What is the technical term for a walkie-talkie's one-at-a-time transmission mode?

Half duplex lets each side talk in turn but never together: pressing the talk button shuts off the radio's own receiver, which is why users say 'over' to hand the channel back.

How does a fax machine send a scanned page down a telephone line?

As audio-frequency tones, the scanned page travels like a voice call; the machines code long runs of blank white in shorthand, so a mostly empty page sends faster.

As of 2025, which video-call app's free plan cut group meetings off after 40 minutes?

Zoom's free plan allowed up to 100 people in 2025 but ended group meetings at 40 minutes, while its top paid tier let meetings run for as long as 30 hours.

Unwanted bulk email is called 'spam' after a 1970 television sketch by which British comedy troupe?

Monty Python set the sketch in a cafe where nearly every dish contains the tinned meat, while Vikings drown out the talk by singing its name. Early chat-room users flooded screens with lines from it.

Despite its 'red telephone' image, the Moscow–Washington hotline of 1963 first carried messages by what means?

Teletype equipment carried the first hotline messages as printed text, and fax links took over in the 1980s. The line has never been a telephone, and no red phone was ever used.

Which Hollywood star co-patented a frequency-hopping radio guidance system for torpedoes with composer George Antheil?

Hedy Lamarr wanted Allied torpedoes to shrug off radio jamming, so she and Antheil made the control signal skip between frequencies. Frequency hopping is now a foundation of spread-spectrum wireless links.

At a papal conclave, what colour of smoke from the Sistine Chapel chimney announces that a new pope is chosen?

White smoke, the fumata bianca, means the cardinals have elected a pope, while black smoke means the ballot failed. Since 2005 the bells of Saint Peter's Basilica ring as well.

Which Native American language did US Marines use as a spoken battlefield code in the Pacific during World War II?

Navajo had no word for a submarine, so its code talkers called one an 'iron fish'. A Marine signal officer said that without them the Corps would never have taken Iwo Jima.

Which insects tell nestmates the direction and distance of food with a 'waggle dance' decoded by Karl von Frisch?

Honeybees angle each waggle run to match the food's bearing from the sun and dance longer for more distant flowers. Dancers even shift the angle as the sun moves across the sky.

The Zimmermann Telegram, intercepted by British codebreakers in 1917, offered a German alliance to which country?

Mexico was promised help to recover Texas, Arizona and New Mexico if it fought the United States. Publication of the decoded note enraged Americans and built support for declaring war on Germany.

Which nursery rhyme was the first verse ever recorded on the newly invented tinfoil phonograph in 1877?

Mary Had a Little Lamb was what the inventor recited to test his first machine. That tinfoil recording was not preserved, but a re-enactment he made 50 years later still survives.

In radio voice procedure, which word adopted during World War II confirms that a message has been received?

Roger was the spelling-alphabet word for R, the letter telegraphers tapped out to mean 'received'. It is no promise to act: Wilco is the word that adds 'I will comply'.

Which assistant heard his own name in the first words Alexander Graham Bell spoke over the telephone in 1876?

Thomas Watson was in the next room when Bell said, 'Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you.' In 1915 he was in San Francisco to take Bell's first coast-to-coast call from New York.

Which word stands for the letter Q in the NATO phonetic alphabet used by pilots and radio operators?

Quebec sits between Papa and Romeo in the 26-word list, which was built from words that speakers of English, French and Spanish could all pronounce.

Which homing pigeon is said to have saved the US Army's trapped 'Lost Battalion' in 1918 despite being shot?

Cher Ami, by popular legend, flew on after being shot in the breast and losing a leg, carrying a message that gave the unit's position. Only 194 of its men walked out of the forest.

Which science-fiction author proposed in 1945 that geostationary satellites could relay signals around the world?

Arthur C. Clarke set out the idea in the magazine Wireless World, asking whether 'rocket stations' could give worldwide radio coverage. The geostationary orbit is sometimes called the Clarke orbit in his honour.

Which American company launched the singing telegram in 1933 to cheer up a service linked with bad news?

Western Union wanted telegrams, long associated with deaths and tragic news, to feel fun, so an operator sang the first one over the telephone. The firm suspended the service in 1974.

Which rotor cipher machine, used by Nazi Germany's military, was first broken by Polish mathematician Marian Rejewski?

Enigma rewired itself with every keypress, so each letter was scrambled with a different key. Rejewski cracked it around 1932 using permutation theory and flaws in German operating procedure.

Which Twitter co-founder posted the platform's first message, 'just setting up my twttr', in March 2006?

Jack Dorsey typed it while the service still used its vowel-free code name, inspired by Flickr and five-character text short codes. The team bought the twitter.com domain six months after launch.

Which messaging app, founded by two former Yahoo employees, did Facebook agree to buy for about $19 billion in 2014?

WhatsApp got its name because co-founder Jan Koum wanted it to sound like 'what's up'. He and Brian Acton began building it in 2009, a month after Koum bought an iPhone.

A toy whistle given away in boxes of which cereal let early 'phone phreaks' make free long-distance calls?

Cap'n Crunch whistles happened to sound at 2600 Hz, a control tone that made AT&T's switches open a long-distance line. Phreak John Draper took the nickname Captain Crunch from the trick.

Almon Strowger, who patented an automatic telephone exchange in 1891, earned his living in which trade?

Undertaker Strowger, in a commonly told story, believed a rival's wife on the local switchboard was steering callers away from his funeral business. His switch cut out the human operator.

Which of Aristotle's three modes of persuasion appeals to an audience's emotions instead of to logic or credibility?

Pathos works through an audience's identities, emotions and values to create a sense of shared feeling. Its partners in Aristotle's Rhetoric are ethos, the speaker's credibility, and logos, reasoning.

In the Shannon–Weaver model, what is anything unintended that distorts a signal between transmitter and receiver called?

Noise covers everything from crackling on a phone line to 'snow' on a television screen. The model's cure is redundancy: repeat or pad a message and the receiver can still rebuild what was meant.

Which phrase did media theorist Marshall McLuhan coin in the 1960s for a world drawn together by electronic media?

Global village was McLuhan's image for people everywhere moving toward personal, worldwide interaction. Later writers have applied it to social networks such as Facebook.

Which term did Yale psychologist Irving Janis apply to teams whose desire for harmony produces irrational decisions?

Groupthink was modelled on 'doublethink' from George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. Janis built his theory on case studies such as the Bay of Pigs invasion and the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Psychologists Carl Rogers and Richard Farson coined which term for intentionally engaging with what a speaker is saying?

Active listening aims to remove misunderstandings: the speaker gets confirmation that the point has landed, and the listener takes in more. Rogers and Farson called it an important way to bring about changes in people.

Anthropologist Edward T. Hall used which term for cultures such as Japan's, where much of a message is left implicit?

High-context cultures, in Hall's scheme, rely on shared background and non-verbal cues to carry meaning. He placed Germans, Scandinavians and Americans at the opposite, spell-it-out end.

Which American political scientist framed communication as 'Who says what, in which channel, to whom, with what effect'?

Harold Lasswell published the five-question formula in a 1948 essay on the structure and function of messages in society. It became a checklist for studying sender, content, medium, audience and impact.

Which MIT linguist argued that children are born with a 'universal grammar', so that part of language is inborn?

Noam Chomsky held that syntactic knowledge is partly inborn, leaving children to learn only the features particular to their native tongue. His 1957 book Syntactic Structures remade the study of language.

Which principle, often called the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, holds that a person's language shapes that person's thinking?

Linguistic relativity is its formal name. The popular label is sometimes called a misnomer: Sapir and Whorf never framed their ideas as a hypothesis, and Sapir wrote more often against linguistic determinism than for it.

Which country, where Tok Pisin serves as a common tongue, has more languages than any other, around 840?

Papua New Guinea's languages are mostly tiny, the majority spoken by fewer than a thousand people. Along its old trading chains, some villagers also knew the languages of the villages next door.

Which language usually ranks first in the world by number of native speakers, with nearly one billion?

Mandarin's home region has held China's capitals for most of the last two millennia, which made its dialects prestigious. Most of its varieties use four tones plus a neutral one.

Four developers from which northern European country wrote the original Skype software, first released in 2003?

Estonia's Ahti Heinla, Priit Kasesalu, Jaan Tallinn and Toivo Annus built it for founders Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis. They borrowed the peer-to-peer design of the file-sharing program Kazaa.

Which country is home to Nokia, founded as a pulp mill and later the world's largest vendor of mobile phones?

Finland's Nokia was long associated with rubber and cables before it turned to phones. From 1998 it sold more mobile handsets than any other company on Earth for more than a decade.

Which country was home to Research In Motion, which introduced a two-way pager in 1996 before developing the BlackBerry?

Canada's Research In Motion was founded in Waterloo, Ontario, and later renamed itself BlackBerry Limited after its best-known product. It stopped designing its own handsets in 2016.

Which company developed the Simon, a 1994 touchscreen handset since described as the first true smartphone?

IBM packed a touchscreen, email and fax into the handset, which BellSouth sold for $899 with a two-year contract. Only about 50,000 were bought in the six months it stayed on sale.

Which California-based non-profit selects new emoji for the world's smartphones from proposals anyone can submit?

Unicode Consortium members aim to make every language's text work on every computer. Its people have noted that emoji get far more attention than the fact that Chinese typed on one phone works on another.

Which name did Bell Labs workers invent for the # symbol when adding two new keys to the telephone keypad?

Octothorpe, also spelled octothorp, was coined by 1968 because the engineers needed proper names for the keypad's eleventh and twelfth keys. The sign also answers to hash, pound sign and number sign.

The word 'modem' is a contraction of which pair of terms describing how the device handles a carrier signal?

Modulator-demodulator names the device's two jobs: it encodes digital data onto a carrier wave for a phone line or radio link, then recovers the data from the wave coming back.

What does SMS, the mobile phone text format developed by Franco-German engineers in 1984, stand for?

Short Message Service texts were capped at 160 characters after engineer Friedhelm Hillebrand studied postcards and Telex messages and judged that length enough for most brief notes.

Optical fibres carry internet data as light, which stays trapped in the glass core through which phenomenon?

Total internal reflection turns the fibre into a waveguide for light. Charles Kao won a Nobel Prize for showing that very pure silica glass could carry such signals far enough to be practical.

Which German physicist first conclusively proved the existence of the electromagnetic waves that make radio possible?

Heinrich Hertz saw no practical value in his discovery and, asked about its applications, replied, 'Nothing, I guess.' Radio waves were known as Hertzian waves until around 1910.

Which American inventor built the first working all-electronic television, transmitting a single straight line in 1927?

Philo Farnsworth broke the stunned silence in his San Francisco lab by saying, 'There you are, electronic television!' He had first sketched the idea across several blackboards for a science teacher.

Which 1938 Orson Welles radio drama convinced some listeners that a Martian invasion was really under way?

The War of the Worlds made the 23-year-old Welles famous, though the scale of the panic is disputed. He apologised at a hastily called news conference the next morning and was never punished.

Which US president explained his policies directly to Americans in evening radio addresses known as fireside chats?

Franklin Roosevelt used the broadcasts to quell rumours and counter hostile newspapers through the Depression and the Second World War. They were among the first 50 recordings in the National Recording Registry.

Which candidate sweated under the studio lights against John F. Kennedy in the first US presidential debates, in 1960?

Richard Nixon and Kennedy met four times, the first at a Chicago television studio. No further presidential debates took place until 1976, after which they became a fixture of every campaign.

Which admiral signalled 'England expects that every man will do his duty' to his fleet by flag code in 1805?

Horatio Nelson accepted changes to the wording from his signal lieutenant, John Pasco, before it was hoisted from HMS Victory in a numeric flag code as the Battle of Trafalgar was about to begin.

Which teacher taught the deafblind Helen Keller language by spelling each word into the palm of her hand?

Anne Sullivan built her lessons around the girl's own interests instead of drills. Within six months Keller had learned 575 words, some multiplication tables and the Braille system.

Which Puerto Rico radio telescope beamed a 1974 message about humanity toward the star cluster M13?

Arecibo sent the message only once, at a ceremony marking the telescope's remodelling. Even at light speed it needs about 25,000 years to arrive, by which time the cluster's core will have moved on.

Which online service provider's team, led by Steve Wilhite, released the GIF image format in 1987?

CompuServe wanted a colour image format for its file download areas. A 1994 licensing dispute over the compression patent inside GIF spurred the creation of the rival PNG format.

Which gorilla, taught by Francine Patterson, used many signs adapted from American Sign Language?

Koko became a celebrity through two National Geographic cover stories and a best-selling 1985 children's book about her kitten. Critics have accused Patterson of misrepresenting the ape's skills.

Which singing technique did herders in the Central Alps use to call their flocks and signal between villages?

Yodelling first appears in a record of 1545 as 'the call of a cowherd from Appenzell'. By the 1830s it had moved from mountain pastures into theatres and music halls as entertainment.