All posts tagged: centurylong

Golf-Rai’s Knockout Punch in Rocky’s Backyard Ends Century-Long English Drought at PGA Championship

Golf-Rai’s Knockout Punch in Rocky’s Backyard Ends Century-Long English Drought at PGA Championship

Published by Sam Flores

NEWTOWN SQUARE, Pennsylvania, May 17 (Reuters) – Down the road from the city that produced one of Hollywood’s ultimate ⁠underdog ⁠stories, Aaron Rai wrote an equally inspiring script at the ⁠PGA Championship on Sunday, delivering the knockout punch to become the first Englishman to win the Wanamaker Trophy since 1919. Rai came into the ​week a little-known long shot to win but emerged from a packed leaderboard on one of golf’s biggest stages and was the last man standing at Aronimink Golf Club just outside Philadelphia. “To be standing here is definitely ‌outside of my wildest imagination,” said Rai, the first player ‌in PGA Championship history to lower his score in each round. Rai pulled away from the chasing pack with four back-nine birdies, including a 68-footer at the par-three 17th that delivered the knockout blow, en ⁠route to a five-under-par 65 ⁠that left him at nine under on the week and three shots clear of Jon Rahm (68) and Alex Smalley (70). When ​Rai’s final putt dropped there were still two pairings on the course, …

New Zealand’s kiwi bird returns to Wellington hills after a century-long absence

New Zealand’s kiwi bird returns to Wellington hills after a century-long absence

Published by Sam Flores

The kiwi, New Zealand’s sacred national bird, vanished from the hills around Wellington more than a century ago. Now the capital’s residents are waging an unlikely citizen campaign to return the endangered flightless birds to the city. “They are a part of who we are and our sense of belonging here,” said Paul Ward, founder of the Capital Kiwi Project, a charitable trust. “But they’ve been gone from these hills for well over a century and we decided as Wellingtonians that wasn’t right.” A staff member of a conservation organisation carries a kiwi bird during an event at Parliament in Wellington, New Zealand, on April 28, 2026. © Charlotte Graham-McLay, AP On a hill wreathed in mist above the dark sea that runs between New Zealand’s North and South Islands, Ward and others crossed rugged farmland late on Tuesday night, carrying seven crates in silence by dim red torchlight. Inside each one nestled a kiwi, including the 250th bird relocated to Wellington since the Capital Kiwi Project began. The kiwi gives New Zealanders the name …

How a century-long argument over light’s true nature came to an end

How a century-long argument over light’s true nature came to an end

Published by skeptic

Light is both a wave and a particle, and we know it for sure now Anna Bliokh/Getty Images The following is an extract from our Lost in Space-Time newsletter. Each month, we dive into fascinating ideas from around the universe. You can sign up for Lost in Space-Time here. When physicist Clinton Davisson received the Nobel prize in 1937 for discovering that electrons, which had been considered to be particles, could sometimes unexpectedly behave like waves, he made a point of taking a jab at light. He said, “the perfect child of physics [had] been changed into a gnome with two heads”. It was already known to not be one or the other, but both wave-like and particle-like. Physicists used to think that being a particle and being a wave was mutually exclusive, yet here we had, in light and now also electrons, two examples contradicting that. Somewhat baffled, Davisson couldn’t help but reach for a grotesque metaphor. He was in good company – 10 years earlier, Albert Einstein had a famous argument with Niels Bohr over this seeming absurdity. …

The century-long hunt for the gigantic meteorite that vanished

The century-long hunt for the gigantic meteorite that vanished

Published by skeptic

It all started with an overheard conversation between some camel herders. The year was 1916, and Gaston Ripert, a French army captain, had been injured and sent to recover in the small town of Chinguetti in Mauritania. It was a lonely, dusty place on the edge of the Sahara. So when Ripert heard local people talk of a colossal block of iron out in the undulating expanse of dunes, he was intrigued. They referred to it as the “iron of God”. He persuaded one man to guide him to this fabled iron and what followed has passed into legend. After an arduous overnight camel ride, Ripert arrived at what appeared to be an enormous metal edifice – some 100 metres wide in his estimation – partly buried in the dunes, its side polished by the sand to a mirror finish. Ripert brought back a piece of rock from the site, and when it was analysed after the war, it was found to be genuine meteorite. That caused a sensation and prompted meteoriticists the world over …