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August 13, 2025

Oil Paintings Explore the Childhood Experience of Going Back to School

After a long, balmy summer, it’s now almost time to go back to school. Soon, children will trickle into classrooms; dig into homework assignments; bolt across the schoolyard during recess; snap their pictures for the yearbook; and much, much more until next summer. These are all things that are well-known to us, whether they spark trepidation, excitement, nostalgia, or a mix of all three.

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August 12, 2025

This 5-Foot-Long Chart Lays Out Over 4,000 Years of World History

Throughout the 1920s and 30s, “outlines” were gaining popularity. Dominating nonfiction book publishing, the trend sought to democratize knowledge, distilling subjects like philosophy, physics, and medicine into more digestible and approachable formats. It didn’t take long for John B. Sparks, an English engineer, bacteriologist, and historian, to join the movement and create his very own “outline.

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August 12, 2025

NASA Releases Closest-Ever Photos of the Sun Shot With the Parker Solar Probe

Since its original launch in 2018, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe has completed several orbits around the sun, gradually moving closer and closer with each trip. In 2021, it became the first spacecraft to fly through the corona (the sun’s upper atmosphere), facing what NASA calls “brutal heat and radiation” for the sake of invaluable interstellar insights. But it was only late last year that the probe achieved one of its greatest feats to date.

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August 11, 2025

How a Man Born Into Slavery Became an Art History Legend

By the time the Union army arrived in Dallas County, Ala., in 1865, Bill Traylor had already been enslaved for about 12 years, ever since he was born on a cotton plantation around 1853. After his emancipation, Traylor spent the majority of his life as a tenant farmer near Montgomery, until he picked up drawing in 1939.

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