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Sally Ride (May 26, 1951 – July 23, 2012) was an American astronaut and physicist. Born in Los Angeles, she joined NASA in 1978, and in 1983 became the third woman and the first American woman to fly in space. A graduate of Stanford University, where she earned a PhD in physics in 1978, she was selected as a mission specialist with NASA Astronaut Group 8, the first class of NASA astronauts to include women. She flew in space on the Space Shuttle Challenger on the STS-7 mission in 1983 and the STS-41-G mission in 1984. She left NASA in 1987 and worked at Stanford's Center for International Security and Arms Control, and then at the University of California, San Diego, researching nonlinear optics and Thomson scattering. She served on the committees that investigated the losses of Challenger and of Columbia, and was the only person to participate in both investigations. She is the first astronaut known to have been LGBTQ, a fact that she hid until her death from pancreatic cancer in 2012. (Full article...)

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Did you know ...

Freddie Moore

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... that Totila's actions during the siege of Naples fitted his general strategy of winning by being kind?
... that Taihi Kimura hosted the closing ceremony for a nationwide baseball tournament before starting a career in voice acting?
... that JPEGMafia once released a flash drive containing All My Heroes Are Cornballs that resembles a PlayStation 2 memory card?
... that laws on compulsory voting were not enforced during the 1967 Salvadoran presidential election?
... that the failures of the Chaldean National Congress reflected the sectarian nature of Chaldean identity, according to its co-founder?
... that Nining Suningsih Rochadiat's decision to join the diplomatic service was influenced by reading Little House on the Prairie?
... that the 2026 wildfires in Ōtsuchi are regarded as one of the worst mountain-wildfire disasters in Japan in decades?
... that every in-game environment and asset in Lego Horizon Adventures was constructed entirely from individual digital Lego bricks, meaning that they could theoretically be built in real life?

In the news

Mikel Arteta

A suicide bombing targeting a shuttle train in Quetta, Balochistan, Pakistan, kills at least 48 people.
In association football, Arsenal (manager Mikel Arteta pictured) win the Premier League.
A gas explosion at a coal mine in Changzhi, Shanxi, China, leaves at least 82 people dead.
Author Yang Shuang-zi and translator Lin King win the International Booker Prize for Taiwan Travelogue.

On this day

May 26: National Sorry Day in Australia; Independence Day in Georgia (1918)

Edmund I

946 – King Edmund I (pictured) of England was murdered at Pucklechurch on the feast day of St Augustine.
1906 – Vauxhall Bridge in London opened, crossing the River Thames between Vauxhall and Westminster.
1940 – Second World War: The Allies began a mass evacuation of British, French and Belgian troops cut off by the German army during the Battle of Dunkirk.
1989 – Tropical Storm Cecil dissipated over Laos after devastating Quảng Nam province, Vietnam, and causing the deaths of 751 people.
2020 – Protests following the murder of George Floyd erupted in Minneapolis–Saint Paul before spreading across the United States and internationally.

Yuan Xingqin (d. 926)
Miles Davis (b. 1926)
Jyoti Gogte (b. 1956)
Yeji (b. 2000)

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Today's featured picture

The Blue Quran is an early Quranic manuscript, distinguished by its use of gold Kufic script on indigo-dyed parchment. The exact origin of the Blue Quran is unknown. Scholars have proposed that the manuscript was created under the Abbasid, Fatimid, or Umayyad caliphates, or the Aghlabid or Kalbid dynasties; this would mean it was produced between the 8th and 10th centuries, likely in either the Islamic West (Maghreb or Al-Andalus) or the central Islamic lands of the Middle East. The Blue Quran's script is characterized by sharp angles and the absence of vowel markings. Each page contains 15 lines, which is untraditional for the period, while its more common features include the perceptible column of letters on the right side of each folio and the splitting of unconnected letters between lines. The manuscript's approximately 600 folios were separated and dispersed during the Ottoman Empire, though most of the folios remained in Kairouan, Tunisia, until the 1950s. This folio of the Blue Quran, in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, bears the text of verses 28 to 32 of ar-Rum (surah 30).

Manuscript credit: unknown; photographed by Marie-Lan Nguyen

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