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  Original photo by Supamotion/ Shutterstock Astronauts can vote absentee from space. As human space exploration has evolved, trips offworld have grown longer and longer. In 1961, Yuri Gagarin  spent less than two hours in orbit ; today, it’s common for astronauts to stay in space for  six months to a year . Because astronauts are spending larger portions of their lives hundreds of miles above us, the voting process has had to adapt. A pivotal moment occurred in September 1996, when NASA astronaut John Blaha went to the Russian space station Mir for a  118-day  stay and completely missed voting in the 1996 presidential election. In response, Texas state Senator  Mike Jackson  proposed legislation to allow astronauts to vote in space. (Notably, many astronauts live in Texas because they train at the Johnson Space Center in Houston.) In 1997, NASA astronaut David Wolf, who was also aboard the Mir, became the first astronaut to successfully vote in space. Wolf told  The Atlantic  in 2016

  Original photo by marc zakian/ Alamy Stock Photo "Mona Lisa" is not the name of the painting's subject. Not entirely, anyway. The subject of this early 16th-century portrait by Leonardo da Vinci, so famous that it resides in its own  bulletproof glass case  at the Louvre Museum in Paris, is believed to have been  Lisa del Giocondo  (née Gherardini), the wife of Florentine merchant Francesco del Giocondo. As was common with other Renaissance works, the "Mona Lisa"  didn't have a formal title  for many years, instead going by names like "A Certain Florentine Lady" or "A Courtesan in a Gauze Veil." The identity of the subject also became something of a mystery, as Leonardo  failed to provide any confirmation  in his papers or in the painting itself. It was a later Renaissance artist, Giorgio Vasari, who provided the first inkling that the sitter was the wife of Francesco del Giocondo, in his 1550 book  The Lives of the Most Excellent Paint

  F amed Renaissance polymath Leonardo da Vinci left behind thousands of pages of notes and diagrams from his many pursuits in math, anatomy, botany, science, engineering, and art — he created more than 200 illustrations with notes on flight alone. Leonardo had groundbreaking ideas on everything from human anatomy to bridge design, and even the writing itself is impressive: Most of it is written from right to left, in a  mirror image  of ordinary European script. He only wrote left to right when someone else needed to read it. He also used his own form of shorthand. Leonardo never directly explained why he wrote this way, but there are a few prevailing theories. It may have been simply practical: The artist was most likely left-handed, and writing left to right could get messy using a pen and ink. He also may have been trying to keep his ideas secret from potential copycats, or even trying to hide his work from the Roman Catholic Church. While Leonardo’s artwork is rich with religious