Where coming in second is better than nothing!
Where there's a first, there MUST be a second!
Welcome to SilverMedals.net — The internet's premier blog and reference site celebrating the second greatest achievements, second-best records, and the almost extremes of the world we live in!
Items marked as Second Thoughts are short blog entries. Those marked as Feature Articles are informative, long-form, heavily researched pieces. Please also have a look at the SilverMedals.net Referencepedia for some quick facts of seconds.
12/08/2020
The United Kingdom on December 8, 2020 became the first nation to begin widespread distribution of a working Covid-19 vaccine. At the University Hospital in Coventry, in what hopes to be the beginning of the end for the pandemic that effectively shut down the world for most of 2020, 90-year-old Margaret Keenan became the first person in the world outside…read more
03/04/2020
For those of you who’ve never heard of Donald Mitchel, he’s a former computer research scientist and writer who also a space exploration history enthusiast. He is also an expert in the field of image resampling and enhancement. In his latest tweet (down below) Mitchel presents raw images he got from the Soviet Union’s Venera project, which sent back the…read more
01/15/2020
Updated 08/05/2020
Although we already bid adieu to 2019 more than two weeks ago, science information for the year was still coming in. Unfortunately it’s not exactly welcome news. According to NASA and the U.S. National Atmospheric and Oceanographic Association (NOAA), 2019 was the second-warmest year on record since 1880 (when modern record-keeping began). The average global temperatures for 2019 were second…read more
10/31/2019
There aren’t many people who get the point of this site. Here we celebrate the “seconds” of the world. The second-to-do, second-to-go, second-best, second-biggest, second in a sequence (we don’t give a crap about the Godfather, show us the Godfather Part II). Why? Because if you haven’t taken a look at the other stories on this site, it’s the seconds…read more
10/02/2019
Updated 12/07/2019
Kim Shattuck best known the lead singer and guitarist for The Muffs passed away October 2, 2019, at the age of 56. The pop/punk musician’s life ended after a 2-year struggle with ALS, according to her husband, Kevin Sutherland. ALS also known as “Lou Gehrig’s Disease” is a rare group of neurological diseases where motor neurons that control walking, chewing,…read more
07/12/2019
Updated 09/19/2022
“You spend a good piece of your life gripping a baseball and in the end it turns out that it was the other way around all the time.” — Jim Bouton (1939 – 2019) It was sad news to learn of the passing of Jim Bouton yesterday, one of the most fascinating and notorious sports figures in U.S. baseball history….read more
07/01/2019
Updated 11/01/2022
It didn’t have as compelling a birth as the first Special Air Service regiment. It didn’t have its great founder driving point in a souped-up jeep during attacks on German air bases. It didn’t have the romance of the desert as its initial stomping grounds. About the only thing it seemed to have going for it was the reputation of…read more
04/29/2019
Several cities in the U.S. had a dark smoggy cloud come over them last week as the American Lung Association (ALA) released its annual State of the Air report. The sobering and slightly depressing report uses data on particulate matter — otherwise known as “soot” — and ground-level ozone — otherwise known as “smog” — that was collected between 2015…read more
02/27/2019
Updated 07/13/2019
Venus is the planet second-closest to the the sun in our solar system and Earth’s nearest neighbor. The cloudy rocky planet orbits the sun at an average distance of 67,238,251 mi (108,209,475 km) at a mean orbital velocity of 78,339 mph (126,074 km/h). For us Earthlings, Venus also the second-brightest object in the night sky, with the first being the…read more