Showing posts with the label Featured

European Trees With The Most Interesting Stories

Feb 18, 2019

The Environmental Partnership Association (EPA) is seeking votes from the public to help them select the winner of the European Tree of the...

Cemetery Guns And Coffin Torpedoes

Feb 16, 2019

This unusual-looking gun, now exhibited at the Museum of Mourning Art in Arlington Cemetery, once kept body snatchers away from cemetery gr...

Yasukuni Shrine, Where War Criminals Are Revered

Feb 15, 2019

The Imperial Shrine of Yasukuni, in Chiyoda, Tokyo, is a beautiful spiritual place for remembering those who died in service for Japan. As m...

When Little Boys Wore Dresses

Feb 12, 2019

Until about a century ago, in the western world, you couldn’t tell whether a young child was a girl or a boy from the way he or she dressed....

How Australia Remembers The World’s Biggest Gold Nugget

Feb 8, 2019

On February 1869, two British prospectors, John Deason and Richard Oates, were digging for gold in central Victoria, Australia, when their p...

Music in The Clouds

Feb 7, 2019

In June 1867, James Glaisher, an English astronomer and meteorologists, and an avid balloonist, was floating over Paris in a balloon when h...

Globsters: When Sea Monsters Wash Ashore

Feb 7, 2019

On November 30, 1896, two young boys, Herbert Coles and Dunham Coretter, were bicycling along Anastasia Island, near St. Augustine on the At...

Gyrobus: The Flywheel-Powered Public Transportation

Feb 5, 2019

Back in the 1940s, Swiss engineers developed a new kind of zero-emission electric bus that used a large spinning flywheel to store energy ra...

The Tomb That Inspired Britain's Iconic Telephone Box

Feb 1, 2019

The United Kingdom Post Office introduced the first public telephone kiosk, designated K1, in 1921. These were constructed out of pre-cast c...

Bookwheel, The 16th Century Forerunner to The eBook Reader

Jan 30, 2019

For many of us, the ebook reader was the next best thing to happen since Gutenberg’s printing press. The printing press made books widely av...

Henry Cotton: The Psychiatrist Who Tried to ‘Cure’ His Patients by Removing Their Teeth

Jan 29, 2019

This illustration of a mutilated mouth is not the result of a road accident, but that of a doctor’s obsession with an utterly bizarre theor...

The Ancient Portraits of Fayuum Mummies

Jan 22, 2019

These haunting portraits of long-dead men, women and children come from a vast region known as the Fayuum Basin, located immediately to the ...

Charvolant: The Kite-Drawn Carriages

Jan 18, 2019

On 8 January 1822, an extraordinary journey was made from Bristol to Marlborough. An English schoolteacher named George Pocock took his wif...

Grammichele: The Hexagonal Town

Jan 18, 2019

Located in the province of Catania, in the Italian island of Sicily, is the town of Grammichele. It is one of the few towns in the world to...

The Gable Stones of Amsterdam

Jan 16, 2019

Before Amsterdam had house numbering, they had a curious way of identifying addresses. Each house and building in the city used to have a st...

Congreve Rolling Ball Clock

Jan 9, 2019

In the early 19th century, an Englishman named Sir William Congreve invented an unusual clock that kept time using balls rolling down an inc...

China’s Misguided War Against Sparrows

Jan 8, 2019

These panel of images from the late 1950s China, depicting young boys hunting sparrows for sport, were taken from a poster aimed at school ...

Cascata delle Marmore: A Man-Made Waterfalls Created by Ancient Romans

Jan 7, 2019

About 8 kilometers east from the city of Terni, in the Umbria region of Italy, is a beautiful three-tiered waterfalls called Cascata delle M...

Forma Urbis: Rome’s Giant Marble Map

Jan 7, 2019

A modern illustration of the Temple of Peace with Forma Urbis, the giant map of Rome, on the wall. At the Roman Forum in the center of Rom...

SS Warrimoo: The Ship That Missed New Year’s Eve But Gained Two Centuries

Jan 4, 2019

The story that follows supposedly happened more than a hundred years ago on the eve of New Year. It spanned two centuries, yet was over in a...