Showing posts with the label Featured

The Healing Soil of Boho

Jun 11, 2020

In the Boho highlands of West Fermanagh Scarplands in Northern Ireland, there is a longstanding belief that the soil from the local churchya...

Alexis St. Martin: The Man With A Hole In His Stomach

Jun 8, 2020

By the early 19th century, physicians had a clear understanding of the human anatomy (from dissecting cadavers) but knowledge about the role...

Vladimir Petrovich Demikhov’s Two-Headed Dog

Jun 5, 2020

In 1955, at a meeting of the Moscow Surgical Society, a sensational exhibit was presented to the assembled guests. On the platform close t...

Clever Hans: The Horse Who Could Do Math

May 29, 2020

In a paved courtyard surrounded by high apartment houses in the northern part of Berlin, a small crowd had gathered to watch an old high s...

Stanley Kubrick’s Rejected Monolith

May 27, 2020

The iconic Monolith from Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey was originally not a mysterious black slab. The director wanted it t...

Waterloopbos: Where Dutch Engineers Learned to Play With The Sea

May 27, 2020

A quarter of Netherlands lie below the sea level. Most of these low-lying areas are land reclaimed from the sea. The region was originally o...

Pervitin: The Wonder Drug That Fueled Nazi Germany

May 25, 2020

When Heinrich Böll, the German writer and Nobel laureate, was a young man in his twenties, like many able-bodied youths of his time, he jo...

Draining of Fucine Lake

May 21, 2020

In western Abruzzo, in central Italy, about 80 kilometers east of Rome, lies one of Italy's most fertile plains. The vegetables that a...

Tsar Tank

May 20, 2020

Before World War I, military tanks were a mere concept. Leonardo da Vinci made sketches of a human-powered armored vehicle, with canons all ...

Aerotrain: The High-Speed Train That Almost Revolutionized Transport

May 19, 2020

Some of the fastest trains in service today have a top speed in excess of 200 miles per hour. With the exception of Shanghai maglev, all o...

Vennbahn: The Railway That Created a Peculiar Border Problem

May 14, 2020

Germany and Belgium’s border problem. Photo: gunnsteinlye/Flickr Along the German-Belgian border runs an old disused railway track, the ...

Turnspit Dogs

May 12, 2020

Observe the scene above depicting the inside of an inn at Newcastle, Wales, in the late 19th century. Men and women are sitting around the...

The Pearl Rush of Caddo Lake

May 11, 2020

Caddo Lake. Photo: Maciej Kraus/Flickr Natural pearls are a rarity today, but a hundred years ago, before British biologist William Savi...

The Vegetable Lamb of Tartary

May 6, 2020

When cotton first came to Europe from Central Asia during the Middle ages, people were fascinated by the fluffy, fibrous balls that resemb...

Cosmos 954: The Nuke That Fell From Space

May 1, 2020

What goes up must eventually come down, including satellites that are currently orbiting the earth. After their work is done, they will be...

The Mysterious Hum Nobody Can Explain

Apr 28, 2020

For the past nine years, residents of Windsor city, situated on the Canadian side of the US-Canada border just across Detroit river, have ...

The Artist Who Got Carried Away: The Story of The Peacock Room

Apr 25, 2020

In 1876, the British shipping magnate Frederick Richards Leyland bought himself a grand house at 49 Princes Gate in the fashionable neighb...

Ama: The Freediving Fisherwomen of Japan

Apr 23, 2020

In ancient times, the only way to gather food and other resources, such as sponge and pearl, from the sea bed was to hold one’s breath and d...

The Shortest Rivers in The World

Apr 21, 2020

Most people imagine rivers to be long meandering waterways flowing down faraway mountains, through the valleys and the plains until it reach...

The Secret of Coade Stone

Apr 16, 2020

The large lion statue that stands at the east end of Westminster Bridge, near the Houses of Parliament, holds a secret—it is made neither of...