Clever Hans: The Horse Who Could Do Math
Kaushik Patowary
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...
Showing posts with the label Featured
Stanley Kubrick’s Rejected Monolith
Kaushik Patowary
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
Kaushik Patowary
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
Kaushik Patowary
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
Kaushik Patowary
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
Kaushik Patowary
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
Kaushik Patowary
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
Kaushik Patowary
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
Kaushik Patowary
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
Kaushik Patowary
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
Kaushik Patowary
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
Kaushik Patowary
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
Kaushik Patowary
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
Kaushik Patowary
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
Kaushik Patowary
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
Kaushik Patowary
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
Kaushik Patowary
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...
Rettungsbojen: The Floating Rescue Buoys of The Luftwaffe
Kaushik Patowary
Apr 13, 2020
During World War 2, both the RAF and the Luftwaffe lost a large number of pilots at sea. The British used a couple of high speed boats that ...
The Historic Meeting on Elbe River
Kaushik Patowary
Apr 10, 2020
April 25, 1945, is a date few remember. But it was a significant day in the history of the world. On this day, American troops sweeping in...
The Grain Race
Kaushik Patowary
Apr 9, 2020
By the end of the 19th century, steam-powered vessels had almost completely replaced sailing ships in the commercial shipping business. But ...
