Vinkensport: Belgium’s Competitive Bird Calling

Sep 4, 2020

In the Flanders region of Belgium, a favorite pastime among the old Dutch-speaking folks is raising and training the common chaffinch ( Frin...

Gallaudet Eleven: The Deaf ‘Astronauts’

Sep 3, 2020

In the late 1950s, when NASA was still a young organization, one of the biggest challenges for them was to determine whether human spaceflig...

Turlough: Ireland’s Disappearing Lakes

Sep 2, 2020

Many lakes whose existence depends wholly on rainwater runoffs are seasonal. The phenomenon is not particularly mysterious—the lake forms wh...

The Erfurt Latrine Disaster

Sep 1, 2020

Deaths are always unfortunate and even more so if they occur as a result of an accident. But sometimes there are incidents that have particu...

Medieval Rabbit Warrens

Aug 31, 2020

Back in medieval England rabbits were not bred in cages but in specially crafted earthen burrows called warrens, or pillow mounds. These wer...

The Uranium Cubes From a Nazi Nuclear Reactor

Aug 31, 2020

In the summer of 2013, Physicist Timothy Koeth of University of Maryland received an unexpected gift from one of his friends. It was a small...

Bull Running in Britain

Aug 28, 2020

Bull running as a sport is mostly associated with the city of Pamplona, in northern Spain. But until the 19th century, Britain had a similar...

The Very First Image on The Internet

Aug 27, 2020

Back in the early nineties, when the World Wide Web was still young, a group of geeky girls hailing from the European Organization for Nucle...

The Ruins of Gleno Dam

Aug 27, 2020

In a small valley, among the mountains of Lombardy, in northern Italy, stands a dam, or rather, half a dam. Built on the Gleno Creek, the Gl...

The B-17 That Flew With Its Tail Sliced Off

Aug 26, 2020

This famous photograph of a Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress, with its tail section severed but still flying was taken during Word War 2, towar...