Post Mortem Photography
Kaushik Patowary
Oct 8, 2021
In the olden days before photography, people used to hire painters to create portraits of those who had recently died as a way to keep the...
Itacolumite: The Flexible Rock
Kaushik Patowary
Oct 6, 2021
Ever seen a piece of rock bend? Itacolumite is unique kind of sandstone that does when cut into thin strips. If a foot-long piece, a few cen...
Tripitaka Koreana
Kaushik Patowary
Oct 6, 2021
The Tripiṭaka Koreana is the oldest surviving version of the Buddhist canon and the most complete collection of Buddhist texts, laws and tre...
The Chain Boats of Europe
Kaushik Patowary
Oct 4, 2021
In his travelogue, A Tramp Abroad , Mark Twain describes an encounter with a curious boat on the River Neckar in Germany. We ra...
Otto von Guericke's Magdeburg Hemisphere Experiment
Kaushik Patowary
Oct 2, 2021
The Magdeburg Hemispheres is a classic physics experiment that demonstrates the incredible pressure the atmosphere around us exerts on our b...
Horatio Phillips’s Extreme Multiplanes
Kaushik Patowary
Sep 30, 2021
British engineer and aviator Sir George Cayley suggested, as early as 1843, that an airplane with multiple wings will generate more uplift a...
Hackney Borough Disinfection Station
Kaushik Patowary
Sep 28, 2021
When you came down with an infectious disease in the early 1900s in London, not only were you whisked away in a horse-drawn cart to the hosp...
The Madaba Mosaic Map
Kaushik Patowary
Sep 27, 2021
In 1884, an Orthodox Christian community that had recently moved to Madaba, a city in western Jordan, began the construction of a new Church...
The Soviet Moon Prank
Kaushik Patowary
Sep 24, 2021
In December 1968, Frank Borman, James Lovell, and William Anders, became the first men to fly around the moon and return to earth. But they ...
Viktor Belenko: The Pilot Who Stole a Secret Soviet Aircraft
Kaushik Patowary
Sep 22, 2021
Lieutenant Viktor Ivanovich Belenko woke up early in the morning as he had done everyday for the past four weeks, to watch the approaching d...
