The 100 Ton TNT Test
Kaushik Patowary
Oct 28, 2021
By the spring of 1945, the United States had completed building the world’s first nuclear device, nicknamed The Gadget . It was an implosion...
One-Armed Versus One-Legged Cricket
Kaushik Patowary
Oct 27, 2021
In 1861, Charles Dickens reported, in his magazine All the Year Round , a rather eccentric cricket match being played at Peckham Rye in the ...
The Woman Who Was Hit by a Meteorite
Kaushik Patowary
Oct 26, 2021
At the Alabama Museum of Natural History located in the University of Alabama campus in Tuscaloosa, there is a small chunk of black space ro...
How Two Families Escaped East Germany in a Homemade Hot Air Balloon
Kaushik Patowary
Oct 22, 2021
At 2:40 a.m. on the morning of 15 September 1979, constables Walter Hamann and Rudolf Golkel of the Bavarian State Police were patrolling ...
The First Photograph in History
Kaushik Patowary
Oct 20, 2021
It doesn’t look like much, but this is the world’s first photograph, or rather, the oldest surviving photograph, or both. It was taken by ...
Agent 355: The Mysterious Female Spy of The American Revolution
Kaushik Patowary
Oct 18, 2021
Agent 355 sounds like a comic book character or the protagonist of a television series, but in reality it is the nickname of a real figure: ...
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...
