What a 7-Year-Old Russian Boy Doodled in The 13th Century
Kaushik Patowary
Feb 22, 2019
Fifty years ago, a trove of manuscripts written on birch bark was discovered in the Russian city of Novgorod, situated some 200 kilometers...
Mauritania’s Iron Ore Train
Kaushik Patowary
Feb 21, 2019
At one million square kilometers, Mauritania is not a small country, but a very small percentage of it is habitable. The rest is covered by...
Witch Windows of Vermont
Kaushik Patowary
Feb 19, 2019
Photo credit: Larry Lamsa/Flickr An architectural oddity found only in the US state of Vermont is the so-called “witch window”. These are ...
Water Powered Funiculars
Kaushik Patowary
Feb 19, 2019
Funiculars are an odd mode of transport, but at the same time, they are one of the most energy-efficient one. The system consist of two coun...
The Bolivian Clock That Runs Backwards
Kaushik Patowary
Feb 18, 2019
The building that houses Bolivia’s legislative assembly in Plaza Murillo, in central La Paz, features a clock above the entrance that looks ...
European Trees With The Most Interesting Stories
Kaushik Patowary
Feb 18, 2019
The Environmental Partnership Association (EPA) is seeking votes from the public to help them select the winner of the European Tree of the...
Cemetery Guns And Coffin Torpedoes
Kaushik Patowary
Feb 16, 2019
This unusual-looking gun, now exhibited at the Museum of Mourning Art in Arlington Cemetery, once kept body snatchers away from cemetery gr...
Yasukuni Shrine, Where War Criminals Are Revered
Kaushik Patowary
Feb 15, 2019
The Imperial Shrine of Yasukuni, in Chiyoda, Tokyo, is a beautiful spiritual place for remembering those who died in service for Japan. As m...
Shin's Tricycle
Kaushik Patowary
Feb 13, 2019
Behind a glass case at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum is a battered and rusted tricycle. The seat is missing, and so are the pedals an...
When Little Boys Wore Dresses
Kaushik Patowary
Feb 12, 2019
Until about a century ago, in the western world, you couldn’t tell whether a young child was a girl or a boy from the way he or she dressed....
Edwin Smith Papyrus: The 3,600-Year-Old Textbook of Surgery
Kaushik Patowary
Feb 11, 2019
In 1862, an American Egyptologist named Edwin Smith bought an ancient scroll of papyrus from an Egyptian dealer. Smith didn’t know how to re...
Historic Watercolors Document How The World Was Before Photography
Kaushik Patowary
Feb 11, 2019
Before there were cameras, people documented how the world and its inhabitants looked like through paintings. Oil on canvas was the medium o...
How Australia Remembers The World’s Biggest Gold Nugget
Kaushik Patowary
Feb 8, 2019
On February 1869, two British prospectors, John Deason and Richard Oates, were digging for gold in central Victoria, Australia, when their p...
The Statue of Liberty of Lake Mendota
Kaushik Patowary
Feb 8, 2019
This is what will happen when the polar ice melts and sea level rises. Well, not really. It’s just a continuation of a prank that started f...
Music in The Clouds
Kaushik Patowary
Feb 7, 2019
In June 1867, James Glaisher, an English astronomer and meteorologists, and an avid balloonist, was floating over Paris in a balloon when h...
Globsters: When Sea Monsters Wash Ashore
Kaushik Patowary
Feb 7, 2019
On November 30, 1896, two young boys, Herbert Coles and Dunham Coretter, were bicycling along Anastasia Island, near St. Augustine on the At...
James Hiram Bedford: The First Person To Be Cryogenically Preserved
Kaushik Patowary
Feb 5, 2019
Will humans ever posses the technology to revive a dead person back to life? Dr. James Hiram Bedford certainly hopes so. He has been waitin...
Gyrobus: The Flywheel-Powered Public Transportation
Kaushik Patowary
Feb 5, 2019
Back in the 1940s, Swiss engineers developed a new kind of zero-emission electric bus that used a large spinning flywheel to store energy ra...
Hagfish: The Slimy Creature of The Deep
Kaushik Patowary
Feb 4, 2019
Hollywood horror movie monsters and aliens aren’t complete without loads of repulsive slime, mucous and saliva dripping from their mouths. ...
Halton Arp’s Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies
Kaushik Patowary
Feb 2, 2019
Less than one hundred years ago, astronomers were not even sure whether our galaxy made up the entire universe or there were more Milky Wa...
