Trevor, The Loneliest Duck
Kaushik Patowary
May 24, 2019
On an island far far away, there once lived a duck named Trevor. Nobody knew where he came from, because until his arrival there was no duck...
The Shoe Fitting Machines That Blasted You With Radiation
Kaushik Patowary
May 24, 2019
Finding the right fit for your shoes is not that difficult. All you need to do is take a short walk through the store in the new pair. Squee...
Ethiopia’s Church Forests
Kaushik Patowary
May 22, 2019
Ethiopia is almost completely depleted of its forest cover. In the early 1900s, nearly forty-five percent of the country was covered by fore...
Train Through a Football Stadium
Kaushik Patowary
May 21, 2019
Going to any sporting event to watch your favorite teams play, as opposed to staying at home and watching the live broadcast, has its perks....
Soviet Televisions
Kaushik Patowary
May 20, 2019
This is the KVN-49, a black-and-white television set produced in the Soviet Union in the 1950s, and the first set to be mass-produced in th...
How Japanese Bamboo Helped Edison Make The Light Bulb
Kaushik Patowary
May 17, 2019
Thomas Alva Edison's invention, or shall we say “perfection”, of the light bulb helped brighten up homes of people all across the world,...
The World’s Oldest Printed Book
Kaushik Patowary
May 17, 2019
The Diamond Sutra is an ancient Buddhist sermon that generation of Buddhists have memorized and chanted since at least the fifth century. T...
The Talking Statues of Rome
Kaushik Patowary
May 15, 2019
For the past five hundred years, the people of Rome have voiced their resentment against the authorities through a unique medium—short compo...
The Goliath Transmitter
Kaushik Patowary
May 14, 2019
Communication with submarines is difficult because radio waves do not easily travel through salt water. The obvious solution is to surface ...
The Ice Block Expedition of 1959
Kaushik Patowary
May 13, 2019
In the autumn of 1959, a 3-ton block of ice made an 8,500 kilometer journey on the back of a pickup truck from the edge of the Arctic Circl...
Gustave Doré’s Victorian London
Kaushik Patowary
May 10, 2019
Our visual image of Victorian London is largely fixated on its sordidness—cramped streets, dark alleys, desolate slums, overcrowding, and i...
The Cranes of River Clyde
Kaushik Patowary
May 10, 2019
A giant cantilever crane looms over a car park adjacent to the Hilton Garden Inn at Glasgow City. During its heydays, this crane used to lo...
Operation Sailor Hat
Kaushik Patowary
May 9, 2019
On the coast of Kahoʻolawe, the smallest of the eight main volcanic islands of Hawaiian, is a large crater left behind by a violent test con...
Cycling Through Water
Kaushik Patowary
May 8, 2019
Through a large pond in the De Wijers nature reserve in Limburg, Belgium, runs a cycling lane that goes right through the waters instead of ...
The Lost Tomb of Genghis Khan
Kaushik Patowary
May 7, 2019
The death of Genghis Khan is shrouded in secrecy. The Great Khan died in the summer of 1227, during a campaign against the Tanguts, along t...
Trümmerfrauen: The Women Who Helped Rebuild Germany After World War 2
Kaushik Patowary
May 6, 2019
After the end of World War 2, one of the main tasks was to clear the urban areas of ruin and start rebuilding Europe—Germany in particular, ...
The Hand of Glory
Kaushik Patowary
May 4, 2019
At the Whitby Museum in North Yorkshire is a strange artifact—a dismembered hand, dried and shriveled. It once belonged to a man who was han...
Berezniki: The Russian City Swallowed By Sinkholes
Kaushik Patowary
May 3, 2019
The city of Berezniki, in Russia’s Ural mountains, is slowly sinking into the earth. The city of more than 150,000 individuals was built dir...
The Rockets of Mysore
Kaushik Patowary
May 3, 2019
Rockets were originally invented not to send things into space, but to shoot enemies with. Their effectiveness in warfare was demonstrated ...
Alexander Mitchell: The Blind Engineer Who Gave Sight to Seafarers
Kaushik Patowary
May 1, 2019
Sandbanks are a hazard to marine traffic . Often found near coastlines, near the mouth of a river and around ports, these shallow, submerged...
