HMS Zubian: The Conjoined Ship
Kaushik Patowary
Jan 8, 2020
It is not unusual for navies to cannibalize ships decommissioned or rendered unserviceable by accidents for parts, but rarely an entire new ...
HMS Porcupine: The Warship That Became Two
Kaushik Patowary
Jan 8, 2020
In 1939, the British Royal Navy ordered Vickers-Armstrongs on the River Tyne to build a new P-class destroyer named HMS Porcupine . The ship...
Glass Flowers And Sea Creatures: Leopold And Rudolf Blaschka’s Ultra Realistic Glass Models
Kaushik Patowary
Jan 7, 2020
A glass flower at the Harvard Museum of Natural History. It is nearly impossible to preserve a dead specimen in a pristine manner. Larg...
Theremin: The Musical Instrument That You Can Play Without Touching
Kaushik Patowary
Jan 6, 2020
The theremin is probably the world's strangest and spookiest musical instrument ever made. It has no keys, no strings, just two metal ro...
The Abandoned Cryolite Mining Town of Ivittuut
Kaushik Patowary
Jan 4, 2020
Near the southern tip of Greenland, lies the old mining town of Ivittuut, now a collection of ramshackle houses and sheds and scattered piec...
Tron: Scotland’s Public Weighing Scales
Kaushik Patowary
Jan 3, 2020
The tron at Stenton, East Lothian, Scotland. Image credit: Studio Karel/Shutterstock.com This is the village of Stenton, in East Lothian...
The Mathematical Bridge of Cambridge
Kaushik Patowary
Jan 3, 2020
The Mathematical Bridge is a wooden footbridge across the River Cam, connecting the old and new parts of Queens' College in Cambridge. T...
The Meteorite That Changed The Course of Christianity
Kaushik Patowary
Jan 2, 2020
For more than two centuries, Christianity suffered under the Roman Empire. Christians were arrested, tortured, mutilated, burned, and starve...
Why do People Spit on The Heart of Midlothian?
Kaushik Patowary
Dec 31, 2019
Spitting on the streets is not quite gentlemanly behavior, but on the Royal Mile in Edinburg, it is almost a ritual. The object of contemp...
The Christmas Lights Powered by an Electric Eel
Kaushik Patowary
Dec 31, 2019
Visitors to the Tennessee Aquarium in downtown Chattanooga, the United States, are treated to a shocking Christmas attraction this December....
The Ruins of Washburn A Mill, Minneapolis
Kaushik Patowary
Dec 30, 2019
The tasteful ruins on the banks of the Mississippi River from which rises the Minneapolis’ Mill City Museum serves as a reminder to the site...
Child Birth by Centrifugal Force
Kaushik Patowary
Dec 28, 2019
In 1965, George and Charlotte Blonsky, a childless New York couple were granted patent for a peculiarly weird invention—an ”Apparatus for F...
Corona Spy Satellite: The Humble Beginning of Satellite Espionage
Kaushik Patowary
Dec 27, 2019
There is not a square-inch of earth that has not been photographed and mapped by satellites today. These spying eyes, flying hundreds of mil...
Creepy Victorian Christmas Cards
Kaushik Patowary
Dec 24, 2019
Victorian Christmas cards were a mixed bag of iconography, ranging from religious to everyday things. But one theme common in these season...
The Australian Floating Hotel That Ended Up in North Korea
Kaushik Patowary
Dec 24, 2019
For little more than a year in the late 1980s, a seven-story five-star hotel floated over John Brewer Reef, about 70 km off the coast of Tow...
The Termite Mounds of Okavango Delta
Kaushik Patowary
Dec 23, 2019
The Okavango Delta is a place like nowhere else on earth. It’s a vast swampy inland delta where a river disappears instead of emptying into ...
Sargasso Sea And Sargassum
Kaushik Patowary
Dec 23, 2019
The Sargasso Sea in the North Atlantic Ocean, near the Caribbean, is unlike any other sea in this planet. The boundaries of the sea are defi...
Villa Girasole: The House That Rotates
Kaushik Patowary
Dec 21, 2019
In the hills of northern Italy near Verona stands an L-shaped house called Villa Girasole, which means “sunflower” in Italian. And just li...
Britain’s Hundred Million Pound Banknotes
Kaushik Patowary
Dec 20, 2019
Scottish banknotes are weird. Although they are used all over Scotland and the rest of the UK, they are not legal tender, which means a shop...
Australia’s Rock And Ocean Pools
Kaushik Patowary
Dec 20, 2019
A defining feature of the Australian coastline, particularly in New South Wales, are the rock pools—outdoor swimming pools carved out of the...
