How Australia Fought The Prickly Pear Infestation
Kaushik Patowary
Aug 16, 2022
Prickly pear is a common name that refers to a number of large cactus species of the Cactaceae family that is endemic to the Americas. The s...
Albino Redwood
Kaushik Patowary
Aug 11, 2022
Albinism is rare in humans and animals, and it is rarer still in plants, where it manifests as the complete lack of chlorophyll. Because thi...
Drowning in Sewage: The Sinking of Princess Alice
Kaushik Patowary
Aug 10, 2022
The sinking of SS Princes Alice , a British paddle steamer, on the River Thames on 3 September 1878, that resulted in the loss of more than ...
Spot The Woman
Kaushik Patowary
Aug 9, 2022
For much of history, women have been forced to occupy a position one notch lower than that of men. This is very apparent when you look at ol...
The Thousand-Year Rose of Hildesheim Cathedral
Kaushik Patowary
Aug 9, 2022
Climbing the outer wall of Hildesheim Cathedral’s apse is a rose bush, said to be one thousand years old. According to legend, as long as it...
Clark Stanley: The First Snake Oil Salesman
Kaushik Patowary
Aug 9, 2022
The term “snake oil” is frequently used to describe any substance that has no real value but sold as a remedy for a particular set of proble...
Murtoa Stick Shed
Kaushik Patowary
Aug 5, 2022
In the town of Murtoa, in the Wimmera region of Victoria, Australia, there is a large grain storage facility that looks rather like an enorm...
Franja Partisan Hospital
Kaushik Patowary
Aug 4, 2022
During World War 2, when Slovenia was under Nazi occupation, the country’s resistance movement built a large number of hospitals hidden in t...
Photophone: How Alexander Graham Bell Transmitted Sound by Sunlight
Kaushik Patowary
Aug 3, 2022
Alexander Graham Bell’s greatest invention was the telephone. But if you told that to Mr. Bell, he would have disagreed. On June 3, 1880, ...
The Man Who Bought Stonehenge And Gave it Away
Kaushik Patowary
Aug 2, 2022
On 21 September 1915, a barrister named Cecil Chubb was sent to an auction by his wife to buy some curtains. According to some accounts, she...
The Angel Makers of Nagyrév
Kaushik Patowary
Aug 1, 2022
About sixty miles southeast of Budapest, on the River Tisza, lies a quiet little village with a horrible past. It was here in Nagyrev, a cen...
Australia’s First Tour of England in 1868 Was Made by an Aboriginal Cricket Team
Kaushik Patowary
Jul 29, 2022
Sports has been an important way to bridge different cultures. For the aboriginal Australians and their colonial settlers, it was cricket. ...
Painless Parker: The Showman Dentist
Kaushik Patowary
Jul 27, 2022
At the Temple University's dental museum in Philadelphia, there is a small section dedicated to one of the most notorious dentist of Ame...
The Band of Holes
Kaushik Patowary
Jul 25, 2022
In Peru’s Pisco Valley, there is a strange alignment of thousands of shallow pits. The pits are arranged in a narrow band about 14 to 20 met...
The Diary of Merer: A 4,500-Year-Old Papyrus That Details The Construction of The Great Pyramid
Kaushik Patowary
Jul 22, 2022
The Great Pyramids of Giza has been one of the world’s greatest enigmas—how did an ancient society build such massive monuments without the ...
Dr. Gustav Zander's Victorian-Era Exercise Machines
Kaushik Patowary
Jul 20, 2022
Dr. Gustav Zander's institute in Stockholm, founded in 1865, could be called the world’s first gym. It was equipped with twenty-seven cu...
Princess Caraboo: The Imposter That Fooled a Nation
Kaushik Patowary
Jul 19, 2022
On 3 April 1817, a mysterious woman in her mid-twenties walked into the small English village of Almondsbury in Gloucestershire. She was dre...
Grace Darling's Daring Rescue of Shipwreck Survivors
Kaushik Patowary
Jul 18, 2022
In 1838, a young woman pulled off a heroic rescue saving several survivors from a wrecked merchant ship off the coast of Northumberland in n...
Gol Gumbaz: The Taj Mahal of South India
Kaushik Patowary
Jul 8, 2022
In the city of Bijapur, in the south Indian state of Karnataka, stands one of the grandest royal tombs to be ever constructed in India. Aptl...
Code of Ur-Nammu: The Oldest Law in History
Kaushik Patowary
Jul 7, 2022
Some of the earliest legal codes concerning crimes and offenses and their punishment were formulated in the ancient Middle East. The Sumeria...
