Félicette: The Cat Who Went to Space
Kaushik Patowary
Sep 8, 2022
During the early years of space flight, animals were frequently flown into space and their bodies examined to investigate the various physio...
The Bradford Sweets Poisoning of 1858
Kaushik Patowary
Sep 7, 2022
William Hardaker ran a sweet shop in Green Market in Bradford, England. His most popular confectionary was the humbug, a hard boiled sweet m...
The Texas Horned Lizard That Was Entombed for 31 Years
Kaushik Patowary
Sep 6, 2022
The Texas horned lizard is a hardy creature, but its hardiness might have been overestimated. The Native American legend holds that the rugg...
Frog Battery
Kaushik Patowary
Sep 1, 2022
The term ‘battery’ was first used by Benjamin Franklin in 1749 to describe an apparatus he had designed to produce electricity. Franklin lin...
London to Calcutta by Bus
Kaushik Patowary
Aug 30, 2022
For fifteen years from the late 1950s to the early 1970s, it was possible to hop on to a bus in London and travel all the way to Calcutta, I...
Hannah Beswick: The Manchester Mummy
Kaushik Patowary
Aug 26, 2022
Hannah Beswick had a morbid fear of being buried alive, and this dread was not entirely irrational. Her young brother John almost had his co...
The Dublin Whiskey Fire of 1875
Kaushik Patowary
Aug 23, 2022
On June 18, 1875, a fire broke out on Chamber Street in the Liberties neighborhood of Dublin, Ireland. The exact cause of the fire remains u...
Wilhelm Gustloff: The Deadliest Ship Disaster You Never Heard Of
Kaushik Patowary
Aug 22, 2022
The sinking of the British ocean liner Titanic in 1912, with over 1,500 fatalities, is probably the most famous shipwreck of all time, but n...
The Calutron Girls Who Helped Built The Atomic Bomb
Kaushik Patowary
Aug 17, 2022
The Manhattan project that developed and built the world’s first atomic weapon employed some 130,000 people, of which only a small number of...
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...
