He got home from his around-the-world trip 28 years later

Adventurer Karl Bushby completed a multi-day swim of the English Channel, stepping foot on UK soil after a 28-year journey. Bushby, 57, left Chile, South America, on 1 November 1998, following two self-imposed rules – not to use transport to advance and not to return home until the

During World War II she learned how the nervous system is wired

In December, 1940, Rita Levi-Montalcini rode a train from the station near her home in Turin, Italy, for 80 miles to Milan to buy a microscope. On her return to the Turin train station, two police officers stopped her and demanded to see inside the cake-sized box that

How the weather in space caused a 16-minute train delay in 1848

Detective work by a team of space-weather experts has discovered the truth about a historical event that had been thought to be the first-ever case of technological disruption by geomagnetic activity from the sun, but has now been shown to have taken place seven years later. From it

A death and an obsession with revenge: the bizarre tale of Otto Z

On a balmy, quiet evening in June 2020, Otto’s elderly mother, Doria, was fading in her Munich apartment. As she lay with her eyes closed, her pale face, framed by her white hair, was calm. Otto, masked, gloved and draped in a sterile apron, dozed in a chair beside

A top drone pilot in the Ukrainian Army describes his job

I joined the army on the day of the Russian invasion. I’d studied computer science and only recently landed a great internship at a game company. But I saw the news and knew my options were to sit and wait for them to come and kill me or go

Pittsburgh has an annual Parallel Parking Championship

For six years, the Parallel Parking Championship in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania has (for some of us) been motorsport’s crown jewel, a thrilling contest pitting man and machine against time and a 20 foot parking space. The event was first organized by a young couple named Dan and Jenna, just to

This top litigator had a secret life playing ultra high-stakes poker

Thomas Goldstein did not look at his cards. He shoved his chips forward — all of them — and told the table, “Let’s find out together.” This was the Bellagio poker room in July 2008, then the closest thing the gambling world had to a capital. Goldstein looked like easy prey.

Things can get very competitive at the sauna Olympics

He finds the chamomile and tips a couple extra drops onto a white snowball, making the top of it turn blue. Then the door opens, and he walks through it. For the next 15 minutes, Talmadge, 39, will whip a towel through thick, sticky air to push waves of heat

Japanese monks mummified themselves while still alive

Hidden in remote mountain temples across Yamagata and Fukushima prefectures, you’ll find Japan’s mysterious Sokushinbutsu — self-mummified monks who underwent an extreme ritual to achieve enlightenment. Sokushinbutsu is the ancient practice of self-mummification followed by Shugen-do Buddhist monks in Japan’s mountainous regions. This extreme ritual

Letters written by medieval students mostly ask for money

As one medieval Italian father puts its: “a student’s first song is a demand for money, and there will never be a letter which does not ask for cash.” Here is a typical example from the 1220s: "B. to his venerable master A., greeting This is to inform

The true story of the actual first shot ever fired in the Civil War

It was the autumn of 1865 — a quiet, bitter autumn after four hollowing years of war — when James Gilmore received a manuscript from a ghost. Well, not a ghost exactly. There’d been rumors, of course, about what had become of William Parker. Some had him lynched in a dark

He was an art forger but he became a national hero

In July of 1945, Han van Meegeren picked up his badger-hair brush and began to paint his last forgery. Over a decade, the wiry Dutchman had surreptitiously become Europe’s premier conman — a disgruntled artist-turned-forger who’d sold his works for tens of millions of dollars. He