The Grand Duke Francesco de Medici, a prominent politician in the Tuscany region of Italy in the 16th century, died under mysterious circumstances in 1587 – with the suddenness of his death giving rise to rumors that he'd been poisoned. According to historical documents, Francesco's brother and
At each of the bomb sites — among the scattered detritus of pipe fragments, shell casings, broken plaster, glass, nuts, and bolts — police kept encountering one thing that was not like the others: a partially consumed throat lozenge. Finding a used cough drop on the floor in a public place was
Before the summer of 1936, people were used to dressing in a lot of layers. And while the materials in summer were lighter, they were still hot. That arrangement was tolerated most summers. Temperatures would climb, and everyone would grimace and bear it, sweating underneath coats and petticoats, vests and
On June 12, 2009, a man checked into a hotel in Sligo, Ireland under the name Peter Bergmann and a nonexistent Austrian address. He paid cash every night. Over the next three days, cameras around town filmed him leaving the hotel with a purple plastic bag of belongings and coming
Funding for scientific research in the United States is at a record low after the Trump administration canceled billions of dollars in research grants last year, derailing work focused on diversity, climate change, and other hot-button topics. For Daniel Blumstein, a professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary
David Cifaldi and two of his friends had been hiking for about seven hours up Montana’s tallest mountain on July 20 when he slipped on a rock and fell. He saw one of his trekking poles on the ground, but the second one was nowhere to be found.Then
Wearing an extra-large tan prison uniform, the man who seduced legions of U.S. Navy officers with prostitutes and bribes shuffled into a visiting room at a remote federal penitentiary on the Pacific coast. He squeezed his hulking frame into a tiny plastic chair. In an exclusive interview, Leonard
From TheForce.net: "Here's how that came about: My co-producer was Tony Bongiovi. Jon Bon Jovi was his little cousin and by little I mean we were all in our 30s and early 40s but Jon at that time was 17 years old. And we were
From Gareth Edwards at Every: "In September 1974, Ed Roberts was sitting at the bank in a foreclosure meeting. His once-profitable calculator company, Micro Instrument and Telemetry Systems, was on the verge of bankruptcy. But Roberts was soliciting a $65,000 loan. Not to spend on calculators, he
From Amitha Kalaichandran for Undark: "In May, I was invited to take part in a survey by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine to better delineate how long Covid is described and diagnosed as part of The National Research Action Plan on Long Covid. The survey had
From Chris Lewicki: "Some mistakes feel worse than death. A February evening in 2003 started out routine at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, CA. I gowned up in cleanroom garb and passed into the High Bay 1 airlock in Building 179 where nearly all of NASA’
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It was late afternoon on September 10, 2017, and Bruce Leshan was at home repairing a crack in his car’s windshield in Bethesda when he heard a scream. “Get out!” the voice cried. Leshan looked up and noticed smoke coming from the house up the hill. As he rounded
An old school toilet is not a typical mode of transport on which to hit the high seas but that did not deter friends Alex Craig and Paul Graham from giving it a go. The duo crossed the stretch of ocean between Cape Jervis and Kangaroo Island on a homemade
Harvard scientist Avi Loeb has been doing interviews all week because of his take on 3I/ATLAS, an interstellar object that has captured public fascination. The astronomy community generally agrees it’s a comet — potentially the oldest one ever seen. But Loeb has repeatedly pointed to what he contends are
A few miles from where I live is a small graveyard with one tombstone more decorated than the rest. Offerings of trinkets and candles tell a story about a woman mourned by people who never knew her. No story from the life of this young woman, who died of tuberculosis
A devastating farm accident when he was just two and a half years old became the beginning of an extraordinary journey of resilience, determination and self-belief. After losing both his arms in a grain auger accident on his family's Ohio farm in 1972, Detwiler refused to let
The dream of discovering buried treasure came true for a California couple who found a real pot of gold while walking their dog. The largest such hoard ever found in the U.S. is comprised of 1,411 gold coins, minted between 1847 and 1894, worth an estimated $10 million
As Chelsie Marie Anderson rode through the desert, leaning her head against the bus window, she kept thinking, This is how I’m going to die. Anderson stuck out among the other passengers: an American woman with bleached-blonde tips, huge brown eyes, and olive skin on a bus in
A Montana police officer spotted the giant banana rolling through Billings and did what countless law enforcement officers have done before him: He pulled it over. For Steve Braithwaite, owner, builder and full-time driver of the 23-foot-long Big Banana Car, the stop was less of a surprise
If you like baseball and use social media, you’ve likely already encountered the Savannah Bananas. The team is something of a social-media darling, especially on TikTok – the Bananas’ more than 6m million followers on the app significantly outnumber those of every franchise in Major League Baseball (as well
Qin Jianping had only intended to stop off in Haikou, capital of China’s Hainan province, for a few days. He drove to a seaside plaza to take an evening stroll along a seawall. He remembers slipping in the darkness, losing his balance, and suddenly falling over the edge into
A convoy of police cars, lights flashing, tail the large yellow truck up to the back gates of London’s British Museum. It’s just before 3 a.m. on July 10, a date that has been kept under wraps for months. After the truck pulls into the museum’s
We now think of Dame Barbara Cartland in her hot-pink guise as a romantic novelist, but in the early 1930s she was a sparkier sort of woman. Her early novels and plays raised eyebrows due to their racy nature and she wrote some rather naughty gossip columns. She was