February 18, 1745, is the birthday of the great Italian physicist Alessandro Volta, credited with what many consider to be the most important invention in the history of electricity: the voltaic pile, or battery. The ability to convert chemical energy into continuous electricity was a definite game changer, and Volta
A few hours after driving down Washington Boulevard, I received an email from reader Chris Dwyer. “This summer, I was with my family on the median of Washington Boulevard during a street festival,” he wrote. “Sure enough, there was a vault about 10'x15' and 8-10'
Halfway up a steep street in Margate, in a residential area a short walk from the town centre, is a nondescript building. Walk in, pay a small fee, and head down. You’ll find yourself in a labyrinthine passage, dimly lit. It covers over 2,000 square feet. And around
Ukraine’s unprecedented drone rescue of a wounded soldier from the battlefield has shown once again how battlefield necessity can spur innovation. The operation was revealed just days after separate Ukrainian drones designed for casualty evacuation were deployed for frontline testing — taking a step beyond the US military’s decades
On Sept. 30, 1996, Marc Roode was at home in Fairbury watching his Dallas Cowboys battle the Philadelphia Eagles on Monday Night Football when he noticed some strange, decidedly non-pigskin-related commotion on the Veterans Stadium sideline. The Phillie Phanatic — the taxonomically cryptic mascot of the city’s baseball
In 1983, as the residents of Calcata, a small town 30 miles north of Rome, prepared for their annual procession honoring a holy relic, a shocking announcement from the parish priest put a damper on festivities. “This year, the holy relic will not be exposed to the devotion of the
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
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’
Links that interest me, and maybe you
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
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
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
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
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
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.
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
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
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
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
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
On Tuesday, Kirill Nguyen shared a rare personal dispatch from the @GagaDaily X account: “Sorry about the lack of updates, I was literally in prison 😭”. The profile, an outgrowth of the eminent Lady Gaga fan site Nguyen, now 32, founded nearly two decades ago, had gone dark for a year