From MIT Tech: "On a Friday evening last December, every tier of US law enforcement—federal, state, and local—was dispatched to the US Army Natick Soldier Systems Center, a military research installation outside Boston. A squadron of about 15 to 20 drones had been spotted violating the base’
From The Guardian: "More than 80 years after it was looted by the Nazis from a Jewish art dealer in Amsterdam, a portrait by an Italian master has been spotted on the website of an estate agent advertising a house for sale in Argentina. A photo shows the painting,
From the Smithsonian: "During the late 19th century, in the years following the Civil War, Americans—mostly ailing veterans—were hooked on morphine. Syringes, which were sold at drugstores, allowed people to administer the opiate themselves. So with a morphine epidemic sweeping the country, Bayer offered a hot new
From Toronto Life: "It was the middle of the night, a Wednesday in early April, when the first bag of A&W french fries was deposited on my neighbour’s porch. Nobody saw who put it there, but when my neighbour opened her door to get her mail
From Astral Codex Ten: "Ollantay is a three-act play written in Quechua, an indigenous language of the South American Andes. It was first performed in Peru around 1775. Since the mid-1800s it’s been performed more often, and nowadays it’s pretty easy to find some company in Peru
From NDTV: "Russian President Vladimir Putin's bodyguards reportedly carried a "poop suitcase" to collect his faecal waste during the Friday Alaska summit with US President Donald Trump, as reported by The Express US. The unusual security measure was said to be aimed at preventing foreign
From Popular Mechanics: "After 500 years, researchers finally understand the anatomical function of a heart feature first described by Leonardo da Vinci. To find the answer, scientists used fractal theory, MRIs, and a lot of computational elbow grease to shed light on structures called trabeculae. They found this branching,
From The Smithsonian: "It’s arguably the most iconic photograph of the 20th century: the Earth rising above the Moon’s bleached and desolate horizon, a breathtaking jewel of color and life more than 230,000 miles away. In December 1968, Apollo 8 astronauts Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and
From Veterans Breakfast Club: "You’ve heard of Japanese Kamikazes in World War II, but probably not Kaiten, the underseas version of the famous suicide attacks on Navy warships in 1944-1945. Kaiten was a top-secret manned torpedo program where the Japanese pilots would be sealed into explosive-packed steel cylinders
From LitHub: "One of the most disturbing sporting events in history took place on January 1, 1946, when the US military staged an all-star football game on a field in Nagasaki, Japan—less than five months after an atomic bomb killed over 70,000 in that city, nearly all
From ProPublica: "Jill Dopf Viles — self-taught genetic detective — passed away recently at the age of 50. She became convinced she had a rare form of muscular dystrophy called Emery-Dreifuss, which causes muscle wasting, and an even rarer form of partial lipodystrophy, which causes fat to vanish from certain parts
From New York: "Woeltz and Duplessie transformed the five-story townhouse they were staying in on Prince Street into an after-hours nightclub, filling it with young employees from Brandy Melville around the corner. The parties were wild and sometimes unnerving; the hosts bragged about ties to intelligence agencies and showed
From Wired: "Tuvalu is preparing to carry out the first planned migration of an entire country in response to the effects of climate change. Recent studies project that much of its territory could be submerged in the next 25 years due to rising sea levels, forcing its inhabitants to
From the New Yorker: "Around sunset on a rainy Saturday in November, 1906, a woman walked the streets of Rochester, in western New York State, trying to off-load a stack of counterfeit two-dollar bills. She looked about forty, tall, broad in the beam, with dark eyes and dark hair;
From Nautilus: "On a brisk January evening this year, I was speeding down I–295 in northeast Florida, under a full moon, to visit my dad’s brain. As I drove past shadowy cypress swamps, sinewy river estuaries, and gaudy-hued billboards of condominiums with waterslides and red umbrellas boasting,
From Toronto Life: "From the moment he was born, Ryan Wedding was the family darling. He belonged to a sporty, tightly knit clan with a shared love of the outdoors. In the 1960s, his grandparents, Laurence and Marlyn Spiess, had purchased the Mount Baldy Ski Area, a ski club
From The Atavist: "The weeks leading up to the city’s election had been marked by a frenzy of political violence. Chicago’s flamboyantly amoral mayor, William “Big Bill” Thompson, who had recently won office on the populist slogan “America First,” enjoyed the backing of local gangsters, including the
From Scientific American: "If you haven’t accomplished as much this summer as you had hoped to, you can blame forces far beyond your control: a few of these dog days, by one measure, are among the shortest you’ve ever lived through. For most of humanity’s history,
From SF Weekly: "A rumor had circulated for years that in the 1950s, Lehrer invented the Jell-O shot, a cup of flavored gelatin infused with booze, which has now become a frat-house favorite. He throws his head back and laughs. "What happened was, I was in the Army
From Boing Boing: "Autotune gets a bad rep. Sure, it's been abused by plenty of artists, notably T-Pain and Cher's "Believe" single. But used as a mild assistive, it can be a great way to punch up a piece of music. Dr. Andy
From New York magazine: "Andrew first met Matthew Christopher Pietras in September 2019 at the opening-night gala for the Metropolitan Opera. At 34, he was considerably younger than the other wealthy donors, not to mention handsome — tall, slim, and stylish. Pietras was vague about how he had made his
From Futurism: "An art installation project in Australia, titled "Revivification," has performed a quasi-resurrection of the late experimental American composer Alvin Lucier, creating a sort of brain that continuously composes music on the fly with its errant electrical signals. At the center of the piece is an
From Texas Monthly: "Sara Burnett had initially planned to spend only a few weeks practicing at Blue Element Freediving, a training center in the Caribbean island nation of Dominica. The area is popular among free divers, who plunge deep into open water without a scuba tank, hitting depths that
From Amusing Planet: "During the American Revolutionary War and the War of 1812, the border between British Canada and upstate New York saw some of the fiercest fighting, much of which took place around Lake Champlain. This freshwater lake situated across the US-Canada border provided the British a direct