When Dave Nguyen started chatting with his Uber driver days before Christmas, he discovered that he had never been tobogganing in his life, so something had to change. It was a snowy night downtown, and Nguyen had just finished his company Christmas party at Giovanni’s Restaurant. But Nguyen felt
In 2016, a retired scientist in London discovered a garden snail with a shell that coiled counterclockwise — the opposite of nearly every other snail on Earth. He named the snail Jeremy, after Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn (also a lefty), and what followed was an international quest to find the lonely
An engraving issued by a publisher called John Boydell gave libertine Georgians the opportunity to hang “Joconda” in their boudoir. It must have been popular because many copies survive. This Mona Lisa sits in a chair with her hands crossed in front of a fading view of distant rock formations.
While a handful of genetic mutations are linked to the disease, about 90 percent of cases of Parkinson’s are “sporadic,” meaning the disease does not run in the family. In one of the largest longitudinal twin studies of the disease, Swedish scientists reported in 2011 that of 542 pairs
The scaffolding surrounding the Charing Cross railway bridge has received an addition – two bales of hay/straw – because an ancient British law requires it. The law requires that a bale of straw be hung from a bridge as a warning to mariners whenever the height between the river and the
Target, just like many other retailers, has fallen victim to shoplifters, with almost a billion dollars in goods stolen from their stores in 2023. However, the numbers could have been much worse if it weren’t for their unique anti-shoplifting tactics. Target’s way of combating shoplifting was to establish
Kenner Elias Jones was a performer from a young age. As a choirboy with "the voice of an angel", aged 19 he carried a cross leading a procession at Prince Charles's 1969 investiture in Jones's Caernarfon hometown, watched by hundreds of millions worldwide. But
I grew up in a small town in Connecticut. I always knew I was adopted: my mum told me that, as well as her, I had my “tummy mummy”. I was adopted from the Dominican Republic. My mum there was called Julianna, and she and my dad gave me up
A luxury ocean liner burned and capsized in New York Harbor on Feb. 9, 1942. The SS Normandie, being converted into a troopship, caught fire during welding work and took 6,000 tons of water from firefighting efforts before rolling onto its side in the Hudson River. The Navy immediately
In the early hours of Friday, January 20, 2023, a dirty blue car parked outside St. James’s hospital in Leeds. The car was filled up to its windows with junk. Mohammad Farooq sat behind the steering wheel in the cold and dark, surrounded by his mess. His phone was
Dubbed the “Child Assassin” by Swedish media, the unnamed minor was reportedly paid 250,000 Swedish crowns ($27,000) to travel to the city of Malmö and kill a certain person, but ended up shooting a 21-year-old man who was hanging out with some friends. It is unclear who ordered
On 25 April 1982, two teenage boys in the small town of Borden, Saskatchewan, Canada began playing the relatively new fantasy role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons. Today, 43 years later and more than 2,000 km away, Robert Wardhaugh's D&D campaign is still going strong. The
Hi everyone — Mathew Ingram here. This is a special Christmas edition of When The Going Gets Weird, and it is the last newsletter of the year. Hope you and your loved ones have a great holiday (if you celebrate a winter festival of some kind) and we'll see
A distant webcam captured the moments the couple’s hiking trip started to unravel.The pair, a boyfriend and girlfriend, were nearing the summit of Grossglockner, the tallest mountain in the Austrian Alps, when their lights appeared on its dark peak. Around midnight, the man said, his girlfriend was struck
One lucky couple has beaten extraordinary odds to win £1m on the National Lottery — for the second time. Richard Davies, 49, and Faye Stevenson-Davies, 43, first scooped a seven-figure jackpot playing the EuroMillions Millionaire Maker in June 2018. And now they have done it again by matching five main numbers
On The Abyss, a rat used to demonstrate the film’s oxygenated water technology drowned during filming. Faced with the prospect of a dead rat — and losing the production’s “No Animals Were Harmed” certification — Cameron performed CPR on the rodent. The rat sprang back to life, and Cameron adopted
In 1863, Angelo Mariani marketed a patent medicine called Vin Tonique Mariani à la Coca de Perou. Based on Bordeaux wine infused with three varietals of coca leaves in the bottle, le Vin Tonique Mariani was immediately applauded as a an ideal stomach stimulant, an analgesic on the air passages
Researchers have recorded, for the first time, images of moths drinking a moose’s tears. The intriguing interaction between the nocturnal insects and majestic mammals went down deep in the woods of Vermont, captured by trail cameras set in the state’s Green Mountain National Forest as part of a
The mission demanded the utmost secrecy. A team of American climbers, handpicked by the C.I.A. for their mountaineering skills — and their willingness to keep their mouths shut — were fighting their way up one of the highest mountains in the Himalayas. Step by step, they trudged up the razor-toothed
Clisson et Eugénie, also known in English as Clisson and Eugénie, is a romantic novella, written by Napoleon Bonaparte. Napoleon wrote Clisson et Eugénie in 1795, and it is widely acknowledged as being a fictionalised account of the doomed romance of a soldier and his lover, which paralleled Bonaparte'
It is a drizzly October afternoon and I am sitting in a rural Lancashire pub drinking pints of Moretti with London’s leading snail farmer and a convicted member of the Naples mafia. We’re discussing the best way to stop a mollusc orgy. The farmer, a 79-year-old former shoe
It began with a rumour. Years after the war ended, stories started circulating about a Polish doctor who had supposedly saved thousands of Jews from the gas chambers by inventing a false epidemic. Newspapers repeated it. A documentary crew went looking for it. A myth formed around the idea that
It is easy to miss California’s biggest environmental disaster. Driving north on Highway 111, you wouldn’t expect to find an inland sea. If it’s summer, the thermometer in your car could read 115 degrees. But amid the shimmering heat, there are signs of water. All around you,
The infamous Black Death — a pandemic that killed as many as one third to one half of Europeans within just a few years — may have been aided in its devastation by an unknown volcanic eruption. That’s the hypothesis presented in research published December 4 in Communications Earth & Environment,