From The Guardian: "During the second world war, young women broke traditional gender barriers by working in Britain’s forests as part of the Women’s Timber Corps. As many as 15-18,000 young women left home for the first time, aged 17-24, to fell trees with an axe
From the BBC: "One of the world's most prolific blood donors - whose plasma saved the lives of more than two million babies - has died. James Harrison died in his sleep at a nursing home in New South Wales, Australia on 17 February, his family said
From Scientific American: "In 2011 an anonymous poster on the now infamously controversial image board 4chan posed a mathematical puzzle about the cult classic anime series The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya. The first season of this anime series consists of 14 episodes that were designed so that you can
From the WSJ: "Eleanor Maguire wasn’t great at navigating the streets of London, and she started to think that the brains of the people who were expert navigators—the city’s famous cabdrivers—might actually be different than hers. She burst into her lab at University College London
From National Geographic: "A young woman is swept from her home into a foreign, enchanted world. Her captor is no mere mortal, but a powerful and mystical fairy or beast. So begins the odyssey of Feyre, the protagonist of Sarah J. Maas’s bestselling A Court of Thorns and
From the Wall Street Journal: "Lead pollution in ancient Rome was so high that it dropped the population’s IQ by around 3 points, if not more. Elites were exposed to lead through water pipes, cooking pots, bath tubs, cosmetics and the syrups that sweetened their wine. But the
From Wikipedia: "Claudette Colvin is an American pioneer of the 1950s civil rights movement and retired nurse aide. On March 2, 1955, she was arrested at the age of 15 in Alabama for refusing to give up her seat to a white woman on a segregated bus. It occurred
From Wikipedia: "Alan Francis is a horseshoe pitcher from Defiance, Ohio who has won the World Horseshoe Championship 28 times — in 1989, 1993, 1995–1999, 2001, 2003–2010, 2012–2019 and 2021–2024. He holds the record for most championships with 2nd place belonging to Ted Allen, who has
From CNN: "The oldest known tablet inscribed with the Ten Commandments from the Old Testament sold on Wednesday for $5.04 million, more than double its high estimate. The stone, which dates back around 1,500 years to the Late Roman-Byzantine era, sparked more than 10 minutes of intense
From the WSJ: "Nontra Yantaprasert couldn’t wait to take her husband’s shorter and easier-to-pronounce last name. She didn’t know what kinds of problems it would cause.His last name is Null, the same word used by computer scientists to mean “no value” or “invalid value.” The
From The New Yorker: "For Wilson Bentley, the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century microphotographic innovator and bona-fide snowflake obsessive, contemplating the dazzling panoply of kaleidoscopic snow-crystal formations was a pastime that never lost its lustre. In fact, it is through Bentley’s encyclopedic collection of more than five thousand snowflake photographs,
From CNN: "The patient consulted a doctor about a chronic cough that was concerning him. During his first couple months of treatment, he was diagnosed with pneumonia, thickening and stiffness in the right lung, and bronchiectasis, or damage of the breathing tubes. When the patient finally reached Munavvar’s
From MIT: "Later this month, Intuitive Machines, the private company behind the first commercial lander that touched down on the moon, will launch a second lunar mission from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. The plan is to deploy a lander, a rover, and hopper to explore a site near
From The Guardian: "A humpback whale briefly scooped a kayaker into its mouth off the Chilean Patagonia before quickly releasing him unharmed in an incident caught on camera. Adrián Simancas was kayaking with his father, Dell, in Bahía El Águila near the San Isidro lighthouse in the Strait of
From National Geographic: "Officials in the Brdy region of the Czech Republic were at an impasse.Despite securing more than one million dollars’ worth of funding for a new dam to address water issues, the project had stalled after seven years of planning because the necessary building permits for
From Defector: "If neighbors peeking behind curtains at the idling 18-wheeler thought to call in a complaint, the husband and wife receiving the delivery didn't notice. They were too busy unloading boxes—more than 800 of them. That problem cost $43,000, a sum that represented the
From Discover Music: "No matter how memorable Bobby Fuller’s signature hit was – and his version of “I Fought The Law” is inarguably a classic rock’n’roll record of any era – it always risks being upstaged by the macabre and never-explained circumstances of his death. Born on October
From The Oxford Clarion: "The Eagle & Child is Oxford’s most storied inn. It was here that the Inklings met every Tuesday lunchtime – a writing group including J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and Hugo Dyson, who infamously dismissed a plot twist in the Lord of the
From the NYT: "In the 1850s, Eunice Foote, an amateur scientist, made a remarkable discovery about greenhouse gases that could have helped form the foundation of modern climate science. But the scientific paper she published that might have added her name to the pantheon of early climate scientists was
From The Smithsonian: "On the flat top of a steep hill in a distant corner of northern Japan lies the tomb of an itinerant shepherd who, two millennia ago, settled down there to grow garlic. He fell in love with a farmer’s daughter named Miyuko, fathered three kids
From USC: Oneida. For most Americans, the name conjures up fine silverware. Few are aware that behind this secular symbol of middle-class respectability lies the story of a 19th-century religious community predicated on radical notions of equality, sex and religion. The community’s founder, John Humphrey Noyes, was the scion
From The Sunday Times: "Somewhere in Boston there is a doctor who treats disorders of the brain: a brilliant woman, a Harvard graduate, a mother of two. But she has a dark secret. Unbeknown to her colleagues or her patients, she is also a writer of thrillers, churning them
From Wikipedia: "Emily Rosa is the youngest person to have a research paper published in a peer reviewed medical journal. At age nine she conceived and executed a scientific study of therapeutic touch which was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1998. In 1996, Rosa
From Wikipedia: "At the height of Soviet–Chinese tensions in 1969, Chinese Communist Party chairman Mao Zedong ordered the construction of the Underground City. The Underground City was designed to withstand nuclear, biochemical and conventional attacks. The government claimed that the tunnels could accommodate all of Beijing's