From Nautilus: "The 60-year-old man lying on the street, as far as anyone knew, was just a janitor hit by a drunk driver. There was no mention of it on the local news, no obituary in the morning paper. His name might have been Anonymous. But it wasn’t.
From Science Alert: "Nearly two decades ago, an experiment floating high above Antarctica caught a weird signal. Designed to capture the radio spurts of cosmic rays falling from above, in 2006 the Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna (ANITA) recorded a short pulse of radio waves from below – an event that
From Futurism: "A flurry of activity at pizza delivery outlets near the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, is a surprisingly accurate predictor of war, as hungry military leadership hunkers down to monitor unfolding military activities. As painstakingly documented by X account Pentagon Pizza Report, a "busier than usual"
From Luxury London: “Hidden under enormous shoulder pads and bleach blonde hair, Joan Hannington, who would go on to be dubbed the ‘Godmother’ of London’s criminal network, was one of the world’s most notorious jewel thieves. Her story epitomes the rag to riches trope, having been born in
From the WSJ: “A tiny Pentagon office had spent months investigating conspiracy theories about secret Washington UFO programs when it uncovered a shocking truth: At least one of those theories had been fueled by the Pentagon itself. The congressionally ordered probe took investigators back to the 1980s, when an Air
From the Journal of Urology: "First century Rome saw the introduction of vectigal urinae, a tax introduced by Roman emperor Vespasian for the collection and distribution of urine, an expensive raw commodity. It was used in the tanning industry, where it was mixed with the hide to soften it,
From SFGate: "The evidence of Petro Zailenko’s quiet legacy can be found all over this corner of the Northern California redwood forest. Signs throughout Hendy Woods State Park, nestled deep in Mendocino County’s Anderson Valley along the Navarro River, bear his name and facts — or theories, at
From Tempo de Conhecer: "There is a book whose reading — or mere possession — proved fatal for many. Not because it contained subversive ideas but because the object itself was deadly. It is a 19th-century book known as Shadows from the Walls of Death — a dark title for an even
From PBS: "It was Coney Island in the early 1900’s. Beyond the Four-Legged Woman, the sword swallowers, and “Lionel the Lion-Faced Man,” was an entirely different exhibit: rows of tiny, premature human babies living in glass incubators. Barkers, including a young Cary Grant, called out to passersby, enticing
From Der Spiegel: "It’s two hours after midnight. The extreme mountaineer Kristin Harila is trudging through the death zone on K2, the second tallest mountain in the world, following the beam of her headlamp. To her left, the mountainside plunges almost vertically, hundreds of meters into the depths.
From the New York Times: "Interpol had been looking for a disgraced finance executive for weeks when Christo Grozev, an investigative journalist, found him, hiding in Belarus. He identified the secret police agents behind one of the most high-profile assassination plots of all: the 2020 poisoning of the Russian
From MIT: "Arnhildur Pálmadóttir was around three years old when she saw a red sky from her living room window. A volcano was erupting about 25 miles away from where she lived on the northeastern coast of Iceland. Though it posed no immediate threat, its ominous presence seeped into
From Damn Interesting: "Paris, 29 May 1832. All through the night, a young Frenchman named Évariste Galois stayed awake, quill in hand, frantically scrawling notes and equations across dozens of sheets of paper. He had only been studying mathematics seriously for a few years, but he had proven to
From The Guardian: "A Chinese paraglider who was accidentally propelled more than 8,000 metres high by an updraft has been banned from the activity for six months after a video of his ordeal went viral. Peng Yujiang began from an elevation of about 3,000m in the Qilian
From the New York Times: "Kelly Wakefield, a professional gardener, was doing her spring cleanup of a public park in St. Albans, Vt., when she stumbled upon a mysterious metal box under a pile of leaves. She shook the box and heard the telltale jangle of coins. She opened
From National Library of Medicine: "The structure of modern residency programs in North America originated at Johns Hopkins Hospital during the last decade of the 19th century, under the aegis and influence of William Stewart Halsted. Halsted was a surgical innovator who greatly shaped surgical practice in the 20th
From The Wrap: "A remote indigenous tribe Amazon tribe in Brazil has sued The New York Times, claiming a story about its first exposure to the internet has led to widespread reports that its members have become addicted to pornography. Filed last week in Los Angeles, the Marubo Tribe
From The Atlantic: "Last week, Germany arrested Peter Fitzek, 59, an anti-government figure also known as King Peter I, the Son of Man, the Messiah. Historically, attempts to arrest messiahs have met with mixed results, so to stay on the safe side, the Interior Ministry not only rolled up
From Now I Know: "In 2007, Tommaso was a homeless kitten, living on the streets of Rome — your stereotypical alley cat. He quickly became the feline equivalent of a rags-to-riches story when a woman named Maria Assunta, then either 89 or 90 years old, adopted Tommaso as her own.
From Public Seminar: "Electronic monitoring came into the criminal justice system not as a result of extensive research, but in part because a district judge in Albuquerque avidly pursued the idea in the 1970s. Judge Jack Love had read about the use of location tracking for livestock, and was
From The Atlantic: "Like so many other family members of vegetative patients, she held on to a mother’s belief that Ian could understand everything around him. She took care, when shaving him, to leave the wispy mustache he had been trying to grow. When his high-school friends went
From the BBC: "A manuscript once considered an unofficial copy of Magna Carta is now believed to be a genuine version and one of the world's most valuable documents, according to UK academics. Harvard Law School paid $27.50 for it in 1946 and for years it
From Toronto Life: "Elaine Hoffman, a 71-year-old grandmother, sat in her suburban Indiana home and turned on her computer. A banner ad caught her attention: its claim seemed unbelievable — that she could make money with the click of a mouse. Hoffman knew her way around investments. She had a
From Toronto Life: "To fellow tourists he met around the world, Jeffery Shuman was a semi-retired developer with a bright smile, an even tan and a fat wallet. In truth, he was a legendary bank robber on the run from the Toronto police and the US Marshals. He had