If you're driving through Britain, you might see giant concrete blocks with concave openings. What are they? Acoustic mirrors. More than 100 years ago, these mirrors were built along the coast of England, with the intention of using them to detect the sound of approaching German zeppelins. Invented
Harry Lorayne had an international career as a memory expert, rattling off entire small-town telephone books and telling astonished audiences what was written on any page of a given issue of Time magazine. Mr. Lorayne was not a mnemonic freak. He was born with quite ordinary powers of recall, he
In the 1800s, counterfeiting became extremely common, and the one person acknowledged as America’s greatest counterfeiter was Benjamin Boyd. Boyd used to work for a Chicago syndicate run by James “Big Jim” Kinealy. However, Abraham Lincoln’s legislation to arrest counterfeiters resulted in Boyd being sentenced to prison in
History remembers him as Jimmy Carter’s closest childhood friend. In his best-selling memoirs and poetry, the former president detailed his adventures with Alonzo “A.D.” Davis, the nephew of Black tenant farmers who labored on Carter family land in Depression-era southwest Georgia. The boys grew up together, the 39th
On Friday, February 21, 1986 a group of 300 scientists, engineers, contractors and government officials gathered for a dedication ceremony at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. After final diagnostic tests, the "Mirror Fusion Test Facility-B" (MFTF-B) completion was celebrated, and a letter from John Herrington, Ronald Regan's
Some 16 years ago, The Boston Globe published an article about a jobless man who haunted Marsh Plaza, at the center of Boston University. The picture showed a curious figure in a long overcoat, hunched beneath a black fedora near the central sculpture. He spent his days talking with pigeons
About two weeks after his 18th birthday, Dallas Seavey became the youngest competitor to ever finish the Iditarod; at 25, he became the youngest to win it. But his fifth victory, in 2021, carried an asterisk: He triumphed on a truncated 848-mile course, shortened to prevent the potential spread of
Xuehu Wei, who is a doctoral student in the research team around Alfred Anwander and Angela Friederici, compared the brain scans of 94 native speakers of two very different languages and showed that the language we grow up with modulates the wiring in the brain. Two groups of native speakers
Barnum Brown was marked for greatness from a young age. Born on a Kansas farm on February 12, 1873, the third child of Clara and William Brown went weeks without a name. Nearby Topeka was plastered with advertisements for P.T. Barnum’s traveling circus at this time, as were
In 1832, Europe was in the throes of a cholera epidemic. A Scottish doctor named Thomas Latta knew cholera patients’ blood lacked water and salt, so he’d tried pumping a briny solution directly into the veins of an elderly patient. At first there was no response, but then the
It was March 1827 and Ludwig van Beethoven was dying. As he lay in bed, wracked with abdominal pain and jaundiced, grieving friends and acquaintances came to visit. And some asked a favor: Could they clip a lock of his hair for remembrance? The parade of mourners continued after Beethoven’
In 1747, the young poet Johann Wilhelm Ludwig Gleim was sitting in his study in the small German town of Halberstadt, surrounded by stacks of letters from his friends and associates, and had an epiphany. He realized that despite having corresponded with so many people, he had never actually met