one-armed vs one-legged cricket
In 1861, Charles Dickens reported in his journal throughout the years, a singular cricket match being played at Peckham Rye on the grounds of Rosemary …
Facts
the woman who was hit by a meteorite
At the Alabama Museum of Natural History, located on the University of Alabama campus in Tuscaloosa, is a small chunk of black space rock that …
How Two Families Escaped East Germany in a Homemade Hot Air Balloon
At 2:40 a.m. on the morning of 15 September 1979, constables Walter Hamann and Rudolf Golkel of the Bavarian State Police were patrolling the country …
first picture in history
It doesn’t look like much, but it is the first photograph of the world, or rather, the oldest surviving photograph, or both. It was taken …
Agent 355: The Mysterious Female Spy of The American Revolution
Agent 355 sounds like a comic book character or the protagonist of a television series, but in reality it is the nickname of a real …
post mortem photography
In the old days before photography, people used painters to make portraits of people who had recently died in order to keep the memories of …
Itacolumite: The Flexible Rock
Have you ever seen a piece of rock bend? Itacolumite is a unique type of sandstone formed by cutting into thin strips. If a one-foot-long …
tripitak korena
The Tripisaka Korena is the oldest surviving version of the Buddhist doctrine and the most complete collection of Buddhist texts, laws and treaties engraved on …
chain boats of europe
In his travelogue, a vagabond abroadIn , Mark Twain describes an encounter with a curious boatman on the Neckar River in Germany. We ran forward …
Otto von Guerick’s Magdeburg Hemisphere Experiment
The Magdeburg Hemisphere is a classic physics experiment that demonstrates the incredible pressure of the atmosphere around us on our bodies and everything else. The …