1,500 kilometres southeast of Moscow, sprawling over the rugged steppes of Kazakhstan, lies Baikonur Cosmodrome, the world’s first gateway to space. It is from this hallowed ground that Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite, and Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, blasted off on their historic missions – and a long time primary gateway to the International Space Station. […]
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Throughout history humans have many stories discussing various supposed humans and other beings that we dismiss as legend as a matter of course. Perhaps no source of such legendary figures is more robust than figures related to various religions, with basically no one today, for example, thinking that Hercules ever actually existed, despite the countless and sometimes rather detailed tales […]
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On December 8, 1941, the day after the surprise attack on Pearl Harbour, the United States declared war on the Empire of Japan. Three days later on December 11, Japan’s ally Nazi Germany declared war on the United States. This was to prove a major strategic blunder for the Nazis, for not only was the United States the greatest industrial […]
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In the first episode of the AppleTV series For All Mankind, the people of the world gather around their television sets in the summer of 1969 and watch in awe as the first human being sets foot on the moon. But in this reality, that human being is not NASA astronaut Neil Armstrong but Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov, and his […]
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When thinking about the middle ages, chances are that among the many images popping into your mind there stands a noble knight. Now, there are a variety of myths about what it was like to be a knight during medieval times, not just spread by Hollywood, but even by the contemporary legends during medieval times themselves- in both featuring widespread […]
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On September 15, 1935, the Reichstag or parliament of the German Third Reich passed the infamous Nuremberg Laws. Comprising the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour and the Reich Citizenship Law, these edicts forbade intermarriage or premarital sex between Aryans and non-Aryans – namely Jews and Roma – categorized people according to ancestry, and denied full […]
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Ah, fast-food- greasy cow muscle mush topped with melted coagulated milk, diced bodies of allium cepa, and the blood of tomatoes, all wedged between the ground up yeast enhanced carcases of wheat plantlife and served with a side of the fried corpses of tubers. Or for the king of them all- the delectable breasts of the noble Gallus domesticus, battered […]
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“I never shall forget the way, That Blood upon this awful day, Preserved us all from death. He stood upon a little mound, Cast his lethargic eyes around, And said beneath his breath : “Whatever happens we have got, The Maxim Gun, and they have not.” This passage, from Hillaire Belloc’s 1898 poem The Modern Traveller, infamously captures the awesome […]
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Reach into your pocket and pull out your cell phone. Even if you are rocking the most ancient, stripped-down flip phone from 2002, the object in your hands is still a marvel of modern electronics technology, packing billions of tiny switches into just a few cubic centimetres of space. By contrast, the Apollo Guidance Computer that sent humans to the […]
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On July 20, 1969, the whole world gathered around their flickering television sets and watched in awe as astronaut Neil Armstrong who, if not for someone secretly slipping his very late application to the astronaut program into the pile wouldn’t have even been there (more on this in the Bonus Facts later), climbed down the leg of a strange, spidery […]
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It was 8:15 AM on May 5, 1961, and astronaut Alan Bartlett Shepard Jr. was facing an unexpected crisis. Chosen to be the first American – and the second human – in history to blast into space, at 5:15 AM Shepard had been strapped into his Mercury spacecraft Freedom 7 and the hatch bolted shut behind him. Liftoff was scheduled […]
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A revival of the fantasy genre in recent years has also brought about a revival of historical fiction set in the Middle Ages. With an endless array of titles, we are sure that you can easily visualise scenes from some Hollywood, TV or streaming service production, in which mounted knights charge at a line of terrified spearmen, tattooed Vikings pillage […]
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Humphrey Bogart as world-weary bar owner Rick Blaine in Casablanca. Peter Sellers as the bumbling Inspector Clouseau in the Pink Panther films. Audrey Hepburn as socialite Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Keanu Reeves as kung-fu cyberpunk freedom fighter Neo in The Matrix. What do all these very different fictional characters have in common? You guessed it, they were all […]
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Living with the Animals While modern humans have existed for at least a few hundred thousands years, we didn’t really start massively progressing from our earliest ancestors until we began forming large and very complex societies after transitioning away from small hunter-gather groups for various reasons. Critical to all this being able to happen was creating sets of rules which […]
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On the morning of Thursday, December 17, 1903, two brothers stood on a windswept beach outside Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, and prepared to make history. After winning a simple coin toss, one of the brothers climbed into a strange wood-and-canvas craft dubbed the Flyer. With a clatter and a whir the twin propellers spun up to a blur, and a […]
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On September 1, 1974, U.S. Air Force pilots Major James Sullivan and Major Joel Widdifield took off from New York City and headed East over the Atlantic Ocean. By the time they reached London, only one hour, 54 minutes, and 56 seconds had elapsed – less than 1/17th the time it had taken for Charles Lindbergh to make the same […]
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On June 7, 1195, an English Benedictine Monk named Gervase of Canterbury watched as a great thunderstorm descended on the city of London. What happened next, recorded in Gervase’s 600-page Chronicle, defied the monk’s imagination: “On the 7th of the ides of June, around the sixth hour, a marvellous sign descended near London. For the densest and darkest cloud appeared […]
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On January 23, 1943 at the Battle of Stalingrad, the Red Army captured a Luftwaffe Lieutenant, one Leo Raubal. That name did not ring any particular bell amongst the Soviet interrogators, just another POW. Except he wasn’t. Lieutenant Raubal himself revealed to his captors the identity of his infamous uncle: Adolf Hitler. Now, Hitler could hardly be described as a […]
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