On May 8, 1945, the German armed forces signed their unconditional surrender to the Allied powers. WWII, at least in Europe, was over. And now that the guns had fallen silent, the US, Britain, France and the Soviet Union had to face a daunting conundrum: how to deal with the active members of the National Socialist Party, the SS, the […]
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Controversial research programs, unethical experimentation, and human trials have been part of the medical field for centuries. The more infamous recent examples of wayward science include widespread eugenics sterilization, Nazis Nazi-ing, similar rampant Japanese experimentation during WWII which the U.S. happily let literally everyone off for in exchange for the data, electroshock therapy, ionizing radiation experiments, the CIA program MKULTRA, […]
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Ah hurtling through the air in a device made of several million parts in a portion of the Earth where the temperature generally sits at -40 degrees Celsius or Fahrenheit and there isn’t enough oxygen or atmospheric pressure to keep you alive. All the while a rather complex combination of a controlled explosion and rapidly spinning parts is both providing […]
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For most of history between the point Nikola Tesla and Thomas Alva Edison were respectively doing their things to the present day, if you asked just about anyone which of these men were greater, you’d likely have gotten a response akin to “Nikola who? …I mean, Edison of course? He and God gave us light!” That said, if you asked […]
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Various religions have been popping up randomly seemingly as long as humans have been humaning- interestingly, not just with humans but our Neanderthal cousins, with signs of some form of religious practices with those Neanderthals going back at least 150,000 years. But one religion founded about 2,000 years ago triggered a marked shift in the way many in the world […]
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For anyone sitting in gridlocked traffic on the way to a soul crushing job surrounded by other humans nattering on all day about their TPS reports as you truly internalize the pointlessness of everything because we’re all going to die and everything we ever said or did will be forgotten someday, you may at some point find yourself daydreaming about […]
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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 the first of September, 1939, nearly 1.5 million troops, 2,750 tanks, and 2,300 aircraft of Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich stormed over the border into Poland. We all know what happened next: despite declaring war in solidarity, Poland’s allies Britain and France stood by and did nothing as Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union overran and occupied the country in […]
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If you are like many parents watching your children’s booster seats slide around while they hop into the vehicle and otherwise wonder what precisely is the way you’re supposed to incorporate the seatbelt around the bits so it’s properly positioned on the kids (we’ll get into how to always do this one correctly later in this video), or lord help […]
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In the pantheon of origin stories for some of the world’s biggest businesses, there are no shortage of fascinating tales. From that time Colonel Sanders of KFC fame quite literally tried to kill his competition (via a gunfight that saw one dead and his competition jailed for it, even though said competition was just defending himself and he got shot […]
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On the morning of August 27, 1939, a small aircraft was towed onto the runway at Marienehe airfield in Mecklenberg, northern Germany. To the handful of observers gathered at the edge of the field, the craft must have looked like something out of science fiction, with its gleaming barrel-shaped fuselage, gaping nose intake, and stubby wings awkwardly mounted high atop […]
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Ah, McDonald’s French Fries. According to a poll we recently ran here, 48% of about 42,000 of you prefer this restaurant’s slender tan starch sticks to all the other restaurant tuber cutting offerings, with this percentage more than double the next runner up which was a blanket choice of “Other”- i.e. nearly all other restaurant french fries combined. While many […]
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On August 4, 1945, William Averell Harriman, United States ambassador to the Soviet Union, received a delegation of the Vladimir Lenin All-Union Pioneers, the Soviet equivalent of the Boy Scouts. As a symbol of cooperation between the two Allied nations during the still-raging Second World War, the Young Pioneers presented Harriman with a gift: a hand-carved wooden version of the […]
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At around 7 P.M. on May 2, 1878, the city of Minneapolis, Minnesota was rocked by a massive explosion. In the blink of an eye, the Washburn A flour mill – the largest in the world – disappeared, and a giant column of dust, smoke and debris shot into the sky. The blast was felt 16 kilometres away in Saint […]
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The Nazis weren’t exactly shy about the fact that they didn’t really care for individuals of a race other than the one they idealized. Further, the Japanese seemingly had no problem with peoples like the Jews, even going so far as in WWII taking in Jewish refugees from German occupied lands. Further, unlike Germany’s European allies during WWII, when the […]
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Thanks to Hollywood, as well as words written on the mangled inked corpses of the leafy fellow occupants of our little planet we’ve successfully subjugated, there are a number of common ideas about how an alien invasion of Earth would go. From clandestine infiltration where our celestial enemies walk among us undetected, to these brothers from another primordial goop mother […]
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At 6:45 AM on March 1, 1954, a blinding flash brighter than the sun lit up the sky above Bikini Atoll in the south Pacific. From an observation bunker on Enyu Island 30 kilometres away, scientists watched as a monstrous, glowing fireball rose over the lagoon, expanding to more than seven kilometres in diameter. Within a minute, this fireball had […]
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As the Allied armies advanced through France, Italy and Eastern Europe, high ranking officials and officers in the German National Socialist Party, the SS and the Wehrmacht seem to have finally realised that taking on most of the largest industrialised countries in the World all at the same time had not been the wisest idea, and at this point there […]
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