At 3:45 PM on September 5, 1945, history was made at Chalk River Laboratories in Ontario as the Zero Energy Experimental Pile or ZEEP achieved criticality for the first time. In that moment, Canada entered the nuclear age – only the second country after the United States to do so. While rarely thought of as a leader in nuclear technology, […]
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In September of 1808 Covent Garden Theatre in London burned to the ground. The exact cause of the fire has never been established but due to the extensive amount of flammable items throughout combined with an amazing number of flaming light fixtures, fires of some sort at theaters were relatively common, even inspiring a London fire code requiring several wet […]
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The human body is capable of surviving a frankly astonishing amount of trauma to the point that even the loss of entire limbs isn’t necessarily something that will inherently kill us so long as we keep a sufficient amount of blood circulating and avoid a deadly infection. Curiously, despite stories of people surviving things like falls from high in the […]
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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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The Pyramids of Giza. The Pharos of Alexandria. The Colossus of Rhodes. The Temple of Artemis at Ephesus. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon. The Statue of Zeus at Olympia. The Mausoleum at Halicanarnassus. These are the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, celebrated for millennia as the greatest architectural achievements of antiquity. Sadly, today only one of the original wonders […]
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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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“On September 15th, Nike created a revolutionary new basketball shoe. On October 18th, the NBA threw them out of the game. Fortunately, the NBA can’t stop you from wearing them. Air Jordans from Nike.” This is a quote from arguably one of the single most successful ad campaigns of all time- the initial release of the Air Jordan sneaker line. […]
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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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At 7:35 A.M. on July 1st, 1940, a ship arrived in the port of Halifax, carrying a shipment of fish. Under the watchful eye of 300 armed policemen, the cargo, packed in hundreds of wooden crates, was methodically checked and rechecked before being loaded onto a dozen railcars. From Halifax, the shipment made its way to Montreal, where the train […]
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“An army marches on its stomach.” This adage, variously ascribed to Frederick the Great or Napoleon Bonaparte, captured one of the universal truths of warfare: that battles are won not by men and weapons, but by logistics – the ability to efficiently and reliably supply said men and guns with the ammunition, food, medicine, and any other resources required to […]
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In the early morning hours of June 6, 1944, a massive armada of more than 5,000 ships and 1,200 aircraft appeared off the coast of Normandy in northern France. Moments later, some 160,000 American and British Commonwealth troops stormed onto the beaches or landed by parachute behind enemy lines. Operation Overlord, the Allied invasion of Nazi-occupied Europe, had begun. The […]
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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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In the first two years of WWII, the German armed forces – or Wehrmacht- and especially the Army – or ‘Heer’- stunned the world with an unprecedented string of victories against several otherwise prominent nations that it boggles the mind one small nation could so easily conquer, let alone so rapidly. From September 1939 to December 1941, German troops occupied […]
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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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“All the old paintings on the tombs They do the sand dance, don’t you know? If they walk too quick (oh way oh) They’re falling down like a domino Slide your feet up the street, bend your back Shift your arm then you pull it back Life is hard you know (oh way oh) So strike a pose on a […]
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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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In the early morning hours of June 13, 1944, the residents of East London were awoken by an unusual sound: a loud, high-pitched chugging like a motorcycle with a broken muffler. Looking up, they saw a small aircraft skimming over the rooftops at tremendous speed, a tongue of flame trailing from its tail. Moments later, the aircraft plunged to the […]
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“I think three women who were pregnant went into labour that evening.” This is a quote from BAFTA winning horror writer Stephen Volk discussing perhaps his most infamous work, Ghostwatch. A BBC special released in 1992 that resulted in a quantifiable percentage of the British public watching at home believing that the spirit of a child-molesting ghost had flown out […]
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