In the early morning hours of March 26, 1941, Royal Navy sailors on watch at Souda Bay, on the northern coast of Crete, were alarmed by an unusual sound: the high-pitched whine of high-powered engines, growing ever louder. As the sailors strained their eyes into the pre-dawn gloom, a swarm of tiny, fast-moving craft suddenly burst from the darkness, heading […]

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 […]

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 […]

Pretty much as long as Santa has been Santaing, kids have been trying to send him messages through various means, including, of course, in written form. But when these written messages are mailed, what do the post offices’ the world over actually do with the letters? Well, it turns out, some rather interesting things in some regions, such as in […]

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 […]

In the opening of the 2012 James Bond film Skyfall, everyone’s favourite super spy chases an assassin through the streets of Istanbul to recover a hard drive containing the identities of undercover British agents. For his trouble, he receives a shoulder full of shrapnel from the assassin’s pistol, is accidentally shot by a fellow agent, and falls off a bridge […]

On September 8, 1943, the Second World War took a dramatic turn as Italian Marshal Pietro Badoglio, who had just replaced a deposed Benito Mussolini as Prime Minister, announced an armistice between Fascist Italy and the Allied Powers. The following day, a large Italian naval fleet, on its way to counter the Allied amphibious landings at Salerno, was ordered to […]

Take a flight 400 kilometres due south from the Peruvian capital of Lima, and you will find yourself over the Pampas de Jumana, an 80 kilometre stretch of coastal desert sandwiched between the Andes foothills and the Pacific Ocean. It is one of the driest regions on earth, receiving less than 4mm of rain a year – a rugged wasteland […]

Imagine you are hiking in the woods. Emerging into a clearing, you stumble upon an unusual sight: a circular metal hatch like a manhole cover, protruding from the ground. Curious, you lift open the hatch to reveal a ladder, plunging down a vertical shaft into the earth. After taking a moment to gather your courage – after all, who knows […]

Ah, super glue. Along with duct tape and WD-40, it is an essential component of any toolkit, perfect for repairing everything from a chipped coffee mug to a cracked fingernail to that beloved toy the kids played a little too roughly with. Just dab on a little bit of the sticky stuff, wait a few seconds, and voila: the two […]

The City of London – a one-square-mile enclave on the north bank of the River Thames, is the oldest borough in the UK capital – and one of the strangest. Though surrounded by and part of the sprawling metropolis known as Greater London, the City of London is in fact its own, semi-independent ceremonial county, with its own police force […]

In all but four of the 25 James Bond films so far, the titular super spy starts his adventure with a visit to Q, MI6’s brilliant but grumpy creator of spy gadgets. From a briefcase full of weapons to a safe-cracking cigarette case to a watch with a built-in laser, Q always has exactly what 007 needs to complete his […]

Timeless beauty encased in a frame, day after day stares back at thousands of admiring viewers, engaging with them through an intriguing, smiling expression and a profound gaze, an embodiment of perfection and artistic expression. But enough about me. The Portrait of Mona Lisa by Italian painter, engineer, polymath and all-encompassing genius Leonardo Da Vinci is exhibited at the Salle […]

On the evening of August 21, 1986, Ephraim Che, a farmer from the highlands of northwest Cameroon, heard a great rumbling in the distance like rolling thunder. Emerging from his hut, he peered down the mountain to the moonlit waters of Lake Nyos, a small but deep body of water nestled in the crater of an extinct volcano. Though a […]

While often overlooked, unless you drive an electric car, there is likely a seemingly humble metal can attached to your exhaust pipe that is an absolutely incredible piece of chemical engineering, a product of a herculean but now largely-forgotten feat of politics and industrial research and development that some scholars have compared to the Apollo Program. This is the fascinating […]

Bulletproof vests are one of Hollywood’s favourite action movie plot devices. Easily concealable and seemingly impervious to all weapons, they provide writers with a handy eleventh-hour means of saving their characters from certain death. But how can such a relatively thin and flimsy piece of fabric stop a speeding bullet, and are real-life bulletproof vests really as impenetrable as in […]