Category Archives: Misc.

The World’s First Celebrity Robot

The idea of the robot – an autonomous, even sentient machine – has been around for millennia. In Ancient Greek mythology, the blacksmith god Hephaestus, whose legs were injured as a child, crafted a pair of mechanical women to help him walk. From the Middle Ages onwards, various master craftsmen constructed increasingly sophisticated clockwork automatons that dazzled and bewildered audiences […]

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The Surprisingly Long and Determined Effort to Create a Literal Flying Tank

The Great War of 1914-1918 has been described as the first “industrial war”, and saw the battlefield debut of a number of advanced weapons, including the aeroplane, poison gas, the tank, the flamethrower, and the submarine. Of these, the tank and the aeroplane would go on to completely revolutionize modern warfare. The post-war years saw great leaps in the development […]

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Why is the Universal Sign for a Hitchhiker the Thumbs Up, Held Out? And is Hitchhiking Actually Dangerous?

Sticking your thumb out to convey some meaning has seemingly been around for about as long as humans have been humaning, or, at least, as far back as written history goes. But how did the gesture come to be a signal that you’d like to hitch a ride from someone? And is hitching a ride actually dangerous? To begin with, […]

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The Curious Case of the Last Witch in Britain

In the late 16th and early 17th Centuries, Europe found itself gripped by witch mania. After centuries of denying the existence of witchcraft, Church leaders incredibly came to believe that misfortunes such as plagues and crop failures were causes not by God’s will but rather individuals acting in league with the Devil. The resulting hysteria, stoked by the political turmoil […]

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That Time the United States Tested Biological Warfare on its Own Citizens

For the residents of San Francisco, October 11, 1950 started out like any other day, with thick banks of autumn fog rolling in from the bay and across the city. By the afternoon, however, it became clear that something was seriously wrong. On that day alone, eleven patients were admitted to Stanford Hospital with pneumonia, fever, and serious urinary tract […]

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The Mysterious and Fascinating World of ‘Numbers Stations’

Shortwave radio signals, which occupy the radio frequency band between 3 and 30 megahertz, have the unique ability to bounce or “skip” off the earth’s ionosphere, allowing them to propagate over vast distances. This has attracted a devoted international community of shortwave radio enthusiasts, who exploit the unique properties of the medium to listen to and communicate with shortwave stations […]

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The Horrifying Origin of the Term “Stool Pigeon”

American gangster films of the 1920s, 30s and 40s have contributed a wealth of colourful slang to the English language, much of which is still floating around popular culture to this day: “sleeping with the fishes”, “concrete overshoes”, “G-man”, “Chicago typewriter”, “goon”, “big house”, “private dick”, “speakeasy”, “Chicago overcoat”, “ride the lightning”, “fuzz”, and many others. But while many of […]

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How Does Stealth Technology Actually Work?

At precisely 3 in the morning on January 17, 1991, a series of explosions rocked the Iraqi capital of Baghdad. The explosions were exact and devastating, destroying Iraqi military radars, command bunkers, and communications hubs with surgical precision. Immediately, Iraq’s aerial defence system sprang into action, its 3,000 anti-aircraft guns saturating the air with explosive shells. But the 60 surface-to-air […]

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So What Actually is a Tumbleweed, Anyway, And How Did it Become Associated with the American West?

Picture in your mind a classic Old West showdown. Two gunslingers slowly advance towards each other down a deserted street, their spurs gently clinking with every step. They stop and stare each other down, hands hovering over the six-shooters slung from their hips. All goes still as the tension rises, the silence broken only by the whine of a harmonica […]

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Space Religion

On Christmas Eve, 1968, nearly a billion people sat glued to their radios and television sets as the crew of Apollo 8 entered orbit around the moon. For three days the world had followed the pioneering mission three live television broadcasts, and they now waited eagerly to hear the historic words of the first humans to reach another world. Then, […]

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The Original Uber Eats India’s Amazing Near Century and a Half Old Dabbawala

Every morning around 7 o’clock, a small army descends upon the Indian port city of Mumbai. Dressed in distinctive white uniforms and topi or Gandhi caps, they fan out across the city’s sprawling suburbs to collect their wares before regrouping at local train stations and streaming down a network of rail lines into Mumbai’s commercial heart. There, on bicycles or […]

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When Does a Hill Become a Mountain?

Ever wonder when a hill becomes a mountain? Well, it turns out that language, like the universe, likes to resist simplicity… So the answer is- it’s complicated. But that’s not very interesting, so let’s dive into it shall we? To begin with, turning to our trusty Merriam-Webster Dictionary we have the following definition of a mountain: “a landmass that projects […]

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The Curious Case of the People With Split Brains

In late 1961, Drs. Philip Vogel and Joseph Bogen, neurosurgeons at the California College of Medicine in Los Angeles, were preparing to carry out a radical new procedure. The patients under their care suffered from severe epilepsy, which despite their doctors’ best efforts had resisted all attempts at conventional treatment.  One such patient, a 48-year-old former paratrooper identified in medical […]

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A Legal Clusterf$$k- Murder on Ice

It was July 16, 1970, and Mario Escamilla was furious. The 33-year-old native of Santa Barbara, California, had just learned that a coworker, Donald “Porky” Leavitt, had broken into his trailer and stolen his most prized possession: a 15-gallon jug of homemade raisin wine. Determined to put an end to such theft, Escamilla grabbed a rifle and stormed off to […]

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What’s Up With the Very Real ‘Doomsday Clock’?

On January 23, 2020, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a non-profit research and education organization based in Chicago, moved the hands on its Doomsday Clock forward to 100 seconds to midnight – the closest in its 74-year history. According the Bulletin, this change reflects the growing threat posed by climate change, nuclear proliferation, and misinformation, and the increasing unwillingness […]

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