From King Arthur’s Avalon to Plato’s Atlantis, Jonathan Swift’s Laputa to Pi’s carnivorous Eden, people have long dreamed of magical islands where the miraculous happens and the lost find sanctuary. The Celts of Ireland were no different, and in their tradition, the mythical island was known as Hy-Brasil. The Myth of Brasil Also called O’Breasail, Hi-Brasil, O’Brazil, Hy Breasail, Hy […]

In 2010, architect and PhD candidate at the Royal College of Art in London, Julijonas Urbonas, from Lithuania, decided to attempt to design a method of euthanizing people that they might even enjoy. His solution- the Euthanasia Coaster, which he designed and built at a precise 1:500 scale. It’s a roller coaster that could seat up to 24 passengers and […]

Garden gnomes are those statues you see of pint sized chubby human-like creatures usually wearing red hats and blue pants. You can find them in a variety of poses and pursuing various past times such as fishing, napping, or in the case of my personal gnome, smoking a pipe. Garden gnomes are typically male and have beards but you see […]

One doesn’t commonly associate the slogan “make love not war” with the U.S. military. Indeed, the United States military is feared and formidable precisely because it has proven so effective at conceptualizing clever and innovative ways to search, find and destroy, often with the simple push of a button.  However, in a departure from these hostile traditions, in 1994 the Wright Laboratory, part of […]

Between 1923 and 1951, a diminutive Floridian single-handedly and without heavy machinery moved 1,000 tons of limestone, creating out of it a castle. This is his story. The Builder Very little is known of the mysterious creator of the Coral Castle, Ed Leedskalnin. Born in Riga, Latvia in 1887 to a family of stonemasons, Ed immigrated to the U.S. sometime […]

So ubiquitous in today’s political discourse, many assume that the red state/blue state distinction has been around as long as we have had Republicans and Democrats. In fact, the opposite is true – the dichotomy is relatively young, having only become settled with the Presidential election of 2000. The Color of Political Parties In order to make political reporting more […]

Imagine. There you are, trying to stay in shape. Going to one of your local Pilates classes, and while performing what is known as a Valsalva maneuver, your body suddenly swallows one of your breasts! As fate would have it, we don’t need to just imagine.  We can ask a 59 year old from Maryland who had that very thing […]

When the extent of the U.S. government’s domestic spying program was revealed this past summer, many were surprised and outraged: how could a government which so prizes liberty of its citizens covertly collect data on its own people? Yet, sadly, this is not the first time Uncle Sam, without permission or notice, secretly gathered information on its people and wasn’t […]

Long ago an advanced civilization sprang up along the shores of Lake Titicaca, in the Andes Mountains in present day Bolivia and Peru, and disappeared just as quickly 500 years later. The sophisticated people that created the fabulous city of Tiahuanaco (Tiwanaku) were the forefathers of the Incas and other South American cultures, and some even believe they were the […]

As fascinating as it is horrifying, fetus-in-fetu is a developmental abnormality where, in utero, the larger of a set of twin fetuses absorbs the other into her body. The condition is usually diagnosed shortly after the surviving twin is born, although in a few horrific cases, the absorbed twin is not discovered until adulthood or death. Technically arising only in […]