Running the gauntlet. Starting. Flogging with the cat ‘o 9 nine tails. Gagging. Clapping in irons. Hanging from the yardarm. While this all might sound like a super fun Saturday night with the misses when the grandparents are watching your kiddos for you, it turns out these are actually just a few of the dizzying array of corporal and capital […]
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Steve Austin, astronaut. A man barely alive. Gentlemen, we can rebuild him. We have the technology. We have the capability to make the world’s first bionic man. Steve Austin will be that man, better than he was before. Better, stronger, faster. So goes the iconic opening of the classic 1970s television series The Six Million Dollar Man, starring Lee Majors […]
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A relatively common trope today is that of the noble and honorable Samurai warrior opposed by their shadowy brother from another mother, the mystical and morally corrupt, black garbed assassin warrior known as the ninja. These fabled shadow warriors of Japanese history have been a staple of modern pop culture since around the 1960s when super-spy James Bond encountered them […]
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“We sewed the sacks, we broke the stones, We turned the dusty drill: We banged the tins, and bawled the hymns, And sweated on the mill: But in the heart of every man Terror was lying still.” These are the words of famed master of the pen, Oscar Wilde, in his Ballad of Reading Gaol, referencing his time spent at […]
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At exactly 5:30 AM on July 16, 1945, the world’s first atomic bomb, codenamed Trinity, detonated over the desert in New Mexico, unleashing in an instant the power of 18,000 tons of TNT. The atomic age had begun. As night turned to day and a fireball 200 metres across rose into the sky, the scientists of the Manhattan Project who […]
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Few brands are as closely associated with the idea of “luxury” as Rolls-Royce, a car manufacturer so fancy schmancy that the company’s official website doesn’t even bother to list how much the things it sells are. Rolls-Royce knows that for anyone serious about buying one of their automobiles, price is not a concern. And to be clear, what you can […]
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For those who didn’t grow up in the late 20th century, it may seem strange to learn that for a time many people genuinely believed things like that humans randomly burst into flames for no apparent reason, with the occasional speculative news report or Unsolved Mysteries episode highlighting the latest instance, as well as that there was an area dubbed […]
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For those of us of the slightly more seasoned vintage growing up in or living in the late 20th century, which was totally only a decade ago and I’ll take no further input on this matter, spontaneous Human Combustion ranks alongside the likes of quicksand, the Bermuda triangle. and rain that melts your skin off as one of those things […]
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1,500 kilometres southeast of Moscow, sprawling over the rugged steppes of Kazakhstan, lies Baikonur Cosmodrome, the world’s first gateway to space. It is from this hallowed ground that Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite, and Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, blasted off on their historic missions – and a long time primary gateway to the International Space Station. […]
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Grosse Île lies 50km east of Quebec City, one of 21 islands in the middle of the St. Lawrence River. Though its name means “Big Island” in French, Grosse Île is barely two kilometres square, home to a small collection of buildings from its days as a quarantine station for Irish immigrants arriving in Canada. Designated a National Historic […]
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If you were to ask the average American “who invented the aeroplane?” the answer you would most likely get is the Wright Brothers. Indeed, the two bicycle mechanics from Dayton, Ohio, are generally acknowledged to have carried out the first controlled, powered, heavier-than-air flight in history, piloting their aircraft the Flyer a distance of 36.5 metres at Kitty Hawk, North […]
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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 […]
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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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