According to the World Health Organization, about 347 million people worldwide have diabetes. Because diabetes treatments are so common today, it can be easy to forget that the disease can be fatal. In fact, it is approximately the seventh leading cause of death worldwide. Luckily, many people diagnosed with diabetes today enjoy healthy, otherwise normal, lives thanks to advances in […]

Tabitha Babbitt was a quiet weaver living in a Shaker community in Massachusetts. The community thrived on the forestry industry, and she would observe men hard at work sawing logs. In 1810, she thought up an easier way of cutting wood that wouldn’t expend quite so much energy. The men were using a pit saw. It had two handles which […]

On January 27, 1964, then three-term Senator Margaret Chase Smith put the first crack in the “hardest, highest glass ceiling” when she announced her candidacy for the Republican nomination for President of the United States. Although she never really came close to winning it, Senator Smith’s presidential campaign helped dispel centuries of chauvinism and paved the way for female political […]

On Sunday, December 17, 1967, the Prime Minister of what was then the 9th wealthiest nation on Earth disappeared off of the coast of Cheviot Beach, Portsea, Victoria in the southeast of Australia. Harold Holt’s body was never found. Weekend Vacation On Friday, December 15, Holt travelled from the country’s capital of Canberra to his beach house at Portsea. He […]

Roy Sullivan was born 1912 in Greene County in central Virginia, today home to just a shade over eighteen thousand people. He was the fourth of eleven children and lived in the Blue Ridge mountains with his family. In 1940, at the age of 28, Sullivan joined the national park’s fire patrol. He became one of three rangers to monitor […]

Very little is known about Lance-Corporal James Welch prior to his actions during WWI. However, we do know some basic details.  According to Welch’s grave in Bournemouth crematorium, he was born in 1889 on July 7th in the small English village of Stratfield Saye. Welch must have had a fairly boring childhood because literally the next thing recorded about his […]

Today I found out about Roger Ebert’s somewhat lesser known movie-related job, making X-rated films. Ebert got his start in the public sector at the age of 15 reporting on high school sports for Champaign-Urbana’s News-Gazette. He held that job all the way through college, even while serving as a reporter and editor of the Daily Illini at the University […]