In the pantheon of worst humans to ever human you will find no shortage of bastions of awful. Hitler probably has the most collective conscious panache, but at least he had the decency to bravely, and with no regard for his personal safety, infiltrate the Hitler bunker and then put a bullet through the cranium of Hitler. But individuals like […]
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While Ben Franklin was remarkably successful in keeping elements of his private life very private to the point that historians can only speculate about much of it, despite having a common law marriage, he was, shall we say, noted for his overt and unabashed love of women and their company, particularly if they were educated- something he even used in […]
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Ah, immortality, previously only for the gods and individuals with a fetish for chopping each other’s heads off. In more modern times, science is coming closer and closer to both identifying the tapestry of things that cause humans to grow old, and slowly but surely taking the first steps into finding ways to delay and even reverse this process for […]
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Living with the Animals While modern humans have existed for at least a few hundred thousands years, we didn’t really start massively progressing from our earliest ancestors until we began forming large and very complex societies after transitioning away from small hunter-gather groups for various reasons. Critical to all this being able to happen was creating sets of rules which […]
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Countless films produced in the United States feature use of rather expensive military equipment, and often also real world military personnel. Given the extreme expense of all of this using things paid for by the U.S. taxpayer to benefit for profit companies, how is this allowed? Further, how are projects that the military will support selected? Can just any U.S. […]
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On June 28, 1839, a ship departed Havana, Cuba en route to Puerto Principe. Along with a crew of 7, including two slaves serving as a cabin boy and ship’s cook, the vessel was also packed with cargo worth approximately $60,000, or about $1.7 million today. This included items ranging from wine, saddles, iron castings, mill rollers, fabrics, soap, leather […]
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“Helicopter’s don’t fly – they just beat the air into submission.” and “Helicopters aren’t aircraft – they’re just ten thousand parts flying in close formation.” are just two of the many tongue-in-cheek sayings which have been levelled at rotorcraft. Yet despite their often ungainly and precarious appearance, it cannot be denied that helicopters are remarkable pieces of engineering, capable of […]
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The current total population of people incarcerated on our little spaceship we’ve named Earth is estimated to be around 11 million out of about 8 billion humans, or approximately 1 in 730 people walking the earth. However, 1 out of about 195 nations on our celestial rock, the United States, currently has locked up about 1 in 6 of those […]
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While just about everyone is abundantly familiar with Adolf Hitler’s exploits in the latter half of his life, an often missed part of the once proclaimed “German Messiah’s” history is that of his childhood. So just how did this “boy like any other” grow into arguably one of the most reviled individuals in the history of humanity? Well, put on […]
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Few junk food items have ever reached the heights of general and almost universal popularity as the humble potato chip and its tasty derivative brethren the tortilla chip. But who invented the potato chip, and its cheesy and blessed of the light modification, nachos? How about the invention of tasty, tasty Doritos? Well, I’m glad you asked because that’s what […]
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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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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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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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In June 2021, Southern District of California Judge Roger Benitez made headlines when he struck down the state’s 30-year ban on assault weapons, concluding that: “Like the Swiss Army Knife, the popular AR-15 rifle is a perfect combination of home defense weapon and homeland defense equipment.” Benitez’s landmark decision was but one episode in the long-running political debate over gun […]
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The line between serial killer and, say, a prolific executioner such as 17th century German executioner, Frantz Schmidt, who killed 394 people and disfigured and otherwise tortured about the same number elsewise (more on him in the Bonus Facts at the end of this video), is that one murdered and mutilated people deemed by local society to have deserved it, […]
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On the first of September, 1939, nearly 1.5 million troops, 2,750 tanks, and 2,300 aircraft of Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich stormed over the border into Poland. That same day, Britain and France, bound by treaty to defend Polish sovereignty, issued an ultimatum calling for the immediate withdrawal of German forces. The ultimatum was ignored, and on September 3 the Allied […]
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Paul A. asks: Is there really such a thing as human pheromones? Insects, such as the male silk worm using the pheromone Bombykol have long been known to attract mates through pheromones. Moving over to the one humped camel, also known as the Arabian camel and dromedary, of all their adaptations, the grossest is probably the male dromedary’s proclivity to […]
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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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