After being invaded by Germany in the west and later by Soviet Russia in the east, the Polish government fled Warsaw but continued to fight from abroad. After Germany attacked Russia, the Russians decided to release their Polish prisoners of war, who then began re-forming into an army. In April 1942, several of these Polish units landed in Persia and […]
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Long ago, in the region surrounding Nevsehir and Kayseri, in central Turkey, an ancient people built, or rather dug, over 200 underground cities. The deepest of these, under the present day town of Derinkuyu, delves over 250 feet below the Earth’s surface, and boasts numerous tunnels, halls, meeting rooms, wells and passages. Because the city was carved from existing caves […]
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Myth: Shocking someone who has flat-lined can get their heart started again. It never fails. You’re watching television and someone is circling the drain, in the toilet that is their life. The noise from the heart monitor affirms they’re still alive, with its consistent, rhythmic beeps. All of the sudden, alarms start going off. On the monitor- the dreaded “flat-line”. […]
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Today I found out the origin of the phrase “pleased as punch.” As a child you might have wondered how a bowl of punch could be pleased about anything. Turns out, the saying has nothing to do with the drink. Rather, “punch” refers to the character in Punch and Judy, a puppet show that has its roots in Italy’s 16th-century […]
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Dan asks: How did the running gag of police always eating donuts come about? Members of law enforcement stuffing their faces full of doughnuts is one of the most enduring stereotypes about the boys and girls in blue. In virtually every media representation of the police that isn’t deadly serious, the stereotype is played out in some way- Police Academy, […]
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Myth: Ferdinand Magellan (Fernão de Magalhães) was the first person to circumnavigate the globe. There’s no doubt that Magellan intended to have a successful journey when his expedition set off from Spain on September 20, 1519. He had planned for the departure meticulously, hoping to prove that people could sail all the way around the world, and to be the […]
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Did an exotic actress from Vienna, considered one of the most beautiful women in Hollywood in the 1940s, really invent wireless? Not exactly, but the non-sensationalized facts of the matter are no less fascinating, involving Hollywood, the World War II Axis Powers, and remote control technology. Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler, better known as “Hedy Lamarr”, once really did patent a […]
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Today I found out what happened to billionaire Howard Hughes’ money when he died. Over his lifetime, Howard Hughes’ wallet became one of the fattest of his time. It isn’t known exactly how much he was worth at the time of his death, but ten years before he died, he was forced to sell his shares in the airline company […]
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J. Ramhit asks: Where did the phrase “close, but no cigar” come from? This popular idiom, which means “to fall short of a successful outcome” or “close call,” was first coined in the United States in the late 19th or early 20th century. While it can’t be proven definitively, it’s likely that the phrase originated at fairgrounds around this time. […]
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Today I found out that female seahorses impregnating their male mates, rather than the other way around. The reproductive process of a seahorse begins when a male and a female meet up and “dance”. For several days prior to the actual act of mating, the two fish (yes, they are fish) will meet to intertwine their tails and swim together. […]
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M. Schane asks: When did humans start wearing clothing? Determining exactly when humans began wearing clothes is a challenge, largely because early clothes would have been things like animal hides, which degrade rapidly. Therefore, there’s very little archaeological evidence that can be used to determine the date that clothing started being worn. There have been several different theories based on […]
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There were many heroes who surfaced twelve years ago on September 11, helping people in need as the Twin Towers crumbled around them. Two you probably haven’t heard of were Salty and Roselle, guide dogs who despite the chaos, calmly led their blind owners to safety after the terrorist attacks. Salty, a yellow lab, was born in 1996 and trained […]
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Perfecting a method of foretelling and predicting the passage of time preoccupied our ancestors from the earliest recorded history. The unending journey of the Sun, Moon and stars across the great expanse of the sky provides clues for numerous methods of marking time, the most obvious to primitive man being the passage of a day (light/dark) and that of a […]
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Today I found out that the paperclip was used as a symbol of resistance during World War II. In April of 1940, just a few months into World War II, Adolf Hitler knew that he needed a way to break past the Allied blockade of Germany if he had a hope of winning the war. He set his sights on […]
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Even after our most heart breaking failures, parents, teachers and coaches encourage us to get back up and try again. Perhaps this is because they know that rather than being a permanent condition, failure is an opportunity to learn and improve. This was certainly the experience of Manfred von Richthofen. After cracking up his aircraft on his first solo attempt, […]
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Today I found out that Marie Curie once had two duels fought over her after she had an affair with a married man. Marie Curie and her husband, Pierre, were no strangers to the press. In 1903, the pair won a Nobel Prize “in recognition of the extraordinary services they have rendered by their joint researches on the radiation phenomena […]
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Candace asks: What makes a fruit a fruit and a vegetable a vegetable? An apple is a fruit, right? So is a banana. How about a cucumber? A vegetable, right? Not really, from a botanical standpoint. The good news is that, nutritionally speaking in terms of what you should eat daily, fruits and vegetables are typically grouped together, so you can […]
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Often considered one of the more difficult languages to master thanks to the incredible amount of inconsistencies in the language, it should come as no surprise that the development of the modern English alphabet involved several languages, hundreds of years and a variety of conquers, missionaries and scholars. Origins of Alphabetic Writing Dating back nearly four thousand years, early alphabetic […]
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