The world is more interesting than you think.
Unexpected facts, big ideas, and little discoveries. Find something that sparks your curiosity today.
A little more wonder
Boyle's magical flask was an illusion
Robert Boyle designed a magical-looking flask where a tube loops back into the container, seemingly creating a perpetual fountain of liquid powering itself.…
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The indoor railway built for Norway's winter
The Bergensbanen railway operates in a climate so consistently hostile it makes Hoth look like a tropical resort. To stop passenger trains from being casually…
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Boiling liquid can organize itself into hexagons
We like to think of boiling liquids as chaotic, bubbly messes, but physics has a weird obsessive-compulsive streak. When a shallow layer of fluid is heated…
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How Lonely Planet helped create the Banana Pancake Trail
When Tony Wheeler stapled together his first Lonely Planet guide in 1973, he unknowingly destroyed the exact counterculture he was writing about. By printing…
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Victorian Americans saw singing airships before airplanes
Decades before the Wright Brothers ever got off the ground, thousands of Americans stared at the sky and reported seeing massive, motorized blimps piloted by…
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Évian built a funicular for spa guests
French President Émile Loubet wasn't about to make rich socialites walk uphill after drinking fancy mineral water. The Évian funicular was birthed in 1907…
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The priest who secretly wrote an atheist manifesto
Jean Meslier spent 40 years as a quiet, unassuming Catholic priest in rural France, diligently serving communion and baptizing babies. But when he died in…
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NASA once dreamed of 300-mph hovering trains
When he wasn't designing the literal Lunar Rover, NASA genius Georg von Tiesenhausen spent his free time trying to make terrestrial trains levitate. He drew…
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Existential monkey puppet mocks ventriloquism art
Ventriloquism is usually the depressing domain of creepy dolls and bad cruise ship comedy, but Nina Conti weaponized it into brilliant meta-comedy. Instead of…
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The Secret Service turned an assassin’s gun into a lesson
When Manson family member Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme tried to assassinate President Gerald Ford in 1975, her Colt M1911 failed because she didn't rack the…
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The artist who pulled a scroll from her vagina
In the mid-20th century, the avant-garde film scene was an elitist boys' club focused on rigid, intellectual formalism. Carolee Schneemann completely…
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The opera singer who climbed out of a flaming coffin
Before Alice Cooper or Marilyn Manson even learned how to apply eyeliner, Screamin' Jay Hawkins was terrifying 1950s audiences by erupting out of a flaming…
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Angels tossed Adam's magical apology book into the ocean
According to esoteric lore, God felt kind of bad about kicking Adam out of Eden, so he sent the angel Raziel to hand-deliver a cosmic cheat code book. The…
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Why a sprinkler barely spins when it sucks
Richard Feynman famously nearly blew up a Princeton lab trying to figure out if an S-shaped lawn sprinkler spins in reverse when sucking water in, rather than…
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Cold war politics relied on a psychic real estate agent
Jeanne Dixon was the ultimate master of failing upward. A Washington D.C. real estate agent turned celebrity psychic, she skyrocketed to fame after vaguely…
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The currency designed to expire
Saving money is usually seen as a virtue, but Silvio Gesell thought hoarders were economic parasites. In the early 20th century, he proposed "Freigeld," a…
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Why rural rail lines were abandoned
In 1980, the US government deregulated railroads to save them from total financial collapse. The cynical byproduct? Railroad monopolies immediately realized…
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How nepotism brought down Wang Laboratories
You can build a multi-billion dollar tech empire that dominates the 1980s word-processing market, but you can't out-engineer your own hubris. An Wang held the…
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How a railroad merger became the biggest bankruptcy in US history
In 1968, two massive rival railroads merged to form Penn Central, hoping to solve their money problems. Instead, they created a corporate nightmare where…
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How a tiny ship captured a Spanish frigate
Thomas Cochrane was the Royal Navy's absolute chaos merchant. Commanding a tiny sloop called the Speedy, he once encountered a massive Spanish frigate…
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Pre-mass tourism canal trains built for bragging
Before high-speed rail made China a blur, early tourists flocked to watch trains awkwardly navigate the Danyang-Kunshan precursor canal crossings. It was the…
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The KGB turned IBM typewriters into keyloggers
IBM spent seven agonizing years over-engineering the Selectric typewriter's iconic 'golf ball' print head, and Soviet spies immediately weaponized it. The KGB…
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Bullet trains factory-produce romance trips
In the 1960s, Japan turned newlyweds into an industrial logistics problem. Package honeymoon trains carted thousands of matching couples to Kyushu resorts on…
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Ghosts suffer through a bureaucratic hierarchy in death
If you thought death was an escape from middle management, Allan Kardec had terrible news for you. When he published The Book of Spirits in 1857, he didn't…
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