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
A telephone fire left 170,000 New York phones silent
The 1975 fire at a Manhattan telephone exchange destroyed the connections behind a huge slice of the city's phone service. Restoring it meant rebuilding and…
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Narcisa Hirsch used apples to lure people into cinema
During Argentina's military dictatorship, artist Narcisa Hirsch handed apples to pedestrians to draw them into her expanded-cinema installations, turning an…
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The artist who attacked a TV with a magnet
Nam June Paik used a horseshoe magnet to distort the image on a cathode-ray television, warping it into abstract waves and making the TV itself part of the…
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Top of the Pops made a record look like a live performance
Artists often mimed to recorded tracks on the television show, matching movements to sounds already captured in the studio. The camera supplied the…
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An early digital computer hid in an Iowa physics basement
John Atanasoff and Clifford Berry built the ABC at Iowa State between 1939 and 1942. It tackled systems of equations with electronic arithmetic and rotating…
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A two-part flash became a Cold War nuclear mystery
In 1979, a Vela satellite detected the characteristic double flash associated with a nuclear explosion over the southern oceans. Investigators disagreed over…
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Temporal-lobe seizures trigger intense religious obsession
For a small number of people with temporal-lobe epilepsy, Gastaut-Geschwind syndrome can include persistent religious preoccupation and compulsive writing.…
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The cooking oil sold as olive oil that killed hundreds
In 1981, industrial rapeseed oil that had been denatured with aniline was sold in Spain as olive oil. People who consumed the mislabeled oil developed a…
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The scientist who fed the world and armed poison gas
Haber's ammonia process cracked a difficult problem: nitrogen in the air is plentiful, but plants cannot use it in that form. Combining it with hydrogen makes…
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Alien artifact turned out to be a valve part
After the Betz family found it in Florida woods in 1974, the sphere seemed to roll on its own and vibrate to guitar music. The Navy X-rayed it before…
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The tiny piano that helped create digital code
Baudot’s five-key telegraph console let operators send combinations that encoded letters in a 5-bit code; the system also allowed multiple messages to share a…
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A narrow inlet helps Puerto Rico’s glowing bay keep its glow
In Mosquito Bay on Vieques, limited exchange with the sea helps maintain a dense population of light-producing dinoflagellates. Movement in the water triggers…
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The doctor who tried treating HIV with malaria
Malaria causes bouts of fever, and Heimlich believed deliberately provoking that fever might help treat HIV or cancer. He infected patients with malaria in…
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Medical dictionaries once called homosexuality a disease
Older editions of Taber’s Cyclopedic Medical Dictionary labeled homosexuality a psychiatric disease. That classification reflected the social biases of its…
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Shostakovich gave a silent film a fiercely difficult voice
His 1929 score for New Babylon demanded close coordination between a live orchestra and the film's editing. The music could mock what appeared on screen…
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Shoemaker Jakob Bohme saw the cosmos in a shiny pewter dish
The vision came from sunlight reflecting off the dish; Böhme’s writings described God as a paradox of light and dark and later influenced Hegel and Newton.
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The 62-day military road trip across America
The 1919 convoy took 62 days, with trucks bogging down in mud and wooden bridges collapsing; the trip later inspired Eisenhower’s push for the Interstate…
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Navigating bureaucratic hell in 1950s Tangier
Competing foreign authorities meant navigating multiple currencies and postal services, while the fragmented system attracted spies and smugglers. The…
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The longest Etruscan text became mummy bandages
A linen text in Etruscan was cut into strips and reused to wrap an Egyptian mummy, now kept in Zagreb. That unlikely recycling preserved the longest surviving…
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One student's worm brought the early internet to its knees
In 1988, Robert Tappan Morris released a program that spread between Unix computers. It repeatedly infected machines, consuming resources until thousands…
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The 1968 catalog Steve Jobs called a paper search engine
The Whole Earth Catalog collected tools, books, and ideas for people interested in self-sufficiency and alternative ways of living. Steve Jobs later compared…
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A 1931 film found an alien-looking world in a wineglass
Mary Field's The World in a Wine-Glass used microscopic photography to reveal organisms living in an infusion of hay and water. Magnification turned an…
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Pierre Schaeffer built a keyboard out of tape loops
Its keys triggered and pitch-shifted tape loops of recorded sounds, including street noise and train whistles. Built in the 1950s, the clunky Phonogene often…
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A hospital retired Alberta Hunter at 70—she was actually 82
The blues singer had spent two decades working as a nurse without advertising her former career. When the hospital retired her in 1977, it had underestimated…
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