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
The secret fuel pipeline beneath the English Channel
Moving gasoline in WWII via ship was notoriously explosive, so British engineers decided to simply hide a massive pipeline beneath the English Channel.…
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Fake psychic scammed television viewers with flair
The Amazing Criswell didn't let a minor inconvenience like being completely wrong stop him from dominating television. A flamboyant staple of late-night talk…
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The 1700s had their own TripAdvisor
Forget online reviews. In the late 1700s, early Grand Tour travelers like Thomas Manning and William Bray functioned as an elite, painfully slow gossip…
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MIT's flight simulator project helped invent computer memory
Back when computers were essentially giant, slow calculators fed by punch cards, MIT's Whirlwind project decided waiting was for losers. Funded by the US Navy…
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Birds may prefer a giant fake egg
Nobel laureate Nikolaas Tinbergen proved that animals are absolute suckers for exaggerated traits. He discovered 'supernormal stimuli' by experimenting on…
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How the Supreme Court broke up Hollywood
Back in the Golden Age, Hollywood studios operated like an incredibly glamorous mafia. They owned the production lots, the distribution networks, and the…
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The fake ghost broadcast that harmed viewers
The BBC decided Halloween of 1992 was the perfect time to convince the British public that poltergeists were murdering beloved children's TV presenters. Shot…
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How the Ice Bucket Challenge helped find a gene
For once, a wildly annoying internet trend actually achieved something monumental. The 2014 ALS Ice Bucket Challenge looked like peak social media narcissism,…
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The train with a bathtub for watching elephants
Who wants to look at wild elephants if you can't do it while submerged in a porcelain tub? In 1927, the Blue Train de Luxe gave wealthy colonizers a way to…
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The festival railway built to lift Britain's spirits
Nothing screams 'please forget our economy is in shambles' quite like a miniature train ride. During the 1951 Festival of Britain, organizers essentially…
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The financier whose corpse hung in an iron cage
Joseph Süß Oppenheimer did his job too well, and it cost him his life. As the financial advisor to the Duke of Württemberg in the 1730s, he successfully…
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The camera that broadcast live TV and filmed it
Nothing screams desperation like inventing a revolutionary piece of technology right before going bankrupt. The DuMont network created the Electronicam in the…
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She turned religious outrage into a business
Long before internet trolls discovered Twitter, Madalyn Murray O'Hair turned blasphemy into a lucrative media brand. As the driving force behind banning…
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Mutus Liber explains alchemy with zero actual words
Imagine trying to assemble IKEA furniture, but instead of a bookshelf, you're trying to build the elixir of immortality. The 'Mutus Liber' is a 17th-century…
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British Rail once patented a nuclear-powered flying saucer
In 1973, British Rail got tired of delayed trains and decided the logical next step was a nuclear-powered flying saucer. Patent number 1,310,990 outlines a…
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Monetizing damp wilderness via strict hiking schedules
New Zealand figured out early on that people will pay top dollar to walk through dangerous mud if you just call it a 'managed wilderness itinerary.' The…
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Why tourists collected Cold War border stamps
During the Cold War, border checkpoints were terrifying exercises in state power, but Western tourists somehow turned them into a bureaucratic collectible…
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A Roman cup turns red under light
The Roman Empire accidentally mastered nanotechnology while trying to make a fancy party cup. The Lycurgus Cup is a 4th-century glass chalice that looks…
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Why some people sleep for weeks at a time
Imagine the moody, exhausted teenager stereotype dialed up to pathological levels. Kleine-Levin syndrome is an incredibly rare neurological disorder where…
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The first answering machine recorded sound on wire
Long before voicemail or even cassette tapes, a Danish engineer named Valdemar Poulsen decided the best way to capture a voice was to magnetically abuse a…
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How France accidentally subsidized sex chatrooms
Long before AOL chat rooms, the French government gave out free Minitel terminals to kill the printed phonebook. What they actually built was a horny…
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Swamigal locked a door and dissolved into light
We all have days where we just want to disappear, but Ramalinga Swamigal allegedly took it to a molecular level. In 1874, the Tamil saint grew tired of his…
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The aristocrats who tried to turn a swamp into real estate
Long before real estate moguls flipped houses, 17th-century English aristocrats formed cartels of 'Adventurers' to flip literal swamps. They hired engineers…
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The desert train that crossed the Sahara
Crossing the Sahara in the 1920s usually meant dying of thirst on a camel, until the French introduced the Reso Wagon. These massive, multi-wheeled land…
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