Alfred Brendel’s essays about Beethoven, Schubert, and many others are deeply relevant to performers and amateur listeners alike.

The discovery is among the strongest evidence in the fossil record that the insects pollinated prehistoric cycads, a plant that preceded flowering plants.

The Berlin Wall came down in 1989. But it seems that its story still hasn't been fully told. A previously unknown section of the wall was discovered in summer 2018 in a residential section of northwest Berlin. Several locals on a walking tour came upon a 20-meter (66-foot) section of crumbling wall, covered in graffiti, in June. The wall had been covered by overgrown bushes, which is how it had escaped discovery for so long.

How did British medical worker Janet Parker become the world's last victim of smallpox? By Monica Rimmer.

The telephone swept into Americans’ lives in the first decades of the 20th century. At first, no one knew exactly how to telephone. Alexander Graham Bell wanted people to start conversations by saying, “Ahoy-hoy!” AT&T tried to prevent people from saying “hello,” arguing in Telephone Engineer magazine that it was rude. But eventually, Americans learned to say “hello.” People built a culture around the phone that worked. Etiquette magazines tried to prevent women from inviting people over for dinner via telephone, then gave in.

A note published in a New Zealand paper 106 years ago today (Aug. 14) predicted the Earth's temperature would rise because of 7 billion tons of carbon dioxide produced by coal consumption. "The effect may be considerable in a few centuries," the article stated. The clip was one of several one-paragraph stories in the "Science Notes and News" section of The Rodney and Otamatea Times, published Wednesday, Aug. 14, 1912.

Built in 1874 on the site reserved for an opera house, the Old Cincinnati Library was a thing of wonder.

Emperor Honorius had run away from Rome, settling in Ravenna, with ships ready to take him to safety in Byzantium if things were to get really bad. By Ugo Bardi.

Build more walls!

The time has arrived for some moderation and clarity in thinking about contemporary Russia and its relationship to the Western world. Ronald Reagan was not wrong in the 1980s to call the Soviet...

Prosperity begets prosperity: On a global level, economists and historians have shown that places that prospered 100, 500, even 1,000 years ago tend to be more economically developed today.

The First Emperor’s pursuit of immortality. By Edward Burman.

An old iron safe was discovered by construction workers digging up part of downtown Dawson City, Yukon, but there are no clues as to what may be inside.

My home computer in 1998 had a 56K modem connected to our telephone line; we were allowed a maximum of thirty minutes of computer usage a day, because my parents — quite reasonably — did not want to have their telephone shut off for an evening at a time. I remember webpages loading slowly: ten to twenty seconds for a basic news article.

Apple founder Steve Jobs’ daughter Lisa Brennan-Jobs tells all in new book

A newborn snake, preserved in amber from Myanmar for nearly 100 million years, is a first for the fossil record and reveals how the animals developed.

Socialist party presidential candidate Eugene Debs was sent to prison for speaking out against World War I, and thousands of others were charged with speech crimes.

Over two years, Ed Pilkington has interviewed eight African American radicals imprisoned since the 1970s. Will they ever be freed?

In December 2014, Max Brown was picking through an Incline Village dumpster for a community service project when a collection of 1980s cassettes caught his eye. Fancying himself a collector, he pulled them out and inspected them. 

We knew everything we needed to know, and nothing stood in our way. Nothing, that is, except ourselves. A tragedy in two acts.

In August 1976, North Korean soldiers hacked two U.S. officers to death with axes in the DMZ. The world teetered on the brink of WWIII as America plotted revenge—by cutting down a poplar tree. The bizarre true story of Operation Paul Bunyan. By Josh Dean.

Today, it's a party trick, but two centuries ago, sailors tested the legitimacy of their booze by setting it aflame.

Shigeaki Mori was 8 when the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. He survived and committed himself to uncovering the names of all those who died — including 12 American POWs.

As the United States celebrates the centennial of the 19th Amendment, it’s vital to remember that some of its heroes were less than heroic.

African intellectuals tend to blame the West for the slave trade, but I knew that white traders couldn’t have loaded their ships without help from Africans like my great-grandfather.

Why some people choose to do evil remains a puzzle, but are we starting to understand how this behaviour is triggered?

Most of the edible plants in the rainforest were planted by humans over 4500 years ago, new study finds. Modern farmers should look to these ancient forest gardeners for the key to sustainable food production.

Did the Stars and Stripes on the moon signify the establishment of an American colony?

When nature and secret societies get together.

Why the nostalgia-saturated labels subgenre is reviving the long abandoned format.

A mysterious crop circle in an Irish farmer's field is actually the outline of a buried monument from 5,000 years ago, archeologists say.

Charred remains of a flatbread baked about 14,500 years ago in a stone fireplace at a site in northeastern Jordan have given researchers a delectable surprise: people began making bread, a vital staple food, thousands of years before they developed agriculture.

A writer and former neighbor is still trying to put the pieces together

The $20 million Lunar X Prize was supposed to send startups into space. The cost turned out to be far higher than the reward—but the competitors were never really in it for the trophy.

“If the Western media had a more plausible scale of values, Milada Horáková’s name would be well known, rather than virtually unknown in the West,” writes the Czech Jewish historian Wilma Abeles Iggers. By Briggs Burton.