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+18 +7
The Spy Who Saved The World—Then Tried To Destroy It
Meet the Russian spy who saved the world from disaster during the Cuban Missile Crisis—and then almost provoked the West into launching a preemptive nuclear attack.
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+16 +6
King Tut Was Killed In A Gruesome Chariot Accident, Says Science
Tutankhamen was the most famous of all the Egyptian Pharaohs, but it's always been a bit of a mystery how he died. He passed at only 19, and he seemed to have pretty bad injuries at his death, but there was no record of an assassination. Thanks to Science, we now know it was probably due to a chariot accident.
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+13 +5
Viking Graves Yield Grisly Find: Sacrificed Slaves
A Viking burial in Norway contained the bodies of Viking masters and their slaves, who were probably beheaded and offered as grave gifts.
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+7 +1
JFK Library :: The President's Desk
Sit at President Kennedy's Oval Office Desk and discover what it means to hold the highest office in the land. Click on the icons on the desk.
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+27 +6
Police Mugshots in the 1920's
These dapper criminals make the cast of Boardwalk Empire look like a bunch of inauthentic chumps. Enjoy these awesome (and quite frankly, a little creepy) mugshots.
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+1 +1
An Economist’s Proposal for Abolishing Daylight Saving Time Zone
In this intriguing Quartz article, economist Allison Schrager argues that—for reasons including health, efficiency, and simplicity—the U.S. should abolish daylight saving time and reduce the number of time zones in the lower 48 states to 2 (from the present 4).
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+8 +1
Video: 5 Awesome NES Facts
The best-selling gaming console of its time, the NES helped revitalize the US video game industry following the video game crash of 1983, and set the standard for subsequent consoles of its generation.
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+8 +3
The secret history of CIA women
It was "Mad Men" with security clearances, but some skilled female spies rose high in the ranks.
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+11 +4
50 years of Lamborghini
The history of Lamborghini in pictures.
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+15 +4
The slaves who sued for freedom
New research uncovers a little-known force for abolition: captives who took their masters to court.
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+12 +4
A Brief History of Dude
Contemplate this, dude: that when I call you dude, there’s a whole range of things I might mean—you’ll understand me from my intonation and the overall context—but each time, I’m also reinforcing a specific kind of social relationship. No matter how I use the word, it always implies the same thing: solidarity without intimacy. It says close, but dude, not too close.
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+18 +2
The Amazingly Unlikely Story of How Minecraft Was Born
For most people, the colorful numbers and letters that filled the computer screen would be completely baffling, but Markus felt right at home. The game was called Dwarf Fortress and it had become a cult favorite in indie circles. Markus had downloaded it to try it out himself and watched, entranced by the simple text world drawn up in front of him.
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+21 +5
Raymond Loewy: the man who designed everything
What does it mean to be a celebrated designer? Is it being on the cover of Time Magazine, designing some of America's best-loved exports, or is it something as simple as being recognized with a...
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+7 +3
What You Need To Know About US-Iran Relations
The past couple of months have marked a water-shed moment in US-Iran relations since the hostility between the two states began during the Iranian Revolution in 1979. The historic phone call between Iranian President Hassan Rouhani and U.S. President Barack Obama back in September set the conciliatory mood for nuclear talks, which will continue in Geneva on Thursday.
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+21 +7
Where Did Airline Fees Come From, and How Did They Get So Bad?
Airline fees are an unstoppable menace, rising from $2.45 billion in 2008 to a mind-numbing $27 billion in add-ons around the world, according a new report from IdeaWorks Co. Where did they come from? How did they become utterly unavoidable?
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+9 +2
Ancient builders slid 100-ton rocks on ice paths to construct China's Forbidden City
On a first-time trip to Beijing for an engineering conference last year, Howard Stone visited the Forbidden City, the seat five centuries of dynastic rule since the Ming Dynasty in the 15th century A.D., and a historical site today. After stopping by several intricately carved, massive, single-rock structures, someone in Stone's group marveled at the skill and smarts needed to haul such massive rocks into place.
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+10 +1
13 Toys from the Era of Casual Racism
Before Pez settled on its iconic flip top dispenser, they experimented with different ways to put candy in kids’ mouths, including designs shaped like pistols. Tykes in the 1950s would load a sheath of strawberry flavored bricks into the gun’s magazine like bullets, put the barrel in their mouth, and pull the trigger to enjoy a sugar rush while simulating suicide. Insane, right?
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+23 +3
Why Hitler hated modernism
This week it was revealed that a huge stash of modern art had been found in a flat in Munich. Many of the paintings were considered "degenerate" by the Nazis, who staged an exhibition especially to ridicule them. Why did Hitler hate abstract art so much?
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+11 +4
Incredible colorized historical photos make the past seem incredibly real
Over the last couple years, an increasingly popular trend online has been to create and share colorized photos from history. Artists such as Dana Keller and Sanna Dullaway take intriguing old black-and-white photos and bring them to life with color as if they’d been taken only yesterday.
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+13 +2
NASA-Caliber Nuclear Engineer Wins $73m in Super Soaker Royalties
You couldn't make it up: According to a 2001 Times article, aerospace engineer was Lonnie G. Johnson had been working on technology for a $1.6 billion-dollar spacecraft when he accidentally discovered a children's toy that is now his claim to fame. Tasked with "preparing an interplanetary spacecraft for its atomic battery" at his day job, he was working on a side project at home one night when he turned on a faucet hooked up to one end of a "prototype cooling device" with a metal nozzle.
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