Oysters. Chocolate. Opium. Ginseng. Spanish Fly. Ambergris. Alcohol. MDMA. What do all of these have in common? Well, aside from the makings of a very wild party, they have all at one time or another been used as aphrodisiacs. Derived from the Greek aphrodisiakon or “pertaining to Aphrodite”, goddess of love, aphrodisiacs are substances believed to enhance the sexual experience […]
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From October 1945 to October 1948, almost 1,700 Nazi officers and officials underwent the famous Nuremberg trials, charged with committing war crimes, crimes against peace and crimes against humanity. The trials resulted in 200 death sentences, while 279 defendants were to serve life prison terms. Similar trials for similar charges were conducted in Tokyo, from April 1946 to November 1948, […]
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Take a flight 400 kilometres due south from the Peruvian capital of Lima, and you will find yourself over the Pampas de Jumana, an 80 kilometre stretch of coastal desert sandwiched between the Andes foothills and the Pacific Ocean. It is one of the driest regions on earth, receiving less than 4mm of rain a year – a rugged wasteland […]
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We all have to start somewhere and the Ancient Greeks didn’t arrive in Greece ready to write world changing epic poems, philosophy, and tragedies. They wandered into the Aegean after splitting from other Indo-Europeans, settled, founded a civilization, saw it collapse, and started again. As you do. The story of how the Greeks became the Greeks is a complex and […]
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In May 1855, a 16-year-old girl known to history only as Cornelia called at the office of New York surgeon James Rushmore Wood complaining of severe toothache and swelling in the right side of her lower jaw. Following standard procedure, Wood lanced Cornelia’s jaw, extracted a few teeth, and sent her on her way. But Cornelia’s condition only got worse. […]
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If you were a pilgrim or other traveller during the Middle Ages, you would have faced a whole host of dangers on the road, from bandits and pirates to harsh weather to wolves in the forest. But the encounter you would have feared most was with ghostly figures standing at the side of the road, dressed in rags and shaking […]
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On August 19, 1964, a Delta D rocket blasted off from Cape Canaveral in Florida and soared into space, successfully delivering the Syncom 3 satellite into a 42,164 kilometre equatorial orbit. At this altitude, the satellite orbited at the same rate as the earth’s surface, making it appear to stand still high over the Pacific Ocean. Anchored in the sky, […]
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What is the strangest job you have ever had? Snake milker? Professional cuddler? Dog food taster? Online educational content creator? Professional queuer (and yes, these are all very real)? Well, if you have a taste for offbeat employment, why not consider a career in chick sexing? No, not having spicy time with our delicious avian drumsticks, but the fine art […]
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If you’ve ever been thrown into a highly stressful situation and left to fend for yourself, you’ve likely been told that your options are to “sink or swim.” This idiom, which has existed since at least the 14th Century and has appeared in the works of Chaucer and Shakespeare, is thought to have originated either from the fact that throughout […]
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Imagine you are hiking in the woods. Emerging into a clearing, you stumble upon an unusual sight: a circular metal hatch like a manhole cover, protruding from the ground. Curious, you lift open the hatch to reveal a ladder, plunging down a vertical shaft into the earth. After taking a moment to gather your courage – after all, who knows […]
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Quick: are you right-brained or left-brained? Chances are, you answered this question immediately and definitively. If you are the creative, intuitive type, drawn to creating music, stories, images, and other forms of art, then you are right-brained. If, by contrast, you are more analytical and logical, drawn to mathematics and pattern recognition, then you are left-brained. And if you don’t […]
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Living with the Animals While modern humans have existed for at least a few hundred thousands years, we didn’t really start massively progressing from our earliest ancestors until we began forming large and very complex societies after transitioning away from small hunter-gather groups for various reasons. Critical to all this being able to happen was creating sets of rules which […]
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On September 2, 1945, hundreds of servicemen and representatives from every Allied nation gathered on the deck of the battleship U.S.S. Missouri, anchored in Tokyo Bay. Under the watchful eye of General Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Allied Commander in the Pacific, representatives of the defeated Empire of Japan signed the formal instruments of surrender, officially bringing the Second World War – […]
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On April 12, 1961 at 9:07 AM Moscow Time, a Soviet Vostok rocket blasted off from Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan, and soared into the sky. Minutes later, the rocket reached an altitude of 200 kilometres, placing its payload, 27-year-old Air Force Lieutenant Yuri Gagarin, into orbit. Gagarin circled the earth once before reentering the atmosphere, landing by parachute near the city […]
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On a snowy, blustery morning in March 1968, a two-man MiG-15 UTI jet took off from Chkalov air force base outside Moscow on a routine training flight. Barely ten minutes later, the aircraft’s pilot radioed air traffic control, announcing it was cutting its flight short and requesting permission to land. Then, the transmission went dead. At nearby Kirzhach airfield, a […]
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On the morning of Thursday, December 17, 1903, two brothers stood on a windswept beach outside Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, and prepared to make history. After winning a simple coin toss, one of the brothers climbed into a strange wood-and-canvas craft dubbed the Flyer. With a clatter and a whir the twin propellers spun up to a blur, and a […]
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On September 1, 1974, U.S. Air Force pilots Major James Sullivan and Major Joel Widdifield took off from New York City and headed East over the Atlantic Ocean. By the time they reached London, only one hour, 54 minutes, and 56 seconds had elapsed – less than 1/17th the time it had taken for Charles Lindbergh to make the same […]
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Near the end of the groundbreaking 1988 hybrid live-action/animation film Who Framed Roger Rabbit? hardboiled detective Eddie Valiant is in hot pursuit of three villainous cartoon weasels, who escape through a tunnel into the animated ghetto of Toon Town. Before following them in, Valiant pulls out and loads a cartoon gun given him by none other than Yosemite Sam, whose […]
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