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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On June 7, 1195, an English Benedictine Monk named Gervase of Canterbury watched as a great thunderstorm descended on the city of London. What happened next, recorded in Gervase’s 600-page Chronicle, defied the monk’s imagination: “On the 7th of the ides of June, around the sixth hour, a marvellous sign descended near London. For the densest and darkest cloud appeared […]
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Of all prominent American families, few are more popularly associated with tragedy than the Kennedys. Most infamous of these misfortunes are, of course, the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy and that of his brother, Robert, in 1968. Also well-remembered is the death of John F. Kennedy Jr, his wife, and his sister-in-law in a plane crash in 1999. […]
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Valdivia, Chile. May 22, 1960. Magnitude 9.5. 1,655 killed. Prince William Sound, Alaska. March 26, 1964. Magnitude 9.2. 128 killed. Sumatra, Indonesia. December 26, 2004. Magnitude 9.1. 227,898 killed. Tohoku, Japan, March 11, 2011. Magnitude 9.1. 15,700 killed. These are the four most powerful earthquakes in recorded history. If you keep up with the news, then you have likely heard […]
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If ever there was an ultimate weapon of war, it would have to be the nuclear submarine. For more than 60 years, ballistic missile-armed submarines have prowled the world’s oceans, ready to unleash nuclear armageddon at a moment’s notice. Meanwhile, fast attack boats track and stalk the missile-armed ‘boomers’, the two rivals locked in a shadowy game of cat-and-mouse deep […]
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If ever there was a poster child for human-caused extinction, it was the Dodo. This odd-looking flightless bird, native to the remote island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean, was first encountered by Dutch sailors in 1598. Barely six decades later, the Dodo was all but extinct, wiped out by hungry sailors and invasive species like rats and pigs brought […]
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Before we get started today, we’d just like to send a quick shoutout to one of our most prolific and best authors here, Gilles Messier, who if you liked his few hundred videos here the last few years, please do check out the link in the description below to his channel Our Own Devices, where you’ll find him covering in […]
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The business of giving birth has long been a dangerous one. For most of human history, an estimated 4% of all women died in pregnancy or childbirth due to infections, haemorrhages, and other complications. Starting in the mid-19th century, improvements in sanitation and new medical techniques steadily began to improve these odds, such that today in the United States approximately […]
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The City of London – a one-square-mile enclave on the north bank of the River Thames, is the oldest borough in the UK capital – and one of the strangest. Though surrounded by and part of the sprawling metropolis known as Greater London, the City of London is in fact its own, semi-independent ceremonial county, with its own police force […]
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Study the history of science and technology long enough, and you will discover that – contrary to what popular culture would have you believe – few inventions are the product of a single brilliant mind. Instead, technological progress is the result of incremental discoveries and refinements made by multiple people. But once in a while, a person comes along whose […]
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Arlene, Cindy, Emily, Farrah, Katia. These are not, as you might expect, the names of women who were considered for Mambo No. 5, but rather the names of hurricanes, cyclones, typhoons, and other tropical storms. The practice of giving storms human names is now an accepted part of life, with the names of particularly destructive and deadly storms like Katrina, […]
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Of all belligerent nations in the Second World War, few were as creative and prolific in their pursuit of exotic weapons technology as the Third Reich. From jet aircraft to ballistic missiles, air-independent submarines, and infrared detection, German scientists and engineers pioneered many of the key technologies that would shape the course of late 20th-century warfare. Yet despite their cleverness, […]
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In all but four of the 25 James Bond films so far, the titular super spy starts his adventure with a visit to Q, MI6’s brilliant but grumpy creator of spy gadgets. From a briefcase full of weapons to a safe-cracking cigarette case to a watch with a built-in laser, Q always has exactly what 007 needs to complete his […]
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Most of our nightly dreams are either traumatic conga lines of unresolved anxiety, or a hodgepodge of random, incoherent nonsense that makes perfect sense while we’re asleep but quickly fades into irrelevance once we awake. But for some people, dreams can be far more useful; indeed, they can change the world. Such was the case for German chemist August Kekulé, […]
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Come and listen to my story ‘bout a man named Jed – a poor mountaineer, barely kept his family fed. And then one day he was shootin’ at some food, and up from the ground come a bubblin’ crude. Oil, that is – black gold, Texas tea. Yes, oil: the sticky, fortune-making, war-inspiring, planet-warming liquid that makes the work go […]
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In May 1961, a U.S. Navy aircraft was flying a routine submarine patrol over the Arctic Ocean when it spotted something unusual on the pack ice below: a small cluster of plywood buildings. This was the remains of the Soviet drifting ice station NP-9, hastily abandoned when an ice ridge began destroying the station’s runway. This discovery immediately piqued the […]
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It is a classic supernatural horror trope: a team of archaeologists dig through the desert sands to reveal the entrance of an ancient Egyptian tomb, sealed and forgotten for millennia. Carved over the door in hieroglyphics they find an ominous inscription, warning that anyone who dares disturb the tomb will suffer a terrible curse. Undeterred, our intrepid team ventures inside, […]
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200 kilometres off the coast of Mozambique lies the island nation of Madagascar. With a land area of 587,000 square kilometres, it is the fourth-largest island in the world after Greenland, New Guinea, and Borneo; and the second-largest island nation after Indonesia. A French colony from 1896 to 1960, Madagascar has long been the world’s primary producer of vanilla and […]
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