Sticking your thumb out to convey some meaning has seemingly been around for about as long as humans have been humaning, or, at least, as far back as written history goes. But how did the gesture come to be a signal that you’d like to hitch a ride from someone? And is hitching a ride actually dangerous? To begin with, […]
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In the late 16th and early 17th Centuries, Europe found itself gripped by witch mania. After centuries of denying the existence of witchcraft, Church leaders incredibly came to believe that misfortunes such as plagues and crop failures were causes not by God’s will but rather individuals acting in league with the Devil. The resulting hysteria, stoked by the political turmoil […]
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The age of the giant rigid airship or Zeppelin was tragically brief, lasting barely forty years from the first Zeppelin flights in 1900 to the scrapping of the last surviving such airship, the Graf Zeppelin II, in 1940. When we think of the end of giant airships, we tend to picture the Hindenburg, which met its end in fiery end […]
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For the residents of San Francisco, October 11, 1950 started out like any other day, with thick banks of autumn fog rolling in from the bay and across the city. By the afternoon, however, it became clear that something was seriously wrong. On that day alone, eleven patients were admitted to Stanford Hospital with pneumonia, fever, and serious urinary tract […]
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Shortwave radio signals, which occupy the radio frequency band between 3 and 30 megahertz, have the unique ability to bounce or “skip” off the earth’s ionosphere, allowing them to propagate over vast distances. This has attracted a devoted international community of shortwave radio enthusiasts, who exploit the unique properties of the medium to listen to and communicate with shortwave stations […]
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American gangster films of the 1920s, 30s and 40s have contributed a wealth of colourful slang to the English language, much of which is still floating around popular culture to this day: “sleeping with the fishes”, “concrete overshoes”, “G-man”, “Chicago typewriter”, “goon”, “big house”, “private dick”, “speakeasy”, “Chicago overcoat”, “ride the lightning”, “fuzz”, and many others. But while many of […]
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At precisely 3 in the morning on January 17, 1991, a series of explosions rocked the Iraqi capital of Baghdad. The explosions were exact and devastating, destroying Iraqi military radars, command bunkers, and communications hubs with surgical precision. Immediately, Iraq’s aerial defence system sprang into action, its 3,000 anti-aircraft guns saturating the air with explosive shells. But the 60 surface-to-air […]
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Picture in your mind a classic Old West showdown. Two gunslingers slowly advance towards each other down a deserted street, their spurs gently clinking with every step. They stop and stare each other down, hands hovering over the six-shooters slung from their hips. All goes still as the tension rises, the silence broken only by the whine of a harmonica […]
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In this era of ubiquitous digital media, the idea of being unable to purchase our favourite music at a store that sells music sounds kind of ridiculous. But that was the unfortunate reality for millions of teenagers in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s wanting to listen to the coolest albums, all thanks to the introduction of the “Parental Advisory: […]
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On Christmas Eve, 1968, nearly a billion people sat glued to their radios and television sets as the crew of Apollo 8 entered orbit around the moon. For three days the world had followed the pioneering mission three live television broadcasts, and they now waited eagerly to hear the historic words of the first humans to reach another world. Then, […]
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Every morning around 7 o’clock, a small army descends upon the Indian port city of Mumbai. Dressed in distinctive white uniforms and topi or Gandhi caps, they fan out across the city’s sprawling suburbs to collect their wares before regrouping at local train stations and streaming down a network of rail lines into Mumbai’s commercial heart. There, on bicycles or […]
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Ever wonder when a hill becomes a mountain? Well, it turns out that language, like the universe, likes to resist simplicity… So the answer is- it’s complicated. But that’s not very interesting, so let’s dive into it shall we? To begin with, turning to our trusty Merriam-Webster Dictionary we have the following definition of a mountain: “a landmass that projects […]
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Somewhere deep in the Amazon, a monkey leaps nimbly through the rainforest canopy, blissfully unaware that it is being hunted. Down below on the forest floor, the hunter lurks patiently in the shadows, stalking its prey, waiting for the perfect moment to strike. When the moment comes, the hunter raises his long bamboo blowgun, places it to his lips, and […]
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In late 1961, Drs. Philip Vogel and Joseph Bogen, neurosurgeons at the California College of Medicine in Los Angeles, were preparing to carry out a radical new procedure. The patients under their care suffered from severe epilepsy, which despite their doctors’ best efforts had resisted all attempts at conventional treatment. One such patient, a 48-year-old former paratrooper identified in medical […]
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It was July 16, 1970, and Mario Escamilla was furious. The 33-year-old native of Santa Barbara, California, had just learned that a coworker, Donald “Porky” Leavitt, had broken into his trailer and stolen his most prized possession: a 15-gallon jug of homemade raisin wine. Determined to put an end to such theft, Escamilla grabbed a rifle and stormed off to […]
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On January 23, 2020, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a non-profit research and education organization based in Chicago, moved the hands on its Doomsday Clock forward to 100 seconds to midnight – the closest in its 74-year history. According the Bulletin, this change reflects the growing threat posed by climate change, nuclear proliferation, and misinformation, and the increasing unwillingness […]
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Space: the final frontier – or, if science fiction is to be believed – the final battlefield. In the land of sci-fi, no self-respecting Starfleet officer on an away mission or scruffy-looking nerf-herding smuggler would dare leave their spacecraft without a trusty phaser or blaster at their side. Even in universes where directed-energy weapons have not yet been invented – […]
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Space travel is a pricey business. Even today, the average cost of launching a satellite or other payload into orbit hovers around $10,000 per kilogram. Much of this cost stems from the great complexity of space launch vehicles, which require a great deal of time, money, skilled personnel, and other resources to design, test, and launch. Further complicating matters, different […]
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