One of the lasting legacies of Rome in modern society is the concept of a Senate, though it wasn’t really what we think of as a Senate today. In many countries today, you can find a similar governing body of elected or appointed representatives. If you dive a little deeper, you can see different countries have very different ideas of […]
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Ask people to note conspiracy theories they’ve heard of, and inevitably you’ll hear the name Freemasons brought up. Our conceptions of them are influenced by arcane symbols on the American greenback and older government buildings, vague conjectures of their involvement in revolutions, wacky fringe radio hosts rambling about conspiracy theories, and popular culture. Freemasonry is featured in high school standards […]
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On March 31, 1851, a crowd of curious Parisians gathered at the Pantheon to witness a historic scientific demonstration. In the centre of the building, directly beneath its towering dome, they found a deceptively simple piece of equipment: a 28-kilogram brass-coated lead sphere, suspended from the building’s dome by a 67-metre-long wire. Beneath this was placed a wooden platform covered […]
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Imagine for a moment you are on a long overseas flight – say, for example, Flight SQ22 between Singapore and New York, the longest regularly-scheduled nonstop route in the world. Around halfway through this gruelling 18 hour, 40 minute marathon, having run out of in-flight movies to watch and grown bored of the latest Dan Brown literary abomination you purchased […]
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At around 7 P.M. on May 2, 1878, the city of Minneapolis, Minnesota was rocked by a massive explosion. In the blink of an eye, the Washburn A flour mill – the largest in the world – disappeared, and a giant column of dust, smoke and debris shot into the sky. The blast was felt 16 kilometres away in Saint […]
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You can find it almost everywhere: in every gift shop, on every online merchandise store, on every souvenir stand – and on every object imaginable, from posters and postcards to coffee mugs, water bottles, t-shirts, and phone cases: the brick-red background, the stylized white crown, and in big, bold letters, those five iconic words: Keep Calm and Carry On. …or, […]
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Films, books, TV series and even video games have narrated, and often celebrated, the story of the Italo-American Mafia. A story of violence, oppression, corruption at all levels of society, which swings between the two extremes of turning Mafia dons into folk heroes, and painting the entire Italo-American community as a criminal minority. Both extremes are, of course, far from […]
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If I ask you to picture the words “digital,” “electronics,” or “cyberspace,” odds are the images that just popped into your head are tinted a bright fluorescent green, like Neo seeing the Matrix for the first time. Indeed, our collective image of digital technology is drenched in shades of green, from the strings of code that make up software to […]
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If your parents ever took you to a science museum or planetarium as a child, you likely spent much of your visit in the gift shop, begging them to buy you one of the hundreds of shiny – and purportedly “educational” – items on offer. And most irresistible of all was undoubtedly “astronaut food”: shiny foil packets of freeze-dried strawberries […]
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The Nazis weren’t exactly shy about the fact that they didn’t really care for individuals of a race other than the one they idealized. Further, the Japanese seemingly had no problem with peoples like the Jews, even going so far as in WWII taking in Jewish refugees from German occupied lands. Further, unlike Germany’s European allies during WWII, when the […]
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At 2:46 PM on March 11, 2011, at a spot 60 kilometres off the coast of Japan, the Pacific tectonic plate suddenly slipped and plunged under the Eurasian plate. The resulting Tohoku earthquake, lasting six minutes and measuring 9.0 on the Moment Magnitude Scale, was the most powerful in Japanese history and the fourth largest ever recorded, causing thousands of […]
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Thanks to Hollywood, as well as words written on the mangled inked corpses of the leafy fellow occupants of our little planet we’ve successfully subjugated, there are a number of common ideas about how an alien invasion of Earth would go. From clandestine infiltration where our celestial enemies walk among us undetected, to these brothers from another primordial goop mother […]
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According to research conducted by Professor of Psychology at UC Davis Dean Simonton, a rather interesting facet of early U.S. Presidents was their propensity to be insanely intelligent compared to their contemporaries. This is perhaps no better illustrated than with the subject of our video today. A man who is generally considered the most intelligent of all U.S. Presidents. Despite […]
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History is littered with choices, dichotomies, antagonisms. Nomads and settlers, Romans vs Carthage, Capitalism vs. Communism, Cat people or Dog people, Team Jess vs Team Dean. When it comes to personal hygiene, the big debate is: shower or bath? We here at TodayIFoundOut don’t judge. It is completely up to you whether you like to cleanse your skin and massage […]
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On January 23, 1943 at the Battle of Stalingrad, the Red Army captured a Luftwaffe Lieutenant, one Leo Raubal. That name did not ring any particular bell amongst the Soviet interrogators, just another POW. Except he wasn’t. Lieutenant Raubal himself revealed to his captors the identity of his infamous uncle: Adolf Hitler. Now, Hitler could hardly be described as a […]
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At 6:45 AM on March 1, 1954, a blinding flash brighter than the sun lit up the sky above Bikini Atoll in the south Pacific. From an observation bunker on Enyu Island 30 kilometres away, scientists watched as a monstrous, glowing fireball rose over the lagoon, expanding to more than seven kilometres in diameter. Within a minute, this fireball had […]
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If I say the words “Third World Country”, what image springs to mind? Most likely something out of a World Vision commercial: starving children, ramshackle villages of corrugated metal huts, dirty water, disease, corruption, human rights abuses, and war. Now, what about a “First World Country?” Well, if you’re watching this video right now, odds are you live in one […]
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As the Allied armies advanced through France, Italy and Eastern Europe, high ranking officials and officers in the German National Socialist Party, the SS and the Wehrmacht seem to have finally realised that taking on most of the largest industrialised countries in the World all at the same time had not been the wisest idea, and at this point there […]
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