This is a classic Damn Interesting article which originally appeared on 27 November 2005. We apologize for the re-run.
Law enforcement officers, secret agents, and counter-espionage personnel have most interesting toolboxes. Their occupations center around discovering “the truth” (or a convincing substitute) in environments where truth is scarce, and consequently they make use of methods which attempt to coerce, deceive, or scare the truth out of those who may possess it.
One of the most common interrogation tools in the history of the trade has been the lie detector. Over the years, these machines have helped put people in prison, destroy careers, and possibly even end lives. The Cold War was the heyday of these paranoia-driven truth-hunting techniques, and since the 1980s their popularity in the U.S. has declined. But they’re certainly not gone… if you ever apply for a job with the federal government, particularly a three-letter agency (FBI, CIA, etc), you’re likely to be subjected to a lie detector test, known in the industry as a “polygraph test.” But can these machines actually do what they claim?
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Color film was non-existent in 1909 Russia, yet in that year a photographer named Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii embarked on a photographic survey of his homeland and captured hundreds of photos in full, vivid color. His photographic plates were black and white, but he had developed an ingenious photographic technique which allowed him to use them to produce accurate color images.
Don’t you just love proving people wrong by doing what is supposed to be impossible? My own personal triumph was beating the Saltine myth – I was once told that it was impossible to eat seven Saltines in a minute, and after a few attempts, I was able to prove them wrong (as well as ensure that I’ll never want to eat a Saltine again). I then proceeded to lick my elbows and say “toy boat” ten times quickly. It’s all possible, even though many don’t believe it.
Beginning as early as 1916, and continuing well into the 1920s, an unusual and disturbing illness devastated millions of people throughout the world. It arrived in the shadow of the 1918 Spanish Flu epidemic– which killed an estimated fifty million people worldwide– so it has been largely overlooked by history despite the fact that it took the lives of over a million people, and left countless others frozen inside unresponsive bodies.
Few people are familiar with the condition known as alexithymia, yet it is not so rare a thing. Alexithymia is condition where a person seems devoid of emotion because they are functionally unaware of their emotions. By extension, alexithymics are also unable to appreciate the emotional motivation of others, and generally find emotions of others to be perplexing and irrational. Such a person may be pleasant and highly intelligent, but will be humorless, unimaginative, and have some unusual priorities in decision-making.
Judging from the observed movements of distance bodies in outer space, scientists have long speculated that there is much more matter in the universe than we are aware of. The Newtonian theory of gravity predicts that galaxies will move a certain way given the gravity of their observable mass, but every time, the galaxies behave as though they contain about four times more matter than we can detect. 
You have probably heard about – or done – some form of extreme free-fall, be it sky diving, bungee jumping, or base jumping. But how many people can claim to skydive from an altitude that was almost out of the atmosphere? Joseph Kittinger can, and he still holds a number of records due to one particular jump: the highest balloon ascent, highest parachute jump, longest free-fall, and fastest speed by man through the atmosphere.