Sorry to print yet another classic article (this one from 21 May 2006); very soon we’ll give you the skinny on why things have been a bit slow.
In the early days of the Second World War, Allied forces began Operation Bolero, a daring and risky effort to bring American planes to the European theater by way of secret airbases in the far north. As part of this operation, on 15 July 1942 two Boeing B-17 bombers were being escorted by six Lockheed P-38 Lightning fighters as they flew over Greenland towards Reykjavik, Iceland.
Early in the morning, the flight group encountered syrupy clouds which forced the pilots to climb over 12,000 feet to regain visibility. As the planes gained altitude, temperatures inside fell to ten degrees below zero Fahrenheit. The men in the planes tried to improvise ways to keep warm, such as rerouting the defroster into the cabin, but it did little to help. At about 7:15am, after encountering extreme numbness due to cold and continued poor visibility, the pilots decided to return to the airport they had departed from. But the weather behind them had worsened, and the men became disoriented in the severe conditions. After ninety minutes of flying blind with only intermittent radio contact, the clouds cleared sufficiently for the flight group to ascertain its position: they were over the east coast of Greenland, about two hours from the nearest airport… and they had only twenty minutes of fuel remaining. The men had no choice but to crash-land on the icecap of Greenland.
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The vast freshwater ecosystem of the Amazon River is home to abundant animal life, and many of its species thrive by virtue of their ferocity. If one were to ask the locals which of the river’s indigenous species is the most treacherous, a few might describe the roaming packs of carnivorous piranhas, or the massive anaconda snakes; but based on the general sentiment of the region, the most frequently uttered response would be “candirú.”
The history of Damn Interesting is a rich tapestry of events. In September 2005, the site sprang into existence. Then we wrote a bunch of stuff. Now, something new is happening… It’s rectangular, inky, and full of knowledge. And it’s not a frightened robotic squid. 
In 1976, a farmer in northern India became alarmed when he was informed of his own death. Lal Bihari was in the process of applying for a loan when the bank representative delivered the bad news, and it wasn’t just that his loan had been denied. He was clearly a breathing, animated, fifteen-year-old, and he exhibited none of the classic symptoms of zombiism, yet government records indicated that he was no longer among the living. There was even a death certificate bearing his name.
Hail, in and of itself, is not an unusual weather phenomenon. The frozen precipitation occurs inside storm clouds when water droplets are cooled below freezing, yet remain in a liquid state. When the supercooled water encounters something solid, such as a speck of dust or an ice crystal, it sticks to the particle and freezes. Updrafts in the storm keep the hailstone aloft as it aggregates ice, growing until its weight is too heavy for the updraft, at which time it plunges to the Earth.
In the early 1940s, German secret police agents in Nazi-occupied France were on the lookout for a woman with a wooden leg. She was known only as “the woman with a limp,” but the Gestapo’s many wanted posters described her as “the most dangerous of all Allied spies,” asserting that the Nazis “must find and destroy her.” Her name was Virginia Hall.
In 1950s-era Germany, the British forces which had been stationed there after World War 2 were understandably nervous about an invasion from the Soviet Union. The Cold War had begun, the Iron Curtain was in place, and Stalin was making every effort to compromise Germany’s capacity for another war despite attempts by the U.S. and England to rebuild Germany as the economic center of a stable Europe. Additionally, amid tensions, Stalin had split off the Soviet sector of Germany as a communist state.