As with many of man’s great achievements (or is that blunders?), it all began with the wine. In this case, however, it was actually the glasses and their capacity to produce sound. Wet your fingers then rub them over the ridge of the goblet and (after a few minutes of frustration) a high pitched tone […]

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 […]

In the middle of the afternoon on January 31, 1956 a B-25 bomber crash-landed into the Monongahela river near Homestead, Pennsylvania. All six aboard survived the impact, though two of them died before they were saved from the cold water. It was an unfortunate accident, and in the following weeks a search for the sunken […]

During times of economic hardship, people turn to the road to see if they can make their luck somewhere else. As such, back in the days of the Great Depression, the U.S. saw an increase in the hobo population. Walking along long roads or hitching rides on trains, these hobos would travel about, looking for […]

Try to imagine a world without numbers. No more addition or subtraction, algebra nor calculus. No more high school geometry. It would be pretty hard to get by without basic counting, such as being able to tell whether you had caught five fish or ten fish. Yet one tribe in Brazil seems to get by […]

In the U.S., violent crime rates are consistently higher in the South than in any other part of the country. It’s just a fact. When one tries to figure out why this might be occurring, a few thoughts come to mind. Perhaps the South has a more violent culture and enjoy their guns more. Maybe […]

Battery science has traditionally been the slowpoke of the technological industry. Look at a few of its competitors – in the last fifty years, screens have gone from black-and-white to color; from grainy cathode ray tube screens to high-definition plasma. Computers that used to be housed in gigantic warehouses, using thousands of vacuum tubes, are […]

In 1971, a study about prisons was funded by the U.S. Navy to try to better understand problems in the Marine Corps.’ prisons. The study was run by a group of researchers at Stanford, led by psychologist Philip G. Zimbardo. The idea was to create a controlled environment in the Stanford halls to simulate a […]

Amnesia is a fascinating condition, and as such it comes up commonly in popular culture. It’s such a wonderful (and by wonderful, I mean wonderfully over-used) plot device – after an unfortunate whack on the head by a large blunt object, characters can be caught in precarious positions as they struggle to recall one key […]

Thanks to my parents’ genes, I simply do not grow facial hair. I never have, unless you count microscopic stubble in the same ranks as a full beard. It certainly makes me a little jealous, especially when there are groups around promoting goodwill and happiness through the growth of a beard. So imagine my surprise […]