Located 350 km (217 miles) southeast of Puerto Rico, the British island of Montserrat is sometimes called ‘The Emerald Isle of the Caribbean’ for its verdancy and early Irish settlers. However, far from a paradise, Montserrat also boasts an unfortunate history, and not just because of the British slave trade that brutally ensnared many ancestors […]

In the mid-1800s, Italy was consumed by two parallel fights: one to rid itself of Austrian domination (a holdover from the Holy Roman Empire) and the other for unification. At the time, Europe’s boot was a curious conglomeration of separate states, not all of which got along. Some were dominated by foreigners. One large section […]

As is often the case with people in dangerous professions, the Apollo astronauts found that life insurance policies were prohibitively expensive. Rather than pay the exorbitant insurance fees, the astronauts devised a system to ensure their wives and children would be financially taken care of in the not-altogether-unlikely event of disaster. Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins […]

In the days when hunting was a more common pursuit than it is today, those involved in the job cultivated a taxonomy for the various droppings they might encounter and use for tracking. Thus, rather than merely looking out for scat, those stalking deer would keep an eye peeled for ‘fewmets’ or ‘fewmishings’, while those […]

When the Earth was young, shortly after the moon formed, our planet was spinning so fast that a day was approximately five hours long. During the intervening billions of years, the dragging effect of the moon’s gravity slowed the Earth’s spin to the 24-hour day we now observe. Approximately 50,000 years in the future, this […]

It is down to geological and evolutionary happenstance that there are no monkeys on the island of Madagascar: a fact that has allowed some 100 species of lemur to survive there. Among them, surely none is stranger than the aye-aye–a most elusive creature in at least four ways. First, they’re nocturnal. Second, they spend their […]

It can be tough to give the boss a hint, but it was even more difficult back in the days of domestic servitude when the boss was a nobleman. Such was the case with Franz-Joseph Haydn, master of the symphony and court composer to Prince Esterházy, when the Prince took his orchestra along with him […]

On 17 December 1967, Harold Holt–at that time the Prime Minister of Australia–decided to go for a swim. He and his traveling companions were passing near Cheviot Beach, one of Prime Minister Holt’s long-time favorite swimming and snorkeling locations. The water was a little rough that day, but Holt was a strong swimmer, and he […]

Popeye the Sailor is well known for his penchant for spinach, and the popularity of the character led to generations of children being force-fed often-overcooked greens of that variety in the hopes of their growing up strong. Though spinach does not lack in nutritional value, particularly when raw, it is to be questioned how many […]

Compared to Earth, our astronomical next-door neighbor Venus is 95 percent as large, 28 percent closer to the sun, and almost identical in planetary composition. However, if one wished to spend a day on Venus’s surface–from one sunrise to the next–one would be confronted with a considerable array of hindrances and novelties. Assuming one could […]