Shallowest sea
The Sea of Azov, between Ukraine and Russia, is never more than fourteen metres deep. Parts of the sea are shallow enough to wade across.
Category: North & Central Asia
Flying submarine
In the mid-20th century, several countries had plans to construct a flying submarine.
Sweat genes are made of this
The human gene ABCC11 determines whether your sweat smells bad or not. It also determines whether your earwax is wet or dry.
Blue lava
The sides of Kawa Ijen, a volcano in Indonesia, are wreathed in blue flame.
Rachmaninoff’s All by Myself
The Russian composer Sergei Rachmaninoff has a songwriter credit for the power ballad “All by Myself.”
Time zone tripoints
At several points around the world, three time zones meet.
Oldest carpet
A prehistoric Scythian tomb in Siberia contained the oldest surviving carpet in the world.
Most consonants, fewest vowels
Ubykh, an extinct language spoken on the shores of the Black Sea, has more consonants and fewer vowels than almost any other language.
Reconstructed ancestor language
Proto-Indo-European is thought to be the ancestor language of English, Latin, Greek, French, Russian, Urdu, Sanskrit, Farsi, and dozens of others. But what did it sound like?
Pope vs. khan
In 1245 CE a letter from Pope Innocent IV travelled 7000km to Güyük Khan (Genghis’ grandson) demanding peace. The letter back from the Great Khan was… not friendly.
Second human in orbit
Yuri Gagarin may have been the first person to orbit the Earth in space, but Gherman Titov was the first to orbit the Earth more than once, the first to pilot a spacecraft, and the first to throw up in space.
Russian hobbits
Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings books have a long history in the Soviet Union and Russia, from illegal translations in the 1960s to a film in the 1980s to an unauthorised retelling sympathetic to the orcs in the 1990s.
Involuntary park
When a location is abandoned by humans, nature returns. Sci-fi author Bruce Sterling calls these feral landscapes involuntary parks.
The 101st kilometre
Soviet Russia kept undesirables (criminals and political dissidents) away from view by banning them from coming closer than 101km to major urban centres.
Red Westerns
Sergio Leone famously filmed Westerns in Italy and Spain, creating the genre known as the Spaghetti Western. But Soviet bloc countries had their own version too: the Red Westerns.
All-Joking, All-Drunken Synod of Fools and Jesters
Peter the Great founded a drinking club when he was a young man. Because he was tsar, he took it too far.