Longest elevator fall
In 1945 an Air Force bomber crashed into the side of the Empire State Building. An elevator cab carrying Betty Lou Oliver fell 75 floors straight down; she, incredibly, survived.
Category: Places
The last smallpox survivor
In October 1977, Ali Maow Maalin was the last person to contract naturally occurring smallpox. He died thirty six years later while coordinating a polio vaccination drive.
Texas mess
“Don’t mess with Texas” is an iconic expression of state pride, but it began as an anti-littering ad campaign.
Animal helmets
The Vikings may not have worn horned helmets, but the ancient Greeks had helmets covered in boar tusks and the Dayak of Borneo had helmets covered in fish or pangolin scales.
Who was the real Betty Boop?
A 1932 lawsuit attempted to answer the question “who was the real Betty Boop?”
The Yale blackboard rebellion
In 1830, nearly half of the mathematics class at Yale was expelled for refusing to use a blackboard in their exams.
Castaway rabbits and cattle
Rabbits and cattle were introduced to a remote island near Antarctica as food for shipwreck survivors; they bred there in isolation for more than a century.
Long Hindu time
One of the longest measurements of time appears in ancient Hindu scriptures: the mahā-kalpa, equal to 311.04 trillion years.
Siberian monstrators
When is a protest not a protest? In Russia, when it’s a performance art parody of a protest. But that still didn’t stop the Russian government from overreacting.
Da Vinci’s fractal trees
Leonardo da Vinci observed that tree branches together are always as thick as the trunk beneath them. This is true, and there are some good ideas why.
The search engine of 1896
In 1896 Paul Otlet set up a bibliographic query service by mail: a 19th century search engine.
Samoan constitutional crisis (Part 2)
The 2021 Samoan constitutional crisis came to a head with a face-off between the old prime minister who wouldn’t leave, the new prime minister who couldn’t start, the head of state, the Supreme Court, the Attorney General, and the Speaker of the House. [2 of 2]
Samoan constitutional crisis (Part 1)
Samoa’s first female prime minister was elected this year despite the most dramatic and twist-filled constitutional crisis in the country’s history. [1 of 2]
Sheep fruit
Behold the fabulous creatures of myth and legend! The dragon, the phoenix, the basilisk, the roc, the unicorn… and the Vegetable Lamb of Tartary?
Big remade
Naani is a 2004 Telugu remake of the Tom Hanks film Big. I gotta tell you, though… it gets weird.
The ant in the devil’s garden
Within the extraordinary biodiversity of the Amazon rainforest lie circles of a single tree species – the devil’s gardens. And these pockets of uniformity are created by ants.
The Generalist Academy 