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Before we knew about plate tectonics, a zoologist proposed a lost continent connecting Madagascar and India across the Indian Ocean. That hypothesis, now debunked, was nevertheless picked up by Theosophists and Tamil revivalists.
The leaves of Codariocalyx motorius move fast enough that you can see their motion. This plant likes to dance.
Przewalksi’s horse is genetically distinct from modern horses (it has an extra chromosome pair). It went extinct in the wild in 1969, but a small population was introduced to the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone in 1998; they have thrived.
The 105th surah of the Quran relates a battle outside Mecca between Yemeni war elephants and a flock of birds.
There are few pubs in the world that can claim to be the site of the founding of a religious denomination, the creation of a style of beer, and also a murder by a famous gangster. But there’s at least one pub that can.
In March 1940 two physicists wrote a top secret memo describing, for the first time, just how to make an atom bomb.
The origins of the modern piggy bank are lost to history, but the oldest extant piggy bank comes from 12th century CE Java.
The first time you get sick with a virus can affect how your body responds to that virus for the rest of your life.
Arktika, the second nuclear-powered icebreaker made by the Soviet Union, was the first surface ship to reach the North Pole.
In mathematics, the Pólya conjecture is true for every natural number up to 906,150,256… and then it’s not.
The pig toilet was once a key sanitation building in rural China, Korea, and India. It was ruthlessly efficient, combining a toilet for people with a sty for pigs.
People with central hypoventilation syndrome, also known as Ondine’s curse, can forget to breathe.
In 1822 a white stork landed in Klütz, then a town of the German Confederation, and finally unlocked the secret of where the birds go in winter.
A pair of Sicherman dice have numbers ranging from 1 to 8 on their faces, but roll two of them together and they produce the same totals as a pair of normal dice.
Pobeda Ice Island was first discovered in 1840. It was seen again in the 1910s, but was gone by the late 1920s. By the 1960s it was back, only to disappear again in the 1970s.
Going from house to house singing Christmas carols is a long-held tradition. But what if the wassailers turn up with a goat or a horse’s head? And what if they take you with them?
The Generalist Academy 