Featured category: Animals
The pelican in her piety; the oldest individual animal on the planet; the insects with natural gears; and the lizards who play evolutionary rock-paper-scissors.
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From the archives: All that jazz
The beautiful slang of a remarkable hepcat-orooni; Alice Coltrane’s jazz harp; jazz in 19/4 (!) time; and the fascist jazz of World War II.
Featured category: The oceans
The space cemetery in the middle of the Pacific; the inaccessible island in the middle of the Atlantic; the largest ocean current in the world; and the pivot points around which the global tides turn.
From the archives: Metric
100 seconds in a minute, 100 minutes in an hour, 10 hours in a day; the American highway with kilometre signs; the $327 million dollar NASA metric mix-up; and that time pirates prevented the United States from getting the metric system.
Featured category: 19th century history
The hippo-greyhound swap between Egypt and England; the telepathic snail scam; the Salvation Army’s arch enemies; and the curious appearance of a Sri Lankan bell in pre-colonial New Zealand.
From the archives: Medicine animals
The human pregnancy test that uses dead rabbits; the human fertility test that creates human-hamster hybrids; mice with knocked-out genes; and the immortal dog cancer.
Featured category: Fashion & design
The speed-limit skirt; the millions of dresses made out of feed sacks; the chair designed to be torpedo-proof; and who was actually sticking a feather in their hat and calling it macaroni anyway?
From the archives: Volcanoes
The Japanese government’s secret volcano; the capital city destroyed by a volcano in 1997; the eruption that killed the creator of one of the first encyclopedias; a volcano disrupted world weather in 1808, but we have no idea which one it was.
Featured category: Politics & law
The human chain across the Baltic states; the 1746 Scottish kilt ban; legislators and slumlords in 19th century New York battling over windows and sunlight; when the dictator of Portugal was removed from office no-one told him for two years.
From the archives: Ancient Egypt
The tomb of Meketre contained wooden dioramas of ancient Egyptian life; Ozymandias was a redhead; Ramesses III fought off an invasion by the mysterious Sea Peoples, and was then murdered by a conspiracy of magicians, physicians, butlers, and his wife.
Featured category: Southeast Asia
The infinity pool on top of three Singaporean skyscrapers, the ingenious Indonesian method for building motorway flyovers, the water puppets of Vietnam, and a very slow venomous primate.
From the archives: Cash
Hungary’s one hundred quintillion banknote, the odd denominations of Burma’s numerology money, Britain’s hundred million pound banknote, and money origami.
Featured category: Food & agriculture
The weeds that mimicked crops so much they became crops themselves, the culinary diplomacy of Thailand, the ice cream parlour of a thousand flavours, and the reason Hershey’s chocolate tastes like vomit.
From the archives: Everyday codes
Deciphering the codes of everyday life: car tyre codes, telegraph abbreviations, the hazardous substance Fire Diamond, and North American train whistle codes.
Featured category: Medieval history
The Tongan king who was made of wood, the sultan who disappeared into the Atlantic, the all-female autonomous religious communities (that weren’t nunneries!), and the 14th century pope who denounced modern music.
From the archives: Hallowe’en
Biblical necromancers, illustrated demons, the first vampire, and the bloodthirsty Medieval battle between the vices and the virtues.
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