Spacedust buster
The portable vacuum cleaner Dustbuster was built on the back of technology for the moon landings.
Recent Posts
Uganda Hollywood
There are a lot of pseudo-Hollywoods making films: Bollywood, Dhallywood, Mollywood, and Wellywood. My favourites are the hyper-violent action films of Uganda’s Wakaliwood.
Rotten before it is ripe
Chaucer, Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Rabelais all wrote about the medlar fruit, which must rot before it is ready to eat.
Hobo news
From 1913 to 1929, the hobos had their own newspaper.
Harem conspiracy
The Egyptian pharaoh Ramesses III was murdered in a conspiracy formed by one of his harem wives that included magicians, physicians, and butlers.
First scream
The Wilhelm scream is a sound effect that has been used in hundreds of films, including Disney, Lord of the Rings, Indiana Jones, and Star Wars films. But who was Wilhelm? And why was he screaming?
Ultimate stability
The Gömböc is an object with a very specific trick: no matter how much you push it or tip it over, it will always return to the same position.
Cow opera
Leave it to the Norwegians and Swedes to take a way to call cattle in high mountain pastures and turn it into a genre of music.
Second-fastest animal
Everyone knows that the cheetah is the fastest land animal in the world – but what’s the second-fastest? And why is it so fast?
Boiling saliva
There is a point not more than 20km away from you right now where your normal body temperature is enough to boil the saliva off your tongue and the moisture out of your lungs.
Werewolf witches
Within the witch panic of Medieval Europe was a strange subset of trials that accused people of being both witches and werewolves.
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.
Stomach tadpoles
Remember those fish that raise their children inside their mouths? Two Australian frog species went even further: they raised tadpoles in their stomachs.
Military skateboarding
Sometimes the image says it all; in the 1990s the United States military experimented with skateboards for urban warfare.
Surprising eponyms
An eponym is a word named after a person. Some, like algebra, are well-known. But these words are also eponyms: boysenberry, cardigan, diesel, guy, Kiribati, neanderthal, orrery, and pamphlet.
Double time
Almost all of China uses only one time zone. In the extreme west of China, the Xinjiang region uses two time zones at the same time. This is very confusing.
The Generalist Academy 