Latest history Stories
The weirdest things we learned this week: starting fires with astronaut farts and dancing yourself to death
The weirdest things we learned this week: counting vampires and nudist founding fathers
The weirdest things we learned this week: hot air balloon riots and the man-eatingest tiger
The weirdest things we learned this week: strange sneezes and how sideshows saved 6,500 babies
Charles Darwin wrote enough one-liners to fill a burn book
The weirdest things we learned this week: deadly molasses and the best way to battle cattle
Your ashes might say more about you than you’d think
Dirt can make or break a rodeo
The way we take the pill has more to do with religion than science
The weirdest things we learned this week: the sweetest-smelling butts, flaming birds, and 40 barrels of coke
The weirdest things we learned this week: killer surgeons and mysterious floating feet
Zero is just 1,500 years old. Before it, there was nothing.
The Titanic is now a photorealistic gaming experience
Victorians worried about books like we worry about iPhones
Early humans hooked up with other species a whole bunch
Charles Minard is known for the ‘best graphic ever,’ but he may have topped it with these maps
The swamp science that lured travelers to their doom—and inspired the jack-o’-lantern
The spookiest things we learned this week
The oldest weapons in North America offer a new view of prehistoric tech
The weirdest things we learned this week: glowing Civil War soldiers and historic font battles
Behind the supersonic rise and fall of the Concorde, 15 years after its final flight
The weirdest things we learned this week: birthing rabbits, gruesome taxidermy, and the Parthenon’s best-kept secret
The weirdest things we learned this week: eating your own twin, embalmed milk, and levitating frogs
Mount Vesuvius murdered its victims in more brutal ways than we thought
The weirdest things we learned this week: Sheep on meth, hopping space robots, and the economy of “Frozen”
The weirdest things we learned this week: holes in people (and cows), illegal cheese, and the world’s worst dairy disaster
Humans have been messing with the climate for thousands of years
The weirdest things we learned this week: Lady Liberty’s big secret, the ultimate exercise hack, and a penis in a bottle
Bogs are beautiful, swampy records of human history
Cheese played a surprisingly important role in human evolution
The weirdest things we learned this week: baby skeleton art, zombie presidents, and solar-powered telegraphs
7 famous psych studies with troubling backstories
The weirdest things we learned this week: eating organs, celebrating sweat, and banning dogs
Reports of Homo erectus’ laziness are ‘moronic’
How the sunflower transformed from a garden novelty to a mighty beast
The weirdest things we learned this week: bone flutes, zebra carriages, and laughing gas parties
The weirdest things we learned this week: skin-peeling soup, secret drug toilets, and a chlorinated ocean
The weirdest things we learned this week: art made from human skin, solving a 17th-century thought experiment, and detachable sex organs
Ancient climate change may have dragged the wild horses away
The first underwater film was lost for decades—until now
How to erase your embarrassing old Facebook and Twitter posts
The weirdest things we learned this week: Curing syphilis with malaria, ejecting bears from planes, and discovering new beer yeasts
The weirdest things we learned this week: artistic farts, meat lozenges, and Tesla’s beloved pigeon
Indigo, vermillion, and other ancient colors that have decorated the world for millennia
Dogs spread across the Americas alongside humans. Then they got eaten.
The weirdest things we learned this week: Cruise ships full of poop, deadly wallpaper, and the sport where women beat men
The weirdest things we learned this week: scientists doing sex magick, ancient mac and cheese, and contagious writer’s block
These 1950s experiments showed us the trauma of parent-child separation. Now experts say they’re too unethical to repeat—even on monkeys.
The weirdest things we learned this week: biblical rhabdo, corpse adventures, and socks from the world’s loneliest island
Five things you might not know about the plague (not including the fact that it still exists)
The weirdest things we learned this week: fake memories, sperm is not full of tiny men, and how ketchup makes the grade
The weirdest things we learned this week: underwater horse videos, the call of the void, and an ill-fated, icy balloon trip
We may finally know how Easter Island’s giant statues got their jaunty stone hats
Some 83,000 members of the U.S. military are missing. This group tries to bring them home.
The weirdest things we learned this week: the best dog of all time, kindles of kittens, and mushrooms eating human corpses
Why do we still have fax machines?
You’re almost certainly using the word ‘allergies’ wrong
My ancestor died of a splinter. Wait, what?
Why archaeologists are arguing about sweet potatoes
Is a hot dog a sandwich? The Apollo 13 astronauts had some thoughts
2,300 years after mathematicians first noticed prime numbers, they’re still intrigued
Some of your favorite products have absurd medicinal histories
The big bang got its name from a man who thought the theory was total nonsense
Here’s how Popular Science covered ‘Star Trek’ in 1967