Richard Feynman, Nobel prize winning physicist and science popularizer par excellence liked practical jokes, but I doubt he would have enjoyed watching people in the buff parade on Chicago鈥檚...
In the film 鈥淪herlock Holmes and the Game of Shadows,鈥� Holmes identifies the poison on a dart that had instantly paralyzed a victim by sniffing it. 鈥淐urare!鈥� he says. Curare is a very real poison...
鈥淭ruth serum鈥� refers to various drugs that have been used in attempts to extract truthful statements from people. Wine was the basic method for extraction during ancient times, however, the first...
In Roman times slaves were used to mine salt. It was not a pleasant chore. But today in the Ukraine some people willingly spend several hours a day in a salt mine. They are not there, though, to...
On a fall day in 1991, two Germans hiking in the Alps near the Italian- Austrian border stumbled across what they initially believed to be a modern corpse frozen in the ice. Once the body was...
The science of geyser eruptions was worked out by none other than Robert Bunsen-聽of burner fame. Actually Bunsen did not invent the burner but did improve upon existing equipment by showing that...
Influenza is a nasty illness. It isn鈥檛 just a bad cold. This viral infection kills up to half a million people in the world every year. And that鈥檚 in a good year. In a bad year, like 1968, the Hong...
Woodrow Wilson鈥檚 secretary of state, William Jennings Bryan, was ridiculed in 1913 for serving Welch鈥檚 grape juice instead of wine at a dinner honoring the British ambassador. This proved to be...
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