High in the arid mountains and along the old caravan routes of southern Morocco stand a series of fortress-like structures that once guarded a community’s most precious wealth. Known as agadir (plural igoudar), these ancient granaries are among the most distinctive architectural traditions of North Africa. They are part bank vault, part food store and part citadel.
Inoummar agadir. Credit: Nicolas Hoizey
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High in the Ural Mountains, in the south-eastern corner of the Komi Republic, the Pechora River rises. It descends from the slopes, flows briefly south, then bends and turns north. The river then continues more or less in the northerly direction for some 1,800 km until it empties into the Arctic ocean.
To Soviet planners, this seemed like a colossal waste. Why should a river the size of the Pechora—the third-largest in Europe by annual discharge, after the Volga and the Danube—pour its waters into the Arctic when they could irrigate the parched lands of the south?
From that question sprang one of the most audacious engineering schemes of the 20th century.
Map of all major Siberian rivers. Credit: Steve Wiertz
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High in the branches of trees, you may sometimes spot what looks like an abandoned bird’s nest—a dense, tangled mass of twigs clustered together in a tight ball. But look closer and you may find that no bird built it at all. The strange growth is known as a witches’ broom.
A witches’ broom forms when a tree’s normal growth pattern is disrupted, causing a dense cluster of shoots to sprout from a single point. Instead of growing outward in an orderly fashion, dozens or even hundreds of small branches crowd together, creating a broom-like shape. From a distance, these clumps often resemble large nests wedged in the crook of a tree.
A birch tree infected with Taphrina betulina causing witches' broom. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
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On the morning of 15 January 1857, residents of Hong Kong awoke to what seemed an ordinary day. As usual, loaves of fresh bread were delivered across the European quarter of Victoria, warm from the ovens of a popular Chinese-owned establishment, the Esing Bakery. By midday, however, hundreds were violently ill. Victims suffered nausea, vomiting, severe abdominal pain, dizziness, and general malaise. The cause of this sudden outbreak was not immediately clear. Only later did tests on the consumed bread reveal that it had been poisoned.
Esing Bakery, from The Illustrated London News. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
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In the late 19th century, the British Empire wrapped the globe not only in pink on maps but in copper beneath the seas. This vast web of submarine telegraph cables, known as the All Red Line, allowed London to communicate with its far-flung colonies without relying on foreign powers. At a time when information could decide the fate of empires, the All Red Line became one of Britain’s most important and least visible strategic assets.
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Antarctica has always been a proving ground for survival. Ernest Shackleton’s Endurance expedition saw twenty‑eight men endure shipwreck, drifting ice, and an open‑boat voyage across the Southern Ocean. Yet all returned alive. Douglas Mawson staggered hundreds of miles alone after losing his companions, his body failing even as his will refused to. Earlier still, the crew of the Belgica survived the first forced Antarctic winter by learning how to live off seal and penguin meat, while later explorers like Richard Byrd nearly died attempting solitary winters on the ice.
These stories have shaped how Antarctica is remembered—as a continent where survival depends on endurance, leadership, and adaptability. Almost all of them are human stories.
Yet one of the most extraordinary survival tales from Antarctica belongs not to men, but to the dogs pulling sledges. This is the story of two Sakhalin huskies, Taro and Jiro.
The statues of Taro and Jiro in Nagoya. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
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In the summer of 1946, residents of Sweden and Finland began reporting strange objects in the sky. They were described as rocket, or missile-like, fast-moving, sometimes glowing, and often silent. Many appeared to plunge into lakes without exploding, and strangely, without wreckage. The Swedish press soon gave them a name: spökraketer, or ghost rockets.
A meteor such as this could easily be mistaken for a rocket. Credit: Bill Ingalls/NASA
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Two weeks before Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin rode Vostok 1 into space to become the first human to complete a full orbit around the Earth, NASA test pilot American Joseph A. Walker took the hypersonic rocket-powered airplane, the X-15, to the edge of space, becoming the first person to cross the stratosphere.
The North American X-15 program was one of the most ambitious aeronautical research programs in history. The program was designed to answer fundamental questions about flight at extreme speeds and altitudes. In doing so, it quietly laid the groundwork for much of modern spaceflight.
Joe Walker with the X-15, 1961. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
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In January 1887, a mild-mannered itinerant preacher named Ansel Bourne left his home in Greene, Rhode Island, to travel to nearby Providence. He carried a small sum of money and, by all appearances, the clear intention of returning in a few days. He did not come back.
For nearly two months, Bourne’s family had no idea about his whereabouts. They posted a missing person newspaper advertisements but nobody reported any sightings. Then, in late March a telegram arrived addressed to Bourne’s nephew Andrew Harris in Providence. His uncle had been found in Norristown, Pennsylvania, where he had been living the previous two months under the name “Alfred Brown”.
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In the late nineteenth century, modern surgery was still emerging from an era in which hygiene was, by today’s standards, startlingly poor. Operations were often performed with bare hands, instruments were reused with minimal cleaning, and postoperative infections were common and frequently fatal. Although ideas about germs were gaining ground, everyday medical practice lagged behind theory. It was in this transitional moment that Caroline Hampton, a surgical nurse, played an unexpected role in reshaping operative hygiene.
William Halsted operating in the New Surgical Ampitheatre in 1904. Credit: Wellcome Library, London
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On the evening of 26 July 1909, the SS Waratah sailed from Durban, South Africa, bound for Cape Town. A luxury passenger liner, she was coal-fired and boasted eight watertight compartments. She was said to be “practically immune from any danger of sinking”.
Yet, she never arrived. No wreckage was conclusively identified and no survivors were found. With 211 people aboard, the Waratah disappeared into the Indian Ocean, becoming one of the greatest maritime mysteries of the twentieth century.
The Waratah. Credit: Wikipedia Commons
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In 1577, the Flemish cartographer Gerhard Mercator wrote a letter to his friend, the English scientist, occultist and royal advisor John Dee. In that letter, Mercator described the geography of the North Pole as first reported in the 14th century by a Franciscan friar from Oxford, who travelled the North Atlantic region on behalf of the King of England. An account of his travels were published in a travelogue titled Inventio Fortunata (or “Fortunate Discoveries”), a book that has been lost for more than 500 years. However, a summary of this book was published in another travelogue called the Itinerarium by a Brabantian traveller from the city of 's-Hertogenbosch named Jacobus Cnoyen. It was in Itinerarium where Mercator read about the astonishing claims made by the unknown author of the Inventio Fortunata.
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When Captain Joseph Frazer rescued Narcisse Pelletier from Aboriginal people in 1875, it was not the first time a white captive had been recovered from Australia’s bushmen. A quarter of a century earlier, sailors from a British naval vessel had carried out a similar rescue, this time of a white woman shipwrecked in the Torres Strait, who had been compelled to live among Aboriginal people as the wife of one of their men. Through Barbara Thompson’s story, we glimpse not only an extraordinary personal ordeal, but also the everyday realities of Aboriginal life as observed by someone who lived within it.
HMS Rattlesnake, the ship that rescued Barbara Thompson. Credit: National Maritime Museum, Greenwich
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The Green Stone of Hattusa is one of the most intriguing and enigmatic objects from the Hittite capital, largely because of how little we can say about it with certainty. This unusual polished block of green rock stands apart from the city’s monumental architecture, inscribed tablets, and sculptural reliefs. Yet, despite more than a century of archaeological study, its original purpose remains unresolved.
Credit: Wikimedia Commons
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In 1910, the Lyon police offered criminologist Edmond Locard the opportunity to form the first police laboratory. He was given two assistants and two small, unused attic rooms, where evidence collected from crime scenes could be scientifically examined.
By 1912, these two rooms became the world’s first forensic science laboratory when the Lyon police department officially recognized it and allowed the lab to be used in criminal investigations. It was from within these walls, Locard went on to solve some of the most high-profile criminal cases not only in France, but across the world.
Forensic-science pioneer Edmond Locard, center of the front row, and his team at the Lyon crime laboratory around 1930. Credit: Lyon municipal archives
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The United States is often ridiculed for clinging to seemingly unintuitive units of measurement such as inches, miles, Fahrenheit, and pounds instead of adopting the metric system used by most of the world. Yet it may come as a surprise that the U.S. was among the original seventeen signatory nations to the Metre Convention, the agreement that led to the creation of the International Bureau of Weights and Measures, which establishes global measurement standards. The United States was also the first country to adopt a decimal currency system.
Credit: Reddit
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Somewhere on the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica, buried beneath hundreds of feet of snow (or perhaps at the bottom of the ocean), lies an enormous vehicle. Designed for an American research expedition in 1939, the Antarctic Snow Cruiser was among the most ambitious machines ever sent to the frozen south. Conceived as a self-contained mobile laboratory, it promised to transform Antarctic exploration. Instead, it was quickly humbled by the unforgiving realities of the polar environment.
The Antarctic Snow Cruiser rolls out of the Chicago construction yards on October 24, 1939. Credit: United States Antarctic Service
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As another year draws to a close, let us look back at some of the most memorable stories we published over the past twelve months. From curious episodes of forgotten history to remarkable human lives and unlikely inventions, these posts captured our fascination and, we hope, yours as well.
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On the afternoon of 14 April 1944, the city of Bombay, then the jewel of British India’s western coast, was shaken by a catastrophe so violent that it rivalled wartime bombings, despite being entirely accidental. A single cargo ship, anchored peacefully in the harbour, unleashed an explosion that tore through docks and the surrounding neighbourhoods. By nightfall, large parts of the city were burning, thousands lay dead or injured, and Bombay had suffered one of the worst industrial disasters in history.
A piece of propeller was flung away and landed in St. Xaviers High School, about 5 km (3 mi) from the docks. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
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When coffee first arrived in England in the mid-17th century, it brought with it far more than a new beverage. It introduced a radically new social institution: the coffeehouse. For the price of a single penny—the cost of a cup of coffee—any man could enter, sit at a shared table, read the latest news, and join conversations that ranged from philosophy and science to politics, trade, and gossip. In an age when universities were closed to most of the population and literacy was spreading rapidly, these coffeehouses earned a fitting nickname: “penny universities.”
Credit: Wikimedia Commons
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In the thick, softly rounded walls of a straw bale house, there is sometimes a small, deliberate interruption—a square or circular opening, carefully framed and finished, that exposes what usually remains hidden. This feature is known as a truth window. Modest in size but rich in meaning, the truth window offers a literal glimpse into the inner structure of a straw bale building, revealing tightly packed bales of straw behind the plastered surface.
Credit: Wikimedia Commons
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