Author: Dustin Koski

It’s the largest hot desert in the world. At 3.5 million square miles, it’s over half a million more in size than all of Australia. If you were to combine all the deserts in North America with Asia’s Gobi Desert, you could still fit three of those combined deserts inside the Sahara, and likely be…

Some days, we as humans can find even our own anatomy a little perplexing. The extra bumps and ridges, the body parts you don’t even think about until they start acting up. If someone were to go from considering that to these animals, their head would really begin to spin. In the cases of the…

Today a pound of smokeless gunpowder generally costs $25 in the United States, which would be enough for around 175 rounds in a hunting rifle. But we’re looking back to an era when gunpowder was so new and so unlike anything that had come before it that it could be mistaken for a deadly miracle.…

There’s a common impression that people in the past were less intelligent than they are today, since beliefs were widespread back then which are almost universally dismissed today. Yet John Hawks of the University of Wisconsin reported in 2011 that over the last 20,000 years, the average size of a human brain shrunk from 1,500…

John Lyly’s proverb “All’s fair in love and war” hasn’t resonated so much since he wrote it in his 1578 novel Euphues for no reason. A commander would be in a pretty difficult situation if they had to explain that they let an enemy inflict losses on them out of some abstruse sense of fairplay.…

Having a counterintuitive, provocative interpretation of a mainstream film is an easy but effective way to be heard, since it allows the person who comes up with it to ride the coattails of a well-financed ad campaign or a project that connected with millions of people. Consequently there are a lot of popular opinions of…

John Lyly’s proverb “All’s fair in love and war” hasn’t resonated so much since he wrote it in his 1578 novel Euphues for no reason. A commander would be in a pretty difficult situation if they had to explain that they let an enemy inflict losses on them out of some abstruse sense of fairplay.…

In past TopTenz lists of badass women, we’ve often featured exclusively those that were in the military. While we don’t regret our choices and this list will feature many more, we’re going to widen the scope for this one. A person doesn’t need to be carrying a weapon to be a badass, though it sure…

Older than Texas’s status as one of the United States of America, the humble beginning of the Texas Rangers was when Stephen F. Austin formed a militia of 10 men in 1823 because he didn’t think Mexican militias were sufficient protection from Native American raids. Today there are 166 rangers and 68 support members. They’re…

From Austria to Japan, from Eastern Turkey to Vietnam. These were the borders of the largest contiguous empire in human history. Nine million square miles it stretched, much more than double the size of the modern United States of America. Its rise began in 1206 and its fall finished in 1368, a blip compared to…

In past TopTenz lists of badass women, we’ve often featured exclusively those that were in the military. While we don’t regret our choices and this list will feature many more, we’re going to widen the scope for this one. A person doesn’t need to be carrying a weapon to be a badass, though it sure…

Who wants to take a break from the turmoil civilization is experiencing? Let’s go somewhere away from all humanity’s troubles. To paraphrase what a wise man once sang, we’ll find better down where it’s wetter, so let’s go under the sea. There we know what we’re getting. There’s fish, crustaceans, reefs, and rocks. We know…

It’s no wonder that so many of us take our bodies for granted; we take them with us everywhere we go. We’ve all been there when it comes to complaining about aches and pains. People have been known to spend more than a million dollars altering the appearance of their bodies. There are some, such as neuroscientist Randal…

We know what impressive armies Ancient Rome could field, as brutally treated as the troops were. Curiously, though, most TopTenz articles have focused on times they lost. In fact we’ve done whole lists of them. It’s enough to make you wonder how they ever conquered an empire which stretched from Great Britain to the Persian…

The cyclical nature of boom and bust capitalism has been held off for an unusually long time. On average, the US economy is supposed to go through a recession every 57 months. At present it’s been more than 10 years. Whichever policies have staved it off to date, it’s left much of the populous so…

The Freemasons. The Illuminati. These are secretive organizations that many people suspect have extreme, nefarious influence on society around the world. But they seem like small fries compared to the Bilderberg Group, an annual gathering of many of the wealthiest and most powerful people in the world to make plans regarding global issues. It’s as…

It’s no wonder that so many of us take our bodies for granted; we take them with us everywhere we go. We’ve all been there when it comes to complaining about aches and pains. People have been known to spend more than a million dollars altering the appearance of their bodies. There are some, such…

In the USA, ghost towns are primarily associated with the Old West. The idea is mostly that a town sprung up next to a mine or as part of some other form of speculation, and then eventually the business opportunity dried up and forced everyone to move away. Around the world, the reality is very…

The media will tell you that the communal cultural experience of going to see a movie in a theater is on its way out. While the budgets of the biggest films are going up and up, over the course of 2019 American box office revenue was down five percent. While 2018 had been up one…

Society’s approach to automation requires delicacy. The automated tools can be captivating to watch in action, the process can spare workers immeasurable injury and danger, and automation is no small part of why worker productivity rose roughly 70% from 1993 to 2011. Yet you probably didn’t hear the pervasive stat that automation cost the US…

In 2016, $80 billion was spent on lottery tickets in the United States alone. For comparison, that same year the US spent roughly $30 billion on video games. It’s very revealing how much people hold on to that dream even though their odds of winning big from a video game and a lottery ticket aren’t…

Since it began in 1971, the Witness Protection Program has provided new identities for more than 18,000 people, though most of them are not the witnesses themselves but their family members. It’s by no means a perfect system, with some children that are entered in the program later saying that they have trouble with identity…

The cyclical nature of boom and bust capitalism has been held off for an unusually long time. On average, the US economy is supposed to go through a recession every 57 months. At present it’s been more than 10 years. Whichever policies have staved it off to date, it’s left much of the populous so…

So many of the most successful and celebrated stories are about singing the praises of notorious criminals from real life. Ed Gein has provided morbid fascination in multiple different thinly disguised forms, such as Norman Bates of Psycho. Ted Bundy has both biopics and a Netflix series. How many dozens of actors have been hired…