While robots haven’t yet taken over our daily lives like classic science fiction writers imagined, robotics has still advanced quite a lot in the past few years. From playing music to cooking world cuisine to ruthlessly murdering anyone in a given area, robots of today are capable of much more than we give them credit…
Author: Himanshu Sharma
There are so many ‘mysterious’ photos and videos around the Internet that it’s hard to take them seriously. While it’s true that most of them are staged or fake, that’s not all of them, as there are still many unsolved photographic mysteries around the world that remain unsolved. 10. The Babushka Lady https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jg5pGueel-k Babushka Lady…
The French Empire officially refers to the geopolitical entity set up by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1804, though the French colonial empire is way older than that. French colonies started showing up in the Americas and India as early as the 17th century, and some of them still remain under French control. For the purposes of…
We hear a lot about scientists and their fancy ideas, though it’s actually engineers who put those ideas into practice for real world applications. At its most basic, engineering is the science of building things – like machines – to apply theoretical scientific principles to real life situations. The theoretical system of measuring time, as…
The universe is big. So big, in fact, that even if we learn how to travel at the speed of light and solve all other problems with space travel, we’d still only be able to explore a tiny fraction of what we can currently observe. Of course, even that seems like a thing of the…
We think of all microbes as more or less the same species with some variations here and there, when in reality, it’s the oldest and most diverse subgroup of life on Earth. Their contribution to the ecosystem isn’t as apparent as other forms of life – as we can’t see them – though under the…
We envision the history of our cities to be a step-by-step sequence of accomplishments, from small settlements to towns to the sprawling metropolises we see today. The darker parts are remembered as merely interludes – ‘dark ages’ – in the grand story, when in reality those dark ages have had a much larger impact on…
The Second World War has been extensively studied and analyzed, and yet, so many of its most horrific parts remain largely forgotten outside communities that experienced them. There are few historical parallels to the kind of violence faced by millions of people throughout the painfully-long duration of this global war – from Eastern Europe to…
Scientific research is usually aimed at solving something important, though that’s not always the case. There’s a growing body of research being conducted just because the researchers had nothing better to do that day. Many of these elaborate, yet useless, studies are funded by taxpayer money, too, or at least money that could have gone…
There’s nothing particularly interesting about bridges, until you – like us – look up the best bridges around the world and realize that you’re actually really into bridges. These works of art and engineering have taken bridge-building from its mere utility of connecting two elevated points to something far greater. 10. Magdeburg Water Bridge (Germany)…
Most scientific myths are just that: widely held science beliefs that have little to no basis in actual science. Some of them, however, have simply been brushed off as myths because of how ridiculous they sound, even if later research proves that they’re pretty much entirely accurate. 10. Garlic Can Help With A Toothache Garlic…
We talk about scientific mysteries so much around here that you’d think that scientists are quite bad at their jobs. Of course, that’s not true. Other than the really big questions – like ‘what are the true origins of life on Earth’ or ‘what is the size of the universe’ – science is actually quite…
The dramatic rise of Fascism in the wake of the First World War was one of the most far-reaching and consequential events of the century, and perhaps all of history. While it first showed up with the rise of Benito Mussolini in Italy, the ideology and its various implementations by other regimes in the decades…
Before we set out to explore the cosmos, we’d first have to know everything there is about our own neighborhood. And yet, other than the general position of things and a few specific details here and there, we know surprisingly little about what’s going on in our own solar system – especially in its most…
As we develop tools to explore other worlds for signs of life, there’s still so much we don’t know about life right here on Earth. The mysteries of the living world are as diverse and fascinating as all the various organisms that call this planet home, including our own species. They also raise some fundamental…
There have been quite a few groundbreaking discoveries in biology, neuroscience, space research, and so many other areas of science in recent times, though we hardly hear about any of them due to all the irrelevant, viral science posts that do make the news. From a lab-made plastic-eating enzyme that can potentially solve the plastic…
We know that action movies – like all other fictional works of art – are supposed to be a dramatized version of reality. They’re not meant to be real, as what would be the point of watching a movie that just mimics reality as it is? Action movies get many things wrong, though most of…
Anyone who has traveled around could tell you that Earth is full of geological oddities. The sheer variety of terrains and ecosystems found across the planet lend to some pretty bizarre and fascinating natural formations. Some of them are so weird that they may as well exist on an alien planet with completely different conditions…
With the global supply chain crisis currently affecting every major country around the world, it’d come as a surprise to no one that we’re running out of certain things. However, it’d be a mistake to only see it as a post-Covid problem. Many of these shortages had started showing up in countries around the world…
Human history – or at least the parts we know about – is full of stories of great civilizations and their achievements. Far less common, though, are accounts of some of its darkest periods outside the context of those achievements. From global wars to plagues to natural calamities straight out of the Bible, we see…
Whenever we think of pioneering achievements in mathematics, we think of early modern works by mathematicians like Einstein, Newton or Galileo. None of them, however, would have been possible without the groundwork laid by ancient mathematicians. Some of the greatest ancient mathematical works come from early civilizations like Greece, India and Egypt, providing a base…
Picking the worst years throughout human history is no easy task, as most of it has been undocumented and full of spectacularly bad years. We’ve come a long way from our famine and almost consistently war-ravaged early past, having somehow managed to build a working civilization despite everything nature has thrown at us over the…
As a field of study, chemistry has existed for as long as we can remember. In the early days, alchemists used to study the chemical composition of materials to understand their properties, which could then be used for various applications in the real world. That’s essentially what lab chemists do today, only with modern tools…
The human brain is one of the most complex organs in the human body, as well as the most poorly-understood. While we’ve come a long way in decoding its largely mysterious workings in the past few years – thanks to unprecedented advances in fields like neuroscience – there’s a lot we still don’t know about…