A lot is said about the best places to live and travel to in the world, as they remind us of the successes of our civilization. Hardly anyone, however, talks about the ones on the other end of all this progress. As some parts of the world prosper beyond anything we ever imagined, others pay…
Author: Himanshu Sharma
War is – more often than that – a numbers game. Unless something unlikely happens, it’s usually the side with the numerical advantage that goes home with the victory, which has been especially true in history. Many modern weapons – like nukes – can easily make brute force obsolete, though that wasn’t the case for…
Ancient, lost cities holding secrets of their own trigger our fascination like most other parts of history don’t. Some of them used to be so advanced and well-built that they shatter the common notion of history as a consistently forward march and people in history as primitive versions of ourselves. They also remind us that…
You know how the longer you sit in a traffic jam, the more it starts to feel like one of the worst jams in history? It’s completely understandable, as traffic jams do have the ability to mess up with our sense of time. Objectively speaking, though, it’s highly unlikely that any jam you’ve ever been…
One way to get a better job than the one you’re doing right now is adding more skills to your overall portfolio, gradually climbing up the ladder and raising your value in your respective field. While that would surely get you to a better, higher-paying position, it’d take a while. For those without time or…
Our mental image of world geography is derived from many subjective factors, like where we grow up and our political beliefs. Still, that image turns out to be very similar for most of us, as modern maps are largely uniform around the world. That’s also exactly why it’s almost always wrong, as the maps we…
The last decade may not have been the best time for everyone, though for science, it may have been our biggest leap into the future yet. With massive leaps in fields such as AI, quantum computing, space research and medicine, among countless others, we’re finally close to solving some of our world’s most enduring mysteries. …
Assassinations have always been a preferable way of solving conflict over all-out war, which can be a costly affair. A well-placed political murder – while difficult to carry out – can often achieve the same goal without all the hassles of war, which is why it has been so popular across cultures and time periods…
War is hell, though most of us have an immensely inaccurate idea of exactly what kind of hell it is. While it was a fairly simple affair for most of our history – two sides with dedicated soldiers facing each other at a specific spot, and returning home with a decisive result either way –…
The world is full of things that we think are significant in one way or another, mostly because common knowledge says that they are. Of course, once we actually take the time to look into some of them, we realize that they hold almost no meaning in the real world. From the United Nations to…
Archaeology isn’t just a study of fossils and old rocks, it’s also perhaps the only reliable window into our distant, unrecorded past. Every archaeological discovery gives us a direct – even if incomplete – look into our long, long history as a species, as well as helps us put another piece into the huge puzzle…
Covert weapons have been a part of warfare for as long as we can remember, though till recently, they were largely restricted to untraceable poisons found in nature or basically-assembled booby traps. It wasn’t until the Second World War – when espionage was established as a distinct military discipline – that covert weapons became as…
Our modern, sophisticated understanding of explosions has been a long time in the making. From the Chinese to the Arabs to the Greeks, nearly every empire has contributed its fair share to the art of blowing things up. However, it’s only in the recent few decades that we’ve truly gained almost complete mastery over it.…
Mysterious sounds trigger something primitive in our brains. They take us right back to our hunter-gatherer days, when deciphering a weird ‘bloop’ in the jungle might have helped us survive (as it may be a new type of predator). While that’s hardly the case anymore, that part of the brain still works the same way.…
War is hell, though most of us have an immensely inaccurate idea of exactly what kind of hell it is. While it was a fairly simple affair for most of our history – two sides with dedicated soldiers facing each other at a specific spot, and returning home with a decisive result either way -…
The role of happiness and prosperity has been well documented in our history. Misery, however, only shows up in the records as an anomaly, even if it’s still quite widespread across the world. While there’s no doubt that there are still many countries living in the most peaceful times of their history, there still seems…
Scientifically speaking, coincidences aren’t that peculiar, as we live in a world full of so many random occurrences. They seem weird because our brains are wired to spot patterns to predict future outcomes – in space as well as time – even if those patterns don’t actually exist. As an example, in the early days,…
Our mental image of world geography is derived from many subjective factors, like where we grow up and our political beliefs. Still, that image turns out to be very similar for most of us, as modern maps are largely uniform around the world. That’s also exactly why it’s almost always wrong, as the maps we…
One way to get a better job than the one you’re doing right now is adding more skills to your overall portfolio, gradually climbing up the ladder and raising your value in your respective field. While that would surely get you to a better, higher-paying position, it’d take a while. For those without time or…
If you’ve spent enough time around the Internet, you’d know that there are a lot of weird types of food items available around the world, from insects to stink-meats to horse testicles. Of course, it’s wrong to just paint them all as ‘weird’, as different cultures have different factors driving their cuisine, including topography. Still,…
War is – more often than that – a numbers game. Unless something unlikely happens, it’s usually the side with the numerical advantage that goes home with the victory, which has been especially true in history. Many modern weapons – like nukes – can easily make brute force obsolete, though that wasn’t the case for…
When we talk about the mighty empires of history, we usually think of the more influential ones, such as the Chinese, British, or even the Mongol empires. The Russian empire, though, is often left out of those conversations, despite being one of the largest and longest-running empires in history. Now, the reason for that could…
The reason urban legends work so well isn’t because they’re scary, but because they’ve happened to someone you know. It’s not a fictional story in a book anymore, but a shared tale of a community or locality, giving them more credence than any ghost story we can ever come up with. Even if most of…
If you spend your fair share of the day on the Internet, you’ll have heard of quite a few conspiracy theories. From the CIA’s alleged research into mind control to the fierce online disagreement over Earth’s real shape, most of them don’t come across as mind-blowing, or even surprising. By now, almost all of the…