The internet is full of articles and social media posts assuring you that a movie cannot be successful unless it makes at least twice its budget. You can find them all over the place. This has been written about since at least 2011. The idea that a movie needs to double its budget to be…
Author: Ian Fortey
On June 5, 2024, astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams left the Earth for the International Space Station. The mission had been delayed for seven long years thanks to various technical setbacks and other problems. The length of the mission was to be 8 days. Then something happened. The astronauts were using something called the…
A molecule is really just some atoms that are stuck together. Water, H2O, is a molecule. Next to a simple atom, it’s the most basic part of any chemical compound. It’s the small part of any substance you can make without breaking it into something that changes its entire composition. Most of us know the…
Do you believe in ghosts? A majority of Americans do. In a survey of 1,000 people, over 61% said they believed in ghosts. Earlier polls suggested fewer did, at around 41%. Years before that it was 42%. Even at its lowest, that’s still 136 million people. That’s a lot of folks believing in ghosts. The…
In 2004, then-President Bush was expected to announce a new space initiative. There would be a manned mission to Mars and our first moon base would be up and running by 2020. It was set to cost between $40 billion and $80 billion. More recent estimates suggest the cost would be around half a trillion…
Have you ever pondered what the most painful way to die might be? It’s a morbid curiosity that’s perfectly natural and most of us have wondered it at one time or another. It’s also probably very hard to answer that question for any number of reasons. There are all kinds of terrible ways to die,…
Having access to impossible information, divined from spirits or gods or the thoughts of another human, is a fairly old concept. The oracle of Zeus at Dodona could supposedly offer his priests insight into the god’s will through all manner of spiritual and esoteric means. For literally thousands of years we’ve had clairvoyance, mediums, spiritualists,…
Most everyone in the world today knows that radiation exposure is bad but we have little framework for what that means. We’ve seen images of people exposed to it, but most of us have never had to experience it firsthand. Can radiation exposure kill you? You bet. But how it damages your body is a…
It’s a good rule of thumb to avoid getting bit by a snake whenever possible. There are roughly 3,000 kinds of snakes worldwide, and up 10 to 15% of them are venomous. That may not seem like much, but these are venomous snakes, so it’s enough. Plus, those snakes account for about 138,000 fatalities every…
Nearly everything a person does has an intention behind it. Your words and your actions are done towards a goal. Sometimes it’s clumsy and awkward and you miss your mark, sometimes you nail it and succeed perfectly. It’s not just people, either. Businesses work the same way, stories, ideas, you name it. They all have…
Most everyone has heard of Bigfoot, even if you know him as Yeti, Skunk Ape, Sasquatch, Abominable Snowman, or a dozen others. Many cultures worldwide have legends of a large, man-like beast that lives in the wild and is remarkably cagey. Bigfoot, in the North American sense where his name is literally Bigfoot, only dates…
Back in the 1950s and ’60s school children had to do duck and cover drills in the classroom so they would know what to do in the event of a nuclear war. Apparently, all you had to do was hide under your desk. Lucky for us in the Modern Age there are so many more…
We live in a consumer world and we are spoiled for choice all the time, even if the prices of things are through the roof and we can’t actually buy everything we want. The fact remains that there is plenty of stuff in the world and there always has been. Where all that stuff comes…
In a horror movie about demon possessions, you’re going to want to know the name of the demon if you ever hope to get it out of somebody. Names have power. And the real world, your name can affect how people treat you. Employers are known to engage in discrimination against potential employees based solely…
When you hear the word “mummy” you likely think of Egypt. Those mummies are what you might call the traditional kind. They were mummified intentionally, the organs removed, the flesh wrapped, and they were stored away as per custom and ritual. There is another kind of mummy, however. Natural mummification occurs when temperature and humidity…
In the present, we often have a skewed view of the past. We look at events from our modern perspective and apply our modern opinions to them. It’s hard to put yourself in the mindset of a time and a place that you were never a part of. If we do try to consider the…
By now everyone is aware of cryptocurrency. Even though many people thought it was going to fail, people still mock crypto online all the time, the fact is it’s probably here to stay. To give some of those crypto people their due, a lot of people have made a lot of money off of it.…
Preconceived notions can often color the way we see the world. It’s easy to assume a thing is one way because it seems natural in our minds, and then we learn the truth and can be quite surprised. The easiest way to shake up your beliefs is to look at the cold, hard numbers. Some…
Some of the deepest mines in the world extend miles below the surface of the Earth. Deep, dark pits that stretch on into forever. The world is littered with them and we’ve used them to mine everything from salt to gold to obscure metals like tantalum and gallium. But every so often you’ll find a…
Ever since the proliferation of cameras, either security cameras or cell phone cameras, the world of policing has changed quite dramatically. Now that everyone is watching everyone else, the number of stories about police acting outside the law, being abusive, and generally being unpleasant has absolutely exploded. As much as the police are maligned in…
You won’t find a car more divisive than one made by Tesla these days. Elon Musk is a controversial figure and Tesla’s have a history of maybe not living up to all the hype for some of the drivers. That’s not to say that many drivers aren’t satisfied, because clearly Tesla is doing very well.…
Amazon didn’t get to be one of the biggest companies in the world by accident. They reported $576 billion in revenue for 2023. Clearly, the way they run their business is working out pretty well for them and it certainly looks like Jeff Bezos doesn’t have much to complain about. But, if you’re making that…
You don’t need to go to a desert island and find the x on a map to discover hidden treasure these days. As it happens, hundreds of homeowners and businesses are routinely discovering things hidden in their walls. Sometimes they’re treasures, and sometimes they are decidedly not. 10. The First Appearance of Superman In the…
Only two things in life are guaranteed: death and internet trolls. We’ll avoid the latter for now and focus on the former. We all get our tickets punched at some point and there are a thousand and one ways for it to happen. For the most part, everyone wants to go peacefully and painlessly but…