Amusing Planet

In California’s Imperial Valley—an expanse of desert where geothermal energy, agriculture, and quiet rural towns coexist—lies one of the mos...

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the United States conducted one of the most ambitious experiments in human undersea habitation: Project ...

Few rivers in human history have been so closely tied to a nation’s destiny as the Yellow River— Huang He , the “Mother of China.” Rising in...

In 1756, King Alaungpaya of Burma sent an extraordinary diplomatic letter to King George II of Great Britain and Hanover. The missive was en...

On a freezing January night in 1393, music and laughter filled the Hôtel Saint-Pol, a sprawling palace on the right bank of Paris. The Frenc...

The Earth is bombarded by thousands of micrometeorites every day, but only once in tens of millions of years does an asteroid large enough a...

In the Jewish quarter of Kraków in the 17th century lived a man named Yossele, who was both infamous and pitied. He was a miser, so the town...

In the slums of Victorian England, poverty was so pervasive that even sleep came with a price tag. Among the poorest of the poor, including ...

In March 1923, when British mountaineer George Leigh Mallory was touring the United States to raise money for an expedition to Mount Everest...

In the early years of the sixteenth century, in the small Swiss village of Siegershausen, a man named Jacob Nufer faced a situation of unima...