Amusing Planet

Every spring, just before the arrival of the better-known Qingming Festival, parts of China once observed a strange and austere tradition wh...

In fiction as well as in real life, counterfeiters have always been portrayed as master forgers and artists who reproduced banknotes with as...

In the spring of 1006, people across Asia and Europe looked up into the night sky and saw something astonishing: a brilliant new star blazin...

On 6 December 1917, in the harbour of Halifax, in Nova Scotia, Canada, two ships collided. One of them was a munitions ship loaded with expl...

During the American Civil War, naval warfare underwent rapid transformation. The famous ironclads such as the USS Monitor and CSS Virginia ...

In the year 1692, an 86-year-old man who lived in the town of Mālpils in Latvia stood before a judge and calmly proclaimed that he was a wer...

Many medical therapies, from cancer treatments to the management of infertility, are now so routine that their origins are easily overlooked...

In the mid-17th century, the French colony of New France faced a crisis that threatened its very survival. Despite fertile land and a steady...

During the years the Berlin Wall stood, roughly 5,000 people managed to escape across it into West Berlin. Before the wall was constructed, ...

In the early 1960s, a Soviet mathematician and cyberneticist named Viktor Glushkov floated a remarkable idea. He proposed that the Soviet Un...