Amusing Planet

It appears that quite a few people have been killed or brought to justice for having failed to deliver on their promise of turning ordinary ...

In the first century BC, nearly two thousand years before the invention of the microscope, the Roman scholar Marcus Terentius Varro made a r...

For centuries, travellers to the southern tip of South America returned with astonishing stories. They spoke of a land swept by fierce winds...

In the early hours of April 27, 1865, a steamboat packed with nearly two thousand exhausted Union soldiers drifted northward on the Mississi...

One of Hong Kong’s most unusual sights is the stone wall tree—a mature tree growing directly out of a masonry retaining wall. These remarka...

Most wartime diaries are written on paper. Some are scribbled in notebooks or loose sheets and hidden beneath floorboards, or tucked inside ...

Nearly two centuries ago, a strange hill rose above the flat landscape of London's East End. It stood high enough to appear on maps, ser...

Nearly a century before the Vietnam War, the United States undertook one of its first military interventions in East Asia. It was not a full...

During the medieval period and early modern Japan, decapitation was a common method of execution for criminals and defeated enemy warriors. ...

Scattered across Florence, in the narrow streets, is a curious architectural feature that many visitors walk past without noticing. Set into...