The Sad Tale of The Dionne Quintuplets
Kaushik Patowary
Jan 16, 2020
Nobody could have known, not even Elzire Dionne, that she was going to give birth to quintuplets. Already a mother of five, the shock of giv...
Showing posts with the label Featured
The Shipwreck That Gave Birth to South Africa
Kaushik Patowary
Jan 15, 2020
On 16 January 1647, a fleet of three Dutch ships—the Nieuwe Haerlem, the Olifant and the Schiedam—left Batavia, which is now Jakarta, for th...
Mödlareuth: The German Village Divided by The Cold War
Kaushik Patowary
Jan 13, 2020
The village of Mödlareuth in south Germany, straddles the border between the two federal states of Bavaria and Thuringia. For more than 14...
The Radiological Incident in Lia, Georgia
Kaushik Patowary
Jan 10, 2020
On a cold December day in 2001, three men took their truck and drove 50 kilometers east from their village Lia in order to collect firewood....
Karl Patterson Schmidt: The Herpetologist Who Documented His Own Death For Science
Kaushik Patowary
Jan 9, 2020
Karl Patterson Schmidt was an eminent American herpetologist—one who studies amphibians and reptiles. He worked for the American Museum of N...
HMS Zubian: The Conjoined Ship
Kaushik Patowary
Jan 8, 2020
It is not unusual for navies to cannibalize ships decommissioned or rendered unserviceable by accidents for parts, but rarely an entire new ...
HMS Porcupine: The Warship That Became Two
Kaushik Patowary
Jan 8, 2020
In 1939, the British Royal Navy ordered Vickers-Armstrongs on the River Tyne to build a new P-class destroyer named HMS Porcupine . The ship...
Theremin: The Musical Instrument That You Can Play Without Touching
Kaushik Patowary
Jan 6, 2020
The theremin is probably the world's strangest and spookiest musical instrument ever made. It has no keys, no strings, just two metal ro...
Tron: Scotland’s Public Weighing Scales
Kaushik Patowary
Jan 3, 2020
The tron at Stenton, East Lothian, Scotland. Image credit: Studio Karel/Shutterstock.com This is the village of Stenton, in East Lothian...
The Meteorite That Changed The Course of Christianity
Kaushik Patowary
Jan 2, 2020
For more than two centuries, Christianity suffered under the Roman Empire. Christians were arrested, tortured, mutilated, burned, and starve...
Corona Spy Satellite: The Humble Beginning of Satellite Espionage
Kaushik Patowary
Dec 27, 2019
There is not a square-inch of earth that has not been photographed and mapped by satellites today. These spying eyes, flying hundreds of mil...
Creepy Victorian Christmas Cards
Kaushik Patowary
Dec 24, 2019
Victorian Christmas cards were a mixed bag of iconography, ranging from religious to everyday things. But one theme common in these season...
The Australian Floating Hotel That Ended Up in North Korea
Kaushik Patowary
Dec 24, 2019
For little more than a year in the late 1980s, a seven-story five-star hotel floated over John Brewer Reef, about 70 km off the coast of Tow...
The Termite Mounds of Okavango Delta
Kaushik Patowary
Dec 23, 2019
The Okavango Delta is a place like nowhere else on earth. It’s a vast swampy inland delta where a river disappears instead of emptying into ...
Villa Girasole: The House That Rotates
Kaushik Patowary
Dec 21, 2019
In the hills of northern Italy near Verona stands an L-shaped house called Villa Girasole, which means “sunflower” in Italian. And just li...
Fata Morgana Mirage
Kaushik Patowary
Dec 19, 2019
The atmosphere plays unusual tricks with light in the polar regions, especially at sea, creating strange shapes like a looming island, a flo...
Döllersheim: The Village That Hitler Destroyed to Crush a Rumor
Kaushik Patowary
Dec 18, 2019
About one hundred km northwest of Vienna, in northern Austria, lies a small village called Döllersheim. Eighty years ago, this tiny Austrian...
The Hellfire Club And Caves
Kaushik Patowary
Dec 12, 2019
Throughout history men have formed clandestine clubs where rich young aristocrats met and indulged in drunken orgies, gambling and carousing...
Khuk Khi Kai, The Chicken Poop Prison
Kaushik Patowary
Dec 7, 2019
Chicken poop has a strong and suffocating smell of ammonia that’s hard to stand for more than a few minutes. The odor causes a variety of ad...
Inuit Snow Goggles
Kaushik Patowary
Dec 5, 2019
This man, wearing a pair of strange goggles is not trying to make a fashion statement. He is just getting ready for a trek across the froze...
