The Bradford Sweets Poisoning of 1858

Sep 7, 2022

William Hardaker ran a sweet shop in Green Market in Bradford, England. His most popular confectionary was the humbug, a hard boiled sweet m...

The Texas Horned Lizard That Was Entombed for 31 Years

Sep 6, 2022

The Texas horned lizard is a hardy creature, but its hardiness might have been overestimated. The Native American legend holds that the rugg...

Frog Battery

Sep 1, 2022

The term ‘battery’ was first used by Benjamin Franklin in 1749 to describe an apparatus he had designed to produce electricity. Franklin lin...

London to Calcutta by Bus

Aug 30, 2022

For fifteen years from the late 1950s to the early 1970s, it was possible to hop on to a bus in London and travel all the way to Calcutta, I...

Hannah Beswick: The Manchester Mummy

Aug 26, 2022

Hannah Beswick had a morbid fear of being buried alive, and this dread was not entirely irrational. Her young brother John almost had his co...

The Dublin Whiskey Fire of 1875

Aug 23, 2022

On June 18, 1875, a fire broke out on Chamber Street in the Liberties neighborhood of Dublin, Ireland. The exact cause of the fire remains u...

Wilhelm Gustloff: The Deadliest Ship Disaster You Never Heard Of

Aug 22, 2022

The sinking of the British ocean liner Titanic in 1912, with over 1,500 fatalities, is probably the most famous shipwreck of all time, but n...

The Calutron Girls Who Helped Built The Atomic Bomb

Aug 17, 2022

The Manhattan project that developed and built the world’s first atomic weapon employed some 130,000 people, of which only a small number of...

How Australia Fought The Prickly Pear Infestation

Aug 16, 2022

Prickly pear is a common name that refers to a number of large cactus species of the Cactaceae family that is endemic to the Americas. The s...

Albino Redwood

Aug 11, 2022

Albinism is rare in humans and animals, and it is rarer still in plants, where it manifests as the complete lack of chlorophyll. Because thi...