Space Walk
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In 1980, Lake Peigneur in Louisiana did something lakes are absolutely not supposed to do: it started disappearing. A Texaco drilling crew was working on the shallow freshwater lake when the drill accidentally…
Venus breaks the rules of planetary timekeeping. One full spin on its axis takes about 243 Earth days. But one trip around the Sun takes only about 225 Earth days. That means Venus’s rotation day is longer…
Saturn is already dramatic with its rings, but its north pole has something even stranger: a massive six-sided storm pattern. NASA’s Voyager spacecraft first spotted the feature in the 1980s, and the Cassini…
About 64 light-years from Earth, there’s a giant exoplanet called HD 189733 b that looks like a calm, beautiful blue marble from far away. Up close, it is anything but peaceful. This world is a “hot Jupiter,”…
In 2011, police in Farmington, Connecticut got one of the least strategic 911 calls imaginable. A man reportedly called emergency dispatch to ask how much trouble he could get in for growing one marijuana…
A bright yellow slime mold called Physarum polycephalum can do something that sounds impossible: it can solve mazes without having a brain, nerves, or even a single neuron. In lab experiments, researchers…
Sharks are older than trees: they’ve been cruising Earth’s oceans for about 400 million years, while true trees appeared tens of millions of years later. They were ancient before forests existed.
In 1671, an Irish adventurer named Thomas Blood pulled off one of the boldest almost-robberies in British history: he tried to steal the Crown Jewels from the Tower of London. Blood disguised himself as a…
In 1962, a school in what is now Tanzania had a problem administrators definitely did not cover in teacher training: uncontrollable laughter. It reportedly began with a few girls at a mission-run boarding…
In 897, Rome witnessed one of the strangest courtroom scenes in history: a dead pope was dug up, dressed in papal robes, and put on trial. The defendant was Pope Formosus, who had been dead for months. His…
Titan is the only world beyond Earth known to have stable bodies of liquid on its surface. Its lakes and seas are methane and ethane, not water, chilled to about -179°C. Beach day, but make it alien.
Australia once sent soldiers with machine guns after emus; and the birds mostly won. In 1932, the army tried to cull crop raiding emus in Western Australia, but the fast, scattered birds turned it into a…
Scotland’s national animal is the unicorn. It’s been in Scottish heraldry for centuries, often shown chained because medieval lore said it was dangerously untamable, basically a government-approved chaos pony.
Pringles can designer Fredric Baur was buried with some of his ashes inside a Pringles can. His family honored his request in 2008, choosing the original-flavor can on the way to the funeral home. Once you…
Wombats are the only known animals that poop cubes, thanks to stretchy, uneven intestines that mold the poop as it dries. Basically, nature invented a furry brick factory.
In 2009, Spanish police at Barcelona’s airport stopped a man arriving from Chile with what looked like a normal plaster cast on his leg. It was not normal. Authorities said the cast itself had been molded with…
In 1985, U.S. Marshals pulled off one of the strangest “prize giveaways” in crime history. They created a fake company called Flagship International Sports Television and mailed invitations to wanted fugitives…
In 1945, a Colorado farmer named Lloyd Olsen was preparing a chicken for dinner when something deeply weird happened: the bird did not die. The chicken, later nicknamed Mike, had lost most of its head, but the…
In 1995, a Pittsburgh man named McArthur Wheeler robbed two banks in broad daylight with no mask, no clever disguise, and one deeply flawed science experiment on his face. According to reports, Wheeler had…
Some wood frogs spend winter doing something that sounds like a failed magic trick: they freeze, stop breathing, stop pumping blood, and then come back when the weather warms up. As temperatures drop, ice can…
In 1972, workers testing uranium from a mine in Oklo, Gabon noticed something that looked impossible: the uranium had less uranium-235 than it should. That “missing” isotope was the clue. Scientists eventually…
In 1814, London was hit by one of history’s strangest industrial disasters: a flood of beer. At the Horse Shoe Brewery near St. Giles, a huge wooden vat filled with porter suddenly burst. The rupture triggered…
In 1876, a farm in Bath County, Kentucky became the site of one of America’s weirdest weather reports: pieces of raw meat-like material appeared to fall from the sky. The incident became known as the Kentucky…
In 2011, police in western Pennsylvania got the kind of report that sounds like a prank: an entire bridge had vanished. The missing structure was a steel bridge on private property in North Beaver Township,…