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What Happened To This Cult Leader's Lost Treasure?

The small town of Nanaimo, British Columbia, sits quietly on the edge of Vancouver Island, just a short ferry ride from the mainland. A trip to the local museum mostly shows off fun local events, like...

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Watch How to Properly Sneeze into a Handkerchief in 1940s England

It’s considerate to cover your mouth and nose when you feel a sneeze coming along, especially with the cold and flu season lurking around the corner. And that's been the case since at least 1945, when...

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Chap Records Were Basically Yelp for 1900s Eligible Bachelorettes

After a second date in 1908 with a suitor named Ray Smith, Carol Pardee, the privileged granddaughter of Oakland mayor Enoch Pardee, took out her notebook and, with careless spelling, wrote her opinion...

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The Haunting Street Art Adorning Havana’s Oldest Buildings

In Havana, Cuba, street art is relatively rare. The city is full of derelict, sometimes abandoned buildings that in other cities might have been used as canvases for graffiti, but tags or murals are...

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Bibliomania, the Dark Desire For Books That Infected Europe in the 1800s

Dr. Alois Pichler was almost always surrounded by books. In 1869, Pichler, originally from Bavaria, became the so-called “extraordinary librarian” of the Imperial Public Library in St. Petersburg,...

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Found: A Turtle That’s Basically a Dinosaur, Stuck in a Drain Pipe

 A photo posted by The Wildlife Center Of Texas (@wildlifecenteroftexas) on Nov 30, 2016 at 1:54pm PSTAlligator snapping turtles might be the most mesmerizing and simultaneously ugly creature on this...

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Ascending One of the World's Oldest, Tallest Trees for Science and the Views

By the time John Muir and his trusty mule Brownie splashed across the Marble Fork of the Kaweah River in the fall of 1875, the Scottish-born naturalist had already seen his fair share of California...

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See One Woman's Amazing Project to Save a Vanishing Native American Language

Marie's Dictionary from Go Project Films on Vimeo.As a direct result of colonization, many indigenous languages throughout the Americas have disappeared or are in danger of doing so. In the US alone,...

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Former Boy Scout Mails 500 Pieces Of Garbage To Boy Scout Bullies

Shigeta Miura really hated Boy Scouts. Now 40 years old, the Tokyo resident was bullied by his fellow troop members. But Miura has had his revenge—for over a year, he's been sending anonymous boxes to...

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Discover the Perfect Sundial Motto to Describe Your Mortality

Few things have inspired more poetry and flowery philosophizing than the passage of time. It’s no wonder that the sundial, one of our most ancient and widely used timekeepers, would be the perfect...

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The Hidden Signs That Mark Britain's Ghost Forests

It's always nice to come across a bluebell. With their dainty dangling heads and curved petals, they're a welcome pop up in gardens, brighten highway verges, and form purple carpets over otherwise...

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Listen to the Story of Tenzing Norgay, Who Stood on Top of the World

If asked to give an example of a great adventure, how many of us would immediately think of Everest? Without question, this tallest of mountains holds a special place in the explorer's psyche. For...

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Central Park Was Once Seneca Village, Home to a Thriving Free Black Community

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Young, Lost, and Hopeless? This Map Will Show You the Way to Happiness

It is a truth universally acknowledged (by adults) that youth is irrevocably lost and in need of guidance. Auguste-Jacques Lemiere-d’Ary, an 18th-century French writer and translator, was no exception...

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Found: A River Humans Started Polluting 7,000 Years Ago

In the Wadi Faynan region of southern Jordan, thousands of years ago, people were starting to play with metal. In this area, there’s one of the earliest documented centers of metal extraction in the...

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Something Called 'Trump Fish' Apparently Just Opened In Kurdistan

Since he began his campaign in 2015, President-Elect Donald Trump has drawn scrutiny for his many ties with international developers. In recent days, as his attempts at diplomacy begin, concerns have...

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The Unlikely Italian Roots and Curious Afterlives of Power Wheels

A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail.With Black Friday past us, this is about the time of year when gift lists start...

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Growing Up in a Library Is Exactly As Magical As You'd Imagine

For a certain type of bookish kid (or, let’s be honest, adult), living in the library sounds like a dream. But when the Clark family moved into the Washington Heights branch of the New York Public...

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One of the First Hollywood Heartthrobs Was a Smoldering Japanese Actor. What...

If you think about silent-film era sex symbols, you probably conjure up a mental picture of Rudolph Valentino—even if you don’t know his name. Valentino has become synonymous with sex appeal in early...

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Found: A Roman Tombstone Buried in the New York City Suburbs

Ancient Roman tombstone found buried in New York https://t.co/6B3U5gPKYXpic.twitter.com/mNCBkRVc1M— Fox5NY (@fox5ny) December 6, 2016While working on a new housing development in wealthy Westchester...

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