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The Victorian Teenage Girl Who Entertained Crowds by Overpowering Men

In late 1883, a 15-year-old girl from Polk County, Georgia began a fast climb to national prominence through her exhibitions of a physical strength that appeared to be entirely out of proportion to her...

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India's Foremost Female Crematorium Manager Is Breaking a Lot of Taboos

In her first months at the Velankadu Gas Fire Burial Ground, a crematorium in Chennai, Praveena Solomon thought she could hear ghosts. There was once a sound of someone rushing about in the empty yard...

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The Man Who Used His Nose to Keep New York's Subways Safe

Leaky. Smelly. The Sniffer.These were all nicknames for one of the more unusual figures in New York City's history, James Kelly. For decades, “Smelly" Kelly walked the tracks using his seemingly...

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The Old Man Who Claimed to Be Billy the Kid

History tells us that the outlaw known as Billy the Kid (aka Henry McCarty, aka William Bonney) was gunned down—at the ripe old age of 21—by Sheriff Pat Garrett on July 14, 1881, in Fort Sumner, New...

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The Mysterious Carving at the Church Where JFK Got Married

When John Fitzgerald Kennedy married Jacqueline Bouvier at St. Mary's Church in Rhode Island in 1953, the building itself was already very old, and plenty historic. It was designed by Patrick Keeley,...

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Tyrannosaurs Might Have Enjoyed Making Out Before Sex

When we asked paleontologist Jack Horner why we never see dinosaurs have sex in the movies, his response was to the point: “Have you ever seen a bird having sex?”But now in part thanks to the discovery...

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Found: A Note Sent Into the Air by Balloon in 1987

One evening recently, Steve White was going out for an evening walk near his home in western Pennsylvania. He came across a scrap of laminated paper, dated May 1987. The note had a message from Brenda...

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Oregon Blows Up a Massive Boulder

The Oregon Department of Transportation and the Oregon landscape engaged in two high-stakes games of modified Rock, Paper, Scissors last night. In the first game, rock beat road:New BIG ROCK (12 feet...

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When Cyclists, Not Drivers, Led the Charge for Better Roads

In 1909, a section of Woodward Avenue in Detroit was paved, a one mile stretch that was not the first concrete pavement in the United States, but was by far the longest. The paving presaged the era of...

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What Remains of Asia's Traditional Sky Burial Sites

Excarnation, an ancient ritual of leaving corpses exposed to the elements, has long been believed to be a sacred method of interment. In this traditional practice, bodies are left outdoors atop towers...

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Get a Skewed View of the American West Through These Bent-Horizon Photos

When English theologian and retired schoolmaster Edwin Abbott Abbott wrote his eccentric, satirical novel Flatland in 1884, he created a world populated by flat shapes: squares, lines, circles and...

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Is This Montana Bear Carrying a Laptop?

In Terry Bisson’s classic 1990 science fiction short story, “Bears Discover Fire,” humans find that bears have come to use fire as a tool. These days, though, if a short video shot by a Montana man is...

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A Piece of a WWII 'Bouncing Bomb' Washed Up on an English Beach

The dams of Germany’s industrial Ruhr Valley made for obvious targets for the Allies during World War II. In addition to hydroelectric power, they provided water for manufacturing, canals, and...

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Humans Teamed Up to Rescue Elephants From a Large Hole

TY @thewcs Cambodia for working w/community to rescue 11Asian Elephants from mudhole in Keo Seima Wildlife Sanctuary. Avoided real tragedy! pic.twitter.com/j6QEB8seFy— John Calvelli (@JohnCalvelli)...

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Found: First Evidence in England of Burning Dead Bodies to Keep Them From...

Hundreds of years ago, in North Yorkshire, England, there was a small village called Wharram Percy. There were two rows of houses, one shorter than the other, and church, with a churchyard, but they’ve...

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Chasing McDonald's Pizza, Deep Into Ohio

Brian Thompson's new podcast starts straightforwardly enough. "Welcome to Whatever Happened to Pizza at McDonald's?," he intones at the beginning of the first episode, "a podcast where I ask the...

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The 15th-Century Monk Who Crowdsourced a Map of the World

If you had landed in Venice during the mid-15th century, you might have been accosted by a monk with a prominent nose and baggy, smurf-like hat. Ignoring your exhaustion and atrocious body odor after a...

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The Svalbard Seed Vault Just Got a New Vault Neighbor

The Arctic's Svalbard Global Seed Vault, last seen in these parts getting some seeds back from Syria, just got a new neighbor: a doomsday data vault, designed to secure information, like seeds, in case...

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Victorian 'Coffin Torpedoes' Blasted Would-Be Body Snatchers

On the night of January 17, 1881, a would-be body snatcher by the name of Dipper was killed by a blast in a Mount Vernon, Ohio cemetery. The attempted grave-robbery was a three-man operation, according...

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A Squid-on-Squid Ambush

If you, like many people, have a fear of the open ocean and the many, many alien creatures it contains, prepare to be validated in the video above, which shows one squid's attempt to feed before...

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