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Every story in the Unbubly reading feed.

• Too much salt? Just cancel it with sugar.A poster recalls hearing their mother worry that a simmered dish was too salty. As a child, they thought addi…
• Soldiers. Machine guns. And emus.Crop damage in Western Australia prompted a military operation against emus. Armed soldiers struggled to cont…
• Different towns, different times. One railway timetable.Britain’s Great Western Railway introduced a common railway time in 1840 to reduce confusion from differing l…
• Tekitō: suitable… or careless?The Japanese word 適当 (tekitō) can describe something fitting or appropriate. It can also mean rough or carele…
• On the map. Not in the sea.Phantom islands appeared in charts or reports but were later found not to exist. Misidentification and errors…
• One building. One company.A poster recalls assuming that a company occupied a whole building. Sharing one office block with several com…
• Life on the Moon. According to a hoax.New York’s The Sun published a series claiming discoveries of lunar life and civilization. The reported obser…
• The calendar needed a better leap-year rule.Introduced in 1582, the Gregorian calendar adjusted leap years to keep calendar dates closer to the seasons.…
• Let’s table it. Discuss it—or set it aside?In British parliamentary usage, tabling puts a proposal forward for consideration. In American usage it suspe…
• Learn a word yesterday. See it everywhere today.Frequency illusion is the sense that something newly noticed is suddenly appearing often. Selective attention…
• She raced a fictional round-the-world traveller.Journalist Nellie Bly travelled around the world in 72 days, inspired by the journey in Jules Verne’s novel.
• One address. A flood of unwanted deliveries.In London in 1810, Theodore Hook sent letters ordering goods and services to a single house, drawing tradespe…
• The boundary between one date and the next.The International Date Line crosses the Pacific near 180 degrees longitude, bending around territories and is…
• One word, opposite meanings.A contronym has opposing senses. English clip can refer to attaching something or cutting something off.
• The next round uses a different kind of defence.Chess boxing alternates rounds of chess and boxing. The same contest asks competitors to handle both the boar…
• Alone on an Arctic island. Then rescue.Ada Blackjack joined an expedition to Wrangel Island. After the other members left or died, she remained on t…
• Spaghetti grew on trees. For one BBC broadcast.On April Fools’ Day in 1957, the BBC showed a supposed Swiss spaghetti harvest. Some viewers asked how to gro…
• A prize for knowing where your ship was.Britain’s Longitude Act of 1714 offered rewards for a practical way to determine longitude at sea.
• A misheard phrase that almost makes sense.An eggcorn replaces a word or phrase with a similar-sounding expression that seems plausible in context.
• All that adventure. To iron a shirt.Extreme ironing takes an ironing board to unusual or challenging locations and combines an outdoor adventure…
• He asked to be left ashore. The wait lasted years.Alexander Selkirk was marooned on an uninhabited Pacific island, initially at his own request. His isolation…
• A giant in the ground. A hoax in the making.The Cardiff Giant, unearthed in New York in 1869, was promoted as a petrified man. It was a manufactured arch…
• The world’s industry became an exhibition.The Great Exhibition opened in London’s Hyde Park in 1851, displaying products and technology from many place…
• There is a name for those misheard lyrics.A mondegreen is a misheard phrase given a new meaning, often in a song or poem. Listeners substitute familiar…
• An obstacle race, with another person on board.Wife-carrying is a sport associated with Finland in which a competitor carries a partner through an obstacle…
• Titanic was not her only ship disaster.Stewardess and nurse Violet Jessop survived the sinkings of Titanic and Britannic. She had also been aboard O…
• A human ancestor— until the fraud was exposed.Piltdown Man was announced in 1912 as an early-human fossil. Although doubts appeared early, the fraud was no…
• Under the city, a different kind of river.London developed its modern sewer network in the nineteenth century, confronting the waste problem behind the…
• That smell when rain meets dry ground.Petrichor names the earthy smell associated with rain on dry soil or rock. Australian researchers introduced…
• A cheese rolls downhill. People follow.At Cooper’s Hill in England, competitors race down a steep slope after a wheel of cheese. Falls and injuries…
• A teenager survived a crash and the rainforest.Juliane Koepcke survived an airliner crash in Peru in 1971 and made her way through the rainforest to help. S…
• Fairy photographs persuaded Sherlock Holmes’s creator.Arthur Conan Doyle embraced the Cottingley fairy photographs as evidence of supernatural phenomena. The pictu…
• A newspaper for a penny.Cheap mass-produced newspapers spread in the United States from the 1830s. Steam-powered printing helped make…
• Bought it. Stacked it. There is a word for that.Tsundoku is the Japanese term for acquiring reading material and letting it accumulate unread.
• A snorkel trip without the tropical sea.Bog snorkelling races competitors through a water-filled trench in a Welsh peat bog. Flippers are used, while…
• Around the world, collecting plants.Jeanne Baret was an eighteenth-century botanist and explorer. Her travels, including Bougainville’s expeditio…
• Three days across the Atlantic. A newspaper hoax by Poe.In 1844, a New York newspaper printed Edgar Allan Poe’s account of a three-day balloon crossing as fact. The…
• Before electronic mail, mail moved through air tubes.Pneumatic systems send carriers through pipes using air pressure. They transported papers and money, and stil…
• Sunlight through leaves, in a single word.Japanese komorebi refers to sunlight filtering through a tree’s branches or leaves.
• A festival float that makes visitors look twice.Kawasaki’s Kanamara Matsuri is known for phallic portable shrines. Behind their striking appearance are tradi…
• Japan in 1878, through a traveller’s eyes.British traveller Isabella Bird recorded her journey through Japan in 1878. Her account describes roads, lodg…
• A city’s dancing outbreak. An explanation still debated.Accounts describe prolonged dancing in Strasbourg in 1518. Several explanations have been proposed, and claim…
• A railway built for the journey to a cemetery.Opened in 1854, the London Necropolis Railway carried bodies and mourners to Brookwood Cemetery outside Londo…
• Cleave can split. Cleave can cling.English cleave can mean to split apart or to adhere firmly. The senses come from different historical roots.
• At this event, a crying baby is part of the plan.Japanese crying-baby sumo festivals connect a baby’s cries with wishes for healthy growth. Babies are held by…
• The coast held an older ocean.Mary Anning collected and sold fossils from the cliffs at Lyme Regis. Her discoveries of ancient marine life…
• One pig. An international confrontation.The shooting of a pig helped trigger a confrontation between the United States and Britain in the disputed Sa…
• A coffin designed to call for help.Safety coffins incorporated devices intended to signal that a buried person was still alive. They reflected f…
• Once outstanding. Now outrageously bad.Egregious commonly describes something conspicuously bad in modern English. Older usage could mean outstandin…
• A nativity scene, with someone answering nature’s call.Catalan and some neighbouring nativity traditions include a caganer: a small figure depicted defecating. Sacr…
• A dishwasher before the electric kitchen.Josephine Cochrane invented and manufactured a successful hand-powered dishwasher in the nineteenth century.
• The summer when a river’s smell became a political crisis.London’s Great Stink of 1858 made sewage pollution in the Thames impossible to ignore. It helped spur major s…
• A changing room that rolled into the sea.Bathing machines were wheeled cabins used to change clothes and enter the water with privacy at the seaside.
• A jellyfish that can return to an earlier life stage.Turritopsis dohrnii can revert from the mature jellyfish stage to a polyp stage. That does not make it immune…
• Pay for two coffees. Drink one.The Neapolitan caffè sospeso tradition leaves a prepaid coffee for someone who needs it later. The giver does…
• A film star with a second kind of invention.Hedy Lamarr was both an actress and an inventor. During World War II, she co-invented a radio-guidance system.
• A beer flood. A real industrial disaster.In 1814, a brewery vat failure released a huge volume of beer into a London neighbourhood, killing residents.
• An automatic chess player. With a person inside.The Mechanical Turk, first exhibited in 1770, appeared to play chess by itself. A hidden human player actuall…
• A beetle with a hot chemical defence.Bombardier beetles can eject a hot, irritating chemical spray when disturbed.
• A finished book gets another journey.BookCrossing lets readers register books and pass them on or leave them for others to find. Their travels can…
• To learn to fly, she crossed an ocean.Bessie Coleman trained in France and earned her international pilot’s licence in 1921 after facing racial and…
• The flood was made of molasses.A storage tank burst in Boston in 1919, sending molasses through the streets and causing deaths and injuries.
• An aircraft carrier made from ice.Project Habakkuk explored an ice-based aircraft carrier during World War II, including the use of wood-pulp-r…
• That gap may be small. The octopus is flexible.An octopus can radically change its soft body’s shape and squeeze through narrow spaces.
• Your ordinary street may hide a treasure hunt.Geocaching uses coordinates to guide players to hidden containers. Finders usually record their visit and put…
• Bicycle parts, scrap and a working wind turbine.William Kamkwamba built a wind turbine in Malawi using timber, bicycle parts and materials from a scrapyard.…
• A laughter outbreak closed schools.An outbreak of laughter and other symptoms spread among students in Tanganyika in 1962. It disrupted schoolin…
• Secret documents intended to be discovered.Operation Mincemeat was a British deception in 1943. Documents planted on a body were used to mislead the ene…
• Mantis shrimp come with different weapons.Some mantis shrimp strike with club-like appendages; others impale prey with spear-like structures.
• The treasure is a stamp in your notebook.Letterboxing follows clues to hidden boxes. Participants often stamp their own notebook with the box’s rubber…
• He carved a shortcut through a hill.Dashrath Manjhi cut a path through a rocky ridge in India using a hammer and chisel. The work is reported to…
• The defendant was a deceased pope.In Rome in 897, the corpse of Pope Formosus was put on trial in what became known as the Cadaver Synod, amid…
• A giant liner found work laying undersea cable.The nineteenth-century Great Eastern was an exceptionally large steamship. It later helped lay transatlantic…
• Wombat droppings have corners.Wombats produce cube-like faeces. Researchers have studied how differences in intestinal properties help form…
• Money that will not fit in a wallet.Yap’s rai stones include large stone discs with a hole through the centre. Some are far removed from the pock…
• A postman’s palace, 33 years in the making.French mail carrier Ferdinand Cheval spent 33 years building the Palais idéal in Hauterives, an extraordinary…
• A war named for a bucket. Not simply caused by one.The 1325 conflict between Bologna and Modena is remembered as the War of the Bucket. Long-running political r…
• The shipping revolution started with a standard box.Containerization lets the same standardized container transfer between ships, trains and trucks without repea…
• Growing up without the usual makeover.The axolotl reaches maturity while retaining external gills and an aquatic lifestyle, a form of neoteny.
• A record made of cords and knots.Andean quipus recorded information with cords and knots. Used in Inca administration and other contexts, they…
• A round-the-world voyage. A crew of one.Joshua Slocum became the first person to sail around the world single-handedly. He later described the journe…
• A tree-cutting operation backed by military force.After American officers were killed in the Korean Joint Security Area in 1976, Operation Paul Bunyan removed…
• Ancient gears from a shipwreck.The Antikythera mechanism used gears to model astronomical cycles. Surviving fragments from a Greek shipwreck…
• A plant trap waits for another signal.A Venus flytrap typically closes after repeated stimulation of its trigger hairs within a short interval.
• A conversation carried by whistling.Whistled languages encode features of spoken language in whistles. Some are used to communicate across distan…
• A meteorite struck her inside her home.In Alabama in 1954, a meteorite fragment entered a house and struck Ann Hodges. She was injured but survived.
• A moving-picture pioneer vanished during a journey.Louis Le Prince, known for early motion-picture work, disappeared in France in 1890. His fate has not been co…
• When tulip contracts became a speculation story.Some tulip-bulb contract prices surged and fell in the seventeenth-century Netherlands. The scale of the wide…
• Many ragged strips. Usually just two leaves.Welwitschia typically grows two persistent leaves throughout its life. As they split and fray, they can look…
• A roll of snow, with no person behind it.Snow rollers form naturally when conditions allow wind or other forces to roll snow into cylindrical shapes.…
• The warning said attack. He judged it a false alarm.In 1983, Soviet early-warning equipment reported American missile launches. Officer Stanislav Petrov judged t…
• Someone broke into the television signal.In Chicago in 1987, broadcast signals were hijacked to show a person wearing a Max Headroom mask.
• Messages travelled without wires.Optical telegraphs relayed coded positions of arms or other signals from tower to tower over long distances.
• It looks mould-like. It is not ordinary fungus.Slime moulds were once grouped with fungi, but are now placed in different lineages. Similar appearances need…
• A pile of stones can carry a message.Arctic inuksuit are stone structures that can mark routes or places and serve other purposes. They do not all…
• Around the world, without stopping or a crew.British sailor Ellen MacArthur set a new record for the fastest solo non-stop circumnavigation in 2005.
• A solar storm disrupted the telegraph age.The powerful geomagnetic storm of 1859 affected telegraph systems and produced auroras at unusually low latit…
• A Roman object without an agreed purpose.Small Roman dodecahedra with holes and knobs have been found across former imperial territory. Their intended…
• Not reflected light. Light made by life.Bioluminescence produces light through chemical reactions in living organisms, from marine animals to some fu…
• A repair that leaves the break visible.Kintsugi repairs ceramics with lacquer and finishes joins with metallic powder. The damaged areas become visi…
• “I can pitch a 24-person tent by myself.”A former soldier in South Korea made the claim online. People doubted him, so an event was arranged to put it…
• The city took most of his lot. He built anyway.After a Vancouver street widening left Chang Toy a strip of land roughly 1.8 metres deep, he bet he could sti…
• A city's first public cinema. Gone within a month.In 1904, a cinema opened behind an antique shop in Tehran. It showed comedies and newsreels, but a cleric ban…
• An octopus escaped. The drain led to the sea.Inky left his aquarium tank in New Zealand, crossed the floor and entered a drain pipe connected to the ocean…
• A little luck, baked into a waffle.Lukken are thin waffles from West Flanders. Their name comes from the Dutch word for luck. Children tradition…
• A goose, a swan, and their unusual family.Thomas the goose lived alongside Henry, a male black swan, for years in New Zealand. When a female swan joine…
• Bread. Stapled. To trees. That's the entire community.An online community collects photos of bread stapled to trees. Its core rules require actual bread, actual st…
• Didn't like those chapters? Glue the pages shut.An eighteenth-century reader objected to parts of Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey. They glued pages t…
• Fried eggplant. Then chocolate.Along Italy's Amalfi Coast, a dessert layers fried eggplant with chocolate. Some versions add nuts or candied…
• The coin-shaped bread got the central bank's attention.South Korea's 10 won bread is a cheese-filled snack shaped like a coin. The Bank of Korea once asked sellers…
• The Marine Corps dog was demoted.Chesty VI, a bulldog mascot of the U.S. Marines, tore up a military punching bag and disobeyed an order to st…
• Dog food stolen: 23 short tons.Over several months in 1977, bags of dog food vanished from a California feed store. The losses added up to a…
• Swear never to forgive him. Who was he again?Henry Symeonis was implicated in the killing of an Oxford scholar in the thirteenth century. The university k…
• White chocolate on a vitamin product.According to Nestlé, before 1936 it worked with pharmaceutical company Roche on a coating for a vitamin produ…
• Nekomata Station has a cat assistant.At Japan's Nekomata Station, the name includes the word for cat. After the station opened to general passenge…
• An elephant dropped a log on the electric fence.At Auckland Zoo in 2004, Burma disabled an electric fence with a log, broke through an outer gate and wandere…
• A journalist was bitten by a man dressed as Santa.In 1931, a disgruntled man in a Santa Claus costume appeared at a Canadian newspaper. An editor asked the lar…
• A bullet train skipped Nagoya.A Nozomi service launched in 1992 passed through Nagoya and Kyoto without stopping on its way to Osaka. The d…
• A skull can mean “that's hilarious.”In English-speaking online culture, the skull emoji can stand for “I'm dead”—short for dying of laughter. Som…
• From “load a gun” to “invite to a birthday.”In Wangerooge Frisian, onlidder once meant “to load,” as with a ship or gun. Contact with German appears to h…
• A cactus in a coffee can became a 44-year mystery.A cactus found in a coffee can on a Mexican hotel windowsill was documented in 1952. The plant died, and its…
• A fairground stand makes about a million cookies a day.At the Minnesota State Fair, Sweet Martha's Cookies has capacity for 44,000 cookies every 12 minutes. Its ave…
• A million tulips. Replaced after a month.The Netherlands donated a million tulip bulbs for the 1939 New York World's Fair. About a month after opening…
• An amphipod can reach 34 centimeters.Most amphipods are small crustaceans. The deep-sea Alicella gigantea, however, has been recorded at up to abo…
• The stationmaster is a rescued cat.Mikan, a cat taken in at a Kaohsiung Metro station in Taiwan, was named stationmaster in 2020. The cat became…
• People kept falling ill at a TV-license hearing.During a 1950s U.S. hearing over a TV license, an engineer collapsed on the stand, another bidder had food po…
• Cat fever got its own economic buzzword.In Japan, spending on cat goods, cafés, and cat-related tourism has been dubbed “nekonomics,” a play on “Aben…
• Cranberries vanished from the president's table.In 1959, an herbicide was detected in some U.S. cranberry shipments shortly before Thanksgiving, triggering a…
• That national flag includes a modern rifle.Mozambique's flag depicts an AK-47 along with a book, hoe, and star. It is regarded as the only national flag…
• One country once drank more tea than Britain.New Zealand once consumed more tea per person than Britain. Around the 1980s, coffee began overtaking tea the…
• They looked for tractor keys and found ancient coins.In 2023, two detectorists searched Dutch fields for a farmer's lost tractor key. In a neighboring field they…
• The Forbidden City has feline guards.Roughly 150 to 200 cats live in Beijing's Forbidden City. Museum staff manage their health and numbers, while…
• He disliked sprinklers, so the tower had none.Frank Lloyd Wright's research tower opened without a sprinkler system because he disliked its appearance. Fac…
• Only 43 inches, but about 200 kilograms.Sony's PVM-4300, released in 1989, had a 43-inch screen and is regarded as the largest CRT monitor ever made.…
• An apple-cat mascot plays metal drums.Nyango Star, a mascot from Kuroishi in Japan's Aomori Prefecture, combines an apple and a cat. Its anonymous…
• An 11-year-old Prince was in a strike report.While revisiting footage of a 1970 Minneapolis teachers' strike, a TV station identified a child speaking in…
• Her skirt came off. It was planned.At Eurovision in 1985, the host's skirt appeared to snag and fall away. She then revealed another dress under…
• An ornate theater changed hands for $1.After New York's Valencia Theatre closed in 1977, its owner donated the building to a congregation for a nomi…
• How did they know it was an ancient toilet?At South Korea's Wanggung-ri site, researchers identified three ancient toilets. A high concentration of para…
• An organ console went to the wrong theater.A pipe-organ console intended for Loew's Jersey Theatre was first installed at the Paradise Theatre by mistak…
• The losing coach suited up and scored the winner.In a 1944 football game, coach Ed Storm came out of retirement mid-game. He intercepted a pass and eventually…
• A sports team's name drew a demand to change it.The Green Bay Packers were named for the meat-packing business that backed the early team. In 2000, PETA call…
• A flower thought lost was back in its old cave.A Colorado columbine variety had not been recorded in the wild since 1892 and was presumed extinct. In 2008,…
• One plant name honors three Catherines.The fossil species Prunus cathybrownae was named for three generations of Catherine Brown, all connected with…
• No hiragana allowed. Only kanji posts.Japan's joke social app Tsuita allows users to post only kanji characters. Without the usual Japanese syllaba…
• An emu kept knocking over the camera.At a Florida hobby farm, Emmanuel the emu repeatedly interrupted his caretaker's videos and pecked at the cam…
• The team is named for sausages. And long-range goals.Portland Bangers FC uses a name that points both to British sausages and to spectacular long-distance soccer…
• Five people spotted one comet in 30 minutes.On October 5, 1975, five Japanese observers independently discovered the same comet within half an hour. The…
• It gives birth to live young. Then it may eat them.The Central American fish Brachyrhaphis roseni gives birth to live young. In captivity, adults often prey on…
• A German cake became an internet in-joke.Black Forest gateau, the chocolate-and-cherry cake, appeared in the 2007 game Portal. Its role in the game he…
• He became a father around age 100.Henry, a New Zealand tuatara thought to have hatched around the turn of the twentieth century, became a fathe…
• A Game Boy accessory measured blood sugar.Glucoboy was a removable blood-glucose monitor for the Game Boy Advance. Designed for children with diabetes,…
• Some London railings were once stretchers.Metal medical stretchers made for the Second World War became surplus afterward. Some were repurposed as rail…
• There was a pet cemetery about 2,000 years ago.At Berenike in Egypt, a first- to second-century animal cemetery contains more than 580 cats, dogs and monkey…
• Sweden's first woman bus driver was called “Buss-Berta.”Berta Persson drove the Kappelshamn–Visby route from 1927 to 1934. As Sweden's first female bus driver, she e…
• A visiting cat became an official castle lord.After the 2018 floods in Japan, a friendly cat appeared at Bitchū Matsuyama Castle in Okayama. Adopted as the…
• A film about many children was named for a prolific bull.The Canadian comedy Starbuck follows a man confronted by numerous children from sperm donations. Its title co…
• A Game Boy went online through a mobile phone.Nintendo's Mobile Adapter GB connected the Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance to a cellular network. Launche…
• A church candlestick carries an Algerian city name.The small hand-held candlestick called a bugia once lit books for Catholic clergy. Its name comes from the La…
• Before the music venue, there was a hot-dog factory.Brooklyn music venue Baby's All Right opened in 2013 inside a former production facility of the historic hot-…
• He took over a hotel with a borrowed $20 fee.Wine entrepreneur Armand Ceritano took over a struggling Philadelphia hotel in 1976. The $20 filing fee was b…
• The developers shared their pirate game for free.When Pixel Piracy entered early access in 2013, its makers also released a free torrent. Their reasoning was…
• A missing park monument lay in the grass.After Seoul's Hanyang Park disappeared, its stone monument was moved around and lost from view. It was found…
• The crocodile in Crocodile Dundee was real.Burt, a saltwater crocodile captured in the wild, appeared in the 1986 film. He later lived at a Darwin sanct…
• He wrote their hit. He joined the band 30 years later.Jim Photoglo co-wrote “Fishin' in the Dark,” a hit for the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band in the 1980s. He joined the…
• The show debated a resignation two days after it happened.An American public TV station initially could not receive live network programs. Its manager recalled airing…
• It borrowed an airport's name. The airport was elsewhere.Two Japanese towns proposed merging as Minami-Centrair, referencing Chubu Centrair Airport. The airport was a…
• Was this jazz bar won in a card game?New York's 55 Bar began in 1919. One account says its founder acquired the property in a card game; that rema…
• Nintendo linked handhelds before the Game Boy.The 1983 Computer Mah-jong Yakuman could connect two handheld units with an optional cable for a head-to-head…
• A fictional toaster inventor reached a banknote list.Students invented the toaster pioneer Alan MacMasters in a Wikipedia hoax. The false story spread so far that…
• A dog visited Pompeii almost every day.Argo started visiting the Pompeii ruins as a puppy and learned their opening hours. He was often first in and…
• A satellite dish went into an empty swimming pool.In 1977, Arizona's KUAT-TV began building a satellite dish inside a vacant university swimming pool. The inst…
• A public toilet became a national heritage site.Built in 1905, Paris's Lavatory Madeleine is an unusually ornate Art Nouveau underground public toilet. It wa…
• The Queen's speech versus Snoop Dogg lyrics.In a book about Christmas and mathematics, Hannah Fry compared the vocabulary of the Queen's Christmas messag…
• Beavers, Mario games and Jackie Chan.The slapstick film Hundreds of Beavers drew ideas from Mario games as well as silent comedy. Its lead perform…
• Opera captions came from a film subtitler.After decades subtitling films, Sonya Friedman tried projecting translated words above the stage at a Canadia…
• This crab sometimes eats other crabs.The paddle crab hunts molluscs and crustaceans at night around New Zealand and nearby waters. It is also nota…
• Collected in 1909. Named as a species in 2013.Specimens of the Mongolian flower Aquilegia daingolica were collected in 1906 and 1909. Yet the species was n…
• One very old sentence is a wish against lice.A roughly 3,700-year-old Canaanite ivory comb bears a plea to remove lice from hair and beard. Its inscriptio…
• A Japanese song went viral abroad, then back home.Cinnamons and Evening Cinema released “Summertime” in 2017. It caught on in Southeast Asia in 2019, then spre…
• A cat-book illustrator lived with ten cats.Mary Chalmers wrote and illustrated children's books about cats. By 1967 she had ten cats and a Pomeranian at…
• For a free PC test, shoot down 13 ships.UserBenchmark used a 3D CAPTCHA minigame for free testing slots during busy periods. Users had to shoot down…
• A woman sings on screen. A man supplied her voice.In the 1931 Chinese sound film Sing-Song Girl Red Peony, the lead actress Hu Die's singing was overdubbed by…
• Only three mature trees may have been left.In 2018, Kew botanists thought that just three known mature Madagascar banana trees, Ensete perrieri, might r…
• The Odyssey, arranged like game levels.The album musical Epic retells Homer's Odyssey in nine sagas. Its creator drew on video-game structure: each…
• Her album cover misspelled her name.St. Louis singer Jeanne Trevor's 1965 album printed her name as “Jeannie.” The cover did not show her photogr…
• The movie selection was bad. The host made it the joke.Florida's first TV station, WTVJ, had only a meager selection of old films in its early years. Host Alec Gibs…
• An old tower was compared to bird droppings.A medieval tower once stood on the Acropolis in Athens. As opposition grew in the 19th century, a Greek archi…
• A lovebird with unusually long legs.Fossils of Agapornis longipes show wings similar in size to small living lovebirds, but leg bones comparable…
• A game for non-gamers helped shape visual novels.Koichi Nakamura wanted Otogirisō to appeal to people unfamiliar with games. Players read the story and choose…
• Real birds arrived. He stayed with a concrete one.Nigel was the only gannet living on New Zealand's Mana Island for much of his life. He nested beside a concre…
• Did the owners hide tables from their architect?A local paper reported a rumor that Fallingwater's owners hid tables Frank Lloyd Wright disliked whenever he…
• One of Europe's oldest legal disputes was about land.Around 1180 BCE, the Mycenaean priestess Eritha disputed the status of her land with a local community. Clay…
• This barnacle feeds when the current is strong.The rose barnacle catches plankton with feathery limbs. It extends them to feed only when the current is stro…
• A 3D Celeste game was made in one week.Celeste 64 was developed during a week-long game jam to mark the original game's sixth anniversary. Members o…
• Time bought Elvis photos. It printed the one with a dog.Photographer Alfred Wertheimer sold Time exclusive rights to his Elvis Presley work. The magazine used just o…
• To film an eclipse, roll the studio camera outside.WFRV-TV claimed to be the first station to show a live lunar eclipse in 1959. Its method was direct: wheel a…
• An early animated feature is now a lost film.Argentina's 1917 El Apóstol is widely regarded as the first animated feature film. The only known copy was de…
• A light touch can make a new cactus cutting.One subspecies of the Mexican thimble cactus readily sheds its offsets. A cactus grower described it breaking…
• Phone puzzles in the Imperial Palace gardens.QuizKnock collaborated with Japan's Imperial Household Agency on smartphone puzzles for the Imperial Palace E…