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A gymnastics coach saw too much height. A swim coach saw potential.Taiwan's Chang Wei-chia started gymnastics in fourth grade but left after her coach judged her too tall. That…
Jean shorts became 'jorts'. Punks, skaters and rappers all wore them.The word jorts, shortened from jean shorts, is recorded from the 1990s and is sometimes used to mock unfashio…
Ordinary soldiers stayed outside. Women with swords guarded the king.Ryukyuan envoys to Korea reported that fifteenth-century king Shō Taikyū had an all-female royal bodyguard ar…
✨ began on Japanese phones. Now it marks AI buttons.The sparkles emoji appeared on Japanese mobile phones in the late 1990s and entered Unicode in 2010. By the m…
It is not a film about dolls. Yet critics compared it with Barbie.The 2024 Chinese comedy-drama Her Story follows a single mother and her female neighbor. Its focus on women's…
She won a Broadway role. The theater shut after three rehearsal days.Elizabeth Teeter was cast as Lydia in Broadway's Beetlejuice in March 2020. After three days of rehearsals, t…
Desert land came cheap. Finding water did not.Frank Lloyd Wright bought Arizona desert land for his winter studio in 1937. It was cheap partly because grou…
Its planks were joined with pegs. And sewn along the seams.The Iron Age wreck known as Mazarrón I, found off Spain and identified in 1991, combines pegged mortise-and-t…
The hero already saved the world. What can the sequel threaten next?In series fiction, later installments may face pressure to raise the scale of dangers a hero must overcome. S…
The person behind the song left a message. It ended up on the debut single.US band Honey Revenge released its debut single Miss Me in 2021. Singer Devin Papadol had written it years ea…
Football stickers had failed to sell. He packed them four at a time.Italian entrepreneur Giuseppe Panini bought unsold football stickers in 1960 and began selling them in packs…
Who belongs in a book illustration? This publisher chose himself.Yu Xiangdou, a Chinese publisher active around the late Ming dynasty, liked placing portraits of himself in h…
After a space-center tour, he made an unscheduled supermarket stop.During a September 1989 US visit, Soviet politician Boris Yeltsin stopped at an ordinary Houston grocery stor…
It flowers, fruits and grows readily. That may be why snobs overlook it.Mammillaria prolifera is a familiar, easy-to-grow cactus that can bear flowers and fruit at once. It has intr…
They wanted greener music streaming. So fans danced in Seoul.Climate group Kpop4planet pressed music platforms to switch to renewable power. In February 2023 it held a da…
He was studying law. The next day he flew to New York to act.Dabney Coleman was struggling at law school when actor Zachary Scott, a friend of his wife, visited for about…
The paper helped make a newscast. Then worried it might report first.The Philadelphia Inquirer was linked to the 1990s program Inquirer News Tonight. Editors sometimes withheld i…
Making liquor was illegal. A monk helped farmers build stills.During US Prohibition, Benedictine brother Justus Trettel reportedly helped Minnesota farmers build stills to…
A fence is not the only way to protect land. Some places are entrusted to spirits.In Benin's La Bouche du Roy conservation area, some mangroves and waterways are treated as sacred places prot…
One artist, two unexpected canvases: a skateboard and a team shirt.Qatari calligrapher Fatma Al Sharshani received two Paris Saint-Germain commissions: a skateboard design in 2…
An otter escaped the zoo. Almost a month later, she was found on an island.Jin escaped Auckland Zoo in New Zealand in June 2006 by digging through walls and climbing a barrier. After s…
Want to resign but dread telling your boss? Japan has a service for that.Japanese resignation agencies tell employers that a client intends to quit. They have existed since the late…
A Trojan War tapestry set— made by Chinese artisans in Macau.In the 1620s, Ming Chinese embroiderers in Macau made seven hangings depicting the Trojan War. Despite the We…
The aquarium fish is called a black molly. Its family tree is not so simple.Black mollies are often described as a form of one species, but early breeders crossed several kinds of molly…
An opera singer needed tuition. A Kodak jingle helped pay it.American composer and soprano Susan Botti took commercial work on Kodak's 1988 Olympic 'True Colors' jingle t…
A publisher was 92. He still rode his bike to work.German publisher Hans Dieter Beck, who headed the legal side of C. H. Beck, usually cycled to work. His last…
ABC launched a national morning show. One local station kept its own.In Tulsa, Oklahoma, KTUL's John Chick Show was a popular live morning music program. After ABC launched Good…
In 1919, work for women was scarce. She found a job using her husband's name.After World War I, Maria Einsmann used her husband Josef's clothes and insurance card to find work in Germany…
LG's round face logo traces an idea to an old roof tile.A Silla-era roof tile found in Gyeongju, South Korea, bears a smiling face known as the Smile of Silla. LG sa…
He heard sounds while asleep. Then tried to rebuild them awake.Aphex Twin said lucid dreaming inspired his 1994 album Selected Ambient Works Volume II. He described waking…
Headaches led to brain surgery. The next season he returned to play.US college football player Chad Brinker developed severe headaches and blurred vision in 2001. Doctors found…
Staff learned their radio station was being sold. Its owner died that same day.Employees of WLOK in Lima, Ohio, were told on 30 July 1954 that their station was being sold. On the same day…
The king wanted a prince at his council. The prince was not his vassal.In 1109, King Baldwin I of Jerusalem called Frankish leaders to a council at Tripoli to settle their disputes…
Kagoshima's flag maps its shape. Its outlying islands are missing.Adopted in 1967, Kagoshima Prefecture's emblem and flag depict its two main peninsulas and Sakurajima volcano…
Her 1980s records were not hits. Decades later, listeners found them.Tomoko Aran released nine albums between 1981 and 1990, without major hits under her own name at the time. In…
He was not looking for new species. One flower still got his name.Colorado botanist Harold Harrington collected unusual plants and sent them to specialists rather than hunting…
A station replaced its news anchors. Viewers showed up to protest.Florida TV station WPEC fired Reg Miller and moved Laurel Sauer to weekends in 1988. Viewers responded with p…
Two stone columns stand at a mountain pass. They once belonged to a Roman sanctuary.Switzerland's Julier Pass saw traffic long before modern roads, including in Roman times. Two soapstone colum…
This wild herb is protected. People still gather it for food.Aromatic Thymbra spicata grows around the eastern Mediterranean and western Asia and can be used in zaatar sp…
The manga journey was fiction. Its travel times came from Google Maps.Manga creator Maki Marukido said in a 2022 interview that she checked travel times on Google Maps while writi…
To draw the neighborhood, the director reportedly spent a night there.The 1981 animated film Jarinko Chie is set in working-class Osaka. Director Isao Takahata reportedly stayed o…
An early Green Bay Packer also worked for the packing company.Wally Ladrow played for the Green Bay Packers from their founding season in 1919. He also worked for the Indi…
Tensions ran deep in colonial Java. A road project helped ignite war.The Java War of 1825–1830 pitted rebels led by Diponegoro against Dutch colonial forces. Succession disputes…
One Amman road follows a stream that was covered over.Seil Amman once ran for roughly six kilometres through Jordan's capital. With pollution, flooding and traffic…
The Wizard of Oz opened in 1939. Its original film soundtrack arrived in 1956.The soundtrack using recordings from the film came out in 1956, around the movie's television premiere. Other…
She could not pay for her final semester. She later earned an unprecedented law degree.Unable to afford her last semester at Howard, Mabel Dole Haden transferred to Virginia State College and comp…
A high-school radio station fell silent when its adviser went to Europe.California school station KAUG stopped broadcasting while its only qualified faculty adviser studied in Europ…
Beneath a giant tomb lay at least 30,000 stone vessels.Unrobbed galleries under Djoser's Step Pyramid held at least 30,000 stone vessels, weighing about 90 tonnes i…
A campus webcam began in 1994. Fans objected when it was set to close.Two students started FogCam at San Francisco State University in 1994. Guinness recognised it as a long-runni…
A bag meant to reduce waste became something people collect.Baggu launched reusable bags in the US in 2007. Limited designs and collaborations later attracted collectors…
A keeper said Hanako the elephant helped save his marriage. How?A keeper at Tokyo's Inokashira Park Zoo said Hanako seemed sensitive to people's moods. After arguments with…
The roof leaked. The architect reportedly said to move the chair.Frank Lloyd Wright designed Wingspread, a Wisconsin house completed in 1939. It later suffered leaks. Accordi…
A captive king agreed to cede nearly half his country. France refused.In 1359, during the Hundred Years' War, the captive French king John II signed the Second Treaty of London. I…
Some plant fossils still carry the colors they had millions of years ago.The Clarkia beds within the Latah Formation in the northwestern US formed about 16 million years ago. Excepti…
A Doctor Who story set at Partition changed even the closing theme.The 2018 episode Demons of the Punjab takes place around the 1947 Partition of India. Its score uses instrume…
He doubted a cerebral palsy football team. Joining it changed his mind.English footballer Jake Brown, who has cerebral palsy, grew up playing on mainstream teams. Invited to the En…
Emos and anti-emos clashed. A singing group helped end the fight.In March 2008, rival groups confronted each other at a Mexico City traffic circle. Police separated them, but…
Enemy ships approached, so Rome lashed its transports together.During the siege of Utica in today's Tunisia, Roman forces learned that a Carthaginian fleet was coming. They…
Nearby plants can look different, while faraway plants look alike.The succulent Petrosedum sediforme grows around the Mediterranean. In Spain's Sierra Nevada, plants growing s…
He had not dated anyone, so he listened to couples for a love song.Conan Gray said the idea for his 2021 song People Watching came from overhearing couples and wishing to share…
A longtime gravedigger turned memories of war into an album.Domingo Chalá spent much of his life as a gravedigger in Bojayá, Colombia, and buried victims of the 2002 mas…
Some shop managers did not know who owned their shopping mall.In 1997, several managers at Michigan's North Kent Mall told a local newspaper they did not know who owned th…
A 1323 regional agreement explicitly outlawed abducting brides.The Statutes of Upstalsboom, ratified among Frisian regions in 1323, covered public order, courts and currenc…
This rock hare had ten listed subspecies. Taxonomists now recognize none.Jameson's red rock hare lives across southern Africa. Ten subspecies were listed in 1971; by 2005 that had fa…
Commissioned for pineapple juice ads, O'Keeffe first painted a flower and papaya.In 1939 Georgia O'Keeffe made Hawaii paintings for Dole pineapple juice advertising. Her first submissions sh…
The performer took a different role at Christmas: Santa for children in hospital.Paraguayan drag artist Usha Didi Gunatita performed on stage and television, and offered shelter at home to L…
Vatican City had the world's highest murder rate in 1998. Its population explains why.Two people were murdered in Vatican City in a single 1998 incident. With so few residents, that produced the…
Paris seized a novel for immorality. The ban helped make it popular.Prévost's Manon Lescaut appeared in 1731 with unmarried lovers and a descent into crime. In 1733, copies for…
The same succulent can cover a green roof or go into a soup.Petrosedum forsterianum grows naturally in parts of Europe and North Africa. Its low mat of shoots can be use…
She cut up leggings for comfort. A WNBA style followed.In 2018, A'ja Wilson wanted to keep a sore leg warm but found full leggings restrictive. She cut a pair to co…
A clay scientist invented one of the early industrial nanomaterials.Hungarian-born mineralogist Barbara Neumann studied the structures of clays, then developed the synthetic cla…
He argued that his life sentence ended when he was revived. The court disagreed.Iowa prisoner Benjamin Schreiber was resuscitated after severe illness in 2015. He later argued that his life…
A government commissioned stained glass, then judged it too provocative to install.The Irish Free State commissioned Harry Clarke to create a window for a League of Nations building in Geneva.…
A fossil called T. rex was found. It was a beetle, not a dinosaur.A beetle preserved in Dominican amber was named Tyrannasorus rex in 2001, deliberately echoing Tyrannosaurus…
A jazz arrangement of a Kirby game tune won a Grammy.The US-based 8-Bit Big Band rearranges video game music for jazz orchestra. Its version of Meta Knight's Reve…
A nuclear-fission scientist and his wife sheltered a Jewish musician during the war.German chemist Fritz Strassmann helped discover nuclear fission. During World War II, he and his wife Maria h…
Thieves broke into a cave and took formations that took millennia to grow.In August 2020, vandals forced open the gate of Fitton Cave in Arkansas and stole or destroyed formations inc…
When the field was suppressed, a psychologist secretly wrote a vast manuscript.Chinese psychologist Pan Shu continued writing during the Cultural Revolution, when psychology research was r…
A salmon relative appears to have lived its whole life in fresh water.Eosalmo fossils from Eocene lake deposits in western North America include juveniles and adults. That pattern…
His name is Huwie. People still asked him to write his real name.Japanese singer and actor Huwie Ishizaki said people often doubted the unusual given name he wrote down and a…
A stage and TV actress has another role inside hospitals.Lebanese actress and singer Cynthya Karam also volunteers as a clown doctor. Her hospital work includes visit…
The building called Wall Street Plaza has a Pine Street address.New York's Wall Street Plaza stands in the Financial District but does not adjoin Wall Street. Its address is…
After rebellion damaged a Javanese town, it reappeared on the map as Bojonegoro.Rajekwesi was a base during Sasradilaga's 1827–1828 rebellion in Java. The rebel commander lost it in Februar…
US ketchup grading asks how far it flows in half a minute.A Bostwick consistometer measures the flow of tomato ketchup for US grades. At 20°C, grades A and B require i…
SpongeBob's creators wanted a theme loud enough to annoy sleeping parents.The SpongeBob SquarePants theme adapts an old sea-shanty melody. Creative director Derek Drymon later recalle…
He left school to help his family, then led Colorado's state House.Ruben Valdez dropped out of high school at 15 to work in a brickyard as his family struggled financially. He…
Seattle's mayor sprained his ankle while hunting and was missing for over 30 hours.On 25 September 1902, Mayor Thomas J. Humes slipped and sprained his ankle during a bear hunt. He remained mi…
During the American Civil War, the Union built ships for a second, feared war.In 1863 the Union Navy feared Britain might enter the Civil War on the Confederate side. It planned fast Wamp…
Engineers had found a weak point. The building was only partly upgraded when the quake hit.A 2013 review flagged floor-support weaknesses at Statistics House in Wellington, New Zealand. Upgrade work b…
Two grandsons shared their grandfathers' names—and formed the same kind of duo.The Mexican norteño duo Carlos y José formed in 1968. In 2015, grandsons Juan Carlos Tierranegra and José Edw…
Two opera stars shared a connection long before they shared a stage.Soprano Mirella Freni and tenor Luciano Pavarotti grew up in Modena, Italy, and had the same wet nurse. Years…
A Japanese town's giant squid statue sparked a debate about public money.Noto in Japan unveiled its Squid King statue in 2021. About ¥25 million of its ¥27 million construction cost…
The name Philadelphia belonged to a Middle Eastern city too.Around 255 BC, Ptolemy II rebuilt the settlement that is now Amman, Jordan, and named it Philadelphia after h…
One African ginger has a traditional role as protection from lightning.Among Zulu people in South Africa, African ginger has been used as protection against lightning and snake bit…
At a New Zealand pool complex, the slides took inspiration from eels.The hydroslides at Christchurch's Parakiore Recreation and Sport Centre were designed to resemble eels in an…
A bald eagle incubated a rock. Then rescuers gave him a real chick.At a Missouri sanctuary in 2023, Murphy the bald eagle began incubating a rock and guarding it from other eag…
A leader thought the tower too short. After his death, lightning struck it.Brigham Young had disliked the short tower of Utah's St. George Temple. In 1889, two years after his death, a…
England and France signed a truce in 1343. Brittany kept fighting.The Truce of Malestroit froze each side's holdings and promised talks toward lasting peace. Neither monarch n…
An old legal term pictured the womb as a fortress.Some Old Frisian legal documents on protecting children and pregnant women use a compound word meaning 'fortr…
Sakura Miko turned up in a paper on stability and thermodynamics.The Japanese VTuber Sakura Miko was used as an example in a 2024 paper titled 'Structural stability and therm…
A wetland project stalled for years. Then beavers built the dams.Czech conservation officials had planned small dams in the Brdy area since 2018, but the project was delayed.…
His next team name looked almost identical to his last one.In 1984 Canadian football player Pieter Vanden Bos was traded to the Saskatchewan Roughriders, then moved wit…
After a defeat, a Javanese leader wrote about more than battlefield tactics.Prince Diponegoro's rebels lost heavily at Gawok in 1826 during the Java War. In his later account, he partly…
A tiny animal from 520 million years ago had twice the expected antennae.Antennacanthopodia fossils from Yunnan, China, resemble an ancient relative of today's velvet worms. The anim…
The Finnish film brought part of its subject to its Rome premiere.For the 2024 Rome screening of 100 Litres of Gold, filmmakers shipped 20 litres of unfermented sahti to Italy…
The runner ahead of the champion existed only in her imagination.Lieke Klaver won the women's 400 metres at the 2025 European indoor championships in the Netherlands. Afterwa…
Her sons entered her as a joke. She went on to win 28 times.Anne Woods first tried competitive gurning in England in 1977 after her sons entered her for fun. She surpris…
The familiar Seven Wonders list grew from a series with an eighth monument.A 1572 engraving series, Octo Mundi Miracula, presented a complete visual set of ancient wonders. Earlier cla…
Turning off JavaScript does not rule out every kind of fingerprinting.CSS normally controls a web page's appearance. Conditional style rules can also reveal clues about a visitor'…
A modest home stood among Manhattan towers and drew a huge crowd.America's Little House opened on Park Avenue in 1934 as a model home, complete with a lawn and white fence. S…
The suggestion to try American football came from a burger-shop owner.Samoan-born, Australian-raised Laki Tasi grew up playing rugby. A family friend who owned a burger shop sugge…
Before his NFL appearance, he was a world champion at throwing dried cow dung.Greg Jensen stepped away from football after high school. He won a state cow-chip throwing contest in 1985 an…
Donus II had a portrait and praise, but apparently never existed.A medieval papal list seems to have mistaken the title domnus for a person's name. Later writers gave the sup…
This copepod anchors beyond the nose, at the shark's olfactory bulb.Female Driocephalus copepods have been found in several shark species. Part of the body remains in the nasal…
A Sanrio publication let its characters talk about real conflicts.A 2015 issue of the Strawberry Newspaper carried a pacifist message for the 70th anniversary of Japan's surre…
With no proper helmet, a photographer improvised with kitchenware.While documenting a protest near Gaza's border in 2015, photographer Samar Abu Elouf used a cooking pot as an…
After a child's performance, Elizabeth II noticed something missing from the costume.Holly-Anne Hull performed at celebrations for Queen Elizabeth II's 80th birthday in 2006 as part of a youth t…
His bat-like flying machine worked once. Ten days later, it crashed.On 29 June 1874, Vincent de Groof descended from a balloon in his winged apparatus and landed safely near Lon…
One of the oldest known tyrannosauroids was roughly three metres long.Proceratosaurus lived in what is now England during the Middle Jurassic. Known mainly from a skull, it is pla…
Two nuthatch species gave an ornithologist a literary pun.Robert Allen Norris compared two nuthatches for his 1954 doctoral dissertation: Sitta pusilla and Sitta pygma…
Three Japanese governors went to work wearing weighted pregnancy vests.In 2016, the governors of Saga, Miyazaki and Yamaguchi wore vests weighing about 7.3 kilograms as part of a c…
Dressed as Cleopatra, she rode through town in a bathtub of milk.In 1984, Welsh farmer Thelma Adams protested Britain's milk quotas with a procession through Carmarthen. Her…
A sultan named his grandson heir while the boy's father was still heir too.In 1790, Hamengkubuwono I of Yogyakarta designated his grandson Surojo as crown prince even though Surojo's f…
An ancient, slender fossil may belong to an early molting-animal lineage.Fossils about 560 to 550 million years old from Australia and Newfoundland were described as Uncus dzaugisi i…
A lawyer began filming communication tips inside a parked pickup truck.In 2022, Texas lawyer Jefferson Fisher recorded short videos in his truck in Silsbee. A TikTok on how to argu…
A steeplechase runner went back to help an injured rival.In a heat at the 2022 European Championships, Andorra's Nahuel Carabaña helped injured Danish runner Axel Van…
Who could call their chocolate cake the original Sacher torte?Vienna's Hotel Sacher and the Demel pastry shop disputed the right to market their versions as the original.…
An election tally assigned 130 votes to a candidate's brother.In Vermont's 1860 congressional election, 130 votes from Fairfield were mistakenly credited to Carlos Baxter…
Some research proposals pass peer review, then enter a lottery.New Zealand research funders are among institutions that have used partial lotteries. Reviewers first screen…
A color film reached its first audiences without its colors.The 1982 Albanian film The Second November was shot on color stock, but a shortage of processing chemicals me…
She trained in wartime Sarajevo and reached the Olympic start line.Bosnian runner Mirsada Burić was held in a camp during the 1992 war and later released. She trained while nav…
A reviewer missed a pet bird in a Florence Nightingale film.An American trade magazine praised the 1915 film Florence Nightingale but criticized it for leaving out the R…
An empress gave up the throne, then came back under another name.Japan's Empress Kōken abdicated in 758 in favour of Emperor Junnin. She later became a Buddhist nun and shave…
A continent with hardly any streets joined Street View.Google's mapping team added Antarctica in 2010 as a challenge to capture remote places. It began with two ima…
To follow an Edison biography, a reviewer started at its last chapter.Edmund Morris's 2019 biography Edison runs from the inventor's death back to his birth. NPR's Scott Detrow fo…
An apology after two fans were ejected helped start a baseball tradition.In 2000, security removed a lesbian couple from a Los Angeles Dodgers game for kissing. The club apologized.…
In some Indian rituals, two trees can be married.Ceremonial marriages between different tree species, and between people and trees, are practiced in parts of…
A tanker lost to a torpedo later served as demolition practice.In April 1942, the tanker Axtell J. Byles was torpedoed while US Coast Guard cutter Dione escorted its convoy…
The same dandelion species does not always make seeds the same way.Taraxacum brachyglossum, a dandelion found in Britain, can reproduce sexually or form seeds without fertiliza…
The actor playing a clockmaker went to learn the craft himself.Ben Ahlers plays clockmaker Jack Trotter in The Gilded Age. For the show's second season, he took watchmaking…
Her window recordings helped expose traffickers and corrupt officers.Around age 80, Brazil's Joana da Paz began filming criminal activity near her home. The footage became eviden…
The lead actress brought bears and wolves to the film set.For the 1920s film The Grub-Stake, Nell Shipman moved her animal collection between filming locations. It inc…
A party nominated a man who said he had tried to avoid the nomination.In Michigan in 1912, L. Whitney Watkins preferred another candidate for governor and said he had sought to av…
A century-old science-fiction story featured spies after solar technology.Ukrainian mathematician Mykola Chaikovsky wrote By the Power of the Sun in 1918. It imagined an independent U…
A brass group changed a trombone's sound with folded foil.The Westerlies, a U.S. ensemble of two trumpets and two trombones, has experimented by folding tin foil acros…
A U.S. college recruited a German player it had never seen play.In 2020, American football player Leander Wiegand was offered an athletic scholarship by the University of Ce…
He built a house door that his pets and people could all open.Writer Paul Corey made a door at his California home that his two cats, dog and human residents could operate…
One official took several opposing roles in the same case.Working in colonial Papua New Guinea, Horace Niall helped arrest five murder suspects and served as magistrat…
Workers found contaminated nests at a nuclear site, without finding the insects.In 2025, a radioactive wasp nest was found at the U.S. Savannah River Site; three more were found later. The…
A television opening scene needed quite a crowd of unpredictable performers.The forest opening of the 2025 Doctor Who episode Wish World used an owl, six ducks, a horse and a baby. Inse…
He did not make the baseball team, but later led the university's sports department.Graham Rossini tried out for Arizona State's baseball team but accepted a student-assistant role suggested by…
The same 💩 can be encouragement in Japan and disapproval elsewhere.In Japan, the poop emoji can wish someone luck, helped by a pun linking the word for poop with the word for f…
During the 1812 sack of Yogyakarta, records and instruments were taken too.British forces looted court archives, manuscripts and gamelan instruments along with valuables. Accounts say…
Food and health alone do not describe an animal's welfare.The Five Domains model considers nutrition, environment, health, behaviour and mental state. It is designed t…
How many times does one rock song say 'Na'?A Rock Sound writer counted 261 instances of 'Na' in My Chemical Romance's song Na Na Na. The repetition itse…
No reservations, cash only, four shared tables—and a Michelin star.Mexico City's Expendio de Maíz has no fixed menu. Cooks ask about diners' preferences and serve maize-based d…
The faces on this record sleeve were made with syrup.The cover of Tribalistas' 2002 album depicts the Brazilian trio using chocolate syrup. Artist Vik Muniz first…
A Ming emperor abolished a practice that cost concubines their lives.During his second reign in the 15th century, Emperor Yingzong of Ming abolished the practice of concubines co…
Classical logic has a surprising problem when a claim and its denial are both assumed.Under the principle of explosion, classical inference rules allow any unrelated conclusion from a proposition…
The route takes shape only after passengers book a ride.Victoria, Australia's FlexiRide buses operate within designated service areas rather than along fixed routes.…
A new TV station made its employees' paychecks part of the promotion.WMT-TV, which began broadcasting in Iowa in 1953, paid employees in unusual two-dollar bills as a promotional…
When threatened, this rabbit may dive in and swim away.The swamp rabbit lives in wetlands of the southern United States. It is territorial and mostly active at nigh…
An object that looks like cookware turned up in a Bronze Age tomb.At Chalandriani on the Greek island of Syros, graves dating roughly to 2700–2200 BCE contained ceramic object…
No other month in the same year starts on June's weekday.In the Gregorian calendar, the weekday on which June begins is unique among that year's months. If June 1 is…
The artist built a strange creature—and wrote a fake scholarly report about it.In 1959, Remedios Varo made Homo rodans from discarded animal bones: an imagined human precursor with a wheel…
After being drafted by the NFL, a player wanted to find the judge who sent him to reform school.Ralph Jarvis began playing football at a juvenile reform school, continued in college, and was drafted by the…
This historic bridge no longer has a surface to cross.New Zealand's Opiki Toll Bridge opened in 1918. After a nearby replacement bridge opened in 1969, its deck an…
We can read Cicero's courtroom defence, but not its certain outcome.In 54 BCE, Cicero defended Gnaeus Plancius in Rome. His speech Pro Plancio survives, yet historians cannot sa…
On a coastal rail line, the hillside can decide whether commuters get a train.Washington state's Sounder North Line cancelled a record 170 trips between September 2012 and March 2013 beca…
A pianist's arm pain led her to a smaller instrument and a new musical path.After tendinopathy made both her arms sore, American pianist Phyllis Chen turned to the toy piano. She founde…
After a film about abduction opened, its director received threats against his own daughter.Akira Kurosawa's High and Low opened in 1963. Amid concern about kidnappings in Japan, callers threatened to…
He tried to lift soldiers' spirits with a ceremony for a gun—and was recalled.In 1861, Civil War chaplain Thomas Mooney 'baptized' a cannon at Fort Corcoran. His archbishop objected to th…
A federation called itself indissoluble, then dissolved within ten months.El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras formed the Federation of Central America in April 1921. Its constitution…
A hurricane nearly erased this island; moving sand began to bring it back.Hawaii's East Island was reduced to a narrow sandbar by Hurricane Walaka in 2018. Natural sediment movement t…
Australia had a superhero whose mission was encouraging condom use.Condoman was created in 1987 for an HIV-prevention campaign aimed at Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Au…
A found brooch helped a teacher decide whether to become a headmistress.In 1898, Elizabeth Wilhelmina Jones was hesitant about taking charge of Harrogate Ladies' College. While walk…
A laid-back dog drawing went viral, then became a cryptocurrency without its artist's consent.Phillip Banks posted Chill Guy in 2023. The image spread widely in 2024, and an unauthorized meme coin used i…
A pope offered Sicily's throne to an English child who never went there.In 1254, the papacy offered the Kingdom of Sicily to ten-year-old Prince Edmund. His father Henry III accepte…
A patent dispute led an engineer to build a working computer with game-console parts.Lee Boysel demonstrated the early AL1 chip in a small computer built for a microprocessor patent dispute. Its…
A cartoon fandom even developed its own names for styles of music.Fans of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic have made large amounts of music inspired by the show. Community…
He fenced in Berlin, then judged another fencing match.Bernardo de la Guardia, Costa Rica's first Olympic athlete, competed in men's sabre at the 1936 Berlin Games.…
A monument slated for removal got a cape and helmet instead.In Odesa, Ukraine, artist Alexander Milov transformed a Soviet-era Lenin statue into Darth Vader in 2015. He…
A kingdom's origin story begins with a man emerging from bamboo.An origin myth of the Mori polity in present-day Sulawesi, Indonesia, tells of a supernatural man emerging fr…
In a forest radiation experiment, lichens proved unexpectedly tough.Researchers irradiated part of a Wisconsin forest in 1972 to study ecological effects. Lichens and some plant…
Win this bread contest and supply the French president's residence for a year.Paris has held an annual best-baguette competition since 1994. Eligible loaves are judged on qualities includ…
At Beijing's Winter Games, this flag bearer wore no shirt.Nathan Crumpton, American Samoa's only athlete at the 2022 Winter Olympics, carried the flag shirtless in tra…
The Vatican joined the world taekwondo federation without a registered team.Vatican Taekwondo became a World Taekwondo member in 2021. According to the federation's listing as of July 2…
One building produced flour, textiles, and nights out.Town Mill in Mansfield, England, was built around 1775 as a water-powered flour mill. It later made textiles…
The reef that draws divers can make the island harder to reach.Seal Island lies off Anguilla in a marine park popular with scuba divers. A reef between the island and Angui…
No shiny car renderings: the racers are colored dots on a thick track line.The 2024 management game Golden Lap puts players in charge of a 1970s-style Formula One team. Its races repre…
They moved into a Frank Lloyd Wright house and sat on cardboard boxes.The Freemans initially could not afford furniture for their Los Angeles house, designed by Wright, so they sa…
A tank crushed the car. The monument reverses the scene.In Osijek, Croatia, a tank crushed a small red car in 1991. A monument unveiled in 2011 shows the car appeari…
Rice was leaving the port while locals struggled to buy it.In 1918, protests over rice prices began around Uozu, a fishing town in Japan's Toyama Prefecture, then sprea…
Some of fungi's closest relatives look like tiny amoebas.Nucleariids are free-living single-celled organisms. Molecular studies place them among the closest relatives…
Nicolas Cage took cooking lessons for a chef role.For the 2021 film Pig, two Portland chefs trained Cage to portray a Portland chef. One was Gabriel Rucker, wh…
She spent years championing a concert hall and saw its cornerstone laid at 101.Czech organist Alena Veselá chaired an association working for a new concert hall in Brno. She was present wh…
One wall showed winners. Another displayed 600 arrowheads.At California's Chicken Ranch bingo hall in 1992, a gift shop displayed 600 arrowheads on one wall and photos…
After earthquake damage, a century-old store lost its building but kept its front.The Christchurch furniture-store building dated to 1910. It was demolished in 2015 after the 2010–11 earthqua…
Bones once grouped as one dinosaur may come from two different lineages.Eocarcharia fossils from Niger were described as one new species in 2008. Later research suggests some bones…
A UFO festival has hosted costume contests for pets.McMinnville, Oregon, began its UFO festival in 2000 around the 50th anniversary of famous 1950 UFO photos. It…