Ancient Timekeeping, Lost Calendars, and Forgotten Sky Clocks Mysteries We Still Don’t Understand

The Grand Canyon receives six million visitors a year. Nearly all of them see it from the rim. Below that rim, side canyons branch into slot canyons so narrow that sunlight reaches the floor for minut...

31 Elo 1h 41min

In August 1587, a governor named John White stood on the deck of a departing ship and watched a barrier island grow smaller behind him. On that island — Roanoke, in the Outer Banks of what is now Nort...

30 Elo 1h 42min

Everyone knows what an urban legend is — a story that sounds true, gets told as true, circulates through friends and family and late-night conversations, but isn't real. Except sometimes it is. For ov...

29 Elo 1h 39min

For nearly two thousand years, the most important religious experience in the ancient Mediterranean was a secret. At Eleusis, outside Athens, thousands of people walked a stone road every autumn, fast...

28 Elo 1h 48min

In 1972, a Benedictine monk named Father Pellegrino Ernetti told an Italian newspaper that he and a team of scientists — including, he said, Enrico Fermi and Wernher von Braun — had built a machine ca...

27 Elo 1h 28min

Somewhere in the last few centuries before the Common Era, a scribe composed a text in Aramaic about giants who dreamed troubled dreams. They were the offspring of heavenly beings who had crossed a bo...

26 Elo 1h 44min

For centuries, the Book of Enoch was everywhere. Early Church Fathers quoted it. The New Testament referenced it by name. Jewish communities in the Second Temple period read it alongside the prophets ...

25 Elo 1h 35min

A computer made of bronze gears that calculated eclipses a century before Christ. Concrete that has been healing its own cracks underwater for two thousand years. Sword blades containing carbon nanost...

24 Elo 1h 36min