Short Stuff: Divorcing Your Parents

In 1922, a little farm in the woods of Bavaria became the site of what would become Germany’s most famous unsolved murder, when six people were brutally killed with a pick axe. What led up to it and f...

27 Okt 201646min

For as long as people have been sleeping, about half of us have probably suffered from sleep paralysis. Thanks to an unusual fluke in the sleep cycle, the sufferer feels paralyzed and consumed by fear...

25 Okt 201641min

Chairman Mao’s paranoia of a Soviet invasion led to hundreds of thousands of Beijing residents put to work for a decade building an 85-square-km underground city to serve as a massive bomb shelter. In...

20 Okt 201630min

Fish fraud, misrepresenting a fish as a more expensive one, costs Americans $25 billion a year. And because less than 100 inspectors check for fraud in the US and everyone from wholesalers to sushi re...

18 Okt 201640min

Counting humans has been happening for a long, long time. It usually had to do with taxing them, but now census data can reveal a lot about a population and help satisfy its needs. Count us in for thi...

13 Okt 201644min

When animals are faced with scarce food in the winter, they have two choices to stay alive: migrate or hibernate. For hibernators, their bodies undergo some mind-boggling physiological changes in the ...

11 Okt 201645min

When the first Europeans landed on Rapa Nui, which they renamed Easter Island, they were puzzled by what happened there. Only a few thousand people lived there but there were signs of a massive civili...

6 Okt 201656min

The soda we get instantly mixed at a fast-food joint owes a lot to a rich history going back to the Roman baths, that features drugs, diseases and explosions. Learn all about soda and soda fountains i...

3 Okt 201647min