The Pink Panther: From Hollywood Diamond to Jewel Thieves and War
You picture a tall, silent, brightly colored cartoon cat and hear that sneaky saxophone tune. But how does one two-word phrase connect a 1963 comedy, an Interpol-hunted crime syndicate, a gay rights m...
28 Jun 13min
Socotra: Earth's Alien Island Caught in a Modern Tug of War
Picture an isolated fragment of rock in the Indian Ocean where a third of the plant life exists nowhere else on Earth, where cucumbers grow into 20-foot trees and bleed red sap. This is Socotra, the G...
28 Jun 20min
The 1960 Valdivia Quake: The Most Powerful Earthquake Ever
Imagine an earthquake so massive it shakes for ten agonizing minutes, sends tidal waves across the entire Pacific, triggers a volcano, and permanently sinks a coastline. Then imagine the terror pushin...
28 Jun 21min
The R101 Airship: How Political Deadlines Built a Flying Disaster
Picture a 777-foot flying machine with two promenade decks, gold-trimmed dining rooms, and an asbestos-lined smoking room suspended beneath millions of cubic feet of flammable hydrogen. This was the R...
28 Jun 23min
Ship of Gold: A $2.4 Billion Wreck and the Fugitive Who Found It
Forget eye patches and wooden galleons. Picture an 1857 shipwreck carrying a modern equivalent of 2.4 billion dollars in California gold rush treasure, a wreck so devastating it helped trigger a natio...
28 Jun 19min
Satoshi Nakamoto: The $135 Billion Ghost Who Vanished
Right now, a digital wallet holds roughly 135 billion dollars. Anyone can see the balance, but nobody can touch it, and the owner vanished 15 years ago without spending a single coin. It is the greate...
28 Jun 13min
The Kentucky Meat Shower: When Raw Flesh Rained From a Clear Sky
It is a clear, cloudless morning in March 1876 in rural Kentucky. A farmer's wife hears a strange snapping sound, looks up, and to her horror realizes it is raining chunks of raw red meat across her y...
28 Jun 21min
The 1931 China Floods: The Deadliest Disaster You Never Heard Of
Up to four million people died in the deadliest natural disaster of the 20th century, killing as many as 15 times the toll of the 2004 Indonesian tsunami. It reshaped a nation's geography and forced t...
28 Jun 23min
