The Man With a Window in His Stomach: Birth of Gastroenterology
In 1822, a point-blank musket blast left Alexis St. Martin with a permanent open hole into his living stomach. What followed was one of the most unbelievable, and ethically troubling, chapters in medi...
26 Jun 15min
Tsar Bomba: The 50-Megaton Bomb They Made Less Deadly
The scientists who built it gave the bomber crew a 50 percent chance of survival, and they had run the math. The Tsar Bomba was the most powerful device ever detonated on Earth, a blast so violent its...
26 Jun 21min
The Codex Gigas: The Devil's Bible and Its 30-Year Scribe
Legend says a doomed monk, sentenced to be walled up alive, promised to write a book containing all human knowledge in a single night, and when the task proved impossible he made a pact with the Devil...
26 Jun 23min
The Amber Room: How Do You Steal a Six-Ton Room?
Most stolen masterpieces are small enough to slip under a coat. This one weighed six tons. The Amber Room was an entire chamber paneled in fossilized tree resin, gold, and gemstones, hailed as the eig...
26 Jun 19min
Operation Paperclip: How Nazi Scientists Took America to the Moon
The clean, heroic image of the Apollo 11 moon landing hides an uncomfortable truth: the Saturn V rocket that carried astronauts to the lunar surface was made possible by the very same men who built te...
26 Jun 21min
Tulip Mania: The Financial Bubble That Never Really Burst
The story goes that the Dutch went so mad for tulips that people traded their entire life savings for a single bulb, then the market crashed and ruined the nation. But the actual historical evidence p...
26 Jun 22min
The Axeman of New Orleans: The Serial Killer Who Demanded Jazz
On the night of March 19, 1919, New Orleans should have been a ghost town. A brutal serial killer was on the loose. Instead, dance halls overflowed and living rooms vibrated with jazz, because a self-...
26 Jun 21min
Lake Nyos: The Invisible Gas That Killed 1,746 People Overnight
Imagine waking in a village where the buildings are untouched but nearly every living thing, every human, animal, and insect, lies dead in perfect silence. Reporters described the scene as the afterma...
26 Jun 24min
