The Bosphorus boat spotter tracking Russian military trucks
Yörük Işık is a ship spotter who logs all the boats that pass through the narrow Bosphorus Strait near his home in Istanbul, Turkey. In October 2015, he noticed something unusual - Russian military tr...
10 Jan 202510min
The mystery of Raoul Wallenberg
Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat, saved thousands of Hungarian Jews from the Nazis during World War Two.Once Soviet troops reached Budapest, Wallenberg reported to Soviet officials on 17 January 1...
9 Jan 20258min
The invention of the hotel key card
In the 1970s, Norwegian Tor Sornes invented the hotel key card. He wanted to improve security in hotels after he heard the news that one of his favourite singers, Connie Francis, was attacked in her h...
8 Jan 202510min
Charlie Hebdo attack
On 7 January 2015, 12 people were shot dead at the offices of a satirical magazine in Paris, the capital of France.The two gunmen had targeted Charlie Hebdo because it had published cartoons of the Pr...
7 Jan 20259min
Marie Kondo
In 2011, Japanese tidying expert Marie Kondo’s first book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up was published. Overnight she went from tidying other people’s homes to being known around the world for ...
6 Jan 202510min
Creating Alexa
The smart speaker Alexa is used by hundreds of millions of people around the world every day, but did you know its voice was created by two people in Poland back in 2000?Lukasz Osowski and Michal Kasz...
3 Jan 202510min
Klaus Fuchs: Oppenheimer’s atomic spy
German-born physicist Klaus Fuchs played a key role in the development of the first atomic bomb during World War Two.The project, known as the Manhattan Project, was led by scientist J Robert Oppenhei...
2 Jan 20259min
Robert Ripley and the ‘Believe It or Not’ empire
In December 1918, sports writer and cartoonist Robert Ripley was struggling to find some content for his column in the New York Globe.So he compiled and illustrated some of the quirkiest sports facts ...
1 Jan 202510min
