Christmas is a joyous time of year for most people, but sometimes horrible disasters occur that ruins Christmas for a lot of people. Here are 5 of the worst Christmas disasters of all time.
Art forgery is a multi-million dollar business, one that museums and appraisers are constantly battling. But there is one technique they’ve found to foil forgers that’s near foolproof – and it involves atomic bombs.
Wolfgang Beltracchi is an artist who got his start as a forger of classic masters like Picasso, Van Gogh, and others. But he and those in his business found a foil in Peggy Guggenheim, Dr. Elena Basner, and a cadre of scientists that found a technique that searches for traces of the isotopes cesium-137 and strontium-90.
The reason is that these isotopes are only created by fission of Uranium 235, and between 1945 and 1963, 522 open-air atomic bomb blasts scattered these isotopes into the atmosphere, which then got into the soil, made its way into flax plants, which were used to create linseed oil, which was used as a binding agent in paint.
So if a painting shows traces of these isotopes in the paint, there is no way that it was created before 1945.
This technique has foiled hundreds of art forgers in the years since and has proven to be one of the most difficult challenges for future Wolfgang Baltracchis.
Up to 30% of people experience anxiety around flying. But it turns out that falling from a plane is survivable. If you’re really, really lucky. Here’s how to increase your chances of surviving a fall from an airplane.
From the most powerful royalty in history to an uncontacted village in New York State, we’re talking about some of the most inbred people of all time.
The Blue Fugates of Kentucky were an isolated group of settlers who, through a rare recessive gene, developed blue skin. Due to their blue skin and their isolated location, they began to inbreed, eventually becoming something of a local legend – the blue hillbillies that live in the woods – until they reappeared in the 1960s.
Allentown, New York, is a village in New York State that was cut off from the rest of society after a dam flooded the valley where they lived. They call their community The Hollow, but outsiders call it Allentown because almost everybody there is from the same family.
The Habsburgs of Europe were one of the most powerful families in history, ruling over the Holy Roman Empire in Eastern Europe until the early 20th century. But one segment of the Habsburgs in Spain, known as the Spanish Habsburgs, participated in incest and inbreeding for so long that they developed The Habsburg Jaw – a genetic deformity that got so bad that many could barely speak. It was Charles II of Spain that finally put an end to this practice because he was so inbred that he couldn’t reproduce.
And the Egyptian royal family of ancient Egypt practiced inbreeding for over a thousand years because they believed that the only person who could mate with a pharaoh was someone else from their family – they were living gods after all. By the time King Tutankhamen was born, their lineage was so ruined that he had multiple genetic deformities and died at only 18.
It’s not that uncommon to find glowing animals in nature, this is called bioluminescence. But can people do this as well? Turns out… Sort of.
In the 1800s, grave robbing was big business. Medical schools needed cadavers to teach anatomy and it was common for them to hire “resurrection men” to rob graves. And among grave robbers, Grandison Harris was the best.
In this special Halloween video, we examine June and Jennifer Gibbons, twin girls who became known as the “Silent Twins” due to the fact that they never spoke except to each other, and even then, they did so in their own language nobody else could understand.
As they grew older, they became obsessed with their twinhood, and their obsession consumed them, leading them into violence and crime.
The twins were trapped in their relationship. They couldn’t be together and they couldn’t function apart. They came to believe that the only way either of them would be happy was for one of them to die.
There was a time when traveling circuses and freak shows were the preeminent form of entertainment of the day. Some people made a great living as human oddities, showing off their natural (and unnatural) bodies. Here are 10 of the most famous.
70,000 years ago, the human population hit a major bottleneck, and scientists aren’t exactly sure why.
One of the more popular explanations has been the Toba explosion, the massive explosion of the Toba supervolcano that occurred at roughly that same time, but has been mostly disproven.
DNA evidence shows that African populations, especially the ancient Khoi and San people of Africa, show far more genetic diversity than those who came out of Africa according to the “out of Africa” theory. The study showed that those that came out of Africa descended from between 1000 and 10,000 breeding pairs.
The reason for this remains a mystery.
To celebrate hitting the 20 million view milestone, I asked viewers to vote on their favorite questions and I picked the 20 most-upvoted questions and answering them here. Enjoy!
