Latest Curiosities

The Disappearance of The Waratah

Jan 20, 2026

On the evening of 26 July 1909, the SS Waratah sailed from Durban, South Africa, bound for Cape Town. A luxury passenger liner, she was coa...

Rupes Nigra: The Fabled Magnetic Mountain at The North Pole

Jan 17, 2026

In 1577, the Flemish cartographer Gerhard Mercator wrote a letter to his friend, the English scientist, occultist and royal advisor John Dee...

Barbara Thompson: Prisoner of the Aboriginal

Jan 15, 2026

When Captain Joseph Frazer rescued Narcisse Pelletier from Aboriginal people in 1875, it was not the first time a white captive had been re...

The Green Stone of Hattusa

Jan 12, 2026

The Green Stone of Hattusa is one of the most intriguing and enigmatic objects from the Hittite capital, largely because of how little we ca...

Edmond Locard And The First Forensic Laboratory

Jan 8, 2026

In 1910, the Lyon police offered criminologist Edmond Locard the opportunity to form the first police laboratory. He was given two assistant...

Interstate 19: America's Only Metric Highway

Jan 6, 2026

The United States is often ridiculed for clinging to seemingly unintuitive units of measurement such as inches, miles, Fahrenheit, and pound...

The Antarctic Snow Cruiser

Jan 5, 2026

Somewhere on the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica, buried beneath hundreds of feet of snow (or perhaps at the bottom of the ocean), lies an enor...

The Best Stories of 2025

Dec 25, 2025

As another year draws to a close, let us look back at some of the most memorable stories we published over the past twelve months. From curi...

The Bombay Docks Explosion of 1944

Dec 25, 2025

On the afternoon of 14 April 1944, the city of Bombay, then the jewel of British India’s western coast, was shaken by a catastrophe so viole...

England's Coffeehouses and the Birth of Public Debate

Dec 22, 2025

When coffee first arrived in England in the mid-17th century, it brought with it far more than a new beverage. It introduced a radically new...