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Millennia ago, the Romans split Spain’s mountains in search of gold. Here’s what the world heritage site known as Las Médulas looks like today. The Romans marched into Iberia in the second century BCE. The ruins of their architectural achievements are still scattered around the country in Segovia, Mérida, Tarragona, Zaragoza, and many other places. Las Médulas also bears a quiet testimony to the power of the empire. The mining site is located in the northwest of Spain, near where the region of Castilla y León meets the border of Galicia....

Madalyn Murray O’Hair waged a 30-year-long war against religion in America, a battle that had her dubbed as ‘The Most Hated Woman In America’ by Life Magazine. Reg Innell/Toronto Star via Getty ImagesMadalyn Murray O’Hair on January 24, 1984. Madalyn Murray O’Hair founded the American Atheists organization in the 1960s following the landmark Supreme court ruling that banned prayer in public schools — of which O’Hair pushed for herself. The mission of the American Atheists was in part inclusive, and O’Hair opened her arms to people of all kinds — including ex-cons....

In 1954, Operation PBSuccess dismantled Guatemala’s newfound democracy — so that an American fruit company could continue to profit off the old government’s corruption. National ArchivesCarlos Castillo Armas, the CIA-backed leader of Operation PBSuccess, driving into Guatemala City. Throughout the early 20th century, an American multinational corporation called the United Fruit Company — now known as Chiquita Brands International — controlled vast swaths of Guatemalan land and production. Aided by a corrupt autocracy, it received little pushback over decades of economic exploitation....

Image Source: Netflix Since the debut of Netflix’s docudrama Making A Murderer, the Internet has been abuzz with theories about the murder of Teresa Halbach that would support Steven Avery’s innocence. The release of case information not presented in the documentary, combined with what was revealed throughout the show, has become fodder for couch detectives everywhere. Below are the six sets of theories from Making A Murderer currently gaining traction:...

“It’s absurd to give someone something for nothing and to do that is creating a future that is pretty darn bleak." FacebookDiane Tirado was fired from her school after giving students zeros for not handing in homework. An eighth-grade teacher in Florida has gone on the offensive against her former school after she claimed to have been fired for doling out “zero” grades to students who failed to hand in their homework....

Though more than 100 suspects were interviewed, as recently as 1986, an official suspect has never been named in the Hinterkaifeck Murders. Wikimedia CommonsThe family farmhouse where the Hinterkaifeck Murders would take place. About a week before March 31, 1922, farmer Andreas Gruber noticed something strange on his farmstead, known locally as Hinterkaifeck. Outside the home, he found footsteps leading from the woods behind the farm pointing toward home, but none leading away from it....

A Nepalese Gurkha soldier who fought for Britain, Lachhiman Gurung fended off 200 Japanese soldiers in May 1945 — after losing his right hand to a grenade blast. Daniel Berehulak/Getty ImagesGurkha Lachhiman Gurung was awarded the Victoria Cross for his heroism in World War II. Lachhiman Gurung was a Gurkha warrior from Nepal who fought for the British during World War II. Known for their tenacity in battle, Gurkhas were highly coveted soldiers throughout history....

In another twist, it’s believed that as many as one million people lived there. These populations likely inhabited the land between 1410 and 1460 A.D. before European’s arrived towards the end of the 1400s and early 1500s. Learn more here. At 2,200 Years Old, Archeologists May Have Found The Oldest, Non-Evaporated Wine Li Yibo, Xinhua/ sci-news.comThe 2,200 bronze kettle and the wine found in it. If it’s true wine gets better with age, the wine discovered by a team of researchers from the Shaanxi Provincial Institute of Archeology must be the absolute best....

Scientists have discovered that a Viking grave adorned with swords and axes belonged not to a male, but a seemingly powerful female. What the gravestite may have looked like. Illustration by Evald Hansen/American Journal of Physical Anthropology Despite the fact that strong women warriors like Wonder Woman and Lady Brienne from ‘Game of Thrones,’ are finally becoming more of a fixture in pop culture, it’s not easy to forget how rare these figures actually were in historical society....

Source: US Navy Forgotten Disasters: Messina Earthquake In the dark, early hours of 28 December 1908, a 7.5 magnitude earthquake struck Sicily and Calabria in southern Italy. The epicentre was near the Sicilian city of Messina, and the adjacent cities along the Ionian Sea suffered damages at the hands of a 39-foot tsunami. Messina alone would lose 70,000 people, proving an ominous vision of what so many cities across Europe would look like in the soon-to-come Great War....

It’s the largest reptile egg ever discovered, and the creature who laid it had to have been at least 200 feet long. Francisco HueichaleoAn illustration of the underwater hatching process of the mosasaur dinosaur. The largest reptile egg in recorded history has officially been discovered in Antarctica. According to IFL Science, the football-sized specimen is the first known fossilized soft-shell egg ever found on the continent, and is believed to have been laid by an extinct sea lizard around 66 million years ago....

The Nazis may have killed 14-year-old Czeslawa Kwoka at Auschwitz. But they couldn’t extinguish the haunting power of the photo they took of her before she died. The Holocaust happened on a scale so massive that we’re virtually unable to fully comprehend its scope. Reading the words “6 million lives” is certainly chilling (to say nothing of the millions of others killed), but it is a number so large that it becomes abstract....

St. Augustine Lighthouse & Museum/FacebookArchaeologists work to examine the shipwreck, which appeared in Florida around Thanksgiving 2022. After two hurricanes battered a beach at Daytona Beach Shores in Florida, local residents started to notice wooden structures poking out from the sand. Now, archaeologists have announced that they believe the storms revealed a lost 19th-century shipwreck. “Whenever you find a shipwreck on the beach it’s really an amazing occurrence,” maritime archaeologist Chuck Meide of St....

A notorious SS officer and physician, Josef Mengele sent over 400,000 people to their deaths at Auschwitz during World War II — and never faced justice. One of the most notorious Nazi doctors of World War II, Josef Mengele performed gruesome medical experiments on thousands of prisoners at the Auschwitz concentration camp. Guided by an unwavering belief in the unscientific Nazi racial theory, Mengele justified countless inhumane tests and procedures on Jewish and Romani people....

“Koko touched the lives of millions as an ambassador for all gorillas and an icon for interspecies communication and empathy.” One of the world’s most famous animals, Koko the Gorilla, died in her sleep at the age of 46 on June 19 in Woodside, California. “The Gorilla Foundation is sad to announce the passing of our beloved Koko,” the non-profit that cared for Koko announced in a statement. “Her impact has been profound and what she has taught us about the emotional capacity of gorillas and their cognitive abilities will continue to shape the world,” the foundation said....

Why littering in China has become such an astonishing problem, and how the government now plans to use revolutionary measures to combat it. Image Source: China Smack Imagine a place where trash covers the streets like a thin blanket of dirty snow. With every step, you hear the crunch of a plastic bottle, and garbage floats through the air. Cars drive by, and more trash flies out their windows and onto the sidewalk....

How Mikhail Kalashnikov invented the AK-47, why it took over the world, and what he wishes he’d made instead. NATALIA KOLESNIKOVA/AFP/Getty ImagesMikhail Kalashnikov, the Russian inventor of the globally popular AK-47 assault rifle. In April 2013, an ailing Mikhail Kalashnikov wrote a letter addressed to the head of the Russian Orthodox Church. According to Russian daily Izvestia, Kalashnikov posed the following question in his missive: If his own invention “deprived people of life, then can it be that I… a Christian and an Orthodox believer, was to blame for their deaths?...

While moonmoon is the Internet’s favorite title, other names like “submoon,” “moonlet,” and “moonito” have all been suggested. Rebeeca Naden/Reuters/Illustration by QuartzA fake depiction of a moonmoon. In 2014, one astronomer’s son asked her a tough question: Can moons have their own moon? She was stumped and decided to dedicate the next few years of her professional life to answering that very question. That astronomer was Juna Kollmeier of the Carnegie Institution Observatories, and alongside fellow astronomer Sean Raymond from the University of Bordeaux, she studied these “submoons” and recently published their findings in a paper on arXiv....

For hundreds of years, people around the world have reported stomach-turning sightings of creatures made up of many rats tangled together at their tails — but are these rat kings actually real? Few creatures are as historically reviled as the rat. It’s known for carrying disease and was blamed for spreading the Black Death in the mid-14th century — although recent evidence suggests that this did not happen. The mere mention of its name is enough to incite fear and revulsion in many....

To his family and neighbors in suburban New Jersey, Richard Kuklinski was an all-American husband. To the Mafia and his victims, he was an unscrupulous hitman known as the “Iceman killer.” “Do you liken yourself to an assassin?” an interviewer once asked “The Iceman” Richard Kuklinski. “Assassin? It sounds so exotic,” the hitman replied with a hint of amusement and a small smile. Then his face turned serious. “I was just a murderer....