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What is it about zombies we love to hate? There must be something more to our zombie obsession than a love of gore and guts. Zombies have been a part of pop culture for decades, but they seem especially pervasive lately. They’re featured in TV shows, films, comics, video games — even in works of literature. What is it about zombies that we love to hate? Are they simply experiencing that rare sixteenth minute of fame, or is there something deeper going on?...

From its ancient origins to the billions we spend on it today, these surprising chocolate facts will certainly help you savor the world’s favorite sweet. First, the Mayans and Aztecs drank it. Then, the Europeans made it solid. And today, chocolate is a booming world industry worth well over $100 billion per year. And when it comes to the history of chocolate, that’s just scratching the surface. Now, celebrate the world’s favorite sweet — and learn a thing or two — with these 21 surprising chocolate facts:...

For hundreds of years, the Kingdom of Makuria reigned as a Christian stronghold in Africa. Now, archaeologists may have just discovered the kingdom’s largest cathedral. Polish Centre of Mediterranean Archaeology, University of WarsawArchaeologists believe their find could be the largest Nubian cathedral ever found. For centuries, the sands of Sudan hid a faint echo of a distant time. In the deserted town of Old Dongola along the Nile river, a team of Polish archaeologists has uncovered the remains of what appears to be a sprawling medieval cathedral....

James Callender published exposés on founding fathers like Alexander Hamilton and publicized reports of Thomas Jefferson’s rape of the enslaved Sally Hemings — then he drowned under mysterious circumstances. Early American history was rife with political scandals. Alexander Hamilton had an affair with a woman named Maria Reynolds, then tried to pay her husband hush money. Thomas Jefferson slept with an enslaved woman named Sally Hemings, who bore him several children....

Julian Assange has blasted a hole in American politics by spilling some pretty dirty secrets. Now, he’s stuck inside the Ecuadorian embassy, avoiding a likely prison sentence. What do we know about this man, and will he ever be free? LEON NEAL/AFP/Getty Images From a nomadic childhood in Australia, to a career as a young computer prodigy and award-winning journalist, and finally to confinement as a virtual prisoner in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, Julian Assange has led quite a life in his 45 years on Earth....

Nicholas Godejohn met Gypsy Rose Blanchard on a Christian dating site. Soon after their first few meetings in person, she asked him to murder her overbearing mother — which he did. Nicholas Godejohn was just 26 years old when he committed his first and only murder. It started when he began an ultimately short-lived relationship with the young, seemingly wheelchair-bound Gypsy Rose Blanchard, which soon led to him killing her mother, Dee Dee Blanchard, in a strange tale that has since become infamous....

These gorgeous pictures of Earth from space present our planet’s colorful, bizarre geography from a stunning new perspective. In these images taken by both satellites and astronauts living on the International Space Station, Earth’s strange and colorful terrain comes into focus from a fascinating new perspective. From the Sahara desert to coral reefs off the coast of Africa, the most beautiful places in the world look positively alien as seen from space....

Known throughout the ancient world, Pythia, the Oracle of Delphi was famous for her frenzied prophecies of doom and destruction. Universal History Archive/Getty ImagesPythia, the Oracle of Delphi, speaking to her subjects. Today, the Temple of Apollo sits in ruins, the result of 2,700 years showing their age. Two thousand years ago, however, the Temple was an imposing sight. The Temple rose above the western slope of Mount Parnassus and played host to a shrine known as the Oracle of Delphi, the home, and sanctuary of the Priestess Pythia....

B. charon is a deep sea Godzilla compared to normal larvaceans. After more than a century of searching, scientists have rediscovered a relatively giant sea blob that some assumed never truly existed to begin with. Two Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) researchers conducting a routine sample collection recently spotted the elusive creature in Monterey Bay, off the coast of California. Named Bathochordaeus charon (B. charon) in honor of Charon, the notorious “ferryman of the dead” in Greek mythology, the creature has now made its first appearance in the official scientific record since 1899, according to the researchers’ report in the scientific journal Marine Biodiversity Records....

Willem de Kooning snuck into the United States in 1926. The 22-year-old brought little with him except his formal fine arts training, which he started in his hometown of Rotterdam at the age of twelve. When he arrived in the U.S., he painted houses for a while. He then transitioned to murals with the Works Project Administration as part of FDR’s New Deal. Eventually, he began palling around with New York’s avant-garde, including fellow immigrant Arshile Gorky, art critic Clem Greenberg, and Jackson Pollock....

Of the 166 daguerreotypes known to have been taken by James P. Ball, Glenalvin Goodridge, and Augustus Washington, 40 have just been acquired by the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Smithsonian American Art MuseumThe collection spans 286 items and dates from the 1840s to the 1920s. Larry West was merely looking for a hobby when he visited an antique store in Mamaroneck, New York, in 1975. Fascinated by history and the visual arts, he gravitated toward an antique daguerreotype of an African American man — and spent the next 45 years curating a collection by three of the first Black photographers in America....

In Lalage Snow’s “Faces Of Afghanistan,” you don’t have to go to the battleground to witness the hazards of war; you only have to look at their eyes. Private Chris MacGregor, 24 For many, the Afghanistan War has been a thirteen-year quagmire; an ill-advised, reactionary invasion by the American government immediately following the September 11, 2001 attacks. In modern memory, though, Afghanistan has been plagued with all sorts of political unrest beginning soon after World War II....

Though the 40-foot statue of Zeus lorded over the Olympic Games for 800 years, it somehow vanished from history. As one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, the statue of Zeus at Olympia once stunned any who laid eyes on it. The 40-foot statue of the Greek god of gods, Zeus, used to grace the temple inside the sanctuary of Olympia on the Greek Peloponnese Peninsula for over 800 years — until it was destroyed....

For centuries, the Voynich manuscript has confounded the minds of everyone who has tried to decipher its intricately printed and illustrated pages. Not a single word of the infamous Voynich manuscript has been understood in modern history. Named after the man to whom it was sold in 1912, Wilfrid Voynich, the fifteenth-century text contains enigmatic undertones of alchemy and an unidentified language intertwined with whimsical, primitive scientific illustrations. For decades, historians, linguists, and code breakers alike have diligently worked on deciphering the symbols contained within the Voynich manuscript’s age-old pages....

Clown hysteria has been happening for decades. Maybe people just really hate clowns. Late Monday evening, thousands of students gathered on the Penn State campus to hunt a masked jokester after reports of a clown sighting circulated on social media. But the midnight mob was about as successful in capturing that clown as police were in finding the one that had supposedly been murdered in Fort Wayne, Indiana. And if you’re wondering why both the Penn State students and the Fort Wayne police couldn’t catch their clowns, it’s because neither one ever actually existed....

“It is definitely not good for people to go into the foam, but they just do not understand the risks.” Arun Sankar/AFP via Getty ImagesOfficials are warning beachgoers to avoid the toxic foam covering Marina Beach, a popular spot in Chennai. It’s a picturesque scene on Marina Beach in India as children frolic in the water among bubbles of white suds on the shore. But those aren’t ordinary bubbles — the suds are actually part of a toxic foam caused by pollution that seeped into the sea....

On June 10, 1912, all eight people inside the Moore family’s house in Villisca, Iowa — including two adults and six children — were murdered by an axe-wielding assailant. Jo Naylor/FlickrThe Villisca Axe Murders house where an unknown attacker committed one of American history’s most disturbing unsolved murders of all time in 1912. At the end of a quiet street in Villisca, Iowa, there sits an old white frame house. Up the street, there are a group of churches, and a few blocks away is a park that faces a middle school....

Some experts believe that the animal painting and others found in the cave are some of the earliest examples of the formation of human culture itself. Luc-Henri FageThe trio of cows in a piece of cave art dating back at least 40,000 years. A team of researchers in Indonesia has come across record-breaking ancient artwork that is revealing new things about one of humanity’s oldest cultures. Archaeologists found the earliest known painting of an animal in the remote mountains of the Indonesian province of East Kalimantan on the island of Borneo....

Reports suggest that significantly more teens may have been infected, but their families may have taken them to hospitals farther away to avoid embarrassment. Fifteen teenagers have been treated for rabies that they may have contracted from having sex with an infected donkey. According to the Morocco World News, the local daily Al Akhbar originally reported that the 15 teens from the small village of Sidi Kamel were hospitalized and treated for rabies earlier last week after contracting the disease when they gang raped a local donkey....

From the Sentinelese to the Korowai, these uncontacted tribes know almost nothing of the world we take for granted. Wikimedia CommonsA member of the Dani tribe of Papua, New Guinea. This tribe had been unknown to Westerners until the 1930s. By most estimates, there are more than 100 uncontacted tribes of indigenous peoples around the world. They raise families and honor their respective tribe’s traditions, from ritual body modification to the barbaric extreme of cannibalism, no matter how unorthodox any of it may seem to the rest of us....