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After suffering from mysterious hallucinations for four days straight, Edgar Allan Poe died of unknown causes in Baltimore at age 40 on October 7, 1849. The eerie tale of how Edgar Allan Poe died is like something out of one of his own stories. The year is 1849. A man is found delirious on the streets of a city in which he does not live, wearing clothes that are not his own, incapable or unwilling to discuss the circumstances under which he arrived....

“By identifying the vast majority of high-risk viruses that have not yet emerged, we’ll be able to design new strategies to reduce the risk of future pandemics.” pixaby Wouldn’t it be great if we were able to stop the outbreak of a major virus like Zika, SARS, or Swine Flu before it even started? The Global Virome Project (GVP), launching in 2018, is aiming to do just that. Today, standard response when it comes to the outbreak of one of these viruses is almost always reactionary: The outbreak occurs, people panic, the public health sector scrambles to find out where it’s coming from and how to stop it....

The parents made their way south into Colorado from Yellowstone National Park in 2019. Until one of them gave birth, officials believed they were both male. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service/FlickrFor the first time since 1940, gray wolf puppies have been born in the wild in Colorado. Colorado is officially home to its first litter of gray wolf pups since 1940, when decades of federally backed hunting and trapping caused the extinction of the species in the state....

A soldier in the famed Harlem Hellfighters regiment during World War I, Henry Johnson’s incredible act of bravery earned him France’s highest military honor. His own country, however, took much longer to do the same. U.S. ArmyPrivate Henry Johnson of the Harlem Hellfighters. Henry Johnson’s Life In A Segregated Military Although African Americans had been serving in the U.S. Armed Forces since the Revolutionary War, they still faced discrimination and segregation within the military....

Killer whales used to peacefully co-exist with Alaska’s fishing boats. Now gangs of the intelligent creatures won’t let humans catch a bite. Wolfgang Kaehler/LightRocket via Getty Images After decades of peaceful coexistence, killer whales in Alaska are tired of fishers taking their food. Now, huge gangs of the massive creatures have begun stalking fishing boats in the Bering Sea, and then robbing them as soon as they have a catch — stripping hooks clean save a for a few halibut....

Each winter, trees piled high with snow are sculpted by icy Siberian winds into magnificent humanoid figures. Like this gallery?Share it: Share Flipboard Email And if you liked this post, be sure to check out these popular posts: 1 of 26Cable cars travel over snow covered trees, nicknamed “snow monsters” on Jan. 19, 2019, on Mount Zaō near Yamagata, Japan. Carl Court/Getty Images 2 of 26Carl Court/Getty Images 3 of 26Carl Court/Getty Images 4 of 26The “monsters” are formed by strong winds over the nearby lake that fling water droplets onto snow covered trees....

With her insatiable fighting spirit, Kathleen Cleaver went from being a bookish child to a front-lines protestor with the Black Panthers. New York Times Co./Getty ImagesKathleen Cleaver. 1968. Early Life Born Kathleen Neal in 1945 to two well-educated parents in Texas, Cleaver spent her early childhood between the segregated deep South and abroad. Her father’s work in the Foreign Service meant that she lived in Tuskegee, Ala. as well as North Carolina, the Philippines, India, and West Africa....

These harrowing photos look inside mental asylums of the 19th and 20th centuries and reveal just how disturbing their conditions once were. Like this gallery?Share it: Share Flipboard Email And if you liked this post, be sure to check out these popular posts: 37 Haunting Portraits Of 19th Century Mental Asylum Patients Inside The Ruins Of 9 Abandoned Asylums Where The ‘Treatments’ Were Torture 25 Haunting Photos Of Life Inside New York’s Tenements...

Ming the clam is more than half a millennium old, so how could scientists kill the animal? Bangor UniversityThe shells of Ming the clam. When researchers cracked open Ming the clam in 2006, they had no idea what they had gotten themselves into. Named after the Chinese dynasty age in which he was born, Ming the clam is the world’s oldest recorded animal, according to National Geographic. However, the 507-year-old ocean quahog (Arctica islandica) met his untimely death when the scientists who studied him accidentally killed him....

With a lack of ancient human bone excavations in Scandinavia, finding human DNA within this piece of chewed-up birch bark was a huge victory. Natalija Kashuba Et. Al/Stockholm UniversityIn the early Mesolithic Era, birch bark tar was commonly used as glue in tool production. Researchers excavated a piece of 10,000-year-old birch bark in Sweden in the early 1990s in the hopes of uncovering a trove of DNA. Why would birch bark be full of human DNA?...

However, there’s still a long way to go before we’ll have individualized replacement hearts. Over a third of Americans who need a new heart will not get the transplant they deserve in the upcoming year. And those lucky enough to receive one still run the major risk of their body rejecting it. However, researchers from Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School have announced that they’ve successfully used adult skin cells to grow functional human heart tissue, according to a new report published in the journal Circulation Research....

After Stacey Castor killed her husband David in 2005, she tried to frame her daughter Ashley Wallace — and then murder her too. YouTubeStacey Castor and her first husband, Michael Wallace. On Aug. 22, 2005, Stacey Castor called 911. Seemingly distraught, she said that her husband had locked himself in his room and that she feared he’d hurt himself. Indeed, police found Castor’s husband David dead in their bedroom — next to a glass of antifreeze....

Although the lives of the greatest American spies are always kept secret, it’s the lives of the notorious double agents that capture the public’s attention. AFP/AFP/Getty ImagesJulius and Ethel Rosenberg are seated in a police van in 1953 in New York shortly before their execution for espionage. It’s no secret that the United States has had its fair share of duplicitous spies. Today, movies portraying double agents and TV shows like The Americans pay homage to Cold War fears and politics that now seem so far away....

Like this gallery?Share it: Share Flipboard Email And if you liked this post, be sure to check out these popular posts: 18 Terrible 1970s Menswear Ads That Prove The Decade Is Better Left Forgotten Death, Destruction, And Debt: 41 Photos Of Life In 1970s New York Nostalgia-Inducing ’70s Pictures That Show What Real Life Was Like In The Decade Of Disco 1 of 30Actor Curt Jurgens with his wife and two female companions lathering up in a hot tub he had built in his den....

These rarely-seen photographs of the Kent State Massacre provide a harrowing look at the day the ’60s died. On May 4, 1970, at Ohio’s Kent State University, four American citizens were murdered by their own government. A line of 29 men of the Ohio National Guard marched up before a group of unarmed protesters and opened fire, killing four and wounding nine others. It’s an episode now burned into history as the Kent State Massacre....

How Jerome Jacobson and his band of psychics, drug dealers, and strip-club owners perpetrated the daring McMillions scam over the course of 12 wild years. In 2018, The Daily Beast reported on a bizzare and complex multi-million-dollar scheme that was virtually unheard of known as the McDonald’s Monopoly scam. The shocking report detailed how a 12-year scheme resulted in the arrest of a former cop who had rigged the fast-food company’s popular game with the help of psychics, strip-club owners, mobsters, drug traffickers, and a family of Mormons....

A century ago Kate Morgan checked into the Hotel del Coronado and took her own life. Now, guests claim her spirit may never have left. Wikimedia CommonsKate Morgan Kate Morgan lived an ordinary and rather unremarkable life by most accounts. Her death, however, has captured the attention of many for that past 125 years. Born in Iowa in 1864, Kate Morgan lived with her family for just two years before her mother passed away....

Meet Yves “Jetman” Rossy - the world’s first jet powered man. Yves “Jetman” Rossy. In 2008, ex-fighter pilot Yves Rossy — nicknamed ‘Jetman’ — became the world’s first jet-powered man when he launched his first official flight above the Alps in his native Switzerland. Since then, he’s gone on to fly across the English channel, the straight of Gibraltar, and over the Grand Canyon in Arizona. In the video below, Rossy flies over Dubai with another jet-powered man, Aerobatics Champion Veres Zoltán, for the first time:...

A tour of the world’s most fascinating and beautiful ice caves. Interesting Ice Caves: Eisriesenwelt, Austria Located forty kilometers south of Salzburg, Austria on Mount Hochkogel, the Eisriesenwelt cave is the largest ice cave in the world. Discovered in 1879 by natural scientist Anton Posselt, the name translates to the “World of Ice Giants,” which is a rather apt one given that the ice and limestone covered wonder stretches for 38 kilometers....

Mummy DNA uncovered, dinosaur-era bird found, ancient Roman cat pawprint discovered, oldest homo sapiens fossil unearthed, Van Gogh paintings made into film. Scientists Able To Extract DNA From Ancient Egyptian Mummies Archaeologists have long mined the burial chambers of ancient Egypt and come away with some fascinating finds. But now they’ve found one thing that has eluded them for years: mummy DNA. According to a new study published in Nature Communications, an international team of European researchers has successfully recovered DNA from 90 ancient Egyptian mummies, and sequenced their genomes....