Posts

Discover the most fascinating facts and stories about the sinking of the RMS Titanic on April 15, 1912, from how it happened to how many people died. When the RMS Titanic first set sail, countless people cheered for the “unsinkable” ship. But the vessel’s maiden voyage ultimately ended in tragedy when it struck an iceberg in the North Atlantic Ocean. Ever since that fateful night, the story of the Titanic has fascinated the world....

Joel Rifkin used his landscaping business to hide his victims’ bodies. In the below video from Seinfeld, Elaine tries to get her boyfriend to change his first name from Joel to something else. His given name is Joel Rifkin, which is the same as that of a noted New York-area serial killer who terrorized the city in the 1990s. Apparently, the fictional Joel really likes his name and the pair can’t come up with a solution to his dilemma....

The unvaccinated high school senior claims that the state’s health department is violating his freedom of religion. CBS News screen grab.18-year-old Jerome Kunkel. 18-year-old Jerome Kunkel, an unvaccinated student enrolled in Our Lady of the Sacred Heart/Assumption Academy in Kentucky, is suing the Health Department for being barred from school and prohibited from playing in his high school’s basketball games. “I don’t believe in that vaccine at all and they are trying to push it on us,” Bill Kunkel, the student’s father said in a video interview with WLWT5....

“It’s as if the spiders are taking advantage of these conditions and are having a kind of party.” Giannis Giannakopoulos/FacebookPart of the massive spider web covering the shore of a lagoon in Aitoliko, Greece. An uptick in temperature and humidity in western Greece has set the stage for a massive spider party along one town’s shore. Residents of Aitoliko, Greece recently woke up to a massive 1,000-foot long spiderweb covering a large patch of greenery on the beach....

The House of the Vettii was buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 C.E. but has been restored to its former glory after 20 years of meticulous restoration work. Marco Cantile/LightRocket via Getty ImagesRestored frescoes in the House of the Vettii. Almost 2,000 years ago, Mount Vesuvius erupted and smothered the Roman town of Pompeii. Now, thanks to meticulous restoration efforts that lasted two decades, one of the doomed town’s most opulent homes, the House of the Vettii, has been brought back to life....

The giant sloth was allegedly up to 20 feet long, stood 13 feet tall, and weighed around 14,400 pounds. Julie McMahon, University of Illinois at Urbana-ChampaignA size comparison depicting an average adult man with the giant, 13-foot sloth. The 2014 discovery of 27,000-year-old fossils of a giant ground sloth was purely coincidental. Divers were searching for ancient Maya artifacts when they chanced upon the animal’s tooth fragment, humerus, and femur fossils in a sinkhole in Clara Blanca, Belize....

Timothy Hauschultz punished his 7-year-old son for forgetting 13 Bible verses by forcing him to undergo manual labor in the winter while his teenage son beat him. Manitowoc County Sheriff’s OfficeTimothy and Tina Hauschultz When seven-year-old Ethan Hauschultz died last April from hypothermia and blunt force trauma to the head, chest, and abdomen, authorities had some pressing questions. The nearly year-long investigation into the young Wisconsin boy’s suspicious cause of death has now been traced back to his court-appointed parents, Timothy and Tina Hauschultz, and their 15-year-old son, Damian....

Rhode Island Rev. Richard Bucci said that at least sexual abuse “doesn’t kill anyone.” WJARAfter publicly banning pro-choice lawmakers from his church, Reverend Richard Bucci said abortion was worse than pedophilia. A Catholic priest from Rhode Island is making headlines this week after first banning pro-choice lawmakers from his church and then telling a local news station that abortion is worse than child molestation. As NBC News reported, Rev. Richard Bucci of Sacred Heart Church in West Warwick said that abortion was worse than pedophilia because at least sexual abuse “doesn’t kill anyone....

China’s Science and Technology Daily briefly published a report saying that its Sky Eye telescope had picked up unusual and possibly extraterrestrial signals in 2020 and 2022. Qu Honglun/China News Service via Getty ImagesChina’s “Sky Eye” telescope picked up the unusual signals in 2020 and 2022. Is there alien life out there? For a fleeting moment, one Chinese publication reported that the country’s enormous Sky Eye telescope had picked up signals indicating just that — before quickly deleting the report....

After more than two years on their trail, authorities from three countries successfully caught a group of eight smugglers bringing thousands of looted artifacts into the U.K. EuropolThe items spanned from the Bronze and Iron Age to the Middle Ages. After two years of investigation by Bulgarian, British, and German authorities, an international crime ring planning to smuggle thousands of ancient artifacts into England has been caught. According to The Times, the 4,600 items ranged from spears and coins to funeral urns, ceramics, and arrowheads....

Modern birth control still has its flaws, but at least we no longer live in a world where women are encouraged to shove glass up their vaginas. People will always want to have sex, but the same cannot be said for the desire to have children. On the quest to prevent the latter from happening, humankind has come up with some pretty terrifying contraptions and hair-brained ideas. Modern birth control of course has its flaws, but a quick look at these contraception devices and methods might leave you thankful that the majority of your birth control-related pains are due to cost, not an iron piece of machinery scraping against your vaginal wall or the occasional bloodletting:...

The 100 rooms of the H. H. Holmes house were allegedly filled with trapdoors, gas chambers, staircases to nowhere, and a human-sized stove. Wikimedia CommonsThe infamous H. H. Holmes hotel in Chicago, built in the late 19th century. If you were staying at the World’s Fair Hotel — more commonly known as the H. H. Holmes hotel — you might run up a flight of stairs and find that it led to nowhere....

“I am sorry, but there were no options here.” Sky News Babchenko thanked and apologized to the news conference crowd. On May 29, 2018, it was reported that Journalist Arkady Babchenko was murdered late that same night. An outspoken critic of Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin, Babchenko was said to have been shot dead at his apartment building in the Ukrainian capital of Kiev. The reports by police stated that he was found by his wife in a pool of blood and died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital....

Learn why a small Colorado town has an annual festival to celebrate a single chicken who managed to survive for 18 months without its head. Fox21 News/YouTube In 1945, a farmer named Lloyd Olson was tending to business as usual, slaughtering chickens on a family farmed shared with his wife, Clara. With one on decapitation duty and the other ready to clean their recent kill, the duo went to work beheading around 50 birds that day....

His story inspired several writers to base characters on him, but Neal Cassady’s life hardly needed embellishment. FlickrNeal Cassady as a young man. Neal Cassady was one of the most prominent figures of the Beat Generation despite having never published a piece of work during his lifetime. Although his list of works includes only personal letters and an unfinished manuscript, his lifestyle and close friendship with several members of the Beat crowd, most notably Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, helped shaped the work of an entire generation of writers....

For decades, countless people have claimed that the “real” Paul McCartney died in a car accident in 1966 and was replaced with a lookalike. Slide The Beatles’ White Album out of its case. Turn on your record player. Put on the second-to-last track, “Revolution 9,” and play it backward. You should hear an otherworldly voice moaning, “Turn me on, dead man.” In 1969, this was enough to convince Beatles fans: Paul is dead....

The artifacts included iron calipers, a wooden handle, a silk and leather sewing valet, a key, and letters and an account book belonging to Paul Revere’s grandchildren and daughter-in-law. John McInnis AuctioneersThe lot of artifacts sold for $20,000. During renovations at an early 19th-century house in Canton, Massachusetts, workers unearthed a trove of personal items belonging to the family of Paul Revere. According to The Boston Globe, the residence in Canton is believed to have once been owned by the Revere family....

Public toilets aren’t exactly known for their cleanliness. Here are some gross facts — and to keep you from having a panic attack upon the thought of entering one — some helpful information to put it all into perspective. Flushing the toilet before “going” can cut down on airborne bacteria. The standing water in a toilet is the perfect breeding ground for germs to multiply, which has led some to say that flushing prior to urinating will get rid of some of the bacteria in the bowl....

Prolonged war and a stagnant economy gave way to a massive national hangover in the 1970s. But at Studio 54, the party was just getting started. Described by some as Sodom and Gomorrah with a disco beat, New York City’s delightfully depraved nightclub opened its doors in 1977. It took owners Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager just six weeks to transform the former CBS Studio 52 into the destination for celebrities and others in high society looking to cut loose....

Stanford researchers have just pushed knowledge on the relationship between humans and robots one step further. Is robot sex in our future? Image Source: Sean Gallup/Getty Images A recent Stanford University study that saw researchers building on the idea of the “uncanny valley” has turned up some surprising results. The uncanny valley hypothesis describes the U-shaped relationship between how “human” a robot looks, and how comfortably humans receive them. The theory suggests that for a “familiar but distinctly non-human robot,” a natural human response would be “to look at them as a friendly, non-threatening computer,” according to the study’s press release....