10Nan Madol Nan Madol in Micronesia is an ancient city built on a hundred tiny islets in the sea. This watery location has led to Nan Madol being called the Venice of the Pacific. The buildings and walls of the city are constructed of huge blocks of basalt columns and coral. How the city came to be built is the subject of myth among locals. Two brother wizards, Olisihpa and Olosohpa, arrived from over the sea in a giant canoe....
10The STS 114 ‘Boomerang’ Incident The STS 114 mission on the space shuttle Discovery, was the first mission of its kind since the Columbia disaster two and a half years earlier in 2003. Since that tragic event, NASA had noticeably improved what were already tight safety procedures. Perhaps because of this, it was noticed almost immediately that a piece of foam had appeared to break away upon Discovery’s launch. Discovery’s mission was to dock with the International Space Station and resupply the crew that were already on board....
10ColombiaCocaine And Violence The Stereotype: Thanks to an ongoing civil war and a history of producing enough coke to single-handedly fuel the whole of Hollywood, Colombia has a pretty bad rep. In popular culture (and many people’s minds), it’s shorthand for “drugs” and “violence.” The Reality: Know which country is the source of most of our cocaine? Peru. Thanks to a multibillion-dollar effort to combat the drug trade, Colombia lost its crown as the chief coca producer back in 2013....
10Ya’qub The Coppersmith Ya’qub al-Saffar (“the Coppersmith”) was an impoverished metalworker who lived in the city of Zaranj in the mid-ninth century. His brother, a mule driver named ‘Amr, lived close by. For most of their lives, eastern Persia was in a state of turmoil as the Abbasid caliphs vied for control with an extremist sect known as the Kharijites. As things descended into anarchy, local self-defense militias sprang up throughout the province....
10 Lin Biao Water And Wind A key supporter of Mao Tse-tung who eventually rose to become his right hand man and chosen successor before dying in a mysterious and suspicious plane crash, Lin Biao was a notorious hypochondriac who suffered an irrational fear of water, as well as wind and cold. His many phobias made him appear like a drug addict most of the time, and in his later years he was often in a very fragile physical and mental state....
10Refrigeration A team of researchers at Penn State University, sponsored by Ben and Jerry’s, has made a refrigerator that chills food with sound. It works on the principle that sound waves compress and expand the air around them, which heats and cools the air respectively. Normally, sound waves affect temperatures no more than 1/10,000 of a degree, but far larger effects can be had by placing the gas inside the fridge under far greater pressure—about 10 atmospheres worth....
And that’s just the stuff you heard about. Behind the scenes and underreported by the media, many further serious conflicts took hold—and are continuing even now, out of the spotlight. 10The Yemen Insurgency Imagine an armed Islamic group had suddenly risen up, slaughtered hundreds of people, seized control of parts of a major city, and threatened to destabilize an already-volatile region. You’d assume the international media would give it the attention it granted ISIS, right?...
10Xbox Live Argument Leads To Stabbing The phrase “Well, that escalated quickly” seemed apt in this scenario. In August 2012, 20-year-old Kevin Kemp of Oakley, California was playing online with a 17-year-old neighbor via Xbox Live—the online gaming service of Microsoft’s Xbox video game console—when the two young men had an argument. The argument via headsets turned vicious, as the teenager’s anger began to boil. Meanwhile, Kemp said, “Bro, if you want to do this, come over to my house and we’ll do this right now....
Secret Identity: Roger Hayhurst Personal Gotham: Salford, Greater Manchester, UK Gardener by day, masked crime fighter by night—that’s the tagline for Knight Warrior, a 19-year-old in the UK whose self-proclaimed superpower is a “supernatural desire to make the world a better place.” His main target is drunk people who get a little too rowdy as they leave pubs. When there aren’t enough people fighting each other, he hands out food to homeless people in the Greater Manchester area....
Robert Falcon Scott’s race to the South Pole was one of exploration’s biggest screw-ups. Not only did his team fail to claim the Pole for the British; they were pinned down by a ten-day blizzard on the way back and froze to death. Crappy luck doesn’t come much crappier than that. Unless, that is, there was no blizzard. In 2001, science writer Susan Solomon caused a stir by claiming the ten-day storm was impossible....
10Canada Has Free Healthcare And An Excellent System Thomas Clement Douglas is the recognized founder of socialized medicine and is regarded as a national hero by many Canadians to this day. Perhaps if Mr. Douglas was alive today to see the state of Canada’s national healthcare system, he might be calling for reform if not a complete overhaul. That overhaul is not just a plausible whim of fancy, but is actually completely necessary in order for Canada’s healthcare system to survive into the future....
Today, electronics are more prevalent than they were in 1859 by many orders of magnitude. Almost every home in the developed world is connected to an electrical grid, billions of people rely on satellites for communication, and vital supply lines depend on electricity to operate. It’s been estimated that an EMP attack on the United States would utterly obliterate the American energy grid and starve 90 percent of the US population....
The English language is complex, so even native speakers can make simple mistakes. A misspelled word or an unfortunate choice of font can completely alter the context of the message we’re trying to convey. Fortunately, in many cases, we can correct these errors quickly. For non-English speakers, translation can also be fraught with difficulty, sometimes producing hilarious results. We’ve all seen the “funny signs” on Facebook and YouTube that were major translation fails....
Sometimes though, they go too far, and their eagerness to understand comes at the expense of other people’s safety and well-being. At best, the following psychological experiments left their participants hurt and upset (and sometimes traumatized). At worst, they cost lives. 10 The Monster Experiment In 1939, Wendell Johnson and his student Mary Tudor began experiments to determine whether stuttering was a learned behavior and, if so, whether it could be induced....
Then there are songs like these, whose inspiration comes not from out of left field, but from somewhere completely outside the ballpark. 10 “We’ve Only Just Begun” The Carpenters, 1971 Paul Williams is the quintessential songwriter and one of very few to have won a Grammy, a Golden Globe, and an Academy Award for his songwriting. He’s the guy who wrote “The Rainbow Connection” from The Muppet Movie, and dozens of artists have recorded his songs....
10 World Records That Have Never Been Broken 10 Longest Car Jump Fail (Tignes, France, 2014) After winning his fourth world title in freeriding, Guerlain Chicherit, hung up his skis to try his hand at rally and rallycross driving. After winning the French Rally Cup and the FIA Cross Country Rally World Cup, Chicherit tried stunt driving, performing the world’s first unassisted backflip in a car in 2013. But he wasn’t done....
10Cimarrones, Panama The presence of Cimarrones in the Panamanian isthmus was first recorded in the 1520s, when slaves slipped away from convoys traveling between ports on the Pacific and Atlantic coasts. In the 1550s, a ship carrying a Mandinko slave named Bayano was wrecked off the coast, and Bayano was then elected “King of the Blacks.” He spent the next five years harrying the Spaniards by preying on mule convoys carrying gold and silver....
In this list, you will learn about 10 people who turned out to be roommates from hell. From a nightmare landlady to a sleepwalking killer, here are 10 roommates who will make you want to live alone. 10 Elderly Lady’s Boarding House of Horror In 1988 in Sacramento, California, Dorothea Puente welcomed 52-year-old Alvaro Montoya into her boarding house. He had been suffering from mental health problems and was referred to Puente because she was known for looking after her elderly and disabled tenants....
More than a few people have dressed as animals, clowns, or children’s characters for a jaunt on the wrong side of the law. Their reasoning is often unclear, seemingly running the gamut from an attempt at a novel disguise to the result of profound intoxication. Whatever their motivation, the following people chose to commit crimes while wearing goofy costumes. SEE ALSO: 10 Historical Clowns That Helped Make Clowns Terrifying...
When that happens, they will only release the ship after receiving a huge ransom running into the millions of dollars. However, we do not know as much about these pirates as we think. Here are 10 shocking facts about them. 10 They Don’t Like Repairing Their Vehicles Pirates are the biggest spenders in Somalia. They spend their cash so recklessly that they quickly return to the impoverished lifestyles they were trying to escape....
