The ancient Romans are known for many innovations that were ahead of their time, including running water and a rotating dining room. But some of the civilization’s construction work seems ahead of even our time. Case in point: Concrete used in some

In an age of misinformation and voter mistrust, Prof. Paul Gronke is delivering the data.

Daytimes are what Pike Place Market is known for—it’s when the fish fly, farmers vend, and tourists mill. By the measly hour of 5 pm, the stalls shutter and the shops in the market’s depths get ready to close. But in the evening, a whole other market…

You may already know Pearl Nelson as the driving force of hip-hop trio Champagne Champagne, a high-energy staple of the Seattle music scene and beyond, or through his punk band White Tears. After a decade of hectic schedules—in one period of just six…

The Mary Tyler Moore Show is one of the most influential and groundbreaking sitcoms in the history of television. The series follows Mary Richards, played by Mary Tyler Moore, as a 30-something working as an associate producer on a local news series…

UFO, short for unidentified flying object, is a pretty vague term. But it tends to call to mind a specific image in the popular consciousness: a flying saucer. The disc-shaped craft entered the public imagination in 1947 after aviator Kenneth Arnold described a strange sighting of several objects while flying over Washington state, spawning hundreds of other dubious UFO sightings and many a spooky movie. But for a brief time, flying saucers were more than science fiction, thanks to a failed mili

Synthesizer music has been around a lot longer than many realize. Look no further than the telharmonium: Patented back in 1897 by an American lawyer and inventor named Thaddeus Cahill, it not only created the first electrically generated music but was also a music streaming service nearly a hundred years ahead of its time.  The telharmonium was designed to turn the telephone — which had only recently been invented, in 1876 — into a music player. The instrument itself, comprising some 200 tons of

In the 1820s, French inventor Nicéphore Niépce was experimenting with using light to create and copy lithographs, and found success with bitumen of Judea, a kind of photosensitive asphalt. After spreading a mixture of the asphalt and lavender oil on a pewter plate and exposing it to sunlight, he found that the parts exposed to light would harden, and the parts that were in shadow would wash away easily. Niépiece decided to expose one of his plates to a camera obscura — a device that projects rea

In ancient Rome, most people didn’t have their own ovens. This included some bakers, which put them in a tricky spot since bread was strictly regulated. Government officials would carefully inspect the weight, size, and cost of the loaves, and nobody wanted to get punished for someone else’s substandard bread. So to distinguish their goods, bakers put their dough in the oven with a bronze brand on top, which would leave an indent on the finished product — not unlike a maker’s mark on ceramics. S

One of the oldest religious practices in ancient Rome was augury, or reading signs from the gods through the behavior of birds, the idea being that the birds were deliberate divine messengers. Augurs, or bird divination experts, would sometimes draw diagrams on the ground to help them interpret behavior from owls, woodpeckers, crows, and other wild birds.  These avian messages, called auspices, were taken extremely seriously, but wild birds weren’t always around to deliver them — so eventually,

As the United States and the Soviet Union started competing for space supremacy in the mid-20th century, they were also racing in the opposite direction. Both countries wanted to dig the deepest hole, with the goal of reaching the Earth’s mantle in order to better understand the planet’s interior and also demonstrate technical prowess. A group of American scientists took a first stab at the deep hole in 1961 by drilling into a deep sea bed, where the Earth’s crust is thinner. The Soviet Union, a

Although computer science goes back to the 19th century, the academic field really came into its own in the early 1960s. The first United States graduates with advanced computer science degrees emerged in the middle of that decade, and the first two Ph.D. candidates graduated on the same day (from different schools) on June 7, 1965. One of the graduates was not only the first U.S. woman to earn a Ph.D. in the field, but also a nun: Sister Mary Kenneth Keller, who earned her degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. (The other candidate was Irving Tang of Washington University in St. Louis.) Keller was born Evelyn Keller, and her name was changed to Mary Kenneth after she took her vows with the Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary (BVM) in 1933 at age 19. She was assigned to teach elementary ...Read More

There’s a reason we typically receive X-rays only in a medical setting: Without the proper precautions, radiation is extremely dangerous. But for several decades following the discovery of X-rays in 1895, most people didn’t think twice about sticking their feet inside unregulated X-ray machines at the shoe store. Shoe-fitting fluoroscopes, which show moving images in real time, were developed during World War I to examine injured soldiers’ feet without removing their boots. After the war, they were adapted for commercial use to help fit people for shoes, and they became staples at shoe stores in many countries, including the United States. The machines were tall wooden or metal cabinets with an X-ray tube encased in lead at the base, and an alcove for the customer’s feet just above. When the fluoroscope was turned on, X-ray beams created an image on a fluorescent screen ...Read More

Benjamin Hornigold was a powerful fleet captain during the golden age of piracy — the period in the late 17th and early 18th centuries when most of the pirates you’ve heard of were doing their plundering. Blackbeard, for instance, started his career under Hornigold’s command, eventually becoming his second before going out on his own, as did many other notorious pirates.  It’s easy to imagine a fearsome pirate captain like Hornigold filling his ships’ coffers with booty from wealthy merchant ships, but in reality, not every trading ship targeted by pirates was carrying high-value goods. Often, ransacking a vessel was just a means to run errands — picking up rum, foodstuffs, ammo, ship repair parts, and other basics that were critical to maintaining the swashbuckling lifestyle. Hornigold’s crew had a pretty short shopping list when they boarded a sloop off the coast of ...Read More

Revolving restaurants reached their peak in the “space age” of the mid-20th century, when futuristic aesthetics were all the rage. But at least one rotating dining room emerged 1,900 years before those atop the Space Needle and the CN Tower. Roman…

If you’ve ever picked up a modern fantasy novel or movie, chances are you already know at least a little about some kind of dragon, whether it’s the scaly and fire-breathing kind from Game of Thrones or Lord of the Rings or the fuzzy, blessed beings…

The most beloved children’s books are also remembered fondly by grown-ups, but there’s always something new to learn about them. Which rhyming classic, now a standard part of any nursery, had dismal sales at first? What was Where the Wild Things Are…

At 1 a.m. on March 10, 1879, the arena at Gilmore’s Garden in New York City (later renamed Madison Square Garden) was absolutely packed with screaming fans of America’s latest sports craze: pedestrianism. That’s right, competitive walking. At the…

There’s something magical about train travel for just about everybody, whether you’re an engineering nerd, a hopeless romantic, a world traveler, or an easily excitable 8-year-old. Trains have gone through a lot of changes in the last few centuries,…

In the United States and Europe, a ghostly pallor was the height of fashion among Victorian-era women. Pale skin signaled high class, both because it meant that you never had to work in the sun and because wasting away from consumption, what we now…