Two Ships Collided at 1 MPH. The Resulting Explosion Flattened a City.
The 1917 disaster was, at that point, the biggest explosion in history.

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The 1917 disaster was, at that point, the biggest explosion in history.

© HUM Images

Boston’s Great Molasses Flood of 1919 sounds like fiction, but it was all too real.

© Boston Globe

For decades, a single whale has been calling out at a frequency no known species uses. Scientists still can’t find it.

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Harnessing this ability could even make your life feel longer.


The cannon-like sound could be heard for hundreds of miles, but its cause long remained a mystery.

© Jon Sargent
An electromechanical marvel called the Bombe decrypted thousands of WWII messages.

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Foucault’s pendulum experiment led to an increase in the public’s interest in both real-life science and science fiction.

© by Marc Guitard
More than 100 shipwrecks from a forgotten wartime gamble lie half-submerged in a quiet Maryland bay—and almost no one knows why they're there.

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In 1884, the Syria sank after hitting a reef in Fiji—and today its legacy lives on through lighthouses and reconciliation.

© Jason Edwards
From 1811 to 1812, quakes in the central U.S. rang church bells in Boston and caused the Mississippi to flow backward.

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On January 3, 1961, the small Stationary Low-Power Reactor Number One (SL-1) exploded at the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory—possibly because of a prank gone wrong.

© Jose A. Bernat Bacete
4,000-year-old megalithic art in the South Caucasus holds the mysteries of an ancient culture.

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Mammals aren’t known for the ocular regenerative powers, but a new study shows that nature has a few tricks up its sleeve.
© Andriy Onufriyenko

“It’s the entire ecosystem from an age that’s gone.”

© shotbydave
The burial pits were filled with the remains of at least 32 individuals.
© Nirian

One researcher believes that we evolved to filter out a larger truth—and it’s helping us survive.


Perhaps even indefinitely.


Turns out we’re not all watching the same version of the world unfold, just continuously updating our own personal “simulation.”


You might say it’s like striking gold, but these elements are much more valuable than that.

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