Side Projects https://sideprojects.pub en-us Sat, 04 Jul 2026 01:17:27 GMT https://sideprojects.pub/article/people-and-neanderthals-lived-together-heres-how-we-know https://sideprojects.pub/article/people-and-neanderthals-lived-together-heres-how-we-know Sat, 04 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT Has anyone ever called you a neanderthal? Well, that's actually not offensive because that person was most likely right. Everyone except for Subsaharan natives has at least some neanderthal DNA mixed in with their own. This is the result of thousands of years of cohabitation and interbreeding between our two species. In a very uniquely human egoistic way, for the longest time we saw Neanderthals as savages and brutes that stood in humanity's way of world dominance and posed a threat to our survival. The reality is, however, quite the opposite. Not only have humans and Neanderthals lived together, but we also influenced one another's genetic code, societal development, and eventually the extinction of one, and biological perseverance of the other species. Neanderthals are, in a way, still alive — here's why. ## Neanderthals and Humans — Two Separate Lineages Although the exact hominid family tree still can't be agreed upon by anthropologists because there are simply too few fossils to provide us with a specific answer, it's widely believed that *Homo heidelbergensis* was the last common ancestor of Neanderthals and modern day humans. *Homo heidelbergensis*, named after the German city of Heidelberg, near which a fossil was found in the early 20th century, evolved simultaneously in Africa and Eurasia from *Homo erectus* around 600,000 years ago. Some 200,000 years later, the African group would evolve into *Homo sapiens*, otherwise known as the person you see in the mirror every time you pass by it, and the other group would separate into two and evolve into Neanderthals and Denisovans. Denisovans are, for clarity, a humanoid species very closely related to Neanderthals. In fact, some anthropologists even wanted to classify them as a Neanderthal subspecies, but they were in fact their own species, and alongside Neanderthals, they're our closest cousins. For hundreds of thousands of years, humans never bothered to leave Africa. Denisovans were largely living in Asia, with Neanderthals spreading across both Asia and Europe, with Italy, Spain, France, and Germany having the highest fossil finding density. This, however, shouldn't limit our view of them as Neanderthals were fantastic nomads, capable of establishing long-lasting cultures over 3,000 kilometers in less than 2,000 years. This might not sound impressive now because such a distance is nothing more than a flight away for you nowadays, but keep in mind that Neanderthals lived roughly 400,000 to 240,000 years ago. They had to cross an unforgiving wilderness on foot, without access to sophisticated tools or weapons. According to the latest stone tool findings, it's entirely possible that Neanderthals have, in fact, lived for much longer than we think — up to 32,000 years ago — and that they inhabited one of the harshest environments on earth, the Arctic. At the same time, Denisovans were establishing communities in modern-day Siberia, Tibet, Taiwan, China, New Guinea, and Australia. Denisovans migrating across the Wallace Line, the natural faunal line between Asia and Australia, is a very recent discovery based on high DNA percentages in modern Australians and Papuans. At the same time, we were…doing nothing. The lazy bastards that we are, we've actually spent the majority of our existence as a species not bothering to venture outside of Africa. Of course, some isolated cultures from northeastern Africa migrated to Southern Europe and the Middle East, but not in big enough numbers to leave a trace. The oldest known trace of such a migration is a human skull found in Greece dated to about 210,000 years ago, but this is an exception rather than a rule. As a species, we spent close to two-thirds of our 300,000-year existence just moving across Africa, and large-enough migration waves that would establish long-term cultures wouldn't occur until about 100,000 years ago. Then, early humans crossed the Bab-el-Mandeb strait between the Arabian Peninsula and the Horn of Africa while the tide was low and spread across the modern day UAE, Oman, and India. The northern route, which crossed the Sinai Peninsula, was also used, and by using those two routes, humans later migrated to Europe and Asia, while those who entered Central Asia later migrated to the north, then crossed the Beringia land bridge, which existed at the time, and spread across modern day North and South America. Here is the very important part, though. Throughout the vast majority of our migration across Europe and Asia, we constantly came across Neanderthals and Denisovans. In fact, they only went extinct roughly 40,000 years ago, which means that, as a species, we actually spent more time with them than without them, and since we bumped into them so many times, cohabitation and interbreeding was unavoidable, and we today know for certain that our cultures lived together. ## Neanderthal and Human Cohabitation The first humans reached the heart of Europe, modern-day Germany, around 45,000 years ago. Five thousand years later, Neanderthals were completely extinct aside from a few pockets of the surviving culture in Iberia. Throughout that short time period, however, some humans shared territory with the Neanderthals instead of competing for it. The Tishemet Cave in modern-day Israel is one of the best examples of Neanderthal and human cohabitation. According to the research team, several groups of humanoids, including humans, Neanderthals, and pre-Neanderthals, maintained ongoing contact for many years. This resulted in the exchange of tools, hunting practices, various rituals, and, of course, DNA. It's highly likely that Tishemet Cave was used as a burial site by both humans and Neanderthals. This is one of the oldest burial places in the world, dating at some 110,000 years old, which is right around the time when the first humans started migrating from Africa to Eurasia, and their path would take them to the cave. Objects such as stone tools, animal bones, and pieces of ochre were found at the site, alongside human and neanderthal remains of roughly the same age. According to Professor Yossi Zaidner, who's in charge of the dig, the Cave was a melting pot for different humanoid populations. There, they regularly came into contact with one another and influenced one another's burial practices. Scientists also believe that Neanderthals and humans shared the modern-day Cave River nature reserve in Israel. There's evidence of interbreeding and technology sharing with stone axes and sharp arrowheads found in both human and Neanderthal caves. More evidence proving good neighbourly relations between humans and Neanderthals comes from Germany. Scientists from Berkeley analyzed DNA from numerous bone fragments found at Ranis, and discovered that they are most definitely human. However, by dating them, they found that the bones are at least 45,000 years old or quite possibly 2,500 older. This would not only make those humans some of the first in Europe, but it would also put that particular human culture at the right place and at the precisely right time to share their immediate area with Neanderthals. A similar thing happened in France about 50,000 years ago. Somewhere on the slopes of the Prealps in southern France, the Mandarin Cave was most likely shared by humans and Neanderthals. By dating the remains, the anthropologists deduced that humans inhabited the cave precisely 54,000 years ago. This means that they were most likely an oddly successful nomad culture that got further west than any human by that point, but this was by no means common and they were an outlier more than anything. Interestingly, local Neanderthals have used the cave both before and after that human culture. According to the article published in *The Conversation*: > "When Neanderthals and modern humans made fires in the site, the smoke would leave a layer of soot on those surfaces. Then the following season a thin layer of calcium carbonate called speleothem would cover it over. This cycle was repeated over and over. A decade of work…has shown that these patterns can be read like tree rings to tell us with what frequency and duration the groups visited the site, demonstrating that human groups came to Mandrin some 500 times over 80,000 years." By reading the layers of soot and calcium carbonate, the scientists were able to determine that no more than a year had passed between the last time the Neanderthals used the Cave and the time the first humans moved in. The humans occupied the cave for about 40 years and likely shared the immediate territory with Neanderthals, and once they abandoned the cave, the Neanderthals moved back in and remained there until extinction. There is also cultural evidence suggesting that Neanderthals were influenced by early humans. Samples taken from some Neanderthal sites include very human-specific artifacts that were never made by Neanderthals, which would suggest that some Neanderthal culture adopted our own habits and copied our technologies. The most obvious proof of us sharing territory with Neanderthals is, however, found in biology. The University of Adelaide ran a DNA study of Neanderthal dental plaque found at the El Sidron cave in Spain and found evidence of a bacteria that causes gum disease and dental caries. The only issue is the fact that the disease should only be present in modern humans and that the remains in question are 180,000 years old. So, how did a 180,000 year-old Neanderthal get a human-specific microbe in his or her mouth? The most apparent answer is that the Spanish Neanderthals grouped with our forager ancestors in Africa. The composition of the oral bacterial population closely correlates to the amount of meat in someone's diet, something that applies to both humans and Neanderthals, and the composition of the microbes from the sample in the north of Spain is extremely similar to ancient humanoid microbe compositions. The other explanation is that the Neanderthal in question exchanged saliva with a human, and that's what takes us to the strongest argument proving that we lived with Neanderthals. There's simply too much evidence of interspecies breeding to ignore. ## Interbreeding and Its Results When the first larger migratory waves of humans arrived in Europe, the Neanderthals were most definitely the superior species. They were pound for pound stronger than modern humans, they were faster, they knew the lay of the land, and since they had already been living in Europe for at least 200,000 years by the time we arrived, they were better adapted for the cold weather. Europe back then was much colder than it is today and very few cultures dared migrate more north than Germany because of the intense cold. Suffice it to say that we needed a little bit of that Neanderthal DNA if we planned on surviving in Europe. According to Ludovic Slimak, an archeologist with the Center for Anthropology and Genomics of Tolouse, when two populations are physically close, but still separated by traditions and language, they are going to exchange women. This is, obviously, extremely sexist, primitive, and inhumane by modern standards, but it is simply the way early human societies functioned. The purpose of exchanging women is the creation of a larger, universal clan, which ultimately makes survival easier for both groups. Although the groups won't necessarily live together, by exchanging members, they're not only exchanging DNA, but knowledge as well. This is a universal phenomenon common with various human clans across history, not just something we can observe with Neanderthals and humans. No single species had the upper hand in the interbreeding. According to the analysis of Y chromosomes of remains found in the Altai Mountains in Russia, Neanderthal Y chromosomes are more similar to the chromosomes of modern humans than the chromosomes of Denisovans, which is odd as Neanderthals and Denisovans are more closely related to one another than either group is to us. Anthropologists still don't know why that is so. The prehistoric 50 Shades of Grey was a two-lane road, however, as some human mitochondrial DNA was found in Neanderthal remains. We know that in humans, mitochondria, which is the part of your cells that turns sugar into usable energy, is exclusively passed down from a mother to her children. If a Neanderthal has human mitochondrial DNA, it proves that they had a human mother. Aside from sharing women, we also shared sexually transmitted diseases with Neanderthals. Professor Ville Pimenoff of the University of Oulu realized this by accident when he was studying the human papillomavirus. All humans have a number of papillomavirus infections throughout our lives, and most of them are asymptomatic. However, the Type 16 HPV is the well-known strain responsible for anogenital cancers. This HPV type is further categorized into five subtypes. AFR-1 and AFR-2 types mostly occur in Subsaharan Africa, while the EUR type occurs in Europe, and guess what? The type dispersion almost perfectly matches the distribution of Neanderthal DNA around the world. Pimenoff calculated that the EUR type of HPV16 first emerged around 60 to 120 thousand years ago, which is right around the time when archaic humans started massively moving into Europe, and it's likely that the strain switched hosts from Neanderthal to *Homo sapiens*. The only way of doing that is by copulating. It's likely that the perpetrators were some of the earliest humans in Europe and Asia who came in contact with Neanderthals in modern-day Iran and Turkey, long before they explored the hearts of the continents. What supports this theory further is the fact that the virus is so cancerous in humans. If you think about it, we only came in contact with the EUR type of HPV16 very recently in our evolutionary history and our immune systems simply haven't yet evolved to fight it properly. So…Neanderthals kind of gave us cancer, but we gave them herpes in return so the interspecies STD ledger kind of balances itself out. Even though neither we nor the Neanderthals were faithful to our own species, we were faithful to our partners. Ancient humans and Neanderthals were both largely monogamous, and we know this for a fact thanks to…ancient penises. Yes, that's right, the anatomy of the male genitalia is actually key to understanding monogamy in mammals. Based on the Neanderthal genetic code research, we know that just like human ones, their penises were smooth. The same cannot be said for the majority of the animal kingdom, but with Neanderthals, it's a sure sign that the females made babies with very few partners, usually just a single one. Before I explain it, you should be warned that you're about to have a fantastically nasty picture painted in your head. So, the penises of most male animals — thank God, not humans — have something called penile spines covering them completely. These spines are essentially tiny barbs that are supposed to clear out the sperm of competing males. Why did evolution come up with this, you wonder? In the wild, when a female animal is ready to make babies, it will usually copulate with more than a single partner, and much of that copulation is non-consensual, by the way — just saying that in case this hasn't ruined wildlife enough for you. It is the goal of every single species to continue the life of that species, and this is something that applies to humans as well, it's ingrained in everyone's DNA, we can't help it. On an individual level, it's every animal's instinct to spread its very own DNA, which is why males compete for the females in the wild — they see them as nothing more than incubators for their offspring. So, in the wild, it's completely natural for a single female to copulate with several males in a very short time period, and these penile barbs are supposed to remove the previous male's sperm. The barbs have a texture very similar to a cat's tongue, so if you've ever been licked by a cat, you know that you should be grateful for not being born as one, and you now finally understand why they're moaning in pain every time they mate. The main point of this penile barb monologue is that we don't have them, and Neanderthals didn't have them either, which means exactly one thing — there is and was not enough genetic competition for our own and Neanderthal evolution to bother with developing barbs. Neanderthal communities usually composed of brothers and cousins and their own female partners and children — there was very little room for promiscuity. If a Neanderthal clan exchanged one of their own female members for a human female, that human female would usually spend the rest of her life with her Neanderthal partner. The result of such an interspecies marriage wasn't often successful, though. According to years of research, the children of human males and Neanderthal females could survive, but the adverse rarely happened. We know this because most humans nowadays have at least some Neanderthal DNA — we'll get to the specifics later — but very few Neanderthal remains with human DNA were ever found. It's believed that the children of male Neanderthals and female humans were most likely sterile. We still don't know why that is, but we might find the answer if we look at other mammalian species. What do you get when you forcibly mate a male lion and a female tiger? A liger. That's not a joke, it's an actual lion-tiger hybrid and it's one of the largest cat species in the world. Calling it a species, however, is biologically incorrect because male ligers are completely sterile, and being capable of reproducing is the most important identifying feature of a species. Mules are similar. They're the offspring of a male donkey and a female horse and they are almost always sterile, although a few medical miracles have been documented. This is in accordance with Haldane's rule, which is one of the most important laws of hybrid biology. That rule states that in species hybridization, if one sex has to be sterile, it will always be the one with different sex chromosomes. This means that male human-Neanderthal hybrids were most likely the sterile ones, while female hybrids could probably successfully mate with other Neanderthals or humans. This explains why human mitochondrial DNA was found in Neanderthal remains. The Neanderthal Y chromosome is one of the reasons why human women could rarely successfully mate with Neanderthal males. According to *Live Science*, the Y chromosome created conditions that might have led to miscarriages. After analyzing the Y chromosome of a Neanderthal male found in Spain, researchers found three mutations that could trigger immune responses from human women during pregnancy, which could lead to a miscarriage. Human males only have one of those three mutations. To simplify it — male Neanderthals were simply incompatible with human women, and just going through the pregnancy and giving birth was, from a medical perspective, a success. The human-Neanderthal mating rate would quickly die down, though. The oldest human remains found in Neanderthal-rich areas and dated to the right time period have the longest stretches of Neanderthal DNA. However, if we fast forward just by a few thousand years, Neanderthal segments in human DNA become much shorter. The two most reasonable explanations are that people with more Neanderthal DNA were simply less fertile, or that breeding with Neanderthals resulted in unwanted features and mutations that we wanted to eradicate, so we avoided mating with human-Neanderthal offspring. We have very little information on what human-Neanderthal hybrids looked like. Even though we have some Neanderthal DNA now, we lack pronounced Neanderthal features. The only two skeletons that give us any idea what a Neanderthal-human person could look like are those of children. A skeleton of a boy, dated to about 24,500 years ago, found near Fatima in Portugal had a stocky torso and short legs, which are characteristic of Neanderthals, but a normal, human chin, jaw, and arm bones. An even older set of remains, one dated to about 40,000 years ago, was found in Romania. The skull is rich with both human and Neanderthal traits, particularly the extremely large molars and a flat head. This individual was between 6 and 9% Neanderthal, and that makes him the person with the highest percentage of Neanderthal DNA ever found, at least so far. Speaking of features, breeding with Neanderthals has most definitely affected our genetics. Taller noses, for example, likely come from Neanderthals. Neanderthals developed tall noses as a way of dealing with the intense cold in Europe, and through mating with them, we inherited one specific gene that determines nasal height. The noses of modern humans are designed to regulate the temperature and humidity of colder air, while our ancestors' noses were smaller because the air in Africa was warmer. Genes affecting keratin have been introgressed from Neanderthals in East Asians and Europeans, effectively determining the way our hair looks. Baldness is still, interestingly, an inherently human thing. The skin pigmentation gene was also affected by Neanderthal genetics. Other genes, such as those involved with the function of sugar metabolism, muscle contraction, enamel thickness, brain size, and body fat distribution, have all been influenced by Neanderthal genes. There are also three Neanderthal genes that result in great pain sensitivity in humans who carry all three variants, while we also share the FOXP2 gene, which, when mutated, leads to speech problems, as well as problems with oral and facial control. Our immune systems were by far the most affected by Neanderthal DNA. By breeding with Neanderthals, we acquired the genetic resistance to certain European diseases that we had never encountered before. This gave the offspring a better chance at survival, but it also resulted in backfiring. Some autoimmune diseases are the direct consequence of breeding with Neanderthals. Graves' disease, for example, which causes the thyroid to produce hormones in excess, can be a result of Neanderthal genes. Even COVID-19 has been affected by this. In 2020, researchers found that the Neanderthal genome plays a huge part as a genetic risk factor for severe COVID. A lot of people who died from COVID were affected by this. Similarly, one of the genes responsible for Duputryen's disease, an illness that causes the thickening and shortening of finger tissue, comes from Neanderthals. Some Neanderthal genes in humans were originally very important but have outlived their usefulness. The clotting gene is one of them. We inherited it from Neanderthals and it was useful when we hunted every day as it allowed the blood to quickly clot and prevent bleeding from small wounds. However, since we're not exactly chasing after reindeer in the woods every day nowadays, this same gene is now useless and even dangerous. It can cause harmful clots to form in the later stages of life. Another Neanderthal gene can cause neurological disorders when the natural sleep cycle is disturbed — this can actually cause depression. It's likely that Neanderthals rarely experienced this because they actually had much better sleeping habits than we do nowadays, but the gene was there. And to end this Neanderthal gene tirade, we'll say that by far the most ridiculous gene is the group of genes regulating everyone's circadian rhythm. So, if you're not a morning person, you might have your Neanderthal ancestor to blame. We inherited pretty similar genes from the Denisovans, with the addition of a few adaptations for survival at high altitudes, and these genetic adaptations are the ultimate proof that we not only spent thousands of years living alongside Neanderthals and Denisovans, but that we bred with them. Today, Melanesians and Aboriginal Australians have, on average, between 4 and 6% Denisovan DNA, with the Ayta Magbukon people having the highest level of Denisovan ancestry in the world, ranging from 30 to 40%. When it comes to Neanderthals, Europeans carry about 1.5 to 2.5% of Neanderthal DNA, while East Asians have more — on average, mind you — with 2.5% being the average. Non-Subsaharan Africans have about 2% Neanderthal DNA, while Subsaharan Africans are the only people in the world with no Neanderthal DNA admixture. Native Americans have between 1.5 and 2% Neanderthal DNA on average with about 0.2% Denisovan DNA. After taking a short trip down ethnicity lane, two thoughts come to mind. First of all, considering that humans are already pretty racist now, can you even begin to imagine how incredibly racist we would be if we had to share the planet with another humanoid species? Just makes you wonder — if some people are losing their minds over skin color, how bad would they get if they met someone whose features are humanlike, but not human. Secondly, we are proof that we lived with Neanderthals, and even though they have gone extinct, they live through us in a way, and, in fact, we are one of the primary reasons they're not here anymore. ## Our Cohabitation Led To the Neanderthals' Demise The "Why have the Neanderthals gone extinct?" question is one that anthropologists have been trying to answer ever since the species was described for the very first time. Although there is no definitive answer to the question yet, and it's reasonable to assume that there will never be one, it's widely believed that the Neanderthal extinction is the result of a combination of factors, almost all of which had something to do with us, the human race. It should be pointed out, just for the sake of chronological clarity, that the Neanderthals went extinct around 40,000 years ago, although a few isolated cultures remained alive for a few thousand years. Those cultures were, however, nowhere near enough to repopulate the entire species. One of the primary ways we contributed to their extinction is by spreading pathogens. Similarly to how we weren't equipped to deal with Europe-based parasites and pathogens when we first arrived on the continent, the Neanderthals weren't equipped to deal with the pathogens we brought from Africa. Since we lived so close together and interbred so many times, we transferred Africa-based pathogens to them that killed them by the thousands. This had a catastrophic effect because the Neanderthal population was never that large, with anthropologists saying it ranged from 3,000 to 12,000 adults. They had a naturally lower fertility rate and had fewer children than humans who, as now know, went at it like rabbits. The Cro-Magnons, which are the first ever humans to come into contact with the Neanderthals, outnumbered their local adversaries ten to one. This means that the Neanderthals were quite literally surrounded by a bunch of pathogen fountains that were taking over territory and spreading like wildfire. The natural question here is if Neanderthal populations were decimated by our illnesses, why didn't the same thing happen to us? It did, actually, to a degree, but by the time we first arrived in Eurasia, we were much better equipped to handle new illnesses thanks to something called the 'African advantage'. The disease load of the African tropics was much higher and humans evolved a stronger and overall better immune system in comparison to Neanderthals. Our immune system was also better at adapting, and it did that fairly quickly, and we also plugged the holes in it by breeding with Neanderthals and getting genes that would help our immune systems deal with Eurasia-specific pathogens. Neanderthal immune systems were specialized for local pathogens, but they faced fewer and less severe illnesses, which made them comparatively weak and slow, which partly led to their demise. A very similar thing happened to Native Americans when they first came into contact with Europeans. Another way we contributed to the Neanderthals' extinction is by simply taking over their territory. Although we didn't necessarily engage in a war, and we even interbred with them, it's in our nature to expand territory in order to secure our survival, which is exactly what happened here. We lived in larger groups which were better connected to one another and allowed trading, as well as the spread of technology. Neanderthals lived in smaller, isolated tribes — their tools were sophisticated, yes, but there were very few technological improvements over time. We were most definitely beating them in the technological race. They were also less efficient in acquiring resources as some Neanderthal tribes didn't divide labour based on sex. Females were often hunting with males, and this was during an era when you had to run for miles on end to tire out a deer or a doe and have enough strength to drag it back home, so it's safe to say things could have been done more efficiently. Speaking of running, this was a massive disadvantage for the Neanderthals as their bodies were built for fighting and wrestling, not for half-marathons. Humans, on the other hand, are designed to run and run and run, seemingly to no end. We, in fact, often killed our prey by simply running it down to a point of exhaustion when it would simply lay down and let itself be slaughtered. This is why we largely lost all our body hair and developed the sweating ability — it's so we could cool ourselves and regenerate stamina whilst moving. You'd be surprised how little stamina most wild animals have, most of them are built for short bursts of energy, not long-term expenditure. The Neanderthals required around 30% more energy to run and about 10% more energy to sprint, although, admittedly, they could likely sprint much faster than us. Walking, however, is key here. Their pelvises made it harder to absorb shock from all the walking, and while it's completely reasonable for a human to cross around 30 kilometers in a day, such a feat was virtually impossible for a Neanderthal, at least in a sequence and without rest days in between. We conquered the entire world by walking, it's how we took European territory over, and the Neanderthals simply couldn't cover the distance as fast as we could as they would tire quickly and needed more time to rest. It's also widely believed that the Neanderthals never domesticated the dog, and even if they did, it certainly never became mainstream in their societies, which once again takes us back to the fact that they didn't share technology and knowledge with one another as much as we did. By relying on our furry friends, we became much more efficient at hunting, and more food led to more procreation, which led to more territorial spreading. Interbreeding, which we discussed earlier, played a role as well as Neanderthal-to-human gene flow was much more common than human-to-Neanderthal gene flow, meaning that we were actively taking away members of their species, while rarely giving anyone back. The reason why is not yet known, but this was another way we affected their population. There is, of course, the most obvious method of killing a species — war. There have most definitely been conflicts between our two species, probably never at a large scale, but it's likely that entire human tribes were killed by Neanderthals and vice versa. There was for long an idea of the Neanderthal as this ape-like, aggressive, violent subhuman, which couldn't be farther from the truth, but conflicts most definitely did arise once we started closing in territories around them. The dwindling of resources and supplies always leads to that, and it was unavoidable. This led to the final nail in the Neanderthal coffin — inbreeding. Once the technological and intellectual advances, our walking ability, the way our societies worked, the spread of our pathogens, and war all took their toll on them and their societies started to dwindle, Neanderthals started breeding amongst themselves. This, in turn, made them even more vulnerable to illnesses and worse at every survival skill necessary, which ultimately drove them to extinction. We, of course, aren't the only reason Neanderthals have gone extinct. There's also the Heinrich event four, a massive climate change event that influenced the extinction of many species, and we have to account for the fact that the Neanderthals were unable to improve their hunting methods when faced with scarcity of prey, which is something humans definitely aren't at fault for. Nevertheless, we most definitely lived together and our two species influenced one another's existence massively, while our constant presence in shared territories and our spread across Eurasia contributed to their disappearance, and that makes one wonder would Neanderthals still be around if the human race never existed? That is a question we will likely never know the answer to. ## Key Takeaways - Humans and Neanderthals cohabitated and interbred, with all non-Sub-Saharan humans carrying Neanderthal DNA. - Neanderthals were more adapted to Europe's cold climate and had superior strength and speed. - Interbreeding between humans and Neanderthals influenced genetic traits, including immune responses and physical features. - Humans contributed to Neanderthal extinction through pathogen spread, territorial expansion, and technological advancements. - Neanderthals' extinction was likely due to a combination of human influence and environmental factors. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### What is the common ancestor of Neanderthals and modern humans? Homo heidelbergensis is widely believed to be the last common ancestor of Neanderthals and modern-day humans. ### Where did Neanderthals primarily live? Neanderthals spread across both Asia and Europe, with high fossil finding density in Italy, Spain, France, and Germany. They were also capable of establishing long-lasting cultures over 3,000 kilometers in less than 2,000 years. ### How long did Neanderthals and humans coexist? Neanderthals went extinct roughly 40,000 years ago, meaning humans spent more time with them than without them. ### What evidence supports the cohabitation of Neanderthals and humans? Evidence from sites like the Tishemet Cave in Israel, the Cave River nature reserve in Israel, and the Ranis site in Germany shows shared territory and interbreeding between Neanderthals and humans. ### What genetic evidence supports interbreeding between Neanderthals and humans? Modern humans, except for Subsaharan Africans, have at least some Neanderthal DNA. Additionally, Neanderthal remains have been found with human mitochondrial DNA, indicating interbreeding. ### How did interbreeding affect human genetics? Interbreeding with Neanderthals influenced various human traits, including nasal height, hair texture, skin pigmentation, and immune system responses. Some Neanderthal genes also contribute to certain diseases and conditions in modern humans. ### What role did pathogens play in the extinction of Neanderthals? Humans spread pathogens from Africa that Neanderthals were not equipped to handle, leading to a significant decrease in their population. Neanderthals had a weaker and slower immune system compared to humans. ### How did human technological and societal advantages contribute to Neanderthal extinction? Humans lived in larger, better-connected groups, allowing for the spread of technology and trade. Neanderthals lived in smaller, isolated tribes with fewer technological improvements over time, making them less efficient in acquiring resources and adapting to changes. ### What was the impact of interbreeding on Neanderthal population? Neanderthal-to-human gene flow was more common than the reverse, meaning humans were actively taking away members of the Neanderthal species while rarely giving anyone back, contributing to their population decline. ### What is the significance of the Heinrich event in Neanderthal extinction? The Heinrich event four, a massive climate change event, influenced the extinction of many species, including Neanderthals. This event, combined with human factors, contributed to their demise. ## Sources - [Original Side Projects video: People and Neanderthals Lived Together. Here's How We Know.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7B7jBeLTXO8) - [Hero image source](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ac/Roze_zaterdag._10.000_Homo%27s_en_lesbische_vrouwen_bezochten_Haarlem._NL-HlmNHA_54031661.JPG) by Poppe de Boer / openverse, cc0. ## Related Coverage Simon Whistler https://sideprojects.pub/article/archaeologists-just-found-1000-roman-artefacts-in-a-swiss-lake https://sideprojects.pub/article/archaeologists-just-found-1000-roman-artefacts-in-a-swiss-lake Fri, 03 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT On a clear day in November 2024, two scuba divers carefully approached something in the lakebed. They both worked with the Octopus Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to underwater exploration, and they were about to make a huge archaeological discovery. The pair were diving in Lake Neuchâtel, the largest lake that's entirely within Switzerland. Most divers know it for a surprisingly creepy underwater shark statue. But the lake is also a dumping ground for unexploded bombs left over from World War II. So when a drone flying over the lake picked up an anomaly, that's what everyone assumed was going on. But this was strange enough to justify a dive team, albeit one that needed to move carefully, or this dive might come to a sudden and violent end. The anomaly looked like a pile of circles half-buried in white mud. One of the divers turned on a light to take a photo, and the circles suddenly went from a hazy grey to a bright terracotta red. The divers realized that this wasn't a bomb at all, but a pile of broken plates that looked very, very old. Over the next two years, a team of underwater archaeologists raced to find out the extent of the artifacts on the bottom of Lake Neuchâtel. It was a mission that had to be carried out in absolute secrecy, and had to be finished ASAP—or it might be too late to save them. ## When in Rome Luckily, these weren't regular scuba divers investigating the drone's anomaly. The pair included Fabien Langenegger, a staff archaeologist for the canton of Neuchâtel. There was also Julian Pfyffer, the founder of the Octopus Foundation. In fact, they were just finishing up a project analyzing vulnerable shipwrecks in the lakebed. If anyone knew what to look for, it was them. The pair decided that the artifacts on the bottom of the lake were likely Roman, and probably dated from the time of the early empire. At this time, Rome was well established as a global power. Julius Caesar kicked off this phase in 30 BCE, and his adopted son Augustus became the first official Roman Emperor in 27 BCE. His forty-year reign was followed by his stepson Tiberius. There was then a brief interlude with Caligula, but the Praetorian Guard decided that three years of partying, chariot racing, and murder was more than they could take, so they arranged for his assassination and put his uncle Claudius on the throne. He turned out to be much more normal. At this time, Rome was still expanding, but it was already struggling to keep up with its huge amount of territory. Italian soldiers had been chipping away at the Swiss plateau since the time of the Republic, but in the Imperial Era, Augustus decided that controlling the Alps was a matter of national security (apparently, he hadn't forgotten about Hannibal using them to surprise the Roman army about two centuries earlier). By the time of the shipwreck, the mountains were solidly in the hands of the Empire, as was most of modern-day Switzerland. This was the early part of what is sometimes called the *Pax Romana*, a time of relative peace and economic prosperity. For the most part, the day-to-day lives of local people didn't change. They kept speaking their regional languages, worked their jobs and ran their communities the same as always. But there were some noticeable changes. Roman-style villages sprung up around Switzerland, along with villas for the upper-class administrators. There were also military outposts staffed with Roman soldiers ready to defend the empire from those barbarians living in what is now Germany. All those newcomers required a lot of stuff, ideally things from home that felt familiar. The Romans were so well-known for their expansive road network that it's still common to remark that "all roads lead to Rome." But when it came to moving massive amounts of stuff (something necessary for running an empire), waterways were a much better option. For one, shipments are really heavy, and both humans and animals get tired while hauling amphorae of olive oil or crates of pottery around. Another consideration is that slow-moving trade caravans are easy targets for thieves. Cargo ships were faster, easier, and more secure. So, the Romans took advantage of the local geography. Switzerland is covered in lakes and rivers, so a complex trade network of ships criss-crossed the region during their reign. If needed, a ship could be unloaded and the cargo carried across a section of land. Then, it would be reloaded onto a new ship in a new waterway. This was still much easier than trying to move everything by road. Lake Neuchâtel was an especially important part of this network. As an especially long and skinny body of water, it was perfect for moving cargo around. It was also conveniently along the way to one of the new Roman military outposts, a camp called Vindonissa that today is located in the modern town of Windisch. The ship probably started its journey at the southern end of the lake, at a port that the Romans called Eburodunum and is now Yverdon-les-Bains. It then set sail across what was, at the time, *Lacus Eburodunensis*. Obviously, most of the shipments reached their destination with no problems. This one did not. ## History of the Lake Out of all the places that this load of cargo traveled, it's lucky that it sank in Lake Neuchâtel. This particular Swiss lake has unique features that make it a potential treasure trove of historical knowledge, and it's already home to multiple world-shaking archaeological discoveries. While the Swiss Alps are known all over the world for their high peaks and quality skiing, the northwestern side of the country is home to a second mountain range. The Jura mountains are shorter, greener, and less crowded with tourists, which makes them a popular hiking destination. Today, the area is mostly French-speaking, since it sits along the French-Swiss border. Lake Neuchâtel sits at the base of these mountains. It's part of Switzerland's Three Lakes Region, so called because it has three lakes: Morat, Biel, and Neuchâtel. All three are part of the floodplain of the Aare River. The problem with living in a floodplain is that things can get unpredictable. For most of human history, this area was prone to flooding. If there was a lot of rain, the area around the lakes would turn into a giant swamp called La Grand Marais. If there was a drought, the waters would dramatically recede, only to come back with a vengeance once it started raining again. One of these prolonged drought periods happened in 1857, and a man named Hans Kopp decided to take a walk along the edge of Lake Neuchâtel. He was hired by a local colonel to find some interesting ancient collectibles, and he was about to hit the jackpot. With the lakeshore about two meters (or over six feet) lower than usual, a large area of the northern shallows was completely exposed. Close to where the lake met the River Zihl, he found a bunch of wooden stakes sticking out of the water. He also found almost forty iron swords. Obviously, everyone else wanted their own cool iron sword and the site was promptly looted every time the water level dropped enough to find it. But by the nineteenth century, everyone was pretty sick of these fluctuating water levels. People who came home to a flooded house were opting to move, oftentimes straight out of the country. The Swiss government decided it was time that the lakes picked a size and stuck with it. The result was a huge hydraulic engineering project that cost over five million Swiss francs. It was called the Jura water correction, and it involved a series of canals and dams that would do double duty by controlling the water levels and draining the marshes. In the end, it was successful in controlling the flow of the Aare River and preventing floods. However, a side effect of the project was that all three lakes shrunk. By the time the Jura water correction was finished, archaeologists assumed that all the artifacts at the north end of the lake were gone. They were also pretty sure that the wooden stakes sticking out of the water were the remains of an Iron Age lake dwelling, a kind of prehistoric house that was built on marshy ground and raised on poles to protect it from flooding. Overall, an interesting site, if it hadn't been looted. However, the archaeologists decided it was worth it to take a look. To their shock, the swords were only the tip of the iceberg. Now that the site was dried out, excavations revealed two bridges, five houses, an assortment of shields, brooches, tools, chariot parts, and an additional over one hundred swords. It turns out that Lake Neuchâtel is amazing at preserving historical artifacts. The cold dark waters and dense mud protected the wood and animal bones at the Iron Age site by keeping them hidden from sunlight, bacteria, oxygen, and the most destructive force of all: humans. It's kind of like a giant refrigerator with the door shut. Also, the lakebed contains a lot of chalk, which is alkaline. That is the opposite of acidic. There are a couple reasons why this is good for preservation. One, bacteria and microorganisms that consume organic material aren't interested in this kind of environment. Two, if there isn't any oxygen to mess up the process, the chemistry in a chalk-rich area allows some materials to become encrusted with a protective coating of mineral salts. Today, the site is called La Tène. Over time, this became the name of an entire group of archaeologically similar people throughout Europe known as the La Tène culture. Since this was such an extraordinary archaeological find, a museum was created to house the artifacts. Today, the Laténium Park and Museum showcases items that cover fifty thousand years of local history, with the obvious highlight being those from the nearby La Tène site. But the archaeological discoveries of Lake Neuchâtel were far from over. In fact, now that archaeologists understood exactly how good the preservation conditions were, they wondered what else that chalky mud might be hiding. ## Finding the Cargo Ship However, in the modern day, the most likely thing you'll find in Switzerland's alpine lakes is bombs. Lots and lots of bombs. The reason why actually goes back to the country's most iconic personality trait: neutrality. Since 1815, Switzerland has refused to partake in military alliances or external conflicts. But that doesn't mean they planned on rolling over if one of their neighbors decided to invade. And considering that it shares a border with Germany, the Swiss government felt pretty justified cranking out weapons during the 1930s and 40s for a "just in case" scenario. Miraculously, however, Switzerland made it through World War II without having to use any of their weapons, so the government now had a giant stockpile of dangerous stuff they didn't need anymore. The easiest solution was to chuck them into alpine lakes. The government assumed that the water would neutralize them, but modern studies indicate that is not always the case. Currently, the Swiss government is looking into proposals on how to best clean up this mess. Lake Neuchâtel has an especially large amount of these explosives. As a result, if there's something that looks a bit off in the lakebed, that's probably what it is. It's certainly what everyone assumed in November 2024, when a drone flew over the lake to monitor water quality and ecological health. However, the Cantonal Archaeology Office of Neuchâtel kept an eye on it anyway, just in case it found something interesting. The drone footage revealed a dark patch and divers were sent to see if it was yet-more unexploded ordnance from World War II. But when they surfaced, it was better news than anyone had dared hope. The dark patch was a load of cargo, and it looked like it might be Roman. At the point of the anomaly, the lake was only eight meters or twenty-six feet deep. Only faint traces of light could make it so far down. The divers had to quickly figure out what they were looking at, how much stuff there was, and most importantly, whether or not it would still be there if they came back later. The divers grabbed a few of the artifacts to bring to the surface, just enough to get an idea of the site. Since Lake Neuchâtel is especially good at preserving wood, they made sure to grab a piece. Then their time at the wreck was done. It was time to go to the lab and figure out what was going on here. The wood, they believed, would be key in confirming that this was indeed a Roman shipwreck. Now that they had it above the surface, they could date it using dendrochronology. Since the wood had once been a tree, the archaeologists could analyze the pattern of the growth rings. While the tree is still growing, it will create wide rings for years with good conditions and small, tight rings for years with bad ones. By lining up the pattern of growth rings with trees that are confirmed to come from different eras, it's possible to figure out exactly when this particular tree was cut down. The dendrochronology date came back as somewhere between 50 BCE and 50 CE. That covered pretty much the entire early Roman period of Switzerland. Combined with the artifacts that were clearly Roman, there was no longer any doubt that this was a Roman cargo ship. ## Excavation Now that their suspicions were confirmed, the Octopus Foundation and its collaborators had to keep this a secret. They knew about what happened to the La Tène site and believed that if word got out, people would start tearing through the underwater cargo to find a cool artifact to take home. Or worse, to sell. While artifacts are undeniably interesting, they aren't the most important part of archaeology. An object on its own can only tell you so much. The "context," or where the artifact is found, is by far the most interesting thing about it. On land, the layer of dirt that it came from can provide important clues about how old it is. Also, the artifacts that are found around it can tell a bigger story. After all, a brick is a lot more interesting when it's part of a wall. The Octopus Foundation had to keep their discovery secret for months. They only told people who could be trusted, mostly other archaeologists. Everyone knew that they would eventually have to go back. The artifacts were just laying there on the bottom of the lakebed, and they definitely hadn't been visible for long, because someone would have found them earlier. Everyone knew what was to blame for this sudden reemergence of Roman artifacts: the Jura water correction. In fact, one reason for the drone surveys was that it's currently changing all three lakes in the region. The problem is that rivers aren't just water. As they flow from high points to low points, they collect and carry sediment like soil and sand. This gets deposited in a floodplain. However, since everyone was in agreement that no one liked the Aare River floodplain, the Jura water correction ended this natural process. As a result, the bottom of Lake Neuchâtel is eroding, and this has the fun byproduct of revealing shipwrecks. The Octopus Foundation was worried that if they waited too long, the artifacts would erode away like the sediment. They also knew it was only a matter of time before someone spotted them and took some home as a souvenir, or someone accidentally dragged a boat anchor or a fishing net through the site. They needed to bring everything to the surface as soon as possible. In March 2025, a team of thirteen divers went back into Lake Neuchâtel to investigate the wreck. They found that the artifacts were concentrated in a sixty meter by twenty-five meter area, or two hundred by eighty feet. The most numerous items were ceramic plates, cups, bowls and goblets. Many of them looked similar, like they were mass produced for a large audience. But perhaps the most interesting thing about the shipwreck was what the divers didn't see—the ship. Despite the fact that this massive amount of cargo couldn't have ended up at the bottom of the lake any other way, there was absolutely no trace of the vessel that had brought it there. Obviously, something had gone horribly wrong on its voyage across the lake. The heavy load of terracotta plates and bowls somehow ended up sinking and stayed in place for almost two thousand years. Something else, clearly, had happened to the ship. Julian Pfyffer, the founder of the Octopus Foundation, told *ArtNet News*, "My positive way of looking at things makes me feel that maybe relieved by the heavy weight of the cargo, the sailors and Roman soldiers saved their boat." Other archaeologists, however, aren't so optimistic. They think that it's more likely that after the ship sank, it broke apart and the wooden fragments floated to the surface. There, they were torn apart by the mechanical pressure of the waves and by bacteria and other wood-boring organisms. After a few decades, there would have been nothing left of it. Either way, the ship is gone. All that remains is the cargo that it was carrying. ## The Artifacts During two weeks in March 2025, the dive team brought over one hundred and fifty artifacts to the surface. Most of them were ceramic tableware, like plates, bowls, cups, and goblets. The archaeologists were thrilled with this discovery, because these are not the kinds of things they normally find in their excavations. Underwater archaeology is an important piece in the jigsaw puzzle that is figuring out the past. It's joked that history is reading dead people's mail and archaeology is going through dead people's garbage. While that's an oversimplification, it's true that a lot of the artifacts found on land are broken. That's why it's so exciting when someone stumbles across an undisturbed tomb or a hidden cache of items. They're a deviation from the norm. Underwater sites, however, are different. They're like a time capsule. Shipwrecks are usually chock-full of artifacts that never made it to the trash. In the right conditions, there might even be clothing or personal items that literally exist nowhere else in the world. And if the cargo is intact, there may be large numbers of artifacts that were never even used at all. In archaeological terms, the pottery from the Roman cargo ship was basically brand-new. This is quite exciting, because it meant that from now on, these would be the textbook examples of what pottery looks like for this time period. There were also some more unusual finds amongst all that tableware. There were pieces of two amphorae, which are large two-handled jugs that were used to transport wine and olive oil. The team at the Octopus Foundation are confident these were used for olive oil. Even more interesting, it was likely produced in Spain and shipped to Switzerland. The team also found parts of a harness, the kind used to attach horses to a wagon. Nearby were two amazingly preserved wood and metal spoked wheels. They were likely part of a chariot, a small two-wheeled vehicle that normally was used for military campaigns or in racing events. This was an extraordinary find; nothing like this had ever been discovered in Switzerland before. By the time the two week excavation was over, it was clear that the team needed to plan another one as soon as possible. There were still hundreds of artifacts on the bottom of the lake, and no one had a good explanation as to why a ship loaded with mostly tableware was also carrying a Roman chariot. However, there were other shipwrecks in Lake Neuchâtel that needed attention. The Octopus Foundation installed underwater cameras that would let them know if anything happened to the precious cargo. Then, they crossed their fingers and hoped everything would still be there when they returned. ## Final Excavation In the months between the excavations, a team of local archaeologists and conservators from the Laténium Museum examined the artifacts removed from the lakebed. To avoid giving the two thousand-year-old artifacts too much of a shock, the team kept them submerged in a pool of water that was cooled to the same temperature as the lake. One by one, the team removed the artifacts, stabilized them, and took a closer look. All that dirt, sand, and clay floating around during the excavation can make it difficult to make out small but important details. Preliminary analysis suggests that the pottery was made in Switzerland, but there is a lot of it and not everything has been examined yet. The next set of excavations was scheduled for a year later, in March 2026. The plan was to retrieve all the Roman cargo still at the bottom of Lake Neuchâtel. There would be nineteen excavation units to carefully document each item before bringing it to the surface, and each unit was four meters (or thirteen feet) square. It was an enormous undertaking, but if they wanted to save the artifacts, this might be their last opportunity. By the time the excavation was finished, over one thousand artifacts were removed from Lake Neuchâtel. The team spent hours on the painstaking work of removing each ceramic item one at a time, and they were rewarded by finding fragments of the wooden crates that they were once packaged in. There were even bits of straw still stuffed between the items as cushioning. The wood and straw is currently being analyzed at the Laténium Museum. So far, a piece of a crate has been dated with dendrochronology to 17 CE. In addition to the pottery, there were also some unusual items that revealed a lot of what was happening on this Roman cargo ship. There was the jaw-dropping discovery of a wicker basket. In any other situation, a delicate item like this would never have survived for two thousand years. However, the previously mentioned amazing preservation conditions meant that it was protected by the chalky mud. And even more incredibly, the basket still had items in it. It was more pottery, but it looked completely different from the mass-produced stuff the archaeologists were finding in spades. This was probably what the ship's crew was using at mealtimes as they voyaged across the lake. Currently, the Laténium Museum is working to pull food residue from the inside of the dishes. While the basket is definitely the favorite of archaeologists, the general public is more excited about something else. It turned out that Lake Neuchâtel had more swords to offer. Specifically, two Roman shortswords called *gladii*. One of them was still tucked into a wood-and-metal scabbard, which is incredibly rare and very exciting. And on top of just looking cool, these swords provide an important clue about what was going on with this ship. See, ordinary Roman citizens weren't walking around with *gladii* on their belts. They were distributed to soldiers as part of their gear. If the ship had swords on it when it went down, that probably meant there were Roman soldiers onboard. Another discovery solidified this theory even further. The dive team found a fibula, a type of brooch that looks kind of like a modern safety pin. This type of pin was part of a soldier's uniform and was used to fasten a cloak around the shoulders. This type of design was implemented during the reign of Emperor Tiberius, which means the ship went down sometime between 20 and 50 CE. In addition to the sword and fibula, the dive team also found a pickaxe and a belt buckle that also seemed to belong to soldiers. Clearly, this wasn't an ordinary merchant ship. It was associated with the military in some way, and the soldiers on board were likely an official escort. The Octopus Foundation believes that the ship was headed to the north end of the lake, probably on their way to the military camp at Vindonissa. It was home to about six thousand Roman soldiers, and they were all expecting their standard-issue Roman gear. That many people would need a literal boatload of tableware to keep their meals running smoothly. Unlucky for them, it never arrived. As the ship approached the north end of the lake, something happened that caused the cargo to sink. And that's where it stayed for two thousand years. ## Conclusion The discovery of over one thousand artifacts in a Swiss lake is more than just a fascinating discovery, it is a huge step forward in understanding what life was like at the edges of the Roman Empire. The world owes a debt of gratitude to the intrepid team of divers that retrieved the artifacts from the bottom of the lakebed. Not only did they bring them to the surface for the first time in two thousand years, but without them, we never would have known what lay at the bottom of Lake Neuchâtel all that time. ## Key Takeaways - In November 2024, divers discovered over 1,000 Roman artifacts in Lake Neuchâtel, Switzerland. - The artifacts, including ceramic tableware and military items, were remarkably preserved due to the lake's unique conditions. - The cargo ship, likely headed to a Roman military camp, sank around 20-50 CE, with no trace of the vessel remaining. - The discovery provides significant insights into Roman trade and military operations in early Imperial Switzerland. - The Octopus Foundation led the excavation, emphasizing the importance of preserving archaeological context. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### Where were the Roman artifacts found? The Roman artifacts were found in Lake Neuchâtel, the largest lake entirely within Switzerland. ### Who discovered the Roman artifacts? The Roman artifacts were discovered by two scuba divers working with the Octopus Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to underwater exploration. ### What was the initial assumption about the anomaly found in the lake? The initial assumption was that the anomaly was an unexploded bomb from World War II, as Lake Neuchâtel is known for being a dumping ground for such ordnance. ### What was the significance of the Roman period in Switzerland? During the early Roman Empire, Rome was expanding and controlling the Alps was considered a matter of national security. The Romans established military outposts and villages in Switzerland, and used the lakes and rivers for trade. ### Why is Lake Neuchâtel significant for archaeological discoveries? Lake Neuchâtel has unique preservation conditions due to its cold, dark waters and dense, chalky mud, which protects artifacts from sunlight, bacteria, oxygen, and human interference. ### What was the Jura water correction and how did it affect Lake Neuchâtel? The Jura water correction was a hydraulic engineering project that controlled the water levels of Lake Neuchâtel and other lakes in the region. It caused the lakes to shrink and revealed previously hidden artifacts. ### What types of artifacts were found in the Roman cargo ship? The artifacts included ceramic tableware such as plates, bowls, cups, and goblets, as well as amphorae, parts of a harness, spoked wheels from a chariot, a wicker basket, Roman shortswords, a fibula, a pickaxe, and a belt buckle. ### What was the significance of the wicker basket found in the cargo ship? The wicker basket was significant because it contained pottery that looked different from the mass-produced items, likely used by the ship's crew for their meals. It also contained food residue that is being analyzed. ### What was the estimated date of the Roman cargo ship? The dendrochronology date of the wood from the cargo ship indicated it was from between 50 BCE and 50 CE, covering the early Roman period in Switzerland. ### What was the estimated date of the wooden crate found in the cargo ship? A piece of a crate was dated with dendrochronology to 17 CE. ## Sources - [Original Side Projects video: Archaeologists Just Found 1,000 Roman Artefacts in a Swiss Lake](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vRbO7hYkjoo) - [Hero image source](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/04/Bronze_age_or_Early_Iron_Age_cairn_tomb_Partille_municipality_Sweden_on_June_21_2026_view_1.jpg) by R. Henrik Nilsson / openverse, by. ## Related Coverage Simon Whistler https://sideprojects.pub/article/10-terrifying-zoological-discoveries https://sideprojects.pub/article/10-terrifying-zoological-discoveries Thu, 02 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT Animals can be delightful, cute, friendly creatures that give you that heartwarming sensation when you think about the natural world. But away from the National Geographic schmaltz and the often shockingly inaccurate tales we tell our children, there is a much darker side. Look carefully into the zoological world, and you will find stories of horrific violence, mind control, organised warfare, and the kind of sexual depravity that would see humans locked away for decades. The natural world has its beauty, but it always has its savagery. And here are 10 terrifying zoological discoveries that will make you look at animals in a completely different way. ## 1. Social Insects Wage Organised Warfare For centuries, warfare was considered one of humanity's defining traits. Large-scale conflict requires organisation, communication, strategy, and sacrifice. It was assumed that creatures with brains smaller than a grain of sand simply weren't capable of such behaviour. However, the reality is quite different. As scientists began studying ant colonies over longer periods, they discovered something remarkable – some ant societies engage in organised warfare on a scale that rivals human conflicts. Now, I know that's a big statement, but bear with me. You might have always just assumed that an ant is an ant and isn't really capable of highly sophisticated collective behaviour. But that's way too simplistic. Ant colonies function as superorganisms, and individual ants are comparable to cells within a body, while the colony itself is the true organism. In that way, ant colonies can resemble rival states competing for territory and resources, some with just a few hundred ants, some with millions, maybe even billions of ants. To really put those numbers in perspective, it's thought that there are roughly 20 quadrillion ants on Earth. And if you don't know what a quadrillion is, don't worry, there's probably a lot who don't, but it's a million billion. So 20 quadrillion is 20, with 15 zeroes behind. Basically, a lot of ants. And just like humans, ants, and ant colonies regularly fall out, often over territory, food sources, nesting sites, and access to aphid herds, essentially ant livestock/slaves. Yes, ants sort of have slaves, and we'll be coming to that later. Many ant species maintain specialised military castes whose primary purpose is combat and defence. These ants often possess enlarged jaws, thicker armour, or physical adaptations specifically designed for fighting. While workers gather food and care for the colony, soldiers function as permanent defensive forces. In effect, some ant societies maintain standing armies. When there is trouble, the process often begins with reconnaissance. Scout ants venture beyond the nest searching for food, territory, and rival colonies. When they discover an opportunity or a threat, they return and communicate the information through chemical signals known as pheromones, allowing thousands of individuals to respond as a single unit. What follows looks surprisingly similar to an old-fashioned human raid. Some species launch coordinated raids against neighbouring colonies, with soldier ants advancing in organised groups and overwhelming defenders through sheer numbers. In some cases, the attackers specifically target brood chambers where eggs, larvae, and pupae are stored. And this is where things get borderline unbelievable. Some colonies have been seen attacking rival nests and carrying away developing young. Once those larvae mature, they effectively become workers for the colony that captured them. The victims spend their entire lives serving the society that destroyed their original home. Scientists refer to this behaviour as dulosis, but let's be brutally honest, it's slavery. The scale of these conflicts can be extraordinary, and just because we don't see a vast battlefield littered with bodies, doesn't mean it's not there. One of the most dramatic examples involves Argentine ants that have been documented forming vast supercolonies stretching across hundreds or even thousands of kilometres. Members of the same supercolony cooperate with one another, but outsiders are treated as enemies, and when these supercolonies collide, the battlefield is vast. One of the best-studied battlefronts lies near San Diego, where two Argentine ant supercolonies regularly meet - the so-called Very Large Colony and the smaller Lake Hodges Colony. Researchers observed millions of ants clashing along a shifting front line that stretched for kilometres, creating a near-constant state of warfare between neighbouring colonies. Unlike human conflicts, these battles show no signs of negotiation or surrender, continuing year after year as each side attempts to expand its territory and secure access to food and nesting sites. The results were astonishing, with around 15 million ants killed during a six-month study period. For creatures that most people barely notice beneath their feet, the scale of the conflict is remarkable. Entire armies clash, territories are conquered, young are enslaved, and millions die. What appears to us as a patch of mud can, from an ant's perspective, be a battlefield every bit as savage as those found throughout human history. ## 2. Komodo Dragons Use Multiple Killing Systems Anything with the word dragon is probably something you need to be wary of. The Komodo Dragon might not be the same fire-wielding beasts seen in Game of Thrones, but they aren't an animal you want to mess around with. This is a heavily-built lizard that can grow over 3 metres (10 feet) long and weigh more than 70 kilograms (150 pounds), with beef cake limbs, powerful claws, rough armoured scales, and a long, muscular tail. It carries its head quite low to the ground and has a broad snout filled with around 60 serrated, backward-curving teeth designed to tear flesh. The dragon constantly flicks its yellow forked tongue through the air, allowing it to detect the scent of prey from several kilometres away. Large individuals can overpower deer, wild pigs, water buffalo, and occasionally humans, making them one of the most formidable reptilian predators on Earth. One of the best-known fatal incidents occurred in 2007 on Komodo Island when an eight-year-old boy was attacked and killed while near the village. In 2009, a fruit picker on Komodo Island fell from a tree and was set upon by several Komodo dragons and later died from massive blood loss and injuries. The morale of the story is watch your back. But what happens once they catch you? Well, the dragons don't attack like, say, a crocodile would. They might look like a dinosaur/dragon hybrid that could savage and tear you limb from limb while you were still screaming, but that's not their style. For years, the common belief was that its mouth was filled with dangerous bacteria, so once they bit you, the infection would spread, and they would simply wait patiently as you writhed around in pain and finally stopped moving. Then it would eat you slowly. It was a simple explanation, repeated in documentaries, books, and classrooms around the world. But over time, that theory was challenged and ultimately disproved. Modern research has revealed a far more sophisticated predator. Komodo dragons do not rely on a single killing method, but rather combine multiple biological weapons into one devastating attack, quite unlike anything else seen in the natural world. It begins with a bite. Its serrated teeth are designed not to puncture but to tear. When a dragon bites, it often removes chunks of flesh, leaving deep wounds and severe tissue damage. But that's just the start of its victims' problems. In the early 2000s, researchers discovered venom glands in the lower jaws of Komodo dragons. We're not talking the same kind of venom level as a cobra or rattlesnake, and the victim won't stagger away and quickly collapse. Instead, it contains compounds that lower blood pressure, interfere with clotting, and actually promote blood loss. So, while it doesn't have the same devastating physical attack as a shark, crocodile or lion, or the same kind of venom as a box jellyfish or the inland taipan, it quietly encourages its victim's body to not bother clotting a gaping wound and to speed up the onset of shock. Even if the victim escapes the initial attack, the damage is often already done. For years, scientists believed harmful bacteria were the dragon's secret weapon and while their mouths do contain bacteria, including E-Coli, modern research suggests the real danger is much more to do with catastrophic tissue damage and venom-induced blood loss. The bite itself is usually enough, but if you survive the attack, the clock is still ticking. The body begins to fight itself, encouraging it to freak out, and that is the biggest danger. When that happens, and you decide to close your eyes for just a moment, you can bet that the Komodo Dragon is close by, licking its lips and wondering which part of you to start with. ## 3. Sharks Are Far Older Than Trees Humans tend to work best with decades and centuries. They are time frames that feel manageable, but as we move into thousands and then millions of years, it's difficult for our primitive minds to keep up. When we start talking about hundreds of millions of years, our brains fizzle pathetically and refuse to go any further. So let's really scramble the psyche and think about how long certain species have been around. Homo sapiens have been here for roughly 300,000 years; our cousins, the apes, have been roaming the planet for around 25 million years. The elephant and its distant ancestors have been here for 60 million years, give or take, and when we get to 66 million years, we're now talking about the final stages of the dinosaurs. But what about flora? Flowering plants first emerged around 140 million years ago, and what you would call trees appeared around 380 million years ago. So let's take that benchmark. What was the world like 380 million years ago? This era falls in the late Devonian Period. No dinosaurs, no mammals, no grass, no flowers. A lot of swamps, along with plenty of early insects who were just feeling their way into existence. But there was a lot of water, and in that were sharks that had already been around for roughly 80 million years. By the time trees arrived, sharks were already ancient. OK, they weren't exactly like you remember from Jaws, but these early sharks were their direct ancestors. They looked very different from modern species, and were typically smaller and heavily armoured. Many lacked the streamlined bodies and replaceable rows of teeth that define modern sharks, giving them a much more primitive and less scary appearance. Some hunted close to the seafloor, while others fed on small marine animals in ecosystems that vanished hundreds of millions of years ago. One of the oldest shark-like creatures known is Elegestolepis, which was just 30 cm (12 inches) long. A little further down the road, was the Cladoselache, an early shark that lived around 370 million years ago. Reaching lengths of around 1–2 metres (3–6.5 feet), it had a relatively smooth body with few scales, a blunt snout, and simple teeth designed for grabbing rather than tearing prey. It wasn't quite the monster of the deep back then, but one that would have sent a shiver down the spine was the Xenacanthus. This shark actually had an eel-like body, with a long dorsal fin running down much of its back and a sharp spine projecting from the rear of its head that scientists believe could have been venomous. Some species reached over 3 metres (10 feet) in length and likely sat near the top of freshwater food chains. Forget crocodiles and alligators, if you had been enjoying a quiet river swim 320 million years ago, this monster would have dragged you down and had you for breakfast. And because it didn't have the teeth size or power associated with the beast of today, it would not have been a quick process. But what truly stands out is their ability to survive. Over hundreds of millions of years, Earth experienced multiple mass extinction events that wiped out huge percentages of life. The worst of them occurred around 252 million years ago during what scientists powerfully call the Great Dying, when roughly 90% of marine species disappeared. But guess who just kept on coming? Sharks are unsettling regardless of their history, but the fact that they are older than pretty much everything we have on Earth today and have survived almost everything Earth has ever thrown at them adds a new angle of fear. Entire groups of animals rose and disappeared, vast forests emerged, and continents split apart. A mass extinction wiped out around 90% of marine life, another erased the dinosaurs, but through all of it, sharks remained and slowly evolved into the formidable apex predators that they are today. ## 4. Chimpanzees Conduct Planned Murders From ancient sharks, to chimpanzee murders. There was once a time when chimpanzees were seen as relatively docile, peaceful creatures – our evolutionary cousins who roamed the forest, swinging through the canopy, munching on whatever could be found. The babies were cute, even the adults had something cuddly about them. But that view began to change dramatically in the 1960s and 1970s. At Tanzania's Gombe Stream National Park, primatologist Jane Goodall and her colleagues witnessed a conflict that would later become known as the Gombe Chimpanzee War. For more than a decade, the Kasakela community in the Gombe Stream National Park appeared relatively stable, but around 1971, tensions emerged within the group. It's difficult to say why, but gradually the group split into two: The Kasakela with eight adult males and several females and offspring, and the Kahama with six adult males and several females and offspring. Then things became deadly. On 7th January 1974, researchers witnessed something unprecedented. A Kahama male named Godi was feeding alone in a tree when a group of Kasakela males approached silently, dragged him down, and beat the life out of him. Over the next four years, the Kasakela males systematically hunted down members of the Kahama community, always attacking males when they were alone. Researchers also witnessed coordinated patrols, silent border raids, and ambush attacks carried out with a bloodlust that shocked human researchers. One by one, the Kahama males were murdered, until there were none left standing. The Kahama females either disappeared or were assimilated into the Kasakela community, and peace descended on the Gombe Stream National Park. The Kahama had been effectively exterminated. And this wasn't an isolated incident. There have been similar events in the Mahale Mountains National Park in Tanzania and the Kibale National Park in Uganda, and sometimes the stories are enough to make you wince. Victims are commonly beaten, bitten, and mutilated, with fatal attacks recorded against adult males, females, and even infants. Chimpanzees are not exclusively vegetarians, and they regularly hunt animals such as monkeys, bushbabies, and small antelope. And I think you can probably guess where this is going. Researchers have documented cases where chimpanzee victims were partially eaten. It's not common, but these creatures are certainly prone to the odd bit of cannibalism. And this is not just the chest-puffed-out males. There have also been plenty of reports of female-on-female violence, with the most shocking example, again in the Gombe Stream National Park, where a mother-daughter pair repeatedly attacked neighbouring females and killed multiple infants over a period of years. I suppose considering what humans are capable of, none of this should be much of a surprise, but it still doesn't sit well with our old-fashioned idealistic view of the peaceful chimpanzee – which we now know is completely wrong. ## 5. Fungi Can Turn Animals Into Zombies There's something supervillain-esque about controlling the minds of multiple beings. In superhero films, the evildoer has spent years constructing a plan and building the perfect machine, but to some fungi, it just comes naturally. Behavioural manipulation occurs when one organism alters the behaviour of another in ways that increase its own chances of survival or reproduction. The parasite Toxoplasma gondii needs to reproduce inside cats, but it often spends part of its life inside rodents. To solve this problem, it alters the brains of infected mice and rats, reducing their natural fear of cat scent, leaving them boldly wandering into territory that no sane mouse or rat would dream of doing. And you can probably guess what happens next. Horsehair worms spend much of their lives growing inside crickets and grasshoppers. When the worm reaches maturity, it somehow manipulates its host into seeking out water, despite these insects normally avoiding it. The cricket often leaps into a pond or stream, where the worm emerges from its body and swims away to reproduce, leaving the host to slowly drown. Charming, but that's nature, I guess. And that brings us to the parasitic fungi known as Ophiocordyceps. These fungi primarily infect insects, especially ants, though related species target spiders, flies, beetles, and other arthropods. The infection begins when fungal spores attach to an insect's body and penetrate the exoskeleton. Once inside, the fungus spreads through the host's tissues, feeding on nutrients while keeping the insect alive. For a long time, scientists assumed the fungus invaded the brain itself. However, a 2017 study found that fungal cells were concentrated throughout the body while largely avoiding brain tissue, suggesting that the fungus may manipulate behaviour through chemical signalling and interactions with the nervous system rather than direct control of the brain. The most famous victim is the so-called zombie ant. When these ants become infected, they suddenly abandon their normal routines and simply wander off and leave the colony. Then comes what is known as summit disease, where the ant is overcome with a sudden, overpowering urge to climb. It clambers up vegetation to a very specific height – roughly 20–30 centimetres (about 8–12 inches) above the ground – usually on the underside of leaves in places with stable temperatures and very specific humidity levels. It then performs what is known as a death grip, where it bites firmly into the underside of a leaf or stem and becomes locked in place. And that is where the story of the ant finishes. Now that it has reached the perfect location, the fungus puts the sorry ant out of its misery, but its grip remains vice-like, and the ant can often stay attached for weeks in the same spot. Yet while the ant might be dead, the fungus continues growing inside the corpse. A stalk eventually erupts from the insect's body, often from the head, releasing spores onto the forest floor below where new ants are likely to pass. And the zombie process can begin all over again. So, with such a deadly zombie disease, why don't ant colonies simply collapse in the face of such a devastating foe? Well, because this battle is ancient, and perhaps even goes back millions of years. Because of this, ants have developed a resistance plan. They often groom each other to remove spores and when they detect infested members in the colony, they will actively address them, i.e, kill them and remove the corpses. It's not perfect, but it does just enough to keep the balance in this bizarre battle for the soul of the ant. ## 6. Ants Farm Livestock Let's stay with ants for the time being. If you recall, ants sometimes raid other colonies and carry away the larvae of their enemies, which then develop into young ants who essentially become lifetime slaves. Well, they're also into livestock farming. It begins with a small insect called an Aphid. These tiny sap-feeding insects use needle-like mouthparts to pierce plants and drink their nutrients. As they feed, aphids produce a sugary liquid called honeydew, which attracts ants, who adore honeydew. When they want some, they simply stroke an aphid with their antennae, and the aphid releases a droplet of honeydew, which the ant drinks. That's fairly odd, but things get weirder. Ants can be highly protective and actively defend aphids from predators such as ladybirds, lacewings, and parasitic wasps. They transport aphids to better feeding locations and sometimes even move them into sheltered chambers during bad weather. During winter, some ant species carry aphid eggs into their nests for protection, and when spring arrives, the ants return the newly hatched aphids to suitable plants. This relationship between ants and aphids is generally considered mutualism because both sides benefit, but it's not always so rosy. Certain ants become extremely possessive and scientists have documented cases where ants prevent aphids from wandering away, physically move them back to feeding sites and even keep them in protected chambers. There have also been observed instances where ants have removed aphid wings, forcing them to essentially work for them until they drop dead. And forget there being a logical quota of honeydew that ants can take. When there's a large colony involved, you normally see aphids being harvested at an absurdly high rate. Aphids also reproduce at astonishing speeds, with females often giving birth to live young without needing to mate, a process known as parthenogenesis. This is also in the ant's best interest, because when they do over-harvest, the aphid must up its consumption and workload, which typically results in slower growth and producing fewer offspring. For the ants, it's a numbers game. The relationship is often compared to dairy farming, but there are moments when it looks more like an old-fashioned mafia protection racket – pay up, or we'll cut off your wings and force you to work harder anyway. The ants do technically provide security and shelter, but the aphids rarely have much say in the arrangement. In some species, the ants' interests and the aphids' interests align closely and the process moves at a healthy rate that benefits all, but in others, it is blind, cruel exploitation, with the aphids becoming little more than living sugar factories. ## 7. Some Birds Weaponise Fire Fire transformed early human existence. It enabled us to cook food, which was a major driver in the evolution of larger human brains. And this happened a lot earlier than you might think. The earliest known evidence of controlled fire dates back at least one million years, and possibly as far as 1.5 million years ago. Species such as Homo erectus are widely considered the first humans to regularly use fire, likely collecting it from natural wildfires before learning how to maintain it. Evidence from sites in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia suggests these early humans used fire for warmth, protection from predators, light, and possibly cooking. Later species, including Homo heidelbergensis and Neanderthals, became highly skilled fire users, building hearths and using flames to survive harsh Ice Age climates. But other animals? That was a step too far. Despite the millions of other species that have inhabited Earth, humans are the only ones who have ever used fire. Well, almost the only species. The indigenous people of Australia have long told of birds, particularly firehawks, soaring through the sky with flaming sticks in their beaks. They go even further to state that these birds were the ones that actually introduced fire to humans. The problem was that this sounds so far-fetched that it wasn't hard for the scientific community to completely discount these stories. Of course, birds don't carry flaming torches. Or do they? In 2017, a group of scientists published a study examining numerous eyewitness accounts collected from firefighters, Indigenous land managers, park rangers, and local residents across northern Australia, that claimed, unequivocally, that yes, some birds do carry flaming torches. But why? Just for the hell of it? Are we talking pyromaniac birds just seeking out that next level of danger? Not quite. The reasons are entirely more practical. The birds involved included species such as the black kite, the whistling kite, and the brown falcon — all intelligent predatory birds commonly seen gathering around bushfires. According to reports, some of which involved hundreds of birds, they would move towards smoke caused by the fires, before swooping down and picking up sticks or small branches that are already alight with their beaks or talons. And the next step is the crafty part. They then soar upwards towards areas not affected by the fires, before dropping them in the hope that they create a new fire. When this happens, whatever wildlife in the area, rabbits, hares, birds, lizards, and insects drop their usually defensive tendencies and evacuate the area as fast as possible. And when this happens, guess who is circling above waiting to pick them off. And this isn't just a few isolated incidents, with cases reported across Australia, sometimes with huge numbers of birds gathering to flush out vast swaths of animals. It's brilliant, it's ingenious, it's borderline evil. When this news broke, it created a huge stir, but for the Aborigines, there was little more than a shrug. Of course, birds can spread fire. We've been talking and singing about it for around 40,000 years. ## 8. Octopuses Can Edit Their Own Genetic Instructions Anybody who watched the 2020 film, My Octopus Teacher, will tell you that there's something different about these creatures. But where do we even start? They've got three hearts, two to pump blood to the gills, while a third pumps blood around the rest of the body. Unlike most, their blood is blue because it contains a copper-rich protein called hemocyanin instead of iron-rich hemoglobin. Their brain power isn't really where you think it is. An octopus has about 500 million neurons, and roughly two-thirds are located in its arms rather than its central brain. Each arm can process information and perform complex tasks with a surprising degree of independence. They can solve puzzles, they are masters of disguise and can change color in seconds, they don't have any bones, and may well dream in similar ways to how we do, according to research in 2023. In short, they are among the strangest, most unique creatures on planet earth. Yet one of the most bizarre features is something we're still only beginning to understand — RNA editing. We'll begin with the basics. Most animals rely on DNA mutations over many generations to adapt to changing environments. A useful genetic mutation appears, survives natural selection, and gradually spreads through a population over tens, if not hundreds of thousands of years. It is a painfully slow process, but for most species, that is simply how adaptation works. But octopuses are different — of course they are. Scientists discovered that octopuses extensively modify their RNA after it has been copied from DNA. RNA acts as a set of instructions that tells cells which proteins to build and in most animals, those instructions are copied pretty much to a T. Minor editing can occur, but it is generally limited. In octopuses, however, researchers found something far more extensive, with large portions of their genetic instructions being routinely rewritten. A major study published in 2015 identified tens of thousands of RNA editing sites throughout octopuses' nervous systems, with many concentrated in genes associated with brain activity and neural communication. Rather than relying entirely on permanent DNA mutations, octopuses appear able to adjust how certain genetic instructions are expressed. In evolutionary biological terms, this goes against what basically every other animal does. Evolution generally rewards useful DNA changes that can be passed to future generations, but octopuses seem to place a lot of emphasis on preserving their ability to edit RNA instead. In some cases, researchers believe this allows them to respond more quickly to environmental challenges, such as living in colder waters. Scientists found that they edit RNA involved in nerve signalling, helping neural activity continue efficiently despite low temperatures. Instead of waiting countless generations for natural selection to solve the problem, they can alter protein production within their own lifetimes. What unsettled many researchers wasn't simply that octopuses edit their RNA. It was that they appeared to be achieving a level of biological flexibility through a mechanism rarely seen on such a scale anywhere else in the animal kingdom. The more scientists study octopuses, the more they encounter systems that seem to operate according to their own set of biological rules. So are octopuses some kind of advanced being? Maybe. They're often described as alien-like, not necessarily because of physical features, but because so many aspects of their biology seem utterly alien-like. But there might be a trade-off. Some researchers argue that maintaining this extensive editing system may actually slow conventional genetic evolution in parts of the genome — meaning octopuses appear to have prioritised flexibility in the present over genetic change in the future. They are the ultimate live-in-the-moment creatures. ## 9. Murdering Dolphins It's difficult to find many more lovable creatures than dolphins. For years, we've been told that they are adorable, highly-intelligent creatures who just want to frolic and play. They follow boats, jump serenely through the sky, and provide that once in a lifetime experience when swimming with them. I'm sorry to burst bubbles today, but they are also murderers, masters of sexual coercion, and violent thugs. Let me explain. Researchers studying wild bottlenose dolphins discovered behaviours that seemed completely at odds with their reputation. Instead of the peaceful ocean flipper that you would let play with your children, dolphins were found engaging in some pretty horrific activity. One of the most shocking discoveries involved the deaths of young dolphins, with the most famous case occurring in 1996 when researchers led by Dr. Richard Connor documented evidence that male bottlenose dolphins were deliberately killing calves. The behaviour appears similar to infanticide seen in lions and certain primates; by eliminating a calf, a male may increase the likelihood that the mother becomes reproductively available again. Female bottlenose dolphins typically nurse calves for three to six years, which usually means she's out of the reproductive game for that amount of time. And how this happens is pretty harrowing. Adult males chase young calves, separate them from their mothers, ram them, toss them, and hold them underwater until, well, you know. In one observed attack, multiple males pursued a mother and her calf for hours. The calf was repeatedly struck and eventually died from its injuries. In some dolphin populations, calf mortality during the first year can exceed 20–30%, although other predators, disease, and environmental factors also contribute. But dolphin violence extends outside their own species. Beginning in the 1980s and 1990s, beaches across parts of Europe started receiving dead harbour porpoises. At first, researchers assumed it was down to fishing accidents, shark attacks or disease, but post-mortems carried out revealed something disturbing – these porpoises had been beaten senseless. Injuries included broken ribs, internal haemorrhaging, severe blunt-force trauma, and bite marks consistent with, you've guessed it, dolphins. By the early 2000s, scientists had recorded hundreds of suspected cases around European coastlines, mostly young porpoises with the same style of injuries, but none showed any sign of being consumed, or partially consumed. Whoever was doing this, wasn't doing it for food. They were basically killing, and then leaving. And, of course, it was dolphins doing it, and it's since been visually documented many times. Why? We're not really sure. Some scientists suggested the behaviour might be practice for conflicts with rival dolphins. Others proposed it could be a form of redirected aggression. As in, that dolphin was having a bad day, and simply didn't like the look of that porpoise swimming past. Sounds ridiculous when you actually say it out loud, but even today, there is no universally accepted explanation. We'll round out our evil dolphin trilogy with sexual coercion and assault of females. Male bottlenose dolphins form sophisticated alliances that can last for years or even decades. These groups cooperate during conflicts and compete for access to females, with researchers documenting cases where groups of males work together to isolate females, prevent them from leaving, and aggressively maintain control over them for extended periods. In the human world, that's essentially kidnap and rape. What makes these behaviours particularly horrifying is the level of coordination involved. Dolphins possess some of the largest brains relative to body size in the animal kingdom. They recognise individual animals, maintain long-term social relationships, and communicate using unique signature whistles that function almost like names. In other words, this is not mindless violence. It is very sophisticated violence carried out by one of the most intelligent species on Earth. ## 10. Humanity Nearly Went Extinct We're going to round this list out with the fact that you reading this article very nearly didn't exist because Homo sapiens came perilously close to extinction several times throughout history. Modern genetic research has revealed that humans passed through several population bottlenecks during prehistory, which are specific periods when a species' population crashes so severely that only a small number of individuals survive and reproduce. The most famous example is linked to the eruption of the supervolcano at Lake Toba around 74,000 years ago. This was a monster of an eruption. To give you a sense of scale, the Mount St. Helens eruption produced around 1 cubic kilometre (0.24 cubic miles) of material, while Krakatoa, the monster of 1883, produced 20 cubic kilometres (4.8 cubic miles). Toba produced approximately 2,800 cubic kilometres (672 cubic miles) and many believe that volcanic winter conditions reduced temperatures worldwide and devastated ecosystems which may have reduced humanity to just 10,000 with only a few thousand breeding-age adults. More recently, a 2023 study using genetic modelling proposed an even more dramatic bottleneck between approximately 930,000 and 813,000 years ago. According to the researchers, the breeding population of these human ancestors may have fallen to between 1000 and 1500 individuals for more than 100,000 years. This bottleneck coincides with dramatic climate instability during the Early Pleistocene that saw a severe ice age paralyse vast sections of the globe. This led to large-scale food insecurity, or to put it more bluntly, species-wide starvation, with entire groups vanishing during droughts, cold periods, or ecological collapse. These weren't Homo Sapiens yet, but rather members of a very early human lineage somewhere between Homo erectus and Homo heidelbergensis. And if the study is correct, nearly 99% of the ancestral population disappeared during this point of our history. So, let's go back to that figure of between 1000 and 1500 individuals. To put that in perspective, there are some severely endangered species on Earth today with more individuals. There are 14,000 Sumatran Orangutans, 2,000 Iberian Lynxes, and perhaps as many as 6,000 Snow Leopards. The point is, humanity came extraordinarily close to simply never existing as we know it today. A few deadly disease outbreaks here, a particularly harsh winter there – that was all it would have taken. Today, there are more than 8 billion humans in practically every corner of the globe, but for as long as 100,000 years, the fate of humanity hung by thread, with little more than 1,000 of our early ancestors battling through the most horrendous of conditions. ## Zoology – Not Always What you Think And that's a wrap – 10 terrifying zoological discoveries that make you look at the natural world in a completely different way. Animals we think of as peaceful turn out to be violent. Creatures we dismiss as simple display astonishing complexity. Some species wage war, manipulate behaviour, start fires, or use biological mechanisms we are still struggling to understand. It's a weird world, and while we might be the most powerful, destructive creature on the planet capable of depravity and senseless violence, we're certainly not the only ones. Thanks for watching. Olivier Guiberteau ## Key Takeaways - Ant colonies engage in organized warfare, with specialized military castes and coordinated raids, resembling human conflicts. - Komodo dragons use a combination of venom and bacterial infection to kill prey, not just bacteria alone. - Sharks have existed for over 400 million years, surviving multiple mass extinctions and evolving into formidable predators. - Chimpanzees conduct planned murders and infanticide, challenging the notion of them being peaceful creatures. - Some fungi can manipulate the behavior of insects, turning them into zombies to spread spores and ensure survival. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### What is dulosis in the context of ant behavior? Dulosis is a behavior observed in some ant species where they raid rival nests, carry away developing young, and enslave them. These captured larvae mature and spend their entire lives serving the colony that destroyed their original home. ### How do Komodo dragons kill their prey? Komodo dragons use a combination of biological weapons to kill their prey. They have serrated teeth that tear flesh, venom that promotes blood loss and interferes with clotting, and bacteria in their mouths that can cause infections. The bite itself is usually enough to kill the prey, but if the prey survives the initial attack, the venom and bacteria ensure that the prey's body fights itself, leading to shock and eventual death. ### How long have sharks been around compared to trees? Sharks have been around for approximately 450 million years, which is significantly longer than trees. Trees appeared around 380 million years ago, so sharks were already ancient by the time trees emerged. ### What is the Gombe Chimpanzee War? The Gombe Chimpanzee War was a conflict observed in the 1970s at Tanzania's Gombe Stream National Park. The Kasakela community of chimpanzees systematically hunted down and killed members of the Kahama community, effectively exterminating them. This event challenged the previous view of chimpanzees as peaceful creatures. ### How do fungi like Ophiocordyceps manipulate the behavior of ants? Ophiocordyceps fungi infect ants and manipulate their behavior through chemical signalling and interactions with the nervous system. Infected ants abandon their normal routines, climb to a specific height on vegetation, and perform a death grip, where they bite firmly into a leaf or stem. The fungus then grows inside the ant's corpse, eventually releasing spores to infect new ants. ### What is the relationship between ants and aphids? Ants and aphids have a mutualistic relationship where ants protect aphids from predators and move them to better feeding locations. In return, aphids produce honeydew, a sugary liquid that ants consume. However, this relationship can be exploitative, with ants sometimes removing aphid wings and forcing them to produce more honeydew. ### How do some birds use fire to their advantage? Some birds, such as black kites, whistling kites, and brown falcons, carry flaming sticks in their beaks or talons to start new fires. This behavior flushes out prey, such as rabbits, hares, birds, lizards, and insects, which the birds then hunt and eat. ### What is unique about octopuses' ability to edit their RNA? Octopuses extensively modify their RNA after it has been copied from DNA, allowing them to adjust how certain genetic instructions are expressed. This ability enables them to respond more quickly to environmental challenges, such as living in colder waters, without relying solely on slow genetic mutations. ### What are some of the violent behaviors observed in dolphins? Dolphins have been observed engaging in infanticide, where male dolphins deliberately kill young calves to make the mothers reproductively available again. They also attack and kill harbor porpoises, and male dolphins form alliances to isolate and aggressively maintain control over females for extended periods. ### How close did humanity come to extinction? Humanity passed through several population bottlenecks, including one around 74,000 years ago due to the eruption of the supervolcano at Lake Toba, which may have reduced the human population to just 10,000 individuals. Another study suggested that between 930,000 and 813,000 years ago, the breeding population of early human ancestors may have fallen to between 1,000 and 1,500 individuals. ## Sources - [Original Side Projects video: 10 Terrifying Zoological Discoveries](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gm4nyFfhwgQ) - [Hero image source](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f4/National_Geographic_at_SM_Mall_of_Asia_%282026-01-18%29.jpg) by Wide Awake! / openverse, by. ## Related Coverage Simon Whistler https://sideprojects.pub/article/5-american-military-defeats https://sideprojects.pub/article/5-american-military-defeats Thu, 02 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT The United States is one of the most militarily successful nations in history. Emblematic of this is its decisive intervention during WWII, without which allied victory simply would not have been possible, or the Revolutionary War, through which it freed itself from colonial bondage and set itself on the path to becoming the superpower it is today. But despite this formidable record, it has also had plenty of military failures and disasters, and today we shall be looking at some of the worst ones — this is 'Five American Military Failures.' ## 1. Red Cloud's War For our first military failure, we must cast our minds back to the 19th century, where in the tumultuous expanses of the American west, a small band of natives were preparing to give Uncle Sam a bloody nose, in a conflict that would become known as Red Cloud's War. Red Cloud, the leader of the Oglala Lakota subtribe, was both a fearsome warrior and a brilliant strategist — an indigenous leader whose vision penetrated the veiled arrogance and tactical shortcomings of the American military establishment. His war, waged against the encroachment of his people's sacred territories between 1866 and 1868, saw Red Cloud leverage his intimate understanding of the expansive, rugged terrain and forge a coalition between various tribes, providing a strong and united front that the soldiers of the US Army simply could not match. Red Cloud's point of umbrage was the establishment of the Bozeman Trail and the many forts surrounding it from 1863. These had been erected to safeguard the passage of miners en-route to the gold fields of Montana but were built with a stark disregard for established treaties and the sacred significance of the indigenous lands it perforated. So, Red Cloud's goal proved to be a simple one — fight a guerrilla war against these installations until they were vanquished from his lands. He proved very adept at implementing this strategy too. The American military, rendered ignorant by the spirit of manifest destiny, systematically underestimated his resistance, perceiving his coalition of indigenous tribes not as formidable adversaries but as mere obstacles in the path toward unabated expansion. The forts, envisaged as bastions of security and symbols of American prowess, instead became isolated strongholds, vulnerable to the adept guerrilla warfare tactics employed by Red Cloud and his warriors. A specific example of his guerrilla prowess comes from December 1866, when near Fort Phil Kearny, Red Cloud and 1,000 of his best warriors ambushed a detachment of 81 soldiers led by Captain William Fetterman. They never saw the enormous force coming, and before they knew what had hit them, all 81 of them lay dead, only managing to mount a token defence that took no more than 60 of the natives with them to the grave. The skirmish in time became known as the Fetterman Fight, and was a devastating defeat that rocked the US Army to its core; not merely a physical defeat, but a psychological one, and one that dismantled the myth of invincibility that had enveloped the American military persona. Fetterman's tactical errors were palpably evident, yet there existed a deeper, more insidious failure rooted in cultural ignorance and a stark underestimation of indigenous leadership, military capability, and resolve. The US, in its pursuit of territorial expansion, neglected to comprehend the sociopolitical and cultural complexities of the indigenous tribes. The notion that the natives might be able to mount an effective resistance simply wasn't considered before that point. Thanks to Red Cloud however, the US Army was forced to not only consider, but accept that very point, and so, in 1868, the Treaty of Fort Laramie was signed — a reluctant but inevitable concession that saw the US abandon all of its forts along the Bozeman Trail and withdraw its troops. Red Cloud had not merely defended his people's territories but had strategically exposed the vulnerabilities and failures of the American military apparatus. Red Cloud's War presents a narrative that extends beyond battles and treaties, seeping into the domains of strategic integrity, cultural understanding, and the acknowledgment of indigenous sovereignty and military capacity. The United States, in its quest for expansion, collided with a resistance that was both physical and philosophical, dismantling preconceived notions of indigenous inferiority and military incapability. ## 2. The War of 1812 When it comes to controversial American wars, they don't get much more controversial than the War of 1812 between the US and the UK — ask 100 historians who won it, and you will get 100 different answers. For American historians, the war is often remembered for the resilience of the fledgling nation and the stirring national anthem born from the bombardment of Fort McHenry. However, a meticulous peeling back of the layers uncovers a reality less spoken about: The United States didn't attain its primary objectives, thus presenting a plausible argument that this conflict was, in fact, a US military failure. But to explain this argument, first we must be clear about what those primary objectives actually were, and for the Americans, what they wanted was simple: the end of the British military presence in North America and the annexation of Canada. American strategists and politicians, basking in the triumphant glow of the recent American Revolution, envisioned Canadians welcoming their troops as liberators. A harsh reality awaited instead. A significant number of Canadians were Loyalists, exiled from the nascent United States due to their allegiance to the British Crown during the Revolution. These Canadians, far from welcoming the American forces, aligned firmly with the British military, and stymied the American campaign to conquer and annex Canada. Moreover, American planners overestimated their own unity. Disparate interests among states, particularly the New England states which maintained strong maritime trading ties with Britain and outright opposed the war, weakened the American front both politically and militarily. For a time, in an unsettling display of disunity, these states even considered secession and reunification with Britain, significantly undermining the war effort. As a result of these poor estimations, the US suffered numerous defeats, with notable battles being the Battle of Queenston Heights in 1812 and the Battle of Crysler's Farm a year later, both of which saw invasions of Canada totally thwarted. But the worst defeat by far was the Battle of Bladensburg in 1814, after which the British entered the capital unopposed and razed many government buildings in what became known as the Burning of Washington. To make matters worse for the Americans, that same year Napoleon was defeated and subsequently imprisoned on Elba, meaning that the British now had a lot of spare troops in Europe that they could commit to America. With total defeat imminent, the Americans sat down for peace talks in August 1814 and signed the Treaty of Ghent soon after — a de facto peace in which neither the US nor the UK lost or gained any territory. It is hard not to view this as a failure for the US. When measured against their ambitions at the onset of the war, they unequivocally fell short. Their primary objective of annexing Canada and evicting the British from North America remained unfulfilled. Frankly, they were also lucky that the British were not eager to overly exploit the peace negotiations, because between their less than stellar performance in the war, and the full might of the recently freed up British military which stood poised to leap across the Atlantic — they wouldn't have been in much position to quibble had the British wanted more from the treaty. Couple this with the domestic strife and lack of cohesion that the war exposed, and the War of 1812 is not just a mere failure, but a testament to the perils of overreaching ambition without proper preparation and unity. ## 3. The Vietnam War The Vietnam War, which lasted from 1955 to 1975, involved the commitment of over 2.7 million American troops, the ultimate sacrifice of approximately 58,000 of them, and the wounding of over 150,000 more. The US' primary objective, ostensibly clear, was to defend capitalist South Vietnam against the expansive reach of the communist North — it completely failed to do this. But the failure was not just a military defeat; rather it was the consequence of geopolitical machinations, socio-political upheavals, and a burgeoning anti-war sentiment at home, which all worked in tandem to render the American military machine impotent, and ultimately handed South Vietnam over to the Communists. It all began going wrong in late 1972, when, with the US Air Force exercising its bombing prowess over key industrial and military targets in Hanoi and Haiphong, there was a palpable sense that the strategic tide had turned in the US' favour. The North Vietnamese, with little other option, then entered the Paris Peace Talks, and by January 1973, the Paris Peace Accords were signed and a US withdrawal from Vietnam began. "VV Day," symbolizing "Victory in Vietnam," resonated within the corridors of the White House. Notably however, these accords did not end the war. Rather, with the military situation now largely tied up, South Vietnam was going to be left to handle the mop up itself. As part of this, a crucial pledge was made: the US would replenish South Vietnam's military hardware in the face of future North Vietnamese aggression. This commitment was not merely a logistical assurance, but an essential cornerstone upon which the entire strategy for preserving a capitalist South Vietnam rested. However, the domestic political landscape within the US was undergoing seismic shifts. The Watergate affair had just broken, because of which President Nixon resigned in August 1974, and with the controversy blighting the Republican Party, the consequent November congressional elections ushered in a Democratic majority in Congress, many of whom were vehemently opposed to further involvement, or aid, to South Vietnam. Consequently, a critical lifeline was severed, as the 94th Congress withdrew military support, leaving South Vietnam in a precarious position. President Ford, acutely aware of the ominous horizon unfolding before South Vietnam, implored Congress in April 1975 to uphold the promises made. But his pleading fell on largely deaf ears, as even during his poignant speech, members of Congress exited the chamber, symbolizing a definitive turning away from a commitment that had been solemnly made. The de-funding of military aid to South Vietnam was not merely a withdrawal of support; it was the crux upon which the fate of the nation pivoted, and into the vacuum created, the forces of North Vietnam advanced unimpeded. South Vietnam, bereft of the anticipated support and facing a robust and determined adversary, capitulated. Saigon fell on the 30th of April 1975, and with its fall, the entirety of Vietnam was enveloped under communist control. The objective to maintain a capitalist South Vietnam was a failure. With this the US had achieved a rather remarkable feat — snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. Surprisingly, this perspective is quite a controversial one, with many historians (notably American ones) arguing that the political defeat should be viewed isolated from the military victory, but we aren't about that. From our perspective, the US went into Vietnam to keep the South capitalist and failed to do so, and that basic fact is all that matters in making our assessment. ## 4. The Afghanistan War The US intervention in Afghanistan, initiated in 2001, is undoubtedly one of its greatest military failures. The 9/11 terrorist attacks, which left almost 3,000 Americans dead, acted as the catalyst, thrusting the US into a war on the rugged terrains of Afghanistan, with the primary objective of dismantling the Taliban regime, which was believed to be harbouring and supporting Al-Qaeda terrorists, including the mastermind of the attacks, Osama bin Laden. Commencing with Operation Enduring Freedom, US forces, backed by a coalition of allies, swiftly overran the Taliban. Kabul, the nation's capital, was captured in November 2001, a mere two months after the war began. This quick success gave rise to optimism; the Taliban seemed defeated, and Afghanistan appeared to be on the cusp of a brighter, democratic future. As the years rolled on, the US became embroiled in nation-building, attempting to reconstruct a war-torn nation with democratic institutions, infrastructure, and the promotion of rights, especially for women and minority groups. However, beneath this seemingly promising veneer lay a multitude of problems. Afghanistan's complex tribal politics, the influence of regional powers, rampant corruption, and the resilience of Taliban fighters all combined to challenge American objectives. The US military, one of the most advanced and sophisticated in the world, found itself battling an elusive enemy that utilized guerrilla tactics, melting away into the vast, challenging terrain, only to strike back with deadly force. Over the two-decade conflict, the US committed thousands of troops and invested billions of dollars into the Afghan security forces and infrastructure. While there were periods when it seemed like progress was tangible — the establishment of schools, the return of women to public life, elections, and even peace dialogues — underlying issues persisted. The Afghan government, though officially in power, struggled with legitimacy issues and internal rifts, often proving ineffectual outside urban centres. Perhaps more problematic was the Afghan security forces' perennial state of unpreparedness. Despite rigorous training and vast resources poured into its establishment, when put to the test, the Afghan military often displayed a lack of morale, cohesion, and capability, making the eventual US exit a precarious affair. That exit came after nearly twenty years. The US, in a bid to end its "forever war," negotiated with the Taliban and set a timeline for withdrawal, finally pulling the last of its troops out in August 2021. This decision, to many analysts, seemed hasty and ill-prepared. As US troops began to leave, the Taliban rapidly advanced, capturing territory at an alarming rate. The culmination of this swift offensive was the fall of Kabul in August 2021, almost mirroring the rapidity with which the city was taken two decades earlier. The Afghan government collapsed, and President Ashraf Ghani fled the country. The very force the US had set out to defeat was now back in control — the Afghanistan War was a failure. ## 5. The Iraq War The Iraq War, which spanned from 2003 to 2011, remains a contentious chapter in American history. At the heart of the debate lies the very rationale for the invasion, a topic veiled in layers of political rhetoric, intelligence reports, and international tensions. Over time, various justifications for the war were provided, with some appearing contradictory and inconsistent. Yet among the myriad of reasons given, one stood out as the most prominent: Iraq's supposed possession of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) that posed an imminent threat to the US and its allies. From early on, the narrative of WMDs was persistent. Leaders of the western world, anchored by the US, painted a vivid picture of a rogue state under the leadership of Saddam Hussein, amassing dangerous weapons capable of wreaking havoc beyond Iraq's borders. But what underpinned this narrative? The intelligence community's conclusions, while debated internally, generally supported the idea that Hussein was either in possession of such weapons or actively pursuing them. However, as the invasion proceeded and the subsequent occupation lengthened, this foundational justification began to show cracks. Despite extensive searches and investigations, the US military was unable to uncover any active WMD programs or stockpiles — all of Iraq's chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons programs had been shuttered as per international agreements following the Gulf War. One could argue, however, that the absence of WMDs doesn't render the Iraq War a failure. After all, with or without them the trigger-happy Saddam was a potential threat to US geopolitical interests in the region, as his invasions of Iran and Kuwait in 1980 and 1990 respectively demonstrate. Where this point becomes harder to argue, however, is when one considers that the bungled nature of the US' withdrawal led to the rise of a threat far greater than Saddam — ISIS. Originating as a faction of Al-Qaeda, the group adeptly capitalized on the socio-political chaos and sectarian fissures left in the wake of the American exit in 2011, launching a campaign of conquest that spread across the whole region. By 2014, they formally declared a "caliphate" across their extensive territories in Iraq and Syria and unleashed a wave of barbarism that the region had not seen since the medieval age. This development underscored a poignant irony: an intervention initially justified as a pre-emptive strike against a potential threat had inadvertently birthed a fully realised and hostile threat. Soon enough this threat spread to US soil, and as of the time of recording, there had been 7 known ISIS attacks in the US, the worst of which, the Orlando Nightclub Shooting of the 12th of June 2016, left 49 innocent people dead, and a further 53 injured. All in all, ISIS attacks on US soil have killed 72 and left 108 injured. Such attacks haven't been limited to just the US either, with its allies also having been targeted, the UK having seen 37 people killed and 189 injured in the five known attacks on the country's soil. All in all, over 30 countries, US aligned or otherwise, have had to suffer such attacks — all of them, a direct repercussion of the bungled US War in Iraq. And those WMDs Saddam didn't have that the US went in to try to prevent from being used? Well, turns out ISIS not only had WMDs, but also used them. According to a report released by IHS Conflict Monitor, a London-based intelligence collection and analysis service in 2016, ISIS used chemical weapons on at least 52 occasions since their ascension to statehood in 2014. Given the fact that the war was started in part to prevent the proliferation and use of WMDs — this hardly speaks to it being successful, does it? This perspective is a controversial one, as there are many eager to argue that the War in Iraq was a success, and while we certainly welcome debate, we feel quite confident that, in light of the perspective we just outlined — the War in Iraq has earned its place on this list of US military failures. ## Key Takeaways - Red Cloud's War showcased the US military's underestimation of indigenous tactics and leadership. - The War of 1812 failed to achieve US objectives of annexing Canada and removing British influence. - The Vietnam War ended in defeat due to domestic political shifts and lack of sustained support. - The Afghanistan War resulted in the Taliban regaining control after a hasty US withdrawal. - The Iraq War's justification of WMDs was unfounded, leading to the rise of ISIS. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### What was Red Cloud's War? Red Cloud's War was a conflict between the Oglala Lakota tribe, led by Red Cloud, and the United States Army from 1866 to 1868. It was fought against the establishment of the Bozeman Trail and the forts surrounding it, which were built without regard for established treaties and sacred indigenous lands. ### What was the significance of the Fetterman Fight? The Fetterman Fight was a significant defeat for the US Army in December 1866, where Red Cloud and his warriors ambushed and killed 81 soldiers led by Captain William Fetterman. This battle exposed the vulnerabilities and failures of the American military apparatus and led to the Treaty of Fort Laramie in 1868. ### What were the primary objectives of the United States in the War of 1812? The primary objectives of the United States in the War of 1812 were to end the British military presence in North America and to annex Canada. ### Why is the War of 1812 considered a failure for the US? The War of 1812 is considered a failure for the US because they did not achieve their primary objectives of annexing Canada and evicting the British from North America. The Treaty of Ghent resulted in no territorial gains or losses for either side. ### What was the outcome of the Vietnam War for the United States? The outcome of the Vietnam War for the United States was a failure to maintain a capitalist South Vietnam. Despite initial military successes, domestic political changes led to the withdrawal of support, resulting in the fall of Saigon and the communist takeover of the entire country. ### What were the primary objectives of the US intervention in Afghanistan? The primary objectives of the US intervention in Afghanistan were to dismantle the Taliban regime, which was believed to be harboring and supporting Al-Qaeda terrorists, and to promote democratic institutions and infrastructure in the country. ### Why is the Afghanistan War considered a failure? The Afghanistan War is considered a failure because, despite initial successes, the US was unable to establish a stable, democratic government. The Taliban regained control of the country shortly after the US withdrawal in 2021. ### What was the main justification for the Iraq War? The main justification for the Iraq War was the supposed possession of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) by Iraq, which was believed to pose an imminent threat to the US and its allies. ### What was the outcome of the Iraq War? The outcome of the Iraq War was the rise of ISIS, which capitalized on the socio-political chaos and sectarian fissures left in the wake of the American exit. This led to numerous attacks on US soil and in other countries, as well as the use of chemical weapons by ISIS. ## Sources - [Original Side Projects video: 5 American Military Defeats](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4JPhhpcBWY) - [Hero image source](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/50/Arquebus_Krigshistorisk_Museum_Norway._WW2_Battle_of_Berlin_1945_diorama._Nazi_Germany_Wehrmacht_Waffen-SS_military_and_Soviet_Red_Army._Uniforms_weapons_artillery_FLAK_gun_T-34-85_tank_corps_mannequins_ruins_debris_civilians_etc_%282023.jpg) by Wolfmann / openverse, by-sa. ## Related Coverage Simon Whistler https://sideprojects.pub/article/5-strange-cases-of-mass-hysteria https://sideprojects.pub/article/5-strange-cases-of-mass-hysteria Thu, 02 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT The dictionary definition of the phenomenon known as mass hysteria is: "a condition affecting a group of persons, characterized by excitement or anxiety, irrational behavior or beliefs, or inexplicable symptoms of illness." Instances of mass hysteria have been recorded throughout human history and across the whole world. While it can't be predicted when it might happen, there do seem to be similar underlying factors between cases which can explain why an epidemic might start, if not exactly how. The common link seems to be a group of people under stressful conditions that manifest their psychological stress into physical symptoms. These symptoms are then passed throughout the group they are in with everyone falling prey to the strange behaviour or beliefs. There are some very famous examples, such as the Salem Witch Trials and the Satanic Panic of the 1980s and 90s that have taken mass hysteria and irrational beliefs to deadly lengths. Let's look at some more of the weirdest cases of mass hysteria that have been recorded so far. ## The Dancing Plague One person deciding to behave a bit oddly is not usually a cause for concern; if you see someone dancing around by themselves in the middle of a city street you generally give them a wide berth and get on with your day. But what if other people started joining in and not in a fun flashmob kind of way but in an uncontrolled and fervent way that went on for days and led to some people dying? That's what happened in Strasbourg in 1518. You might have heard of "St Vitus Dance", a disorder where people start uncontrollably jerking and moving. This was named after St. Vitus, obviously, who was the patron saint of dancers and entertainers. There isn't anything entertaining about this dance, though, with some sufferers eventually dying of exhaustion or heart attacks. In one of the earliest documented examples of mass hysteria, a woman started dancing in the street in July, 1518. After a while, other people joined her and the dancing group grew as the outbreak spread. Incredibly, it wasn't until September that the dancing plague was brought under control with doctors rounding up people to take them off to hospital and the magistrate of Strasbourg clamping down on this sort of behaviour. At the time, a theory of demonic possession was offered as a reason for the dancing and, as most of the afflicted were young women, another suggestion was given as "overheated blood". There are no confirmed numbers relating to how large the afflicted group was, with estimates ranging between 50 and a whopping 400 but even 50 people unable to stop dancing is 50 too many. Another theory proffered to explain the behaviour is that of the victims having ingested a fungus on mouldy bread which acts in a similar way to LSD. It does not explain why everyone behaved so similarly, though, as psychotropic chemicals do not affect large numbers of people in the same way. Mass hysteria seems more likely with the underlying factor being the stress caused by the poor conditions many people were living in at the time. There were many recorded outbreaks of this dancing disease, especially in the Middle Ages, with the issue generally resolving itself after weeks or sometimes months. It does still sometimes occur nowadays and medication can be given to help control the involuntary movements but no medical cure has been found. ## Strange Events at the Nunnery You wouldn't expect too many weird things to be afoot in a nunnery, right? They are calm groups of religious women living under God and serving their communities. Well, in the Middle Ages, two very bizarre cases of mass hysteria took hold of convents across Europe. The first example happened in France where one young nun started to make meowing noises, as one does. This escalated into every nun in the convent meowing at the same time for hours a day. It might not have been so bad if they'd chosen a different animal to imitate but cats were linked with Satan at the time so not only were the women making annoying noises, they were also baiting God by sounding like the devil's pet. Eventually this all stopped when, after complaints from the neighbours, a group of soldiers arrived and threatened to beat the nuns if they didn't put a sock in it. Later in the fifteenth century, a nun in a German convent began to bite her sisters. Instead of being put in a nun time-out or thrown in an insane asylum, the biting behaviour actually spread, with all the nuns in the convent taking a chomp at each other on a regular basis. As if this wasn't weird enough, when news of this peculiar social contagion spread, it started happening at other nunneries across Germany, into Holland and even as far as Italy. With no clue as to what to do, religious authorities tried praying and eventually turned to exorcisms to cast the biting demons out but this did nothing to prevent the epidemic from continuing. Finally, it came down to physical threats and punishments of whipping or being held under water that got the behaviour to stop. You might wonder why nuns were seemingly so susceptible to falling victim to mass hysteria but, especially at this time in history, lots of the convents were made up of young women put there against their will, forced into a life of celibacy and hard work by their families. If this doesn't create a breeding ground for psychological stress then I don't know what does. Also, the middle ages were a very religious and superstitious time which would have fed into the bizarre group events with talk of devils and sorcery adding fuel to the fire. ## The Halifax Slasher Fear can make people do strange things. In Halifax, England in November 1938, the whole town was in a panic after a number of attacks by a mysterious man who was slashing people with a razor. Encouraged by scaremongering newspaper articles, mass hysteria gripped the town with businesses shutting down until the attacker was found. More reports came in from neighbouring towns of Slasher attacks and detectives from Scotland Yard were eventually called in to investigate. Convinced they were doing the right thing, groups of townspeople started roaming the streets to find the Slasher, themselves becoming violent attackers if they came upon a person who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. After just over two weeks of the town becoming a hotbed of suspicion, violence and paranoia, one of the first Slasher victims fessed up that his injuries had, in fact, been self-inflicted. After this admission, it turned out that at least 9 of the 12 recorded victims had actually caused their injuries themselves and had not been attacked by a razor-wielding maniac. Four of these people ended up in jail for public mischief and Scotland Yard closed the case with the conclusion that there had never been a Slasher, it was all just a collective delusion. ## The Laughing Epidemic We've all heard that laughter is the best medicine but what happens when it's actually the disease? Maybe these quotes would be more accurate with Charles Dickens saying: "There is nothing in the world so irresistibly contagious as laughter and good humor." And according to Mark Twain: "Against the assault of laughter, nothing can stand." That brings us to 1962 and the Tanganyika Laughter Epidemic. In what is now Tanzania, a small group of young girls started giggling in their boarding school one day. Nothing unusual there, children laugh all the time. This proved to be different, however. After laughing fits lasting up to several hours, this laughter did prove to be contagious in the worst possible way. Soon, other girls had joined in and six weeks later, over half the school was laughing in prolonged, uncontrollable bursts and the establishment was shut down. Unfortunately, this didn't end the epidemic as the girls were still having outbursts at home and the contagion spread throughout their communities. If you're thinking that laughing so much doesn't seem that bad, you're wrong. It would be totally exhausting and they weren't laughing because they were happy. In fact, other symptoms of this mass hysteria were crying, rashes and fainting. The schools eventually reopened but the laughing epidemic was still going strong so they had to shut down again almost immediately. In total, over 1000 cases were reported and 14 schools were closed. It's believed that once again, stress and anxiety were the cause of the initial outbreak. The religious boarding school was not known for its easygoing, lenient nature and there was a lot of uncertainty in the country in general as Britain had ceased its rule only a few months earlier. It wasn't until over a year later that the laughter stopped, as abruptly as it had begun. ## Recurrent Mass Hysteria The only known case of a recurrent mass hysteria epidemic is in a school in western Nepal. Since the 1990s, the small country has seen many outbreaks of mass hysteria, usually presenting as young people crying and writhing on the ground but they have been isolated incidents. In August 2016, a young schoolgirl started shouting and having crying outbursts which quickly spread throughout her class, resulting in about 12 children demonstrating the same symptoms by the end of the day. The next year, the same thing happened again with 18 children being afflicted by group dissociative symptoms. And then it happened again in 2018, with 47 boys and girls displaying the same bizarre behaviour. It has been suggested that cases such as this might have an environmental trigger, some smell or chemical in the air, but a study of the 2018 phenomenon in the Nepalese school found nothing that could have acted on the children in this way. Once again it was put down to stress and anxiety which was then exacerbated by the attention the episodes received from local onlookers. Every year, once the affected children had been taken out of the school grounds, the symptoms resolved themselves pretty quickly. The outbreaks stopped after three years and no further cases have been reported. ## Key Takeaways - Mass hysteria is characterized by irrational behavior or beliefs in a group under stress. - Historical cases of mass hysteria include the Dancing Plague in 1518 and the Tanganyika Laughter Epidemic in 1962. - Stressful conditions and psychological stress often manifest as physical symptoms in mass hysteria. - The Halifax Slasher incident in 1938 was revealed to be a collective delusion with self-inflicted injuries. - Recurrent mass hysteria in a Nepalese school was linked to stress and anxiety, resolving quickly when affected students were removed. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### What is mass hysteria? Mass hysteria is a condition affecting a group of persons, characterized by excitement or anxiety, irrational behavior or beliefs, or inexplicable symptoms of illness. ### What are some common factors underlying mass hysteria? Mass hysteria often occurs in groups of people under stressful conditions who manifest their psychological stress into physical symptoms, which then spread throughout the group. ### What was the Dancing Plague? The Dancing Plague was an event in Strasbourg in 1518 where people started dancing uncontrollably in the streets, leading to some deaths from exhaustion or heart attacks. It was one of the earliest documented examples of mass hysteria. ### What happened at the nunnery in France during the Middle Ages? In a French nunnery, a young nun started making meowing noises, which escalated into all the nuns meowing together for hours a day. This behavior was eventually stopped when soldiers threatened to beat the nuns if they didn't stop. ### What was the Halifax Slasher incident? In Halifax, England in 1938, mass hysteria gripped the town after reports of a mysterious man slashing people with a razor. It turned out that most of the victims had self-inflicted their injuries, and there was never an actual Slasher. ### What was the Tanganyika Laughter Epidemic? In 1962, in what is now Tanzania, a group of young girls started giggling uncontrollably, and the laughter spread to over 1,000 people, leading to the closure of 14 schools. The epidemic lasted over a year. ### What was the recurrent mass hysteria in Nepal? Since the 1990s, a school in western Nepal has experienced recurrent outbreaks of mass hysteria, with students crying and writhing on the ground. These outbreaks occurred annually from 2016 to 2018 and were attributed to stress and anxiety. ### What are some theories about the cause of the Dancing Plague? Theories about the Dancing Plague include demonic possession, overheated blood, and ingestion of a fungus on mouldy bread acting like LSD. However, mass hysteria due to stress from poor living conditions is considered more likely. ### Why were nuns particularly susceptible to mass hysteria in the Middle Ages? Many convents were made up of young women forced into a life of celibacy and hard work, creating a breeding ground for psychological stress. Additionally, the religious and superstitious nature of the time contributed to bizarre group events. ### How was the Halifax Slasher incident resolved? The Halifax Slasher incident was resolved when one of the first victims admitted to self-inflicting their injuries. It was found that at least 9 of the 12 recorded victims had caused their injuries themselves, leading to the conclusion that there had never been a Slasher. ## Sources - [Original Side Projects video: 5 Strange Cases of Mass Hysteria](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BUA-ygKEodM) - [Hero image source](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2f/UNICEF_Mitarbeiter_untersucht_Menschen_in_Aethiopien.jpg) by Nesbitt / openverse, by-sa. ## Related Coverage Simon Whistler https://sideprojects.pub/article/50-deadliest-plants-animals-earth https://sideprojects.pub/article/50-deadliest-plants-animals-earth Thu, 02 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT The world can be a dangerous place sometimes. Although humans don't have any natural predators, there are still plenty of animals that can and will kill humans when given the chance. And for anyone that finds themselves lost in the wilderness, foraging for food, there are a lot of plants that can be far more deadly than any animal that person may stumble across. So today we'll be looking at 50 of the plants and animals that are deadliest to humans. ## White Baneberry White baneberry is also sometimes referred to as doll's eyes, because the white berries bare an uncanny resemblance to eyeballs. The plant is native to eastern North America, found in both Canada and the United States, and it can even be found as far inland as the American Midwest. While many plants only contain toxins in either the berries, leaves, or stems, the entire baneberry plant is poisonous to humans. The berries and roots are the most toxic, as they contain an as of yet unidentified cardiogenic toxin. Ingestion of this toxin causes the immediate sedation of the heart, which can result in cardiac arrest and death. It only takes a few berries for a person to become seriously ill. There is a similar plant, the red baneberry, which is equally poisonous to humans. Red baneberry is potentially even more dangerous, as the red berries are more appealing, whereas the doll's eyes are a bit creepy and off putting. ## Box Jellyfish Box jellyfish are often referred to as the most venomous species of marine animal in the world, but they actually make up a class of about 50 different species. All box jellyfish are dangerous, though stings from some of these species will only result in multiple days of ceaseless pain rather than death. The most venomous species live in the Indian and Pacific Oceans, and the deadliest species is the Australian box jellyfish of the northern coast of Australia. These jellyfish have 80 tentacles that can grow to up to 3 meters in length each, and each tentacle is covered in millions of tiny hooks that deliver a myriad of toxins when they come into contact with the jellyfish's prey, or an unfortunate human. Each Australian box jellyfish contains enough venom to kill 60 adults, and it acts extremely quickly, able to kill a person within minutes of the venom taking effect. While many people have been told that urinating on a jellyfish sting can relieve the pain, this is not true; it likely stems from the equally false belief that ammonia is effective at treating the stings. The only effective form of first aid is to douse the wound with vinegar for 30 seconds, and Australian beaches are stocked with bottles of vinegar if such a need arises. In 2019, an antivenom was developed to combat the box jellyfish stings. Although it was shown to be effective in labs, in the real world the results have been mixed. While an antivenom can neutralize the venom and prevent it from causing any more harm to a person, any damage it's already done cannot be reversed. Because the venom attacks the heart and works extremely quickly, victims of the Australian box jellyfish may suffer fatal damage to their hearts before there is a chance to administer the antivenom. ## Castor Bean Castor beans have been an important crop for thousands of years. Believed to be native to eastern Africa, the castor oil plant now appears in many tropical and subtropical areas throughout the world, often as a weed. What are often referred to as beans are actually seeds, and these seeds contain 40-60% oil. Use of this oil in medicine, cosmetics, and as fuel for lamps dates back to at least 4000 BC in Egypt and 2000 BC in India, the latter of which is now the world's largest producer of castor beans. In modern times it is used in animal feed, as an antimicrobial agent, for biodiesel, in plastics, and more. The oil is extracted from the seeds by pressing them, leaving only the pulp behind. But as anyone who watched Breaking Bad may remember, the pulp of the castor bean contains the deadly toxin ricin. As little as one milligram of ricin is enough to kill an adult, and there is no antidote available. Both the US and UK militaries claim to have created antidotes, but neither has undergone significant human testing. Ricin works by preventing cells from producing new proteins. When ingested, this affects the gastrointestinal tract, causing symptoms similar to food poisoning. These symptoms increase in severity with internal bleeding and bloody bowel movements, resulting in dehydration and low blood pressure. If untreated, this can lead to organ failure of the kidney, liver, and pancreas, and the victim will die within 3-5 days. Although there is no available antidote, treating the symptoms caused by ricin usually can prevent ingestion from being fatal. ## Black Mamba Africa is home to over 150 different venomous snakes, and there are over 20,000 reported deaths from snakebites in Africa each year. It's believed that the number of actual deaths is over 30,000, but that many bite victims don't seek medical attention and thus aren't reported. Of all the snakes in Africa, however, there is none more feared than the black mamba. The black mamba is regarded as the deadliest snake in Africa. Not only is it highly venomous, it's big and aggressive as well. An average adult black mamba is over 2 meters long, often reaching 3 meters in length. Some have even been reported to be as long as 4.5 meters, all of which makes it the second longest venomous snake in the world, only losing out to the king cobra. Though they are considered to be highly aggressive, black mambas only attack humans when they feel threatened or cornered. When this happens it will display the inside of its mouth, which is where its name comes from. The snakes themselves are either grey or brown, but the inside of their mouths are black. Black mambas will often bite their prey multiple times, injecting more venom with each bite. The venom contains a fast acting neurotoxin, and victims will begin showing symptoms within 10 minutes of being bit. It can start with a sensation that their skin is tingling, blurred vision, and slurred speech. It quickly progresses to twitching muscles, loss of voluntary movement, and difficulty breathing. Within 45 minutes of being bitten, a person will usually collapse. In just 7 to 15 hours from the initial bite, it results in respiratory failure and death. Black mamba bites have a near 100% mortality rate when left untreated, but an effective antivenom was developed in the 1950s and 60s. So long as a person receives treatment quickly, most are able to recover from a mamba bite. ## Lily of the Valley While ricin played a larger role in the plot, fans of Breaking Bad may remember another poisonous plant from the show, Lily of the Valley. It is native to Europe and Asia, though a subspecies, American Lily of the Valley, is native to North America. The flower has also been popular in bridal bouquets and as an inspiration for perfumes. However, because the flowers have no aromatic extracts that can be used in perfumes, the scent of the flowers must instead be simulated. Lily of the Valley produces bright red berries, which can look highly appealing to children and animals that don't know better. Unfortunately, all parts of the plant are highly poisonous, containing 38 different toxins. The symptoms of ingesting Lily of the Valley are similar to the symptoms of ricin, though generally not as severe. Fortunately, cases of people dying from ingesting Lily of the Valley are exceptionally rare. Plants produce different toxins as a defense mechanism to protect them from predators, but the Lily of the Valley has a second defense mechanism that is likely the reason fatalities caused by the plant are so rare: it tastes horrible. Oh sure, the berries may taste sweet at first, but that sweetness quickly dissipates, instead being replaced by an intensely bitter taste. It's likely because of the plant's bitterness that people usually stop eating before consuming a lethal dose of poison. ## Brown Recluse Of the thousands of types of spiders that are native to North America, only about a dozen are considered medically relevant. And of those, the brown recluse is considered to be one of the two deadliest spiders, along with the black widow. Neither of these are actually that deadly to humans, but it only seemed fair to include one of the United States' deadliest spiders. As the name might suggest, the brown recluse is both brown and reclusive. They are so timid and reclusive that a house could be infested with thousands of brown recluses without the residents ever being bitten a single time, something that there is multiple documented cases of. These spiders are usually only active at night, and they flee from humans whenever possible. The only time a person is likely to be bit by a recluse is when the spider is pressed against a person's skin, like when putting on shoes or a shirt that a recluse has hidden inside. The spider would have to be trapped directly against the skin in order to bite though, as their fangs aren't long enough to make it through most fabric. In the majority of cases, these bites are harmless and cause no symptoms. But when there are symptoms, it can get pretty bad. About 37% of brown recluse bites will become painful and itchy in the hours immediately following the bite. Anywhere from 12 to 36 hours after the initial bite the pain will intensify as necrosis sets in. Over the next few days, the area of necrotic skin can spread until it reaches 25 cm (10 inches) in diameter. Eventually it will heal, but it leaves large, deep scars. In 14% of cases, the venom results in systemic illness rather than just localized necrosis. Though severe, these cases are still rarely fatal except in the case of young children, the elderly, or those with compromised immune systems. ## Hemlock Hemlock has long been known to be one of the most deadly plants in the world to humans. It's native to Europe and northern Africa, though it has spread all across the world, often as an invasive weed. One of the most famous cases of hemlock poisoning was that of Socrates in 399 BC. Socrates was tried and found guilty of heresy and corrupting the young minds of Athens. As was customary in ancient Athens, Socrates was given the opportunity to propose his own penalty. He proposed that he be given free food and housing by the government as payment for his services to the city. The jurors respectfully declined this punishment and instead sentenced him to death by drinking poison hemlock. It takes six or eight fresh leaves to kill an adult human, though the seeds and roots are far more potent. The key chemical in the toxicity of hemlock is coniine. The initial effects appear similar to those of narcotics, and within 30 minutes of ingesting hemlock a person will fall into a deep sleep. A few hours later they will be dead of asphyxiation caused by failure of the respiratory muscles. There is no known cure for hemlock poisoning, and the only treatment is to put somebody on a ventilator until the poison leaves their system and the symptoms subside. ## Mosquitoes Mosquitoes are horrible, vile creatures that the world would be better off without. Most ecologists would disagree with the last part of that statement, as mosquitoes pollinate plants and act as a food source for a number of other animals. Still, most people find mosquitoes to be annoying pests that are the cause of a lot of itchy discomfort. But while most of us tend to just think of mosquitoes as pests, they are much more than that. Of all of the animals in the world, mosquitoes are the number one killer of humans. Conservative estimates put the number of human deaths caused by mosquitoes at 1 million per year, while other estimates believe it is 2 or 3 million each year. Obviously mosquitoes aren't directly killing humans, literally sucking them dry of every drop of blood in their bodies. Instead, mosquitoes kill by acting as disease vectors. The number one disease mosquitoes transmit to humans that results in death is malaria, but it's hardly the only one. Dengue, Zika, West Nile virus, yellow fever, and chikungunya are all potentially fatal viruses spread by the bites of mosquitoes. Even if they don't kill humans directly through the use of venom, mosquito bites remain the most common killer of humans in the animal world. And with anywhere from 100 trillion to 1 quadrillion mosquitoes in the world, it's not like we can just easily avoid them. ## Rosary Pea Abrus precatorius, better known as the jequirity bean or rosary pea, is a plant native to Asia and Australia. However, it is capable of growing anywhere with a temperate or tropical climate, so the plants are now found all over the world. It was deliberately spread by humans, but the plants are extremely invasive and difficult to remove. Because the plants are so aggressive and resilient, most eradication attempts fail and the area is quickly reinfested. The most notable part of the plant, and the one from which its name derives, are the seeds. These seeds are typically red with a black spot on the end, somewhat resembling a ladybug. They also have extremely hard shells, which made them great for use in jewelry. Their use as prayer necklaces is how they became known as rosary peas. Because the seeds tend to be uniform in size, another feature that makes them great for jewelry making, they were even used in ancient times across the Indian subcontinent as a unit of measurement for weight. The hard shells are impermeable to water, so moisture would not impact their use as a standard unit of measurement. Unfortunately, despite their uses, rosary peas contain a toxin known as abrin. The effects of abrin are the same as ricin, except it is much deadlier. Whereas it would take three castor beans to provide a lethal dose of ricin for a child and up to eight castor beans to kill an adult, a single rosary pea is enough to kill any human. ## African Elephant The African Elephant is the largest and strongest land mammal in the world. They can be up to 4 meters tall, nearly as long, and weigh over 5,400 kg. Not only are they enormous, elephants are strong enough to push over full grown trees with minimal effort. Despite this incredible strength, African elephants are generally peaceful creatures. And why wouldn't they be? They're herbivores so they have no need to kill other animals for meat, and they have no natural predators because they're simply too big for other animals to attack. Sometimes predatory animals like lions or crocodiles may attack a baby elephant, but by the time they reach adulthood there aren't really any non-human predators that would risk going head to head with such a gargantuan creature. However, when elephants feel threatened, provoked, or when something is standing between them and their next meal, they will attack. For a long time this has resulted in elephants and humans coming into conflict, as the loss of their natural habitat has forced elephants into smaller areas with not enough food. Attacks from African elephants are most common when, unable to find food in the areas humans have pushed them to, they raid local farms to eat their crops. Roughly 500 people are killed each year by African elephants, and attacks on humans from all types of elephants have been increasing as the effects of climate change damage their ecosystem, making food and water harder to find. ## White Snakeroot There are no known documented cases of humans ever eating white snakeroot, yet the plant has been responsible for thousands of deaths. White snakeroot is a member of the daisy family that is native to eastern and central North America. When European settlers moved to North America they were unfamiliar with the plant and its toxic properties, but they also didn't consider it food. However, it was seen as perfectly acceptable for livestock to graze on. Snakeroot contains the toxic compound tremetol, and consuming meat and milk from cows that grazed on the plant would pass the toxins on to humans. This earned the condition the name milk sickness, as settlers were able to identify that the illness was caused by milk, even if they couldn't figure out what was causing the milk to become tainted. The main symptom in livestock was trembling, and in humans it would cause trembling, vomiting, severe intestinal pain, and eventually death. It was so deadly that milk sickness would sometimes kill half the population of a frontier settlement, and it's even believed that Abraham Lincoln's mother died from milk sickness. Although farmers were able to solve the problem by cultivating fields specifically for cattle to graze on, white snakeroot wasn't identified as the toxic plant behind milk sickness until 1928. ## Crocodiles People in the United States are far more familiar with alligators than crocodiles, thanks to the over 1 million alligators that call Florida their home. They are well known to be dangerous, however fatal attacks from alligators, especially unprovoked ones, are extremely rare. Alligators will usually only attack humans if they feel threatened, and most attacks aren't fatal. The same cannot be said for their oversized cousins, the crocodile. There are 26 extant species of crocodiles around the world, and together they are responsible for over 1,000 human deaths each year. The two deadliest species are the Nile Crocodile, native to Africa, and the Saltwater Crocodile, native to India, Southeast Asia, Micronesia, and Australia. These are the two species that are most likely to see humans as prey, and over 50% of attacks from Nile and saltwater crocodiles are fatal. Both species of crocodile can grow to be 6 meters in length, and saltwater crocodiles can weigh up to 1,500 kg, making them the largest living reptiles. Despite their massive size, they can reach speeds of up to 18 mph in the water. These crocodiles are also extremely aggressive and territorial, so any person walking into a Nile or saltwater crocodile's territory may quickly find themselves becoming its prey. Unfortunately, you can't avoid saltwater crocodiles simply by avoiding saltwater. Despite their name, they can also be found in brackish waters and freshwater swamps, rather than just salt water. ## Water Hemlock Native to both North America and Europe, this cousin of hemlock is considered one of the most poisonous plants in North America. That said, water hemlock is actually the colloquial name for the genus Cicuta, which is comprised of four different species of plants. All four are extremely toxic and deadly to humans, thanks to the compound cicutoxin. This poison is a type of alcohol that acts as a neurotoxin, causing hyperactivity in the brain that results in seizures. Symptoms can begin to manifest in just 15 minutes after coming into contact with water hemlock, with seizures often being the first noticeable symptom. Other symptoms include nausea, vomiting, abdominal pain, confusion, drowsiness, and more. Death can occur in just a few hours, usually caused by either respiratory failure or ventricular fibrillation, resulting from wild, repeated swings between low and high blood pressure. Exactly how much water hemlock is considered a lethal dose is unknown, but it's very little. There are reported instances in which children used the hollow stem of water hemlock as a whistle, an act that often proved fatal. There are even cases where people have died simply from their skin coming into contact with the plant rather than actually by ingesting it. ## Hippopotamus Most people think of hippos as being docile, friendly creatures. But that's just what they want you to think. Whether it's in cartoons, children's books, or the board game Hungry Hungry Hippos, these creatures are generally depicted as being cute, chubby, and lethargic. Fortunately, people are finally coming around to the fact that this is all just a tactical propaganda campaign put forth by big hippo to lull humans into a false sense of security. In reality, hippos are considered the deadliest land mammal in the world to humans, accounting for over 500 human deaths every year. Just like crocodiles, they are extremely aggressive and territorial, arguably even more so. If the need arises to traverse crocodile infested waters, boats usually provide adequate protection, as the crocodiles are unlikely to attack a boat. But hippos do not screw around, and they absolutely can and will capsize any boats that wander into their territory. This often results in deaths, either by drowning or by being attacked by the hippo directly after they are thrown from the boat. Hippos weigh an average of 1500 kg, more than enough to crush a human, and they have incredibly sharp teeth as well. They're also fast, able to sprint at speeds of up to 19 mph. And unlike other amphibious creatures, hippos are faster on land than in the water because they can't actually swim. They are far too dense to float, so even when submerged in a river they move by walking along the ground. This all means that there is little to no escape from an enraged hippo, as they are twice as fast as humans both in the water and on land. Your best bet is to run in a zigzag pattern, as hippos are unable to turn quickly. ## Deadly Nightshade Atropa bella-donna, more commonly known as deadly nightshade, has a long history of use by humans. It was often used in various herbal remedies as well as being used in cosmetics. Its cosmetic use is where it got the name bella-donna, or "beautiful woman" in Italian. Eye drops would be made from the juice of the nightshade berries which were used to dilate the pupils, something that was seen as making a woman appear more seductive back in the day. However, despite its extensive use, deadly nightshade is extremely deadly, as the name might suggest. It contains tropane alkaloids which disrupt the nervous system causing dilated pupils, blurred vision, loss of balance, delirium, confusion, hallucinations, convulsions, and eventually death. All parts of the nightshade plant are toxic to humans, with the roots being the deadliest. Still, a single berry can be fatal for a child, and 10 berries or one leaf are typically fatal for adults. It's so toxic that even honey produced by bees that drink nectar from nightshade plants can be fatal, similar to the "mad honey" from bees drinking nectar from certain hallucinogenic plants. Because nightshade is from the same family of plants as tomatoes and has a similar taste, people have consumed lethal doses of nightshade by mistaking them for other berries. It can even still be found in some dietary supplements and medicines, even though there is no scientific evidence supporting its use as medicine. Deadly nightshade has also seen some amount of use as a recreational drug because of its hallucinogenic effects, however this never gained widespread popularity because of the high risk of fatality and the fact that the hallucinations caused by nightshade are described as being horrifying rather than fun. ## Death Adder There are several species of death adder around the world, but one of the most venomous is the common death adder. Native to Australia, the common death adder's venom contains a highly potent neurotoxin that disables its prey. Once the venom is injected, it begins with pain and swelling at the site of the wound, followed by blurred vision and respiratory distress. This progresses to paralysis and respiratory failure, with about 60% of bites being fatal to humans when left untreated. That 60% mortality rate isn't because some people survived the venom though, it's because the death adder only injects its venom in about 60% of bites. When venom is injected, each dose is enough to kill several adult humans. Fortunately, despite being one of the most venomous snakes in the world, human deaths from the common death adder are increasingly rare. A big part of this is thanks to the development of antivenom that treats bites from the death adder, but even before then deaths were uncommon. This is because death adders are ambush predators. While many other species of snakes go out actively hunting for prey, the death adder just sits and waits, often burying itself under leaves to further camouflage itself from its prey. Once something gets close enough, the adder will strike with blistering speed, faster than the human eye can properly register. ## Manchineel The manchineel tree is native to tropical areas of North and South America. Its name comes from the Spanish "manzanilla", or "little apple", as the fruit and leaves of the tree resemble that of an apple tree. But it quickly became known as "manzanilla de la muerte", or the "little apple of death" because it is one of the most toxic trees in the world. In fact, the tree is so toxic that there aren't any records of people dying from eating it anywhere in modern literature. That may sound counterintuitive, but perhaps nowhere else in the world is there a plant so overtly dangerous that people wouldn't dare eat it. The tree contains a milky white sap that permeates every part of the tree, including the bark, leaves, and fruit. This sap contains numerous different toxins, many of which are skin irritants that cause an immediate reaction upon contact. Hiding under the tree for shelter in the rain is enough to cause an adverse reaction, as raindrops can pick up sap from the leaves, causing the skin to immediately blister as they land on the person beneath the tree. The same is even true of dew drops falling from the tree. Explorers from the 1600s and 1700s discovered the dangers of the manchineel upon their first encounters with it. One explorer cut off a branch to fan mosquitoes away from his face, only for his face to swell to such a degree that he was blind for several days. In a 2000 paper written by someone who unknowingly took a small bite of one of the apples, the taste was described as "pleasantly sweet". That sweetness quickly morphed into a "burning, tearing sensation and tightness of the throat". The pain eventually became so much that he could barely swallow food from the swelling. Ingestion can also cause swelling and bleeding of the stomach, shock, infections, or suffocation from the throat swelling shut. But since merely touching the tree is enough to cause the skin to blister, nobody can say the tree didn't warn you. ## Cone Snail Cone snails get their name from the large, conical shaped shells they inhabit. There are over 900 species of cone snails inhabiting warm, tropical seas and oceans around the world. Their shells are prized among shell collectors and jewelry makers, as they come in a variety of colours and patterns. However, these snails are also venomous carnivores that can extend a large, harpoon-like tooth out from their head to envenomate prey. This makes collecting these shells dangerous, as shooting their harpoons is the snail's instinctive response to its shell being disturbed. For smaller snails that hunt worms, this isn't too dangerous for people. The stings will be painful, but not life threatening. But stings from the larger cone snails that hunt fish can be fatal, and the harpoons are strong enough to pierce through a glove or wetsuit to strike the victim. Symptoms of the cone snail venom begin with severe pain, swelling, numbness, and tingling at the site of the injection. Later symptoms include muscle paralysis, changes in vision, and respiratory failure. The symptoms of the venom can manifest immediately, though sometimes it may take days to do so. One of the more dangerous species of cone snails to humans, the geography cone, is also nicknamed the "cigarette snail". It was called this because people claimed that once a person was stung by a geography cone, they would only have enough time to smoke a cigarette before they died. While that's an exaggeration of how quickly the venom kills someone, it does still highlight how deadly these snails can be. ## Suicide Tree Native to South and Southeast Asia, the Pacific Islands, and Australia, the tree Cerbera odollam is better known as the suicide tree. And unlike our last tree that was too toxic to kill anyone, the suicide tree is responsible for deaths on a regular basis. The tree produces a poisonous fruit, but far more deadly are the seeds. Each fruit contains a kernel with two seeds, and one kernel has enough poison to kill an adult. The poison found within the seeds is called cerberin, a cardiac glycoside that can cause the person to die from their heart pumping too much, not enough, or not at all. Although the fruit is also poisonous, it contains a lower dose of cerberin. Eating the fruit usually only results in symptoms similar to that of severe food poisoning, but that's enough to keep people from eating the fruit. It's the seeds that people eat, whether willingly or unknowingly. The seeds of the suicide tree have a somewhat bitter taste, but it's also extremely mild. The taste is easily masked by spices, which has made it popular as a means by which to commit suicide, as evidenced by the tree's name. And because the taste of the seeds is so easy to mask, it's also a favourite of people wanting to kill via poison. Death usually occurs in just 3-6 hours after consuming the seeds. While it's difficult to find exact worldwide numbers, it is estimated that hundreds of people in India alone die each year from eating the seeds of the suicide tree. ## Blue-Ringed Octopus There are four species of blue-ringed octopus in the Pacific Ocean stretching from Japan to Australia. As the name might suggest, they can be easily identified by the bright blue rings that cover their bodies. These octopuses are generally considered docile and are small enough to fit in your hand, but absolutely do not try to pick one up. If they feel threatened or provoked they will attack, and their bites are extremely deadly. Blue-ringed octopuses use the powerful neurotoxin tetrodoxin. This is the same poison found in the Fugu fish and some other aquatic animals, though the octopuses are the only known animals to use tetrodoxin as a venom to attack their prey rather than as poison to dissuade predators. Each octopus contains enough tetrodoxin to kill 26 adult humans, and a single bite can be lethal. Even worse, their bites are often painless, meaning that a human who is bit by a blue-ringed octopus may have no idea it even happened until they're already paralyzed and struggling to breathe. This is especially bad because there is no antivenom for the toxin. The only treatment is to put a victim on a ventilator to help them breathe while their respiratory muscles are paralyzed. Because a victim only has minutes between being bitten and death, any delay in seeking emergency medical attention might be fatal. ## Angel's Trumpets The genus Brugmansia, part of the nightshade family, contains seven species of plants that are commonly referred to as angel's trumpets. They're closely related to another genus, Datura, that are referred to as devil's trumpets. Angel's trumpets have large, downward facing flowers as if they were trumpets being played from the heavens, whereas devil's trumpets have large, upward facing flowers as if they were trumpets being played from Hell. All parts of the plant are potentially poisonous, though the seeds and leaves are the most toxic. Similar to deadly nightshade, angel's trumpets contain several tropane alkaloids. Ingestion can result in paralysis, confusion, tremors, migraines, hallucinations, and death, among other symptoms. Angel's trumpets have seen significantly more use as a recreational drug than nightshade, even though the hallucinations are described as being equally unpleasant. The hallucinations from angel's trumpets often result in psychosis and amnesia, and there is a documented account of a man cutting off his own tongue and penis after drinking a single cup of tea made from the plant's leaves. ## Golden Poison Frog In nature, the more brightly coloured an animal is, the more likely it is that you want to stay away from it. The bright colours are meant as a warning, and the golden poison frog is warning you that it is one of the most poisonous animals on the entire planet. These frogs are the largest species of the poison dart frog family, and they are by far the most deadly. The skin of the golden poison frog produces batrachotoxin, an extremely rare and lethal poison produced only by three frogs in Columbia and a few birds and beetles in Papua New Guinea. Although the poison is classified as a neurotoxin, it has significant cardiac effects as well. Exposure to the toxin causes nerve cells to leave a person's muscles permanently contracted, resulting in paralysis, but the cause of death is heart fibrillation and heart failure. Lethal doses of various toxins found in plants and animals are usually measured in either grams or milligrams, but batrachotoxin is so deadly that the lethal dose for a human is only a few micrograms. Each adult frog is only about 6 cm long and only weighs 30 grams, yet it has enough poison in its body to kill 10 or 20 adult humans, or 2 African elephants. In fact, the frogs are so toxic that it's believed they have no natural predators, as no animal would dare try to eat one. Golden poison frogs were long used by indigenous people as a source of poison for the darts they used to hunt game, but the frogs are now endangered due to destruction of their rainforest habitat. ## Devil's Trumpets It's not just the direction of the flowers that give devil's trumpets their name. Well, it probably is, but devil's trumpets have a long history of far more sinister uses than angel's trumpets. Though they have many of the same effects as angel's trumpets, devil's trumpets are a much more powerful deliriant. Not only does ingestion of these flowers cause hallucinations, it can also cause hyperactivity. This causes the people who consume it to become highly confused and agitated, usually resulting in them needing to be hospitalized. Of course, not everyone who ingests devil's trumpets has the opportunity to be hospitalized. Because devil's trumpets have a higher concentration of toxins than angel's trumpets, they have been a popular form of poison both for suicide and murder for centuries. A study out of India from 1950 through 1965 revealed nearly 3,000 deaths from devil's trumpets in India alone, many of which were murders carried out by a religious cult. While angel's trumpets are common in gardens around the world, many countries have placed regulations on the sale and cultivation of devil's trumpets because of its more potent toxins. ## Tsetse Fly Tsetse flies share a lot in common with mosquitoes. These are small, bloodsucking insects, roughly the size of a house fly, that act as disease vectors. While the insect bites themselves are harmless but annoying to humans, tsetse flies infect their victims with a parasite known as trypanosomes. These single celled parasites cause African typanosomiasis, also known as African sleeping sickness. There are two different strains of this parasite, one of which is more acute and fast acting, but the symptoms are the same in each case. The first stage begins with a bunch of nondescript symptoms such as fever, headaches, and joint pain. In the second stage, neurological symptoms develop. These include confusion, numbness, loss of coordination, and trouble sleeping. As the disease progresses the patient experiences severe mental deterioration, often accompanied by delirium, hallucinations, and psychosis. Eventually the victim will fall in a coma and die from systemic organ failure. African sleeping disease is nearly 100% fatal if left untreated. Fortunately, treatment for the infection has improved. In the 1900s tsetse flies were responsible for tens or even hundreds of thousands of deaths each year, but that number is now down to about 3,500. ## Monkshood Monkshood, also known as wolfsbane (and about 20 other names) is a genus of 250 species of plants, all highly poisonous. The entire plant, particularly the roots, is filled with a toxin called aconitine. As little as 2 mg of aconitine can be fatal, and a person would only need to consume 1 gram of monkshood to ingest that amount of poison. Aconitine is a powerful neurotoxin and cardiotoxin, and symptoms appear almost immediately after ingesting the poison. It begins with typical gastrointestinal unpleasantness, followed by burning and tingling sensations that begin in the mouth and abdomen and may spread throughout the body. Within 1 to 6 hours, the person will usually have died either from respiratory failure, arrhythmia, or paralysis of the heart. But that's just for a small dose of the poison. In cases where a person ingested a large dose, death is immediate. Despite its incredibly toxic nature, monkshood is highly sought after by gardeners and florists because of the tall, violet flowers the plant produces. They're so in demand that people are actively cultivating new hybrid species of monkshood, some of them even winning awards. As much as the beautiful flowers are prized by gardeners, however, special care must be taken when handling them as even touching the plants can result in severe toxicity. ## Ascaris Roundworms The Ascaris roundworm is the most common parasitic worm found in humans. They can be found all over the world in tropical and subtropical climates, though infections are most common in developing nations. Eggs are often transmitted from one person to another via human feces. This is a major problem in areas with poor hygiene and sanitation, and especially places where raw human feces are used as fertilizer for crops. Roundworm eggs that find their way into the soil this way can remain viable for up to 10 years. Once swallowed, eggs will hatch into larva in the small intestine. The larvae will then break out of the intestine and into the bloodstream, breaking out again once they reach the lungs. It's quite a long journey, and a seemingly pointless one at that. The larvae cause inflammation in the lungs, resulting in them being coughed up into the throat and swallowed again, returning to the intestines where they stay and mature into adult worms. There are a few different ways that these parasites can kill a human, but the most common is intestinal blockage, especially in children. Female roundworms can lay 200,000 eggs per day, and if enough worms accumulate they may create a tangled ball that blocks any movement through the intestines. Even when not fatal, children may suffer from malnutrition and learning disabilities resulting from one of these infections. Estimates for how many people die each year from ascaris roundworms vary wildly. The most conservative numbers put it at about 2,700 people per year, though one 2014 study estimated that 60,000 people die each year from these infections. But perhaps more concerning than the number of deaths is the number of people infected with these worms, as it's estimated that between 800 million and 1.2 billion people are currently host to ascaris roundworms. Infections can be treated with a number of different oral, anti-parasitic medications, but the vast majority of cases are in poorer countries that lack easy access to these medications. ## Strychnine Tree You've undoubtedly heard of the deadly poison strychnine before, but far less publicized than the poison itself is the fact that strychnine actually grows on the strychnine tree. These trees are native to India and Southeast Asia, and they have had no real use since their discovery other than being a deadly poison. Strychnine is sometimes used in herbal medicine, but there is zero evidence that it is helpful in any way. Its more common use throughout history has been as an arrow poison for hunting and warfare. The poison strychnine is found in the seeds and blossoms of the tree, though other parts of the tree contain other toxins as well. Each seed is made of approximately 1.5% strychnine, which is roughly 0.25-0.5 mg of poison per seed. The lethal dose for humans ranges from 30-120 mg depending on weight so ingesting a single seed is unlikely to be fatal, but even a nonlethal dose of strychnine has serious effects. Probably the most well known symptom of strychnine poisoning, other than death, are the violent muscle spasms it causes. It also results in seizures, hyperthermia, organ failure, hypertension, and tachycardia, among many others. Death can occur in a number of ways, such as respiratory failure, cardiac arrest, multiple organ failure, or brain death. While unpleasant symptoms like spasms can last for up to 24 hours after ingesting the poison, if the dose of strychnine is high enough to be lethal then the person will usually be dead in only 15-30 minutes. ## Indian Red Scorpion There's a lot of debate over what is the deadliest scorpion in the world. The Deathstalker is thought to have the most potent and deadly mix of neurotoxins, but it envenomates its prey with far less poison than some other species, so the human mortality rate is only about 1-3%, and a healthy adult is unlikely to die from a Deathstalker's sting. Far more deadly to humans is the Indian Red Scorpion, which has a mortality rate of 8-40%, with children and the elderly being the most likely to die from its poison. As the name might suggest, the scorpions are most commonly found in India, though they are spread across much of South Asia. The scorpion's venom contains a mix of neurotoxins and cardiotoxins. Immediate symptoms of a sting include severe localized pain, sweating, and vomiting. Although, depending on how blessed the individual that was stung was, the most noticeable symptom may be priapism. This is followed by convulsions, breathlessness, and abnormal heart rates and blood pressure. This leads to pulmonary edema, which is the usual cause of death from these stings. No known scorpion antivenom has shown a meaningful effect at reducing the mortality rate from the Indian Red Scorpion, however treating the patient with medication for high blood pressure has been shown to reduce the mortality rate to less than 4%. ## Rhubarb There are a lot of things that might come to mind when you think of rhubarb. There's rhubarb pie, rhubarb jam, rhubarb preserves, and the 1951 comedy movie Rhubarb about a cat that owned a baseball team. What probably doesn't come to mind is poison. And yet the leaves of rhubarb are highly toxic to humans, and we're not fully sure why. It is known that rhubarb leaves contain oxalic acid, a substance that damages the kidneys. In smaller doses this results in kidney stones, while in larger doses it can cause kidney failure and death. However, the toxic dose of oxalic acid is 15-30 grams, which would either require eating multiple kilograms of rhubarb leaves in one sitting or long term consumption of rhubarb leaves. It is believed there is another toxin in the leaves that may be responsible for the deaths attributed to rhubarb poisoning, but that toxin has yet to be identified. This fortunately doesn't come up often as rhubarb is typically sold without the leaves still attached. Rhubarb poisoning is most associated with World War I, when rhubarb leaves were mistakenly recommended as a food source in Britain. ## Assassin Bugs Assassin bugs make up a family of thousands of different insects. Most of these are harmless, even if their bites are exceptionally painful. However, it is a small group of assassin bugs that are also known as kissing bugs that are the most dangerous. They are referred to as kissing bugs because they bite people on the face, usually near the lips. Kissing bugs are most commonly found in tropical regions of Central and South America. Considering we've already discussed mosquitoes and tsetse flies, you probably think you know where this is going. The assassin bugs bite someone, and they inject some deadly virus or parasite into the person. It's certainly a reasonable guess, but assassin bugs don't directly inject anything deadly into a person with their bites. Instead, the bugs bite a person, then poop on their face. The feces of the assassin bugs contain a parasite that causes Chagas disease, and when a person scratches the bug bite or touches their face then mouth, they can introduce the parasites into their system. Chagas disease is a chronic illness infecting over 6 million people and responsible for nearly 10,000 deaths each year. Although most cases are asymptomatic, Chagas can cause nerve damage, heart disease, and eventually heart failure. The disease can be treated with antiparasitic drugs, especially if it is caught early. Unfortunately, many people who contract Chagas can't afford medication, and an even larger amount don't even realize they were infected, as the more severe symptoms may not present until 10 years or longer after the initial bug bite. ## Gympie-Gympie Dendrocnide moroides, also known as the stinging bush, stinging tree, or gympie-gympie is not directly deadly to humans. However, there are many rumours, claims, and anecdotes about people who were driven to suicide by the plant's painful sting. Of all the alleged stories there is only one confirmed case of a person ending their life over the plant, but it is certainly something you would want to stay as far away from as possible. Gympie-Gympie is native to the rainforest areas of Australia and the South Pacific. Although it is a fruit bearing plant, it is also venomous, with both the leaves and fruit being covered in tiny, toxic stingers. It is believed to be the most venomous plant in the entire world, even if that venom doesn't directly cause death. What it does cause, however, is severe, unbearable pain. When skin comes into contact with the needles, there is an immediate burning sensation. One botanist who was stung by the plant described it as "like being burned by hot acid and electrocuted at the same time". The pain only intensifies over the next 20-30 minutes, and it will last for days. If you're lucky, that is. The needles are too small to be effectively removed with tweezers, so the standard treatment is to remove them with hot wax, the same way you would remove hair. However, because the needles are so small, often times the skin will close over them. When this happens, they will remain in the body and continue to release toxins, resulting in years of pain. Eventually it does finally stop when the toxins run out, so all you have to do is endure two years of something described as being ten times worse than the worst physical pain you could possibly imagine. ## Saw-Scaled Viper The Saw-Scaled Viper can be found in Northern Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia. They are very common, including in densely populated areas. While they are not the most toxic snake, with a mortality rate of about 20%, their frequent encounters with humans make them one of the most deadly snakes in the world, causing an estimated 5,000 deaths each year. Saw-Scaled Vipers can be difficult to spot because they blend in with the dry, desert landscape. This can result in people unknowingly getting too close to one, which is a big problem. While many of the animals we've discussed today are only dangerous when threatened or provoked, these snakes are just looking for a fight. They are extremely aggressive, and if a person is close enough they will strike with little to no provocation. The venom of the Saw-Scaled Viper contains a number of different toxins, but the most notable as it relates to human deaths are the hemotoxins. These toxins prevent blood from being able to clot, which can result in internal bleeding and kidney failure. Victims of the snake bites may also wind up bleeding out of every orifice in their body, with blood present in all of their bodily fluids. Antivenom is effective at treating these bites, but left untreated a person who receives a lethal dose of venom can die in as little as 6 hours, though sometimes it takes a full day. ## Rhododendron Rhododendron is a genus comprising over 1,000 different species of plants. Most are native to Eastern Asia and the Himalayan area, though some are native to Europe, North America, Australia, and the rest of Asia. Several species of rhododendron contain a toxin in their nectar and pollen known as grayanotoxin. This is often fatal to pets, though deaths from consuming rhododendron are rare among humans. Instead, the neurotoxins produce effects similar to that of a hallucinogen. Other symptoms include blurred vision, dizziness, confusion, general weakness, and nausea. While deaths directly caused by ingesting rhododendron are extremely rare among humans, these plants have still been the cause of many human deaths thanks to their use as an early form of chemical warfare. We briefly mentioned "mad honey" earlier, and it is bees that drank nectar from rhododendron that cultivated this honey. Because of its slightly hallucinogenic effects, this honey was weaponized in ancient Greece and Rome, with batches of mad honey being left behind for enemy soldiers. Once they had become intoxicated by the mad honey, soldiers could come in and completely rout their victims. ## Freshwater Snails Freshwater snails can be found all over the world, and unlike the cone snails we discussed earlier they certainly seem harmless. However, for those living in tropical or subtropical climates, the mere presence of these snails is enough to kill a person, even if they never directly interact with the snails. Freshwater snails are often host to parasitic flatworms called schistosomes. Snails release the flatworm larvae into the water where they can then infect humans, causing a disease known as schistosomiasis, or snail fever. Women and children are the most likely to contract these parasites, as children will often play in tainted water and women will do water related chores like washing clothes. This is most common in poor and developing countries where there isn't as much access to clean water, and over 230 million people worldwide are infected with schistosomiasis. Many people don't experience any symptoms of the infection, but when they do the symptoms can be severe and deadly. The flatworms will travel all over the body, and a lot of how severe an infection is depends on where they wind up. In cases where the parasites enter the spinal cord or brain, it can result in seizures, paralysis, and nerve damage. More common is for the parasites to become lodged inside the kidney or liver, causing scarring and eventually leading to organ failure. Though the overall mortality rate is low, the organ damage caused by snail fever can make a person more susceptible to other diseases or infection. And even with a low mortality rate, it is estimated that freshwater snails are responsible for anywhere between 10,000 and 200,000 deaths each year. ## Azalea Azaleas are a special subgenus of rhododendron. They typically are less dangerous to humans than other rhododendron, however the mad honey produced from azaleas actually has a higher concentration of grayanotoxin. This is being deliberately produced in parts of Turkey, where it is used as both a recreational drug and as a form of traditional medicine. However, because of the higher concentration of poison, mad honey produced from azaleas can be fatal on its own without the need for an opposing military force to finish the job. In addition to the hallucinogenic effects of the neurotoxin, it can also cause spasms, tremors, and agitation. More severely, it can result in tachycardia and bradycardia, causing death by cardiac arrest. Because of the disruptions to muscle function, it can also cause death by respiratory failure as the respiratory muscles stop functioning properly. ## Domesticated Dogs When you think of deadly animals, domesticated dogs probably weren't at the top of your list. Dogs can be used to help people hunt, track down criminals, and identify bombs or other contraband at airports. But sometimes, they also like to attack people. In the United States, an average of 43 people each year die from being mauled by dogs, and the dogs in question are usually domesticated pets rather than feral dogs. But that's not even the biggest danger when it comes to these animals. Dogs are the number one disease vector of rabies, accounting for 99% of all cases of rabies in humans. For anyone unaware, rabies is absolutely terrifying. Although it usually lays dormant for 2-3 months after a person has been bitten, as soon as the first symptoms present it has a near 100% mortality rate. There are only a handful of documented cases of any human surviving symptomatic rabies. There is a rabies vaccine that can be given after a person has been bitten before symptoms manifest that prevents any of this, and as a result cases of human rabies in the US and Europe are extremely rare, with only about 10 cases in the US each year. But in less developed nations in Africa and Asia, where they don't have the same access to medical care, this is a much bigger problem. According to the World Health Organization, nearly 60,000 people die each year from rabies, and almost all of those infections were caused by bites from man's best friend. ## Death Cap Mushrooms If there's one thing that everybody knows about mushrooms, or at the very least should know, it's not to eat any wild mushrooms you find. Unless you really know what you're doing, this can be absolutely disastrous. There are a lot of poisonous mushrooms out there, and many of them look dangerously similar to perfectly edible varieties. And it is that last feature that makes the death cap mushroom so deadly. That, and all the deadly toxins inside it. Death caps look very similar to both the paddy straw mushroom and the white Caesar mushroom, two species of mushrooms that are popular and safe to eat. This results in death caps being misidentified and presumed safe to eat. To make matters worse, death caps are described as tasting pleasant, and it takes 6 to 12 hours for symptoms to present. As a result, people may consume larger quantities of the mushrooms, believing them to be safe. But they are absolutely not. On average, it takes just 30 grams of death cap to kill an adult. Early symptoms are your standard nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea, and these usually clear up after about 24 hours. This will often lead someone to believe that it was run of the mill food poisoning, preventing them from seeking medical treatment while their liver and kidneys are being destroyed by toxins. About 72 hours after the original symptoms pass, the more serious symptoms of liver and kidney failure manifest. This includes jaundice, seizures, and coma, ultimately ending in death. In total it takes from 6 to 16 days for a person to die after eating death cap mushrooms. Up until the mid-1900s the mortality rate for these mushrooms was over 60%, but thanks to advancements in medical treatments the mortality rate has fallen to only 10-30%. Still, multiple people die every year by mistaking death cap mushrooms for one of the safe, commonly consumed varieties. ## Inland Taipan Australia's inland taipan can be found in the semi-arid regions near the border of Queensland and South Australia, but it's best not to go looking for it as it is the most venomous snake in the world. The only reason it isn't usually in the discussion for deadliest snake in the world is because humans rarely come into contact with them. The location where the inland taipan lives is remote, so most people would never encounter them. These snakes also spend the majority of their days underground, living in burrows created by other animals. Unless a person is doing something to create excessive noise and vibrations, it's unlikely that an inland taipan would react in any way to a human walking by. Should a person be bitten, however, the result is almost always disastrous. The snake's venom contains a cocktail of different poisons, one of which is believed to be the single most potent beta-neurotoxin in the world. The human mortality rate is over 80%, and it is believed that a single bite from an inland taipan is potent enough to kill 100 healthy adults. Because there is a mix of many different kinds of poison in the snake's bite, there are a myriad of symptoms. These include paralysis, internal bleeding, respiratory failure, organ failure, and tissue necrosis. Antivenom for the inland taipan does exist, but bites often result in death in only 30-60 minutes, so getting medical attention in time can prove quite difficult. ## Destroying Angel People sure love to give deadly mushrooms names that indicate just how dangerous they are. Unfortunately the mushrooms refuse to make themselves identifiable, as the destroying angel is often mistaken for the button mushroom, meadow mushroom, and horse mushroom. Destroying angels are closely related to death caps, and they kill people in the same way. Though considered slightly less potent, as little as half a mushroom cap from a destroying angel can be enough to kill an adult if they don't receive immediate medical treatment. With both the destroying angel and the death cap, early treatment is extremely important as the toxins can cause irreversible damage once absorbed by the liver or kidneys. While the mortality rates of these mushrooms have fallen in the last 50 years or so, survivors may still suffer lifelong complications from the damage to their organs. In many cases, the damage may be so severe that while doctors were able to stave off immediate death, the person will need an organ transplant to survive. ## Tapeworms People in the developed world don't often give a lot of thought to tapeworms. Cases are rare, with less than 1,000 infections in the US each year, and they are easily treatable with antiparasitic medications. Worldwide, however, it is estimated that there are 20 million people with tapeworms, and the parasites claim the lives of over 2,000 people every year. Tapeworms are usually associated with the consumption of undercooked meat, though humans can ingest tapeworm eggs from tainted water as well. These eggs grow into flatworms that attach to the intestinal lining and absorb nutrients as food passes by them. Different species of tapeworms grow to different lengths, depending on whether the parasites were consumed in beef, pork, or fish, but in the most extreme cases they can grow to be 30 meters long. There are often no symptoms of a tapeworm infestation, at least at first, though early signs may include abdominal pain, nausea, diarrhea, increased appetite, and weight loss. Though complications from intestinal blockage are possible, tapeworms are more likely to become life threatening if the eggs or larvae enter the bloodstream and travel to other organs. If the tapeworms reach the brain, liver, or lungs, they can form large cysts that may cause organ failure. In the brain they may also cause seizures or brain damage as well. Not only can these cysts be fatal because of organ failure, but they can also rupture and cause sepsis, which is also deadly. ## Poison Fire Coral Even though mushrooms are technically fungi and not plants, there's one more species of mushroom we had to mention, if only because of how unique it looks. Most mushrooms have a stem and a cap, but the poison fire coral only has a deep red stem. When they grow in clusters the mushrooms look like red coral, which is where their name comes from. It was thought to be exclusively native to Japan and Korea, but fire coral has recently been found on several Pacific islands and Australia. It's been said that simply touching the mushrooms can cause skin irritation, as is the case with some of the other poisonous plants in today's episode, though these claims are disputed. However, what nobody is disputing is how deadly these plants are when ingested. Just one or two grams of poison fire coral is enough to kill a person. The fungus contains the toxin Satratoxin-H, the same poison produced by black mold. When fire coral is ingested, it causes stomach pain, damage to the immune system, hair loss, peeling skin on the face, and shrinking of the cerebellum, which results in problems with speech and movement. It can also cause multi-organ failure and necrosis, with organ failure being the main cause of death. This can take anywhere from 48 hours to over a week, depending on how much of the mushroom was consumed, and even those who survive may suffer permanent organ damage. ## Lions It's probably no surprise that lions, or at least some species of big cat, would have made this list. Lions are so fearsome that they have earned the nickname the "king of the jungle", despite not even living in jungles. In terms of raw physicality, humans are completely outclassed by lions. A typical male lion weighs about 190 kg, can reach speeds up to 46 mph, and is several times stronger than a human. And it is the males that are most likely to attack humans, even though females are the primary hunters of the group. A male lion's job is to guard the pride and protect their territory, which means that males are more likely to venture outside of their core territory to where they may encounter human settlements. As humans continue to expand their development and encroach on territory the lions believe is theirs, these conflicts have actually been increasing in frequency. Lions are also often drawn to human settlements by the scents of food and livestock, with many attacking and eating livestock. This can result in attacks on humans as well, and a typical attack from a lion is fatal about 60-70% of the time. But those are attacks from ordinary lions that don't view humans as food and are merely protecting their own interests. Sometimes, however, lions develop a taste for human flesh. Or more likely other prey has become scarce, or the lion is too old or injured to hunt anything else. When a man-eating lion attacks a person, the attack is almost always fatal, with survival usually requiring other people with guns or torches to come scare the lion away. But while there was an increase in lion attacks as humans claimed more of their natural habitat, lions only account for about 200 human deaths each year. ## Yew Tree Yew trees have long been popular for landscaping. These evergreen trees can live for thousands of years, and they are tolerant of pruning which made them ideal for use as hedges or topiaries. There was once a time when you couldn't walk through an American suburb without seeing yews in seemingly every yard, though this has fallen out of favour due to increased awareness of how toxic these trees are. Every species of yew is highly poisonous, with every part of the tree being potentially deadly to humans except for the flesh of the bright red berries they produce. However, each berry contains a seed, which is the most poisonous part of the plant. These seeds could be broken open while chewing a berry, and they can be dangerous if swallowed as well. Many poison seeds are able to pass through the digestive system whole without releasing their toxins, but the human stomach is able to break down the outer shell of yew seeds, thus releasing their poison. Eating the needles from the trees is extremely dangerous as well. The yew contains alkaloids known as taxines, named after the plant's genus. These tend to cause nondescript symptoms such as headache, nausea, cramps, and vomiting. If a lethal dose is ingested, cardiac arrest leading to death can occur in as little as two hours. However, an interesting property of the toxin is that it stops cells from multiplying. While this would be a bad thing in general, it has actually proven effective for use in chemotherapy to stop cancer cells from multiplying. ## Komodo Dragons While komodo dragons aren't the fire-breathing monsters of Arthurian legend, they are still formidable apex predators in their ecosystem. They are the largest extant species of lizards, and the only natural predator of a komodo dragon is a bigger komodo dragon. And yes, they do eat each other. These giant creatures from the monitor lizard family can be found on the Indonesian islands of Rinca, Flores, Gili Dasami, Gili Motang, and their namesake island Komodo. Attacks on humans by dragons are exceedingly rare for a couple reasons. To start, the dragons typically flee from humans. We aren't their natural prey, so they want nothing to do with us. Komodo dragons are also endangered, with an estimated population of only about 3,000, most of which are in Komodo National Park. As such, encounters with the dragons, especially ones that would result with a dragon feeling cornered or threatened, don't happen often. When they do though, the bites from these lizards are extremely dangerous to humans, with as much as a 50% mortality rate. While they don't have anywhere near the bite strength of other reptiles like the crocodile, they instead have sharp, curved, serrated teeth. After biting down, dragons will use their strong neck muscles to shake back and forth, allowing their teeth to tear apart their victim. Being mauled and torn apart is the primary way that dragons kill, but they have a secondary weapon as well. The serrated edges of their teeth allow bits of food to get stuck in them, and that food then turns into a breeding ground for dangerous bacteria that can cause deadly infections in anything they bite. There is also some evidence that the dragons may produce venom containing hemotoxins to prevent blood clotting and cause their victims to bleed out faster, though all claims of the venomous nature of komodo dragons are disputed. ## Cuckoopint Cuckoopint is native to Europe, and it is rather abundant as the plants are extremely difficult to remove. The plant thrives in poor growing conditions, and it can fully regenerate from fragments of tubers left behind. The plant has two main parts: a hood-like sheath known as a spathe, and a long spike with a bulbous cluster of berries at the top. These components bare a strong resemblance to male and female genitalia, which has resulted in the plant having a myriad of nicknames such as Adam and Eve, Cows and Bulls, and Lords and Ladies. Every part of the plant is poisonous to humans, especially the berries. While it is one of the most common causes of emergency room visits for accidental poisoning, deaths from the cuckoopint are extremely rare. This is because the berries taste absolutely horrible, and there is an immediate tingling sensation in the mouth when the berries are consumed. This tingling is followed by burning pain of the mouth, stomach pain, and swelling of the throat making it difficult to breathe. Death can result either from asphyxiation if the throat swells shut or from cardiac arrest, but the berries are so unpleasant that consuming a fatal dose of the poison is exceedingly rare. ## Polar Bears Attacks by bears in general are rare, with only about 40 attacks on humans each year. Of those, only 1-3 of those is by a polar bear. But when bears do attack, polar bears are the most likely to prove fatal to humans. Not only are polar bears the largest bears in the world, they're also the most likely to see humans as prey. If a grizzly bear attacks you, it's probably because you were being a dick, or at least were a perceived threat to her cubs. But if a polar bear attacks, it's probably because it's malnourished and you are the closest thing in the area that resembles food. Polar bears will even stalk humans as prey when no other food source is available, rather than simply responding to a human that got too close as is the case with most other bear attacks. Of course, not all polar bear attacks on humans are because they're starving. Bears are naturally curious creatures, and since a polar bear's natural habitat is nothing but snow, ice, and delicious seals, literally anything else becomes a major point of interest to them. Typically they will investigate things like campsites or buildings along their migratory route just to see what they are, but once their curiosity has been sated they'll go on their way. It is during these investigations, when a person gets too close to a polar bear that was just doing bear stuff, that polar bears will attack humans not for food. This accounts for about a third of polar bear attacks, with the remainder being hungry bears that want to eat people. Though polar bear attacks have remained rare because they are isolated to arctic regions, in recent decades there has been an increase in the frequency of these attacks as the changing climate alters their normal habitat. Whether this upward trend will continue remains to be seen. ## Oleander Oleander is another popular ornamental plant because of the beautiful flowers it produces. It also produces multiple poisons, such as oleandrin and oleandrigenin. The plants are native to Africa, Europe, and Asia, but they have been cultivated around the world. The toxins in oleander are cardiac glycosides, which result in nausea, headache, vomiting, weakness, stomach pain, and death by cardiac arrest. All parts of the plant are deadly, and a single leaf is enough to kill a child, with 4 to 10 leaves providing a lethal dose for adults. The leaves can also be brewed into tea that is extremely deadly even in small quantities. Fortunately, just like some of the other toxic plants we've discussed, oleander tastes extremely bitter and unpleasant. As a result, deaths related to oleander are extremely rare, especially in adults. Grazing animals are far more likely to die from ingesting oleander, as just 100 grams of the plant is enough to kill an adult horse. There have long been concerns about deadly honey contaminated with oleander similar to the mad honey we discussed earlier, but these fears are likely unfounded. While the flowers do require insects to pollinate them, they don't produce any nectar. As such, bees don't visit oleander flowers often enough to cause concerns over toxicity of their honey. ## Sharks Sharks are probably the most feared creature in the ocean, regardless of whether or not that reputation is justified. There are over 500 species of sharks, and most of them couldn't care less about the existence of humans. Of all shark attacks on humans, the vast majority are from three species: the great white shark, the tiger shark, and the bull shark. Of those, there are three times as many attacks from great whites than either of the other species. However, most shark attacks aren't fatal. Not because a shark couldn't easily kill you if it wanted to, because they absolutely can, most of the time they just couldn't be bothered. If a person is bit by a shark, they invariably respond by flailing their arms and legs, possibly even hitting the shark. But sharks aren't actually used to prey that are capable of fighting back. Arguably more important is that one bite is enough for a shark to realize we're not the kind of meal they're looking for. Sharks are used to fatty animals that are far more calorie dense than humans and have no way to defend themselves. They may need to take that first bite just to double check, but as a meal for sharks, humans are more trouble than we're worth. That said, while most shark attacks aren't fatal, the mortality rate is still about 15%. There's also a strong chance of serious permanent injuries, like loss of limbs. It is worth noting that if anything changes within the ocean ecosystem that makes sharks' usual prey dangerously scarce, humans might suddenly become a lot more appetizing. ## Foxglove Foxglove is the common name for the genus Digitalis, making up about 20 different species of plants. The name Digitalis, from the Latin for "finger", comes from the long, tubular shape of the flowers, reminiscent of fingers. As for the name foxglove, that is believed to be a corruption or misinterpretation of an older name going back to Old English, when it was believed the flowers were called "fairy glove". Many species of foxglove are extremely poisonous, and the toxins can be absorbed by the skin rather than needing to be ingested (though a lethal dose from skin contact is unlikely). Because the flowers have such a distinctive shape and are well known to be deadly, accidental consumption of foxglove is extremely rare. It also tastes so horrid that people typically spit it out immediately before swallowing any of the poison. When it is ingested, however, the toxins are so potent that a single leaf is deadly to a child and only 2-4 leaves are deadly to an adult. Early symptoms of nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea begin within an hour of consuming foxglove, followed by tachycardia and bradycardia. Death by cardiac arrest usually occurs within just a few hours of consuming the plants. Although people know to stay away from foxglove, the plants are most dangerous in their first year. Foxglove doesn't flower until its second year, so in the first year its clusters of leaves are sometimes mistaken for the much safer plant comfrey. Most deaths from foxglove poisoning are the result of this misidentification, as people will use the leaves to brew tea. ## Humans Yes, we realize that ending this list with humans may feel a bit lame, but the numbers don't lie. And really, since humans don't have any natural predators and are generally smart enough not to eat things that have been identified as fatally poisonous, it only makes sense that one of the most deadly things on the planet to humans would be other humans. Each year, there are over 450,000 murders around the world. That number only includes homicides, not people killed during armed conflicts between nations. Armed conflicts account for roughly 90,000 more deaths each year. This also only includes deaths that were ruled as homicides, not those cases where someone slipped and fell onto a knife 17 times. Admittedly though, that category of deaths is rather small. As staggering as that number of homicides is, it pales in comparison to the over 700,000 suicides each year. With people being responsible for over a million human deaths each year, we truly are our own second worst enemy. Mosquitoes are still public enemy number one. ## Key Takeaways - The box jellyfish is the most venomous marine animal, with the Australian species capable of killing 60 adults and acting extremely quickly.,The castor bean contains ricin, a deadly toxin with no antidote, that can kill an adult with just one milligram.,The black mamba is Africa's deadliest snake, with a near 100% mortality rate when untreated, due to its highly venomous and aggressive nature.,The death cap mushroom is deadly due to its resemblance to edible varieties and pleasant taste, with a mortality rate that has decreased to 10-30% thanks to medical advancements.,Mosquitoes are the number one killer of humans, causing up to 3 million deaths annually through diseases like malaria, dengue, and Zika. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### What is the most venomous species of marine animal? The most venomous species of marine animal is the Australian box jellyfish of the northern coast of Australia. These jellyfish have 80 tentacles that can grow to up to 3 meters in length each, and each tentacle is covered in millions of tiny hooks that deliver a myriad of toxins when they come into contact with the jellyfish’s prey, or an unfortunate human. ### What is the most deadly plant in the world? The most deadly plant in the world is the manchineel tree. It is so toxic that there aren’t any records of people dying from eating it anywhere in modern literature. The tree contains a milky white sap that permeates every part of the tree, including the bark, leaves, and fruit. This sap contains numerous different toxins, many of which are skin irritants that cause an immediate reaction upon contact. ### What is the most deadly animal in the world? The most deadly animal in the world is the mosquito. Mosquitoes kill by acting as disease vectors. The number one disease mosquitoes transmit to humans that results in death is malaria, but it’s hardly the only one. Dengue, Zika, West Nile virus, yellow fever, and chikungunya are all potentially fatal viruses spread by the bites of mosquitoes. ### What is the most deadly snake in Africa? The black mamba is regarded as the deadliest snake in Africa. Not only is it highly venomous, it’s big and aggressive as well. An average adult black mamba is over 2 meters long, often reaching 3 meters in length. Some have even been reported to be as long as 4.5 meters, all of which makes it the second longest venomous snake in the world, only losing out to the king cobra. ### What is the most deadly spider in the United States? The brown recluse is considered to be one of the two deadliest spiders in the United States, along with the black widow. Neither of these are actually that deadly to humans, but it only seemed fair to include one of the United States’ deadliest spiders. ### What is the most deadly plant in North America? Water hemlock is considered one of the most poisonous plants in North America. It contains the compound cicutoxin, which is a type of alcohol that acts as a neurotoxin, causing hyperactivity in the brain that results in seizures. Symptoms can begin to manifest in just 15 minutes after coming into contact with water hemlock, with seizures often being the first noticeable symptom. ### What is the most deadly land mammal in the world? The hippopotamus is considered the deadliest land mammal in the world to humans, accounting for over 500 human deaths every year. They are extremely aggressive and territorial, and they are fast, able to sprint at speeds of up to 19 mph. They are far too dense to float, so even when submerged in a river they move by walking along the ground. ### What is the most deadly plant in the nightshade family? Deadly nightshade is extremely deadly, as the name might suggest. It contains tropane alkaloids which disrupt the nervous system causing dilated pupils, blurred vision, loss of balance, delirium, confusion, hallucinations, convulsions, and eventually death. All parts of the nightshade plant are toxic to humans, with the roots being the deadliest. ### What is the most deadly frog in the world? The golden poison frog is the most deadly frog in the world. The skin of the golden poison frog produces batrachotoxin, an extremely rare and lethal poison produced only by three frogs in Columbia and a few birds and beetles in Papua New Guinea. Each adult frog is only about 6 cm long and only weighs 30 grams, yet it has enough poison in its body to kill 10 or 20 adult humans, or 2 African elephants. ### What is the most deadly tree in the world? The suicide tree is responsible for deaths on a regular basis. The tree produces a poisonous fruit, but far more deadly are the seeds. Each fruit contains a kernel with two seeds, and one kernel has enough poison to kill an adult. The poison found within the seeds is called cerberin, a cardiac glycoside that can cause the person to die from their heart pumping too much, not enough, or not at all. ## Sources - [Original Side Projects video: 50 of the Deadliest Plants and Animals on Earth](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOO6ReZC-D8) - [Hero image source](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/46/Indian_Courser_in_Bhigwan_August_2025_by_Tisha_Mukherjee_07.jpg) by Tisha Mukherjee / openverse, by-sa. ## Related Coverage Simon Whistler https://sideprojects.pub/article/50-military-facts-that-will-blow-you-away https://sideprojects.pub/article/50-military-facts-that-will-blow-you-away Thu, 02 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT ## Introduction History is full of shocking facts and stories, as we saw in the two earlier iterations of this new format… and now, it's time to do it all over again, but with weird, wacky, and wondrous military facts. So, let's not faff about, and get straight into it! ## 1. Unsinkable Sam Did you know that there was a sailor who served both with the German Kriegsmarine AND the British Royal Navy during WWII? And as if that wasn't unlikely enough, they also survived the sinking of three separate ships in 1941, specifically the German battleship Bismarck in May, as well the British destroyer HMS Cossack and aircraft carrier HMS Ark Royal in October and November respectively. Now, when we say that, what kind of sailor do you have in mind? Perhaps a young fellow who found himself serving his führer blindly, until a chance encounter with a Mark 12 torpedo gave him pause to reconsider where his loyalties lie? An understandable assumption for sure, but ultimately an incorrect one, for you see, Sam was actually a cat. His service began on the 18th of May 1941 when Bismarck set sail for Operation Rheinübung. Unfortunately for him however, this wasn't an operation that went terribly well for Bismarck, as the entire British home fleet descended upon her to deliver a firm shoeing, one that promptly sent her bow first into the drink and onto the seabed. As a result of this, Sam found himself drifting on a section of wood panelling Jack and Rose style, before he was scooped out of the water by the crew of Cossack and made the ship's Mouse Catcher in Chief. He was then saved again five months later when Cossack was torpedoed by U-563, being scooped up by a fleeing sailor's hand before he leapt into a lifeboat. Sam then found himself on Ark Royal when his saviour received a new posting, only to end up clinging to ANOTHER piece of wood when Ark Royal was torpedoed by U-81. He then spent a few years as Chief Mouser to the Governor of Gibraltar, before retiring to Belfast and passing away peacefully of old age in 1955. ## 2. Germ Warfare One thing movies don't tell you about soldiering, is that all the adrenaline pumping PTSD inducing stuff is actually a TINY part of the gig, and that actually, day to day, being a soldier is damned boring – lots and lots of marching up and down the square, moving a ton of sand bags 6 feet to the left, or just being sat around in a forward operating base, staring at a clock, and waiting for SOMETHING to happen. This, naturally, leads to soldiers finding… 'creative' ways to kill the time; they are but human after all. That brings us to the American aircraft carrier USS Enterprise in 1965, where the crew's boredom had hit such crushing depths, that they opted to relieve it by creating a special one-off bomb to 'commemorate' the sixth million pound of ordnance dropped on Vietnam, specifically a toilet bomb. And we don't mean a normal bomb that someone curled one out in to give the Vietcong an extra little treat, no, we mean a LITERAL toilet bomb. The toilet itself was pinched from one of the lower deck ablutions, stuffed full of explosives, and outfitted with all the bits needed to be dropped from the pylons of a Douglas A-1H Skyraider. The Skyraider in question was 572 'Paper Tiger' piloted by Commander Clarence W. Stoddard, and as he was catapulted from Enterprise's deck a rather perplexed Air Traffic Controller could be heard calling out "what the hell was on 572's right wing?!" over the radio, the answer to which could be found in Stoddard's flight log: "seven Mark 82 500lb bombs and one sani-flush." ## 3. Japanese Holdouts Japan's surrender in WWII came on the 2nd of September 1945, but a few of its soldiers didn't quite get the message and kept on fighting, either because they believed the announcement of surrender to be an allied ruse, felt bound by honour to never surrender, or were simply cut off from communications so never got the message. Most surrendered within a year or two, but some of them held out for WAY longer than you may first imagine, with some, such as Masashi Itō, Kinshichi Kozuka, and Teruo Nakamura holding out until 1960, 1972, and 1974 respectively. ## 4. The Most Important Piece of Equipment in a Tank If we were to ask you to name the most important piece of equipment in a tank, what would spring to mind? Maybe the cannon, vital as it is for ruining the enemy's day and making sure you get home in one piece? Or maybe the radio, because after all, you can't underestimate the importance of communications in this day and age? Ask that question to an American or Russian tanker, and they may well be the answers you get. But ask it to a Brit, and there is only one answer you will receive – the 'Vessel Boiling Electric,' or 'BV' for short, an item that in unbelievably stereotypically British fashion, boils water on demand to keep the tea flowing. The device was an ingenious solution to a problem that had plagued the British Army throughout WWII - tankers constantly stopping for a cheeky brew - anywhere and anytime. So prolific was this, that it started to cause real problems on the tactical level, as no one, not even the fiercest Regimental Sergeant Major could stop a tankie from pulling up to exercise his God given right to a lovely cuppa. So, come the end of WWII and the introduction of the Centurion, the British Army just started fitting all their tanks with the aforementioned BVs, so that brews could be enjoyed on the move. They remain standard to this day, and are taken so seriously, that any vehicle with a defective BV is declared unfit for purpose and torn off the front lines. ## 5. The Soldier Bear Wojtek was a Syrian brown bear bought as a cub by the soldiers of Polish II Corps, while serving in Iran in 1942. Initially he was naught but a cute unit mascot, but was soon formally enlisted into the unit – primarily so that the men of II Corps could blag extra food for him and prevent him being taken away by any fun sponge of a senior officer that may insist that a bear was too 'dangerous' or 'unpredictable' to have a bear running about a warzone. But while he may have just enlisted for the benefits, Wojtek was every bit the competent and professional soldier; quickly learning to salute his superior officers, march on his hind legs besides the men, and load 100 lb crates of artillery shells onto the back of trucks. For this diligence, and ABSOLUTELY not just because the men of II Corps thought it was cute, he was promoted to the rank of Corporal in 1943. But Wojtek didn't let his new position go to his head, and despite the lofty expectations of rank, he remained one of the boys, and could often be found of a night wrestling with the men, drinking beer, and enjoying his favourite treat, cigarettes – which despite MANY witnesses insisting he smoked like a people, he likely just ate. Wojtek survived the war and was demobilised in 1945, he then settled into a well-earned retirement at Edinburgh Zoo and lived to the ripe old age 21… and right to the very end he would remember and salute his old comrades… particularly when they threw cigarettes into his enclosure. ## 6. The Army That Came Back with More Men Than It Sent When the Austro-Prussian War broke out in 1866, Liechtenstein threw its hat in the ring and entered the war on the side of Austria. To this end they sent a modest detachment of 80 men into the fray, specifically to guard the Brenner Pass between Austria and Italy. This proved to be quite the mundane affair, as the war never came that way. And so, with no shooting or stabbing of the King's enemies to be done, the soldiers did what soldiers always do when they find themselves bored – get drunk and liaise with the locals. They had a grand old time of it, and the lads thoroughly enjoyed their little alpine holiday at the expense of the King's treasury. They enjoyed it so much in fact, that they made a friend who came back home with them, and thus Liechtenstein became one of the few nations to bring more men back from war than it sent. The man's specifics are hard to verify. Some say he was an Italian defector, and others insist that he was simply a local who had Liechtenstein sold highly to him by the soldiers and so fancied seeing what it was all about for himself – whatever his motivation, it's an incredible story. ## 7. A Defector to North Korea When we picture soldiers jumping the wire during the Cold War, we typically imagine them jumping from Communism rather than to it, but while that was the way it usually went, it wasn't ALWAYS the way it went, as exemplified by James Joseph Dresnok, an American soldier who defected to North Korea in 1962. He did it because he had nothing left to lose - he came from an abusive home in the US and thus had no contact with his family, his wife of two years had left him on an earlier deployment, and above all else, he REALLY didn't take well to military life; hating the harsh punishments that often came his way for the many minor infractions he committed while serving – and so, he took the plunge. For what it was worth, it appears to have been the right move for him. He found stable work in North Korea as an English teacher, and from 1978 also became something of a North Korean celebrity, as his complexion had him perfectly suited to be cast as the archetypal American 'baddy' in movies. He eventually passed in 2016, without expressing a single morsel of regret for his decision. And what's more, his story, while rare, is far from unique, as he was just one of seven American soldiers who defected to North Korea after the end of the Korean War. ## 8. Stealing a Helicopter What do you do when your enemy has a tarty helicopter that you quite fancy having a look at? Well, you pinch one of course – or at least that's what the Americans did in 1987 when they wanted to get their hands on a Mi-25, the export version of the fearsome Mi-24 attack helicopter, in a mission dubbed 'Operation Mount Hope III.' The operation took place following the eight-month-long Toyota War between Chad and Libya, which concluded in 1987 with a Chadian victory. Post-war, the Libyans left behind significant military hardware, including the Mi-25 helicopter at the Ouadi Doum airbase – and thus the Americans saw their opportunity. The mission was led by the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, and they utilized MH-47 Chinook helicopters. As for the plan, that was simple: get in double quick, hook it up, and get out even quicker. It was executed under the cover of darkness, to maintain secrecy and minimise the risk of engagement with any remaining Libyan forces. All went well, and after dumping the Mi-25 at an airbase in N'Djamena, the capital of Chad, everything was loaded up into a couple of C-5 Galaxy's and the Americans disappeared with their prize. ## 9. The Second Largest Air Force Given that the US Air Force is the world's largest Air Force, with 5,213 aircraft on the books, which do you suppose is the second largest? China perhaps, as they had been pumping cash into their military of late? Or Maybe Russia? They surely must have a fair sized fleet on the go even with their current… 'difficulties' in Ukraine? Certainly, they would be sensible guesses, but with China having 1,992 aircraft in inventory, and Russia having 3,864, neither of them take that second spot. Bizarrely, it is in fact the US, again, that takes the title - specifically the US Navy, which currently has 4,012 aircraft in inventory – such is the insane size of the US Military. There's a cracking fact to put in the pub quiz bank, you're welcome! ## 10. The First Machine Gun? When asked to name the first machine gun, people will typically point to the Maxim Gun – a recoil operated machine gun invented all the way back in the black and white days of 1884. But what if there was something else that beat it to the post? Enter the Puckle Gun from all the way back in 1718 – a bad boy of a shooter capable of putting nine chunky 1.25 inch diameter rounds down range in a minute, a rate that admittedly, was 'just a smidge' under the 600 rounds per minute the Maxim could manage, but sufficient enough for some to say it was the first machine gun, given how it emerged in the muzzle-loading musket days, when a REALLY well trained soldier could let off three rounds a minute. Those who say it doesn't count point to how it operated, specifically the fact that the operator had to manually rotate the cylinder and reset the hammer after each shot, when a 'true' machine gun, to simplify, should just keep firing when you hold down the trigger. So, does it count then? Well, we will leave that up to you to decide. ## 11. Defenceless Nations Last year the world spent 2.2 TRILLION USD on defence, and with such a crazy amount of cash being thrown about for the sole purposes of acquiring killing machines and training a body of handy sorts to operate them, you would be forgiven for assuming there would not be a single nation on earth that would willingly leave itself defenceless by failing to spend even a single cent on an army. And yet, there are 16 countries that do exactly that, and instead depend upon lucky geography or powerful friends to ensure their protection. The nations in question are Costa Rica, Andorra, Dominica, Grenada, Vatican City, Liechtenstein, Samoa, Tuvalu, Kiribati, Nauru, St Lucia, St Vincent and the Grenadines, the Solomon Islands, the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, and Palau. ## 12. WWII Tanks in Ukraine We've all heard about old tanks being dragged out of retirement and returned to service on the battlefields of Ukraine, but such stories usually concern T-55s or T-62s… not WWII vintage German Panzer IVs, and yet, that is exactly what happened in 2023. Now, the armour aficionados in the audience will have noticed straight away that some things aren't right here – it has tracks from a BMP1, and it is missing its muzzle break… and yet, despite this, we shouldn't write it off as a replica that 'somehow' found its way to the frontlines, as its dimensions, armour thickness, suspension, and return rollers are PERFECT, as they rarely are on replicas. So then, just how did this weird miss-mash of a survivor end up fighting in Ukraine? Well, sadly, we don't have a clue, as nothing more has come to light about it since – it could be one an enthusiast owned that was either restored on a budget, or just had some 'whatever' tracks thrown on it to get it going, or it could have been pulled from a museum and quickly bodged together… we just don't know. And yet, despite the uncertainty, there it is, a Panzer IV in Ukraine, clear as day. ## 13. The Bazooka Scooter The Vespa 150 TAP was a wacky little thing developed for France's paratroopers back in the 1950s – a bazooka scooter; literally, a Vespa scooter with a whopping great 75mm M20 recoilless rifle strapped to it. Built between 1956 and 1959, and remaining in service until at least the early 1970s, this weird little thing saw action in both the Algerian and Indochina wars. But alas, we are saddened to report that it wasn't fired on the move, and so, rather than zipping about the colonial countryside and dropping tanks in a weird Quadrophenia / Full Metal Jacket crossover, the TAP was instead used just to ferry the M20 around all nippy and speedy like, and when the rider found something he wished to blow up, he'd dismount, and set it up on the ground conventionally. Ultimately, the Bazooka Scooter concept never really caught on, and remains a weird little footnote in French military history. Primarily, this was because scooters are REALLY terrible at crossing rough terrain – imagine Jeremy Clarkson on the Top Gear Vietnam special, then up the ante with people shooting at him, and you suddenly get why it was such a terrible idea. ## 14. He's More Meth Than Man Now… In 1944, Finnish soldier Aimo Koivunen survived a harrowing, and frankly quite hilarious ordeal when he overdosed on methamphetamine – popping a total of 30 pills, the supply for his ENTIRE unit. What followed was an… 'interesting' series of events, with highlights including: - Being so buzzed off his nut that he began to rocket ahead of his unit, and so focused had the meth made him, that by the time he came to his senses and realised he had overtaken his men, he was now miles over the horizon and totally on his own. - Skiing 62 miles through the forest while completely black out unconscious and having no memory of his journey or what he did on it when he came back to. - Stepping on a landmine and coming off with nothing but a slightly roughed up uniform to show for it, and then stepping on ANOTHER landmine that did actually mess him up severely, but thanks to the magic of meth, he pressed on as if he was fine. - Hallucinating that a mighty tree was in fact a terrifying wild animal, and then proceeding to fight said tree as if his very life was at stake. Surprisingly, he survived all of that, and eventually stumbled upon a Finnish patrol that immediately raced him to a hospital, from which he was eventually discharged when his heart rate dropped to normal THREE WEEKS later. Even more surprisingly, he then walked away from the mother of all come downs totally unscathed, and retired in peace after the war, eventually passing away in 1989 at the ripe old age of 71. ## 15. They Couldn't Hit an Elephant at This Dis… John Sedgwick was a Union Army general during the American Civil War. He was born in 1813, and served in many conflicts before the Civil War, including the Seminole Wars and the Mexican-American War. He took to war like a duck to water, and after honing his craft in those bitter conflicts, he was one of the Union's most valuable and respected Generals come the onset of hostilities with the Confederacy. On the 9th of May 1864 during the Battle of Spotsylvania Court House, he was commanding the Sixth Corps. He was at the front lines, directing artillery placements and troop positions under Confederate sniper fire. His troops were ducking for cover, but Sedgwick, wanting to calm them, stood tall and reportedly said, "They couldn't hit an elephant at this dis..." his final word being cut short by a Confederate bullet, which passed straight through his skull and exited through his left eye socket. He immediately collapsed to the floor; dead before he even hit the ground – becoming the highest rank Union casualty of the whole war. His death was a cataclysmic loss for the Unionists. He was a key figure in their command structure, a tactical genius that helped formulate some of the army's greatest plans, and deeply loved by his men for his caring and paternal leadership. For his legacy however, none of that matters, and today he is defined by one thing and one thing alone – irony. ## 16. The Most Expensive Plane This is the most expensive plane ever to take to the skies, the Northrop Grumman B-2 Spirit. It is an advanced strategic bomber designed to be all but invisible to enemy radar thanks to its low, flat profile, and wealth of other highly classified stealth technologies incorporated into its design. It has all of this tech for one purpose, and one purpose alone – to be the single most deadly thing in the sky, specifically by brazenly flying its payload of 16 B83 nuclear bombs right over enemy radar and air defence installations and dropping them wherever it pleases all but guaranteed that it will not be intercepted while doing so. To put into perspective just how insane this capability is, a B83 has a yield of 1.2 megatons, making a cumulative yield of 19.2 megatons per sortie… which is 914 greater than the yield of the Fat Man bomb dropped on Nagasaki in 1945… it's legitimately terrifying stuff. So then, with capabilities like that, it is small wonder that the B-2 is the most expensive airplane ever made… but just how much does it cost exactly? Well, adjusted for inflation, the flyaway cost in 2024 dollars works out at just over four BILLION… per unit. Or, to put it in other terms, about the same as the WHOLE cost of a British Queen Elizabeth class supercarrier, or twice Argentina's ENTIRE military budget. ## 17. The Admiral Crapnetsov Much has been made of the dire state of the Russian Military since its invasion of Ukraine, between a total failure in logistics that saw its advance on Kyiv stall to a complete halt in the city's suburbs, having to depend upon Aliexpress walkie-talkies after corruption ate up its radio budget, and the near COMPLETE absence of its supposedly most advanced machines, the SU-57 fighter and T-14 tank from the frontlines, we really are spoilt for choice when picking examples. But catastrophic as they are, one thing serves as a monument to Russian military failures and delusions better than any other, and that would be their sole aircraft carrier, the Admiral Kuznetsov. The vessel, originally commissioned for the Soviet navy back in 1991, has been moored up for overhaul since 2018… and it hasn't exactly gone well. In 2018 the floating dock holding the carrier, PD-50, sank, causing a crane to crash onto its deck which led to substantial damage. This was then followed by another incident in 2019, in which a significant fire broke out on the ship, resulting in the death of at least one sailor and injuries to 12 others. Further to this, the budget allocated for her overhaul is believed to have been largely swallowed up by corruption. As a result of this, not only has no progress been made on the Kuznetsov, but her condition has only degraded further, to the point that today it is believed that her engines are totally nonfunctional and in need of total replacement. And if that wasn't bad enough, just to REALLY rub salt in the wound, both China and India have Soviet made carriers of their own, the Liaoning and INS Vikramaditya respectively… and they both work a treat… Russia really has no one to blame but itself for this one. ## 18. China and the USSR Went to War When speaking of the Cold War, two blocs are typically discussed, those being the Capitalist West, headed by the US and containing the various capitalist nations of the world under their leadership, and the Communist East, which contained all of the Communist nations under the leadership of the Soviet Union. But such a lens is actually incorrect, as there were really three blocs in the Cold War, with the third being led by China; this is where we get the term 'third world' from today - it was originally nothing to do with wealth, or a lack thereof, and was actually a Maoist term coined to refer to the nations that fell into China's sphere of influence. The Soviet Union and China did used to be friends early on mind you, but they fell out BIG time in 1960, when ideological differences culminated in the Sino-Soviet Split. From then on, in practical terms, they HATED each other, and the Soviet Union and China had the same relationship as the Soviet Union and America did. Things escalated so much, that come 1969 the two nations were at war. Granted, it wasn't exactly a 'run to the shelters the nukes are coming' type of war, was never formally declared, saw no changes in the borders, and ended seven months later with no more than 150 people killed and a dozen tanks destroyed – but still, the armies of both nations were shooting at each other, and so it counts. ## 19. The Last Nation to March Under the Swastika Because of the actions of a certain moustached Austrian fella, it is fair to say that the swastika has 'rather' negative connotations in the modern day, and because of this, the ancient symbol of peace and well-being, that you once couldn't move for the world over, has been all but purged from public view. But one nation's military still marches under it, quite literally, and that would be Finland… allow us to explain. Despite Finland being wartime allies of the Nazis, their use of it is actually completely coincidental, and predates its adoption by the Nazis, dating back to 1918, when Count Eric von Rosen, a Swedish explorer and friend of Finland gifted the newly independent country its first aircraft – which was emblazed with his personal good luck charm, a big blue swastika. Finland just so happened to like the symbol, and so continued to apply it to their later aircraft, as well as roll it out more widely. After the war, many branches of the Finnish armed forces began to phase it out, for obvious reasons. But the Air Force stood its ground – it was THEIR symbol long before it was Hitler's, and they would be damned if they were going to let him ruin a tradition that they were perfectly fond of. Despite this steadfastness, their use of it has weaned over the years. The roundel adorning aircraft was dropped immediately in 1945, and it was then slowly dropped from the banners and insignias of various units as the years rolled on, culminating with it being removed from the air force's official logo in 2017. But one unit persists in its use, the Finnish Air Force Academy, and they still march under it to this day. ## 20. The First Aircraft to Shoot Itself Down A peculiar incident occurred on the 21st of September 1956 when a Grumman F11F piloted by US Navy test pilot Tom Attridge managed to shoot itself down. It happened while Attridge was conducting high-speed tests of the then new fighter's cannons, specifically while letting the cannons rip during a sharp dive. The rounds, which left the muzzle at supersonic speed, quickly slowed down due to the resistance of the air and followed a curved trajectory downwards, a trajectory that Attridge, with his throttle still binned and full afterburners blazing, soon entered himself, causing the rounds to impact his canopy, right engine intake, and nose cone, which lead to a total loss of power. Fortunately, the rounds didn't penetrate the canopy, and all of the aircraft's control surfaces were still intact, so Attridge, the skilled pilot that he was, was happily able to bring his battered F11F back down to the ground on a glide, and make a rather bumpy emergency landing in a farmer's field. He walked away from it alive, but the impact left him severely injured and out of the cockpit for six months while he recovered. ## 21. The Biggest Cannon The Tsar Cannon from 1586, which currently sits outside of the Kremlin Armoury in Moscow, is typically cited as the biggest ever cannon, and by calibre, the width of the barrel, this is indeed correct, with it coming in at a mighty 35 inches. But with it weighing in at a MERE 40 tons, and never having particularly been used… many say it doesn't REALLY count. With that in mind, may we present to you the Schwerer Gustav from Nazi Germany. This beast weighed an astonishing 1,350 tons, making it just 'a tad' heavier than the Tsar Cannon, and despite having a smaller calibre of 'only' 31.5 inches, it was 155 feet long compared to the 17.5 feet length of its Russian forerunner. Its rounds were also MUCH heavier, weighing in a whopping 7 tons compared to the one-ton balls that came out of the business end of the Tsar Cannon – for these reasons, many argue that the Schwerer Gustav is ACTUALLY the biggest cannon. But which one is correct? Well, that's subjective and for you to decide; pure calibre or 'everything' else… the choice is yours. ## 22. The Biggest Military And while we are on the subject of 'the biggest,' which country do you suppose has the biggest military today? The US perhaps? A sensible guess for sure given their population and the INSANE amount of money they spend every year. Or maybe China? Again, a good guess for both of the same reasons – but while they would be sensible guesses, they would also be incorrect ones, as the real answer is North Korea, a country which has 7,769,000 people, give or take a third of its entire population serving in the military, as compared to 'only' 4,015,000 in China, and 2,072,950 in the US. A few things to note however to qualify that figure, in terms of active military, i.e., people who do soldiering full time, North Korea 'only' has 1,280,000, a figure which is roughly equivalent to that of the US and places it 5th in that category, with the remainder of its figure being made up of 600,000 reservists, people who do soldiering on their days off, and 5,889,000 paramilitary forces. This is because North Korea, whose military strategy is guided by so called 'Songun,' or 'Military First Politics,' makes its military the centre point of its whole society. So not only do they keep LOTS of soldiers on the books directly, but their military also permeates into other aspects of society, leading infrastructure projects, education, cultural works, and other such things, and the workers that do those tasks are also trained up as soldiers on the side and do their jobs under the military banner. You have to admit, it's quite a smart strategy for a nation that isn't exactly the most popular on the world stage… would you want to invade a country where basically EVERYONE living there can be handed a rifle and sent straight to the frontlines? ## 23. The Last British Monarch to Lead Troops into Battle King George II, who reigned from 1727 to 1760, holds the distinction of being the last British monarch to personally lead troops into battle. It occurred during the Battle of Dettingen back in 1743, amid the War of the Austrian Succession. At this battle, he led an allied force comprising British, Hanoverian, Austrian, and other troops against the French. Despite being taken by surprise and facing a formidable French army, George II displayed remarkable leadership. Clad in the most lavish garb of the day, he rode amongst his troops, rallying and inspiring them with his presence. But his direct involvement was not merely ceremonial or morale raising; he actively participated in the strategic planning and execution of the battle tactics, and even got a few swings in on the French himself. Since then, military service has remained an important aspect of the monarchy, and it is all but unwritten rule that senior royals are expected to serve at some point, with King Charles III doing his time between 1971 and 1976, and the future king, Prince William, doing so between 2005 and 2013. But in terms of ACTUALLY getting stuck in while wearing the big shiny hat… it hasn't happened since George II. ## 24. The Last Head of State to Serve in WWII And while we are on the topic of heads of state at war, let us discuss Queen Elizabeth II. While she wasn't exactly storming about Normandy lopping off Nazi heads, she did in fact serve in WWII before she took the throne, and so long lived was her reign, that she was THE last head of state in the world to have done so. It all began at the age of 18 in 1945, when then Princess Elizabeth, who found the whole Nazi malarkey rather irksome, joined the Auxiliary Territorial Service, a women's voluntary branch of the British Army. There she trained as a driver and mechanic. Her service was hands-on and saw her get involved in the maintaining of military vehicles… and by all accounts she was a belting mechanic. Her service continued until the war's end, and she ended the war as a Junior Commander. The skills she acquired and her experiences during the war left a lasting impact, and instilling in her a love for driving – something which is best encapsulated by a little story from 1998, when Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia made a disparaging remark about female drivers as he climbed into Liz's Land Rover… in response to which she decided to show off her Army honed skills, and proceeded to drift and slide her Land Rover around Balmoral, much to the chagrin of the Prince's now brown-stained underpants. ## 25. The Deadliest Battle in Human History The Siege of Leningrad, which occurred during WWII and lasted from September the 8th 1941 to the 27th of January 1944 is by a country mile, the single deadliest battle in human history. The Siege itself was fought by an Axis coalition of German, Finnish and Italian forces in the offense, and Soviet forces in defence. The Axis strategy was simple enough, they hoped to encircle the city, completely cut it off from all supply lines, and pound it into oblivion with long ranged artillery. The idea was that this would yield a swift, glorious, and above all else safe victory for the attackers – who rather than getting bogged down in slow and brutal street fighting, would just sit back, hold their line, and wait for the duopoly of starvation and bombardment to cause a complete collapse of morale, and thus bring about the city's surrender. That simple plan didn't work out, however. Despite coming very close, the Axis attackers failed to fully encircle the city, meaning that just enough supplies and reinforcing soldiers could trickle into Leningrad to keep both hope, and resistance alive and well – and a brutal slog ensued, from which neither side would quickly surrender. When the Siege finally broke, a scene of total devastation was left in its wake. Leningrad itself was little but rubble, and within that rubble, millions of bodies lay, with the figures for the total number of casualties both dead and wounded being anywhere from five and a half million, to one and a half million across both sides – making it easily the single deadliest battle in human history. ## 26. The Last Battle of the Roman Empire Few societies have a martial record as glorious as that of the Roman Empire. For centuries its mighty legions trod the armies of Europe and Near Asia underfoot and bent the civilians hiding behind them to their whims, all to expand the power and influence of Rome. But the Roman Empire has been gone for a fair old while now, long having been confined to the history books after fate's fortunes turned against it – so what was the last battle those once glorious and triumphant legions fought? Well, there's actually two answers to that one – the last battle the Western Roman Empire fought, and the last battle the Eastern Roman Empire fought, as the Empire itself was split up in 395AD. For the Western Roman Empire, it wouldn't have to wait long. Its fortunes were already long in the pan even before the split, and come 476AD, barely a century later, its forces were engaged in the Battle of Ravenna against the Germanic Tribes of Odoacer. It would be their last defeat, as two days later, Romulus Augustulus, the last Western Emperor was kicked off his throne and the Empire formally came to an end. For the Eastern Roman Empire, its fortunes fared significantly better, and it would cling on for another millennia or so. But come the 15th century, as the medieval period drew to a close, its time was up also – its coup de grace being delivered by Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II at the Siege of Constantinople in 1453. ## 27. The German Army Still Uses Nazi Camouflage… Kind Of Way back in the black and white days, the German Army was a pioneer in the use of camouflage uniforms, as exemplified by it being the first ever nation to give a standard issue piece of camouflage equipment to ALL of its soldiers, specifically the M31 'Zeltbahn,' a rather handy half poncho half tent section that came in this rather fetching pattern; so called 'Splittermuster' or 'Splinter Pattern.' The bad moustache man who rose to power two years later was all about this whizz-bang new camouflage idea, so when the time came to outfit the SS for war, he naturally wanted them to have some too. But seeing as how they were supposedly the best of the best, his own legion of ideologically indoctrinated nutters, he didn't want them to have MERE splinter pattern – they needed something that'd mark them out as being better than everyone else. This led to the development of several unique to the SS patterns of camouflage, such as 'erbsenmuster,' or pea-dot pattern, and 'platanenmuster,' or plane tree pattern. Now have a look at this modern Bundeswehr soldier in his 'Flecktarnmuster,' or Flecktarn pattern of camouflage. The colours are a bit different, but otherwise, yeaaaaaaaaah… if it isn't broke don't fix it we guess. ## 28. Saddam's WWII Tanks During the 2003 US-led coalition invasion of Iraq, some interesting things were discovered among the plethora of modern and Cold War era vehicles that made up Saddam's tank force – namely a surprising amount of OLD WWII era tanks that would have been confined to museums in any other country, but in Saddam's Iraq were rolled out to play their part as everything came crashing down. The Iraqi army, originally established in the 1920s, had received various tanks over the decades, including models from Fascist Italy, the United Kingdom, and later the United States, with examples being things such as Italian CV35 tankettes, British Vickers Mk VI light tanks, and Crusader tanks, and they all re-emerged following the invasion. A particularly intriguing find was this German Sturmpanzer II Bison, a self-propelled gun that plonked a heavy infantry gun on an old (even at the time) Panzer II chassis. The extent to which they were used in fighting varied massively. The aforementioned Bison for example, from the fact it was pictured in the middle of a desert having been blown up, was presumably used to some degree, whereas on the other extreme, this Crusader, still in perfect nick on a plinth, was presumably never used at all. But the fact that such old vehicles were pushed back into combat at all, even if just to a limited degree here and there, is still rather interesting. ## 29. Russia and NATO Nearly Went to War in 1999 In 1999, during the Kosovo conflict, a flashpoint of tension nearly escalated into a direct military confrontation between NATO forces, particularly led by the US and UK, and Russian troops. This tense situation arose when Russian forces unexpectedly took control of Pristina Airport in Kosovo, which was strategically important for the NATO-led KFOR peacekeeping mission planning to enter Kosovo after an agreement was reached to end hostilities. British General Mike Jackson, in charge of the NATO forces, faced a direct order from US General Wesley Clark to block the runways and prevent Russian reinforcements. However, Jackson, concerned about the potential for a significant escalation that could lead to a direct conflict between NATO and Russian forces, refused to obey Clark's orders. He argued that such an action might trigger a larger, possibly catastrophic, conflict, and stated that he would not "start the third world war" for Clark. Fortunately, the standoff was later resolved diplomatically, with Russian forces eventually participating in the peacekeeping mission but not under NATO command. Oh, and fun bonus fact, famed English singer songwriter James Blunt was also there – he was then a Captain with the Life Guards Regiment at the time, and it was the squadron he was commanding that was initially racing to secure the airport when the Russians unexpectedly took control. ## 30. The Last WWI Rifles in Service The Sirius Dog Sled Patrol, a unit within the Royal Danish Army's Joint Arctic Command, operates in the harsh, remote terrains of Northeast Greenland. Established in 1941, the unit is tasked with long-range reconnaissance missions and enforcing Danish sovereignty over the vast Arctic expanse. The unit's personnel, handpicked members of the Danish forces, navigate the icy wilderness in pairs, each duo conducting patrols that can last up to four months, accompanied by their sled dogs… and they also have the distinction of being the last unit on Earth to still be equipped with weaponry from WWI. Specifically, they use the American M1917 Enfield bolt-action rifle, and it is their primary means of defence against both any potential villains they stumble across, and polar bears alike. The reason for this choice is simple – in Denmark's opinion, nothing modern has come along that can do the job better. The conditions in the arctic are BRUTAL, and any rifle that isn't made to the best of standards, or has even a single blemish in its design simply won't cut the mustard, and will inevitably become a useless lump of ice in such conditions – something that is far from ideal when one ton of polar bear has its heart set on making you lunch… and thus the Enfield soldiers on still, waiting for some young upstart to come along that can finally bear the weight of its heavy burden. ## 31. The British SS Famously, and also ironically, the Nazi SS was one of the most racially diverse organisations to ever exist, with it having units whose members were drawn from all four corners of the globe – including those countries that Germany was actively at war with, the most interesting of which is the British Free Corps. It recruited from British and Imperial POWs and was started by John Amery, a rabid British fascist and Nazi sympathiser. Unlike other 'enemy' units of the SS however, like those representing the Soviet Union, which had upwards of a million men throw their hat in the ring with their former enemy, recruitment was always a major struggle for the British Free Corps, and it never managed to reach more than 27 active members at its peak, with only 54 joining up in total come the war's end. It was founded in 1943, and never took part in meaningful combat duties, even when it found itself attached to the 11th SS Panzergrenadier Division – instead being used far more for propaganda work and infrastructure odd jobs back on the home front. This is itself an interesting deviation from other 'enemy' units, as both the 33rd 'French' and 15th 'Latvian' divisions were HEAVILY involved in fighting on the Eastern Front. Post-war, the Free Corps members were apprehended, and some were tried and convicted, with its founder, John Amery, being executed for treason in 1945. ## 32. The Biggest Battleship Now let's take a look at history's biggest battleship, which would be the Japanese Yamato. Commissioned in 1941, she was a remarkable feat of naval engineering, one designed to counter the numerically superior US Pacific Fleet by taking on multiple battleships at once. Fully laden, she boasted a displacement of nearly 72,000 tonnes and was 263 meters in length – which, to put it in context, is near as damn it the exact same dimensions as a modern British Queen Elizabeth class super carrier. Her teeth came from nine 18.1 inch Type 94 main guns, which were split into three turrets of three, and were also the largest calibre of naval artillery EVER fitted on a warship even to this day. These guns were capable of firing shells over a distance of 26 miles. Despite her impressive capabilities however, Yamato's operational history was limited. She popped up all over the Pacific here and there during the war but was denied the big showdown with the US Navy for which she was designed and was eventually sent into the drink in April 1945, when she was pounced upon by so many bombers that even she couldn't fend them off. ## 33. Ice Aircraft Carrier During World War II, Britain embarked on a highly ambitious and unconventional project known as Project Habakkuk. The idea was to construct a massive aircraft carrier out of pykrete, a mixture of ice and wood pulp, which promised to be both durable and slow melting. The concept was born from desperation – the UK was losing far too many carriers in the Atlantic, and you know what they say, desperate times call for desperate measures and all that. The visionary behind this project was Geoffrey Pyke, who, with the support of Lord Mountbatten and Winston Churchill, proposed this innovative solution to create unsinkable, iceberg-like carriers. Pykrete's properties, being stronger than plain ice and slow to melt, made it an ideal material for such a massive structure, potentially revolutionizing naval warfare in the Atlantic. A prototype was built on Patricia Lake in Canada, which demonstrated the material's feasibility, but the project was eventually deemed impractical. The challenges, such as the immense scale of construction, the need for continuous refrigeration to prevent melting, and the advent of longer-range aircraft and new technologies, were simply too great to overcome – even in the wacky 'Wallace and Gromit' days of WWII British engineering. ## 34. The Oldest Military Unit The oldest military unit in the world is currently the Spanish Infantry Regiment "Inmemorial del Rey" No. 1 – which has existed, uninterrupted, since 1248. It came into being when King Ferdinand III of Castille began maintaining a group of full-time soldiers post his conquest of Seville - one of Europe's first standing armies since the Roman Empire. Needless to say, the regiment has changed quite a bit over the years. It started off as a 'normal' infantry regiment, before going through stints as both grenadiers and light infantry, and then settled into its modern role as an Honour Battalion for the Spanish Crown – think like the more famous boys and girls you see outside of Buckingham Palace in London; still proper soldiers who get called up like anyone else… just ones who do lots of marching about in posh uniforms when they aren't deployed. Currently, the regiment is based in Madrid and comprises several battalions and specialized units, including a dedicated honour guard battalion, a support unit, an automobile unit, and a well-regarded regimental band known for its performances both in Spain and internationally. ## 35. The Last Cavalry Charge We like to think of cavalry charges as an antiquated relic of the early black and white days; one that had its rude awakening to reality in the face of WWI machine gun fire and was then promptly confined to the history books. This is KIND OF true, but what such a summarisation misses out is that the idea took 'way' longer to die out than many would first imagine – with the final cavalry charge taking place in the closing days of WWII, specifically at the Battle of Schoenfeld in March 1945. It unfolded as the Polish People's Army was progressing into Pomerania, with the strategic objective of reaching the Baltic Sea. Initially, the Polish offensive, which was using tanks and infantry, struggled against strong German defences, and that's when a bright spark among the Poles said, "sod this for a game of soldiers," and broke out the horses - utilising a ravine for concealment, before launching two cavalry squadrons, backed by artillery, against dug in German anti-tank emplacements. Surprisingly, it actually worked a treat, and the Germans turned and fled with their tail between their legs in face of the four-legged onslaught. They didn't make it a habit however, and the event went down as a lucky one-off fluke, rather than a sign that maybe horses were back in martial vogue. ## 36. An Absolute Mad Lad We like to think of war as quite the unpleasant affair, and in fairness, on account of all the wanton slaughter, pestilence, and general misery that typically accompanies it, this is usually an agreeable enough perspective… but it isn't a wholly correct one, because rather shockingly, there exists a special sort of fellow for whom war and its unpleasantness comes to them as naturally as water comes to a duck. Take Lieutenant-General Adrian Carton de Wiart as an example, he served in the Boer War, First World War, and the Second World War, in the course of which he was shot in the face, head, stomach, ankle, leg, hip, and ear, was blinded in his left eye, survived two plane crashes, tunnelled out of a prisoner-of-war camp, AND tore off his own fingers when some know it all doctor with a head full of 'dEgReES' and 'mEDicAL eXpEiREncE' insisted that the amputation was unnecessary. Having gone through all of that, you'd imagine that he'd be a man haunted by his experiences wouldn't you, and that his personal memoirs would read like a reprint of All Quiet on the Western Front? But no, while thinking back on his experiences, he said: "Frankly, I enjoyed the war." What an absolute unit. ## 37. Nazis Dressed as Nuns Fans of the classic wartime comedy Dad's Army will be well aware of the recurring joke about Nazi paratroopers infiltrating while disguised as Nuns, but did you know, it ACTUALLY happened. To evidence that lofty claim, consider the following quote from *The Sands of Dunkirk* by Richard Collier: > "Gunner William Brewer and four mates, retreating to Dunkirk, were drinking tea near a farmhouse when Bombardier 'Geordie' Allen came doubling white-faced. 'Did you ever see a bloody nun shaving?' Stealing across the pasture, all five men saw what they'd always taken to be the tallest of tales: two German paratroopers, white coifs discarded, crucifixes dangling, shaving behind a haystack. Seconds later, the 'nuns' fell dying, riddled with .303 fire, the blood a dark spreading stain on the black habits." And just to prove it wasn't a one off, how about this little extract from *A Soldier's Tale*, by M.K. Joseph: > "In Heugot's, a bistro just behind the Place du Palais Bourbon, a startling transformation took place when a nun who for months had made regular collections among the political clients patronising the bistro appeared as a man – and a German. As Cocteau pointed out, there were 'nuns' everywhere, since penetrating the disguise was a delicate matter." So yeah, Nazi soldiers really were running about dressed as nuns. ## 38. The World's First Super Soldiers? You can't move for depictions of super soldiers in contemporary science fiction, but did you know, the idea has also been tried in real life, with the earliest example coming from the standing in a straight line and politely shooting at each other days of the 17th century? More specifically, it comes from Friedrich Wilhelm I of Prussia, who wanted his favourite regiment, Regiment Number 6, the so called 'Potsdam Giants,' to be comprised of nothing but absolute units, and thus instituted the absurd rule that every single member of the regiment MUST be at least 6 foot 2 inches tall. That would be all but impossible to achieve today, so how on God's earth did he manage it all the way back then, when, you know, no one had any food, and thus lofty fellows were in rather short supply. Well, you could poach them from other militaries with a big bag full of gold, or you could forcibly conscript them – and when that invariably didn't work, you could take the ones you did have, and pair them up with equally tall women… and thus the world's first super soldier program was born! Oh, and if you're reading this and wondering if Friedrich may have had… 'other motivations' behind his obsession with big strapping blokes, you'd be correct, as evidenced by the following which he told to the French Ambassador: > "The most beautiful girl or woman in the world would be a matter of indifference to me, but tall soldiers—they are my weakness." And you know what? Good on you for living your best life Friedrich. ## 39. A Rare Glimpse of Humanity On the 20th of December 1943, right in the dark depths of WWII, an incredible act of human kindness played out in the skies over Germany. Lieutenant Charles Brown was behind the stick of his trusty B-17 bomber, which unfortunately for him, was heavily damaged, having taken an insane amount of flak fire and swarmed by over 12 German fighters while over Bremen. His plane was JUST about holding together, but things weren't looking good. His tail gunner, Sergeant Hugh Eckenrode was dead, many more of his crew were well on their way to joining him, and the plane seemed like it was going to fall apart at any moment, with vast expanses of sky now visible through what once was a solid fuselage. One more attack run would finish him off, he was sure of it. But luckily for him, the man sent to do exactly that was one First Lieutenant Franz Stigler – a man who, when he dived in for the kill in his Messerschmitt 109, couldn't bring himself to do it. The plight of the stricken bomber's crew was plainly visible even to him through the damaged fuselage, and so, he chose not only to spare them, but escort them out of German controlled skies and back to safety – a rare glimpse of war time humanity in the skies over Nazi Germany. ## 40. The Lusitania WAS Carrying Ammunition You likely learned about the 1915 sinking of the RMS Lusitania in school – one of the many German slights that worked to drag the US into WWI. If so, you were likely told that it was an illegitimate target, as it was serving a purely civilian purpose, and thus its sinking was a war crime. But did you know, since those age-old textbooks were penned, it has come out that it WAS actually carrying ammunition, and thus was a completely legitimate target by the standards of the day? Speculation on this matter had been rife for years, pretty much ever since the Lusitania sank in fact, but it was finally confirmed in 2014, when a bundle of documents penned by the British Government back in 1982 were declassified and released to the public, one of which was a communication between Noel Marshall, then the head of the Foreign Office's North America department, and a salvage company that wanted to access the wreck, which said the following: > "The facts are that there is a large amount of ammunition in the wreck, some of which is highly dangerous … (it could) literally blow up on us." This was further confirmed by the releasing of the Lusitania's shipping manifest, which admitted it clear as day – she had 4,200 cases of Remington rifle cartridges, containing about four million rounds, and 1,250 cases of shrapnel shells and fuses in her hold. ## 41. Illegal Weapons of War It's a mad thing given the pointless, wholesale, and industrial scale slaughter that was WWI, but did you know that there was an American weapon that the Germans found so wanton and barbaric, that they actually petitioned their enemy to discontinue its use on humanitarian grounds? But just which one could it be, because we're really spoilt for choice in WWI… Poison gas perhaps, what with the whole slowly dying a burning and agonising death over the course of many hours as your insides melt from the inside out business? Nope, not that. Or maybe flamethrowers, as being melted alive certainly isn't a great way to go. Nope, not that either. It was actually this which was the cause of all the commotion, the Winchester Model 1897, better known as the 'Trench Gun.' It sounds absurd given what else was on offer, but just listen to it from the horse's mouth, specifically from a telegram sent by the Germans on the 15th of September 1918: > "The German Government protests against the use of shotguns by the American Army and calls attention to the fact that according to the laws of war, every prisoner found to have in his possession such guns or ammunition belonging thereto forfeits his life. > This protest is based upon article 23e of the Hague conventions respecting the laws and customs of war on land." ## 42. General Butt Naked Fought between 1989 and 1997, the First Liberian Civil War was a truly horrific business. The conflict resulted in the deaths of over 200,000 people, the displacement of countless others, and left the nation in ruins. Crimes against humanity were also prolific, child soldiers were the norm on both sides, as were mass killings and rampant sexual violence. Amidst this chaos rose Joshua Milton Blahyi, better known by his moniker of 'General Butt Naked,' and he is a… 'interesting' sort to say the least. He led the Naked Base Commandos, a paramilitary insurgency group fighting on the side of President Samuel Doe. And from what you've heard thus far, would you like to guess the standout feature of their… 'method' of warfare? Yep, you guessed right. They did it stark b*llock naked. Well, we say naked, sometimes they would spice things up by cross-dressing, or wearing brightly coloured wigs – but for an average day's crimes-against-humanity-ing, a birthday suit was the battle dress of choice. Why naked you ask? Well, let's hear that from Joshua himself: > "I was naked, and they are shooting me, and nothing was happening. It was not just psychological, it was the means of displaying my power. When I'm naked I disappear faster, when I'm naked I activate my spiritual powers faster than when I had on clothes." As for the crimes against humanity, the Naked Base Commandos had a particular… 'ritual' they liked to partake in before taking to battle… and there's no way to take the sting off of this, so we'll just come out and say it: they'd kidnap a random child, kill them, cut out their heart, and eat it. This, supposedly, would further unlock their spiritual powers. And JUST in case the nudity and the murder didn't grant them enough protection, they would also use a long pointy medical implement to put a tar like substance into their body in a most unpleasant manner. But it gets weirder still, because would you believe it, just as General Butt Naked's side started to lose the war, he had an epiphany – while he was elbow deep in a child sacrifice, literally we might add, the Good Lord Jesus Christ decided to appear and encourage him to repent for his wicked ways. And sure enough, he did exactly that. He's now a Christian pastor… and spends his spare time visiting his victims, who would you believe it, aren't exactly chuffed to see him, and basically breaking into their homes and not leaving until they forgive him. You couldn't make this up. ## 43. Douglas Bader During WWII, there was a British fighter ace named Douglas Bader. He was both a great pilot, and a fantastic strategist, having both 22 kills to his name, and being a huge advocate for the aerial tactics that eventually won the Battle of Britain. That isn't what makes him REALLY interesting however, what does that is the fact he accomplished this… WHILE HAVING NO LEGS. ## 44. The Second Highest Ranked Norwegian Soldier At present, the highest ranked Norwegian soldier is General Eirik Kristoffersen. He is currently head of the entire army and has had a simply glowing career since he first enlisted all the way back in 1988. But commendable though his service has been, we are much more interested in the second highest ranked soldier in that particular army, Major General Sir Nils Olav III, Baron of the Bouvet Islands. Why? Because he is a King Penguin. Sadly, Sir Nils' rank is only ceremonial, meaning we are unable to tell you all about a penguin who ran around Afghanistan with an M16. He is the product of a Norwegian Army tradition dating all the way back to 1961, when the Norwegian King's Guard, while in Edinburgh for the annual Military Tattoo, popped into the local zoo. While there, one soldier, Nils Egelien, took a particular liking to the penguins, and arranged for his regiment to adopt one, which was then named after him. Finding the whole thing rather cute, the regiment decided to treat Nils Olav as if he was people… which including promoting him every time they were in Edinburgh. This led to the martial penguin's rank getting a bit out of hand over the years, especially when ranks and awards are retained by 'new' Nils Olavs. Oh, and the civilian establishment also found the whole thing rather cute, hence the knighthood, and the whole 'Baron of the Bouvet Islands' business… And that's how a penguin became Norway's second highest ranked soldier. ## 45. The First Battle (That We Know About) Battles have been a facet of human civilisation ever since the first cavemen realised they could impose their will on other cavemen by ganging up and smashing their skulls in, but unfortunately, due to writing not really being a thing for the first 300,000 or so years of human history, we know NOTHING about the majority of battles that have occurred. So, knowing that, which IS the first battle we know about? That would be the Battle of Megiddo, which occurred on the 16th of April 1457BC. It saw the Egyptian Empire, commanded by Pharaoh Thutmose III, square off against the Canaanites in the Levant, and delivered a thumping victory for the Egyptians that led to them dominating the region for MANY years to come. But we don't just know a basic overview of the battle, we also know how it played out in some detail. It saw Thutmose strategically camp his forces near the enemy and launch a surprise attack in the early hours of the following morning. The Canaanites had a high-ground advantage, which the Egyptians countered with a clever concave formation and totally overwhelmed them – leading to a glorious and decisive Egyptian victory. We also know the casualty figures: around 4,000 killed and 1,000 wounded on the Egyptian side, and around 8,300 killed and 3,400 captured on the Canaanite side. ## 46. Nazi Crackheads Close your eyes and picture a crackhead… what comes to mind? Perhaps a stereotypical image of a dishevelled fellow on a park bench, engaging in all sorts of bizarre behaviour as he eagerly searches for his next fix? Or maybe an exhausted white-collar financier type who can only get through his gruelling 14-hour shifts with a generous serving of vitamin C? Whatever you pictured, we are willing to bet it wasn't the Nazi Army – and yet, sure enough, they were huge sniff monsters, as narcotics of all sorts were RIFE in the ranks. The chief one was Pervitin, a methamphetamine derivative issued by the Army as an 'alertness aid.' We don't know exactly how much of the stuff was dished out, as such documentation doesn't survive, but we do know that they had 35 MILLION tablets on hand before the Battle of France, and that its issuing continued throughout the war. But it didn't just exist down in the ranks either, Hitler himself was also partial to a bit of rocket fuel. Don't believe us? Have a look at footage of him tweaking off his nut at the 1936 Olympics. ## 47. The Nazi Aircraft Carrier Most of us know that aircraft carriers were 'a bit' of a big deal in WWII, and that Japan, the US, and the UK had a mad amount of them. But what is less well known is that the Germans, typically written off as a middling naval power at best during the war, also had one, kind of. The ship in question was the Graf Zeppelin, and she was part of Germany's ambitious 'Plan Z' – a mass naval building program that was intended to see Germany threaten the supremacy of the Royal Navy, and if finished would have seen them rocking four top-of-the-line carriers. So then, if Germany had her, why do we say they only 'kind of' had a carrier? Well, that would be because she was never actually finished. She was launched in December 1938, and was intended to carry a formidable air wing of 42 aircraft, including the Messerschmitt Bf 109 't' variant, and Junkers Ju 87 'c' variant – both of which were specialised naval variants with tail hooks, reinforced landing gears, and all that other good stuff that naval aircraft need. This would have made her a fearsome prospect if completed, but with war ratcheting ever nearer, and eventually breaking out, there was always something better to spend the money on than actually completing and commissioning her, and so she sat in port, half finished, for the entire war – eventually being scuttled by her own crew in March 1945. ## 48. The Time That POWs Stole a Plane We all love a good escape story, hence the Great Escape, the 1963 classic depicting the legendary 1944 mass escape from Stalag Luft III. But our personal favourite concerns two Luftwaffe pilots, 2nd Lieutenant Heinz Schnabel and 1st Lieutenant Harry Wappler, who REALLY raised the bar for daring when they bust out of Shap Wells Prison Camp in 1941. Their plan saw them secretly make perfect copies of Dutch Air Force uniforms in the camp and 1:1 forgeries of paper IDs, then they cut the wire with homemade tools, and legged it. But that isn't even the audacious part of their plan, because how would they get across the channel? Simple, they'd steal a plane, specifically a Miles Magister trainer from just down the road at RAF Kingstown. Thanks to their uniforms, and buckets full of confidence, no one thought anything of it when they marched through the front gate, hopped in the plane, and took off into the sky. Unfortunately for them, they messed up their fuel calculations, and so ended up making an unplanned hard landing in a field in Norfolk. They attempted to ride it out and play it cool by keeping up the Dutch schtick but were soon rumbled and shipped off to a POW camp in Canada. ## 49. The First Steam Warship Most of you will know that steam propulsion completely revolutionised warships in the 19th century… but do you know what the VERY first steam powered warship ever was? Hopefully not many of you, or else this fact will be a bit redundant! The ship in question was the Demologos, and being the first of her kind, her design was a far cry from later established norms. She was a paddle steamer, so far so normal, right? Where it gets weird is when you discover that her paddle wheel was buried deep within a catamaran hull, that being a style with two parallel hulls of equal size, and a gap of some kind between them. As for her role on the battlefield, she wasn't a ship-of-the-line intended to integrate with the 'normal' navy at sea, but rather was a so called 'floating battery;' literally just a floating gun platform meant for operation in harbours and shallow waters. This also made her tiny, with a displacement of barely 1,500 tons, although she did carry quite a mean set of teeth in the form of 30 32-pounder guns and 2 100-pounder guns. As for her speed… that was a WHOPPING 6mph. Despite being revolutionary, her impact was actually quite limited. The whole world turned around and went: "Ooooh, that's a bit of alright init, we got to get us some of those," but that was about all that happened, and steam warship development proper wouldn't begin until almost 20 years later. And given the fact she was first put to sea in 1814, perhaps this isn't surprising, as she was WAY before her time. ## 50. British Military Slang To finish us off, let's have a quick review of some fun British military slang from over the years. - **"The Civil Servant":** the SA80 rifle, dubbed as such because it doesn't work and can't be fired. - **"Fart Sack":** sleeping bag, dubbed as such on account of what tends to accumulate in it while a soldier is sleeping inside. - **"Crap Hat":** someone from a supposedly boring and/or unglamorous service, often said by the SAS, Paratroopers, and Marines – on account of their posh coloured berets that advertise their 'actiony' roles. - **"Gat":** a gun, derived from 'Gatling Gun.' Note that "bang-stick, shooter, piece," and "bullet-chucker" are also applicable. - **"Bastard Wire":** barbed wire, used to imply that the individual that laid it is one. - **"STAB":** short for "stupid TA bastard," this term describes an incompetent member of His Majesty's Army Reserve, formerly known as the Territorial Army. - **"Death STAG":** A nighttime shift of 'Standing Tall at Gate' guard duty, otherwise known as STAG, dubbed as such on account of what it makes you wish for while doing it. - **"Exercise Blockage":** the inability to go to the toilet while out soldiering… and a problem that is often solved by a Thai Green Curry ration pack. - **"Regimental Bath":** a group activity that involves buckets of freezing water, Brillo pads, and a liberal squirting of shower gel, all applied forcefully and without consent. Performed on gungey blokes who haven't changed their underpants since the Invasion of Iraq. ## Key Takeaways - A cat named Unsinkable Sam served in both the German and British navies during WWII, surviving the sinking of three ships.,The USS Enterprise crew created a toilet bomb to commemorate dropping six million pounds of ordnance in Vietnam.,Some Japanese soldiers continued fighting after WWII ended, with the last surrendering in 1974.,British tankers prioritize a device for boiling water over other equipment, highlighting their tea-drinking culture.,A bear named Wojtek was enlisted in the Polish Army during WWII, helping to load artillery shells and becoming a corporal. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### What is the name of the cat that survived the sinking of three ships during WWII? Unsinkable Sam ### What did the crew of the USS Enterprise create to commemorate the sixth million pound of ordnance dropped on Vietnam? A toilet bomb ### Which Japanese soldiers held out the longest after Japan's surrender in WWII? Masashi Itō, Kinshichi Kozuka, and Teruo Nakamura ### What is the most important piece of equipment in a British tank? The ‘Vessel Boiling Electric,’ or ‘BV’ for short, which boils water on demand to keep the tea flowing. ### What is the name of the Polish bear that was enlisted in the military during WWII? Wojtek ### Which country sent 80 men to guard the Brenner Pass during the Austro-Prussian War and returned with more men than it sent? Liechtenstein ### What is the name of the American soldier who defected to North Korea in 1962? James Joseph Dresnok ### What was the name of the mission in which the Americans stole a Mi-25 helicopter from the Libyans in 1987? Operation Mount Hope III ### Which military branch has the second largest airforce in the world? The US Navy ### What was the name of the first machine gun, invented in 1718? The Puckle Gun ## Sources - [Original Side Projects video: 50 Military Facts That Will Blow You Away](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBj3-MTY1yo) - [Hero image source](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5e/Street_vendor_stall_sale_fake_replica_Nazi_Communist_memorabilia_collectibles_German_WWII_badges_daggers_Soviet_Bulgarian_Lenin_bust_etc_Antique_Artisan_Fair._ul._Oborishte%2C_Paris_SOFIA_Bulgaria_2024-04_IMG_0239.jpg) by Wolfmann / openverse, by-sa. ## Related Coverage Simon Whistler https://sideprojects.pub/article/archaeological-discoveries-that-were-all-lies https://sideprojects.pub/article/archaeological-discoveries-that-were-all-lies Thu, 02 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT In archaeology, every dig is the result of years of study, conflicting theories, academic debate, and often public anticipation. This is especially true when the media gets wind of a potential excavation that could rewrite history, amplifying expectations and fueling excitement. Take, for example, the frequent discoveries in Egypt, each new find often prompts bold predictions from both news outlets and the archaeological community about what might be uncovered. Because these stories are so heavily hyped, the general public is often left disappointed when excavations yield little to nothing. Even worse, genuine archaeological discoveries can sometimes be overlooked simply because they don't match what experts or the public expected to find. So, from supposed Viking sites to the notorious Oak Island of History Channel fame, here are five of the most disappointing archaeological digs ever. ## Newport Tower In the heart of the historic residential downtown area of Newport, Rhode Island, sits Touro Park, home to the mysterious Newport Tower. Standing at 28 feet (8½ meters) tall, this round stone tower features arched entryways surrounding its base, supported by eight columns between them, along with several oddly placed open windows and a floor-level fireplace, accompanied by several nooks. By the 19th century, the tower had become something of a curiosity, as most locals had always remembered it being there, though they weren't quite sure who had built it or for what purpose. Academics tended to believe it was a 17th-century windmill built by Benedict Arnold, not to be confused with Benedict Arnold V, the legendary traitor of the Revolutionary War. His ancestor, Benedict Arnold I, served as the first colonial governor of Rhode Island until his death in office in 1678, and it was on his former property that the tower sits. In his will, Arnold mentioned his "stone-built windmill," which has often been interpreted as the Newport Tower. However, he never claimed that he built the tower, only that it was stone-built, and while many assumed that he had built it, without hard evidence, no one was entirely sure. One theory posited that it was actually built as a beacon tower by the Portuguese noble Miguel Corte-Real, who went missing in 1502 while exploring. Others thought that it could have been a Knights Templar construction. But then, in the 19th century, a new theory began gaining traction: that the Vikings mentioned in the Icelandic sagas, who had settled the New World centuries before Columbus's arrival, had actually made their way as far south as New England, potentially creating settlements and outposts. During this time, several nearby discoveries, like Dighton Rock in Massachusetts, allegedly supported this theory, while researchers like Eben Horsford spent their lives searching New England for Viking settlements. As such, it didn't take long for the Newport Tower to become intertwined with these ideas, and many speculated that Vikings had built it while exploring the region. This narrative was further fueled by notable figures of the era, such as the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and the aforementioned Viking-obsessed Eben Horsford. One of the more influential people to get involved was anthropologist Philip Ainsworth Means, who, in 1942, wrote an article in *The New York Times* claiming that the tower was an ancient Norse church. His main argument was that the architectural style more closely resembled 11th- to 14th-century Scandinavian churches than typical colonial windmills. He also noted that a windmill would not have a fireplace on the ground level, as that is where the grain is stored and that, along with the dry dust present, would be a massive fire hazard. Though this notion has since been proven misguided by the discovery of multiple colonial-era windmills featuring floor-level fireplaces. Eventually, academic curiosity won out, and the local government allowed the Society of American Archaeology to investigate the tower. The project was headed by Harvard University student William S. Godfrey under the direction of Professor Hugh Henken, with the results published in Godfrey's 1951 PhD dissertation. At the site, the team dug a one-meter-wide trench from the tower's exterior through to the interior and discovered several artifacts in the process, including tobacco pipes, iron nails, and pottery fragments, all of which dated to the 17th century. Through the excavations, along with extensive research of historical documentation, Godfrey asserted that Benedict Arnold had undoubtedly purchased the land undeveloped and built both his home and the stone tower sometime before 1677. Of course, this disappointed nearly everyone interested in the project, especially those who believed in a pre-Colonial Norse settlement, and many outright refused to accept his findings. Others argued that, while his work proved the site had been used during the Colonial era, it did not necessarily mean it had been built at that time. Because of the continued contention surrounding the site, which persisted for the next 40 years, a team of researchers from the University of Helsinki and Denmark's Aarhus University eventually stepped in. In 1993, they took a sample of the tower's mortar and subjected it to radiocarbon dating, which revealed, with 95% confidence, that it originated between 1635 and 1698. These findings only further disappointed supporters of pre-Colonial Viking or Templar theories, and some, even within the academic community, still refused to accept that the Newport Tower was simply a 17th-century windmill. In the 1990s, William Penhallow, a professor at the University of Rhode Island who had spent years studying the tower, claimed he had discovered several astronomical alignments within the structure. According to him, certain windows aligned precisely with events such as the winter solstice and lunar cycles. As a result, he speculated that it may have been built as a large timekeeping device. A theory that others later supported and expanded upon. Jim Egan, director of the Newport Tower Museum, believes it was actually constructed under the direction of Queen Elizabeth's advisor John Dee in the 16th century. Dee was known for his intense study of similar optical and astronomical phenomena in England, and Egan suggests that this knowledge was transmitted to the New World. However, there is no concrete evidence to support this claim, and although Penhallow's findings regarding alignments were verified, they did not invalidate Godfrey's earlier archaeological work, extensive documentary research, or the radiocarbon dating results. Most scholars note that the alignments could simply be coincidental or reflect an awareness of such phenomena among colonial builders, especially given that the tower would have been constructed roughly a century after John Dee's experiments. Today, alternative theories about the Newport Tower continue to circulate and are even promoted by Egan through the museum. In reality, much of this persistence is likely driven by the lingering disappointment within popular and fringe circles that the tower is, in fact, just a Colonial windmill. ## Point Rosee As we've already seen today, evidence of Norse or Viking activity in the New World has been among the most sought-after finds in archaeology for the last two hundred years, with countless figures enthralled by the idea. So, in the 2010s, it only made sense for American anthropologist, archaeologist, and Egyptologist Sarah Parcak to join the hunt. In recent years, Parcak has made a name for herself as a "space archaeologist" through her use of satellite imaging, infrared imagery, remote sensing, and other modern technologies. Essentially, she uses satellites to identify anomalies and hidden manmade objects that may indicate potential archaeological sites. Using these methods, Parcak had already unveiled several new tombs, temples, and roads in Egypt, even mapping the ancient city of Tanis and potentially identifying the long-lost 12th Dynasty capital of Itjtawy. Efforts that won her the 2016 TED Prize. Until then, the only confirmed Norse site in North America was L'Anse aux Meadows, discovered on the northernmost tip of Newfoundland, Canada, in 1960 by the husband-and-wife team Helge and Anne Stine Ingstad. There, they uncovered several sod-walled buildings, a forge with worked bog iron, and more than 800 artifacts, irrefutably proving that Norsemen had established a North American settlement around 1000 AD. While many in archaeology believe L'Anse aux Meadows to be an isolated site, with settlers likely returning home after encountering uninhabitable conditions, others maintain that they remained, building additional settlements and expanding further. Using the same methods she had employed in Egypt, Parcak searched Newfoundland and the surrounding regions of Canada, reasoning that if any additional settlements existed, they would likely be near the only confirmed site to date. After identifying several potential locations that might yield evidence of era-appropriate manmade structures, she narrowed the search to Point Rosee, which sits nearly 400 miles (600 km) south of L'Anse aux Meadows. The key feature that drew her attention to the site was a rectilinear, off-colored patch of land, which Parcak assessed to have dimensions very close to those of the Viking longhouse found to the north. Even before excavations were underway, outlets like *Smithsonian Magazine* were publishing articles with headlines such as "Archaeologists Spy New Viking Settlement From Space." And although they noted that archaeological research still had to be conducted, Point Rosee quickly became, for many, proof of additional Viking settlement. To further heighten the situation, when Parcak began leading excavations at the site in 2015, her findings initially seemed to confirm the growing suspicions. At Point Rosee, her team uncovered several earthen features they believed could be Viking-style turf walls, though the most compelling evidence was slag found at a potential hearth site. It was later identified as bog iron, like that discovered at L'Anse aux Meadows, a type of ore commonly found in wetlands and bogs. Because it's damp and tends to explode when exposed to a hot furnace, bog iron is very difficult to work and typically has low natural purity. However, when the slag was tested under an electron microscope, it proved to be between 85 and 90% pure iron and showed signs of slow roasting. All indications that it was not naturally occurring, but rather in the early stages of iron production by someone skilled in working the metal when it had been abandoned. It was then radiocarbon dated to between the 9th and 13th centuries AD. Meanwhile, the hearth itself was located near an assumed turf wall laid out in an "L" shape, leading her team to believe it had been intentionally constructed to allow air to pass to the hearth. To Parcak, these findings seemed definitive at the time, and she felt confident enough to state publicly, "We have the second pre-Columbian iron processing site in North America." A claim that, unsurprisingly, set the academic world ablaze. Outlets like PBS and *The New York Times* began publishing articles relaying her findings, while others such as *National Geographic* hailed it as a discovery that could rewrite history. By this point, nearly everyone expected that Point Rosee would be confirmed as the second Viking settlement in the New World. With expectations higher than ever, Parcak's team returned to the site in 2016, hoping to uncover physical artifacts that would settle the matter. Unfortunately, this was where the story took a sharp turn, and even the previously gathered evidence began to unravel. That second summer, her team found no new evidence, no artifacts and no actual timber beneath the supposed "turf walls." After further examination, the team concluded that the suspected turf walls and longhouse features were little more than natural earthen formations. At the same time, additional testing on the bog iron suggested it was likely natural in origin, albeit unusually pure. In 2017, Parcak herself was forced to concede that the entire effort had been a major disappointment, stating in her project report that "None of the team, including the Norse specialists, deemed this area as having any traces of human activity." The findings were so underwhelming that, within a few months, Point Rosee went from being the next major archaeological breakthrough, seemingly full of evidence of Viking settlement, to effectively nothing. Parcak did not pursue further excavations at the site, and before long, the public largely forgot the disappointing episode altogether. ## Bosnian Pyramids Northwest of Bosnia and Herzegovina's capital of Sarajevo, near the town of Visoko, sit several massive pyramid-shaped hills, the largest of which is called Visocica, with a height just shy of 700 feet (210 meters). All of them are covered in vegetation and have seen their fair share of history. Atop Visocica Hill, for example, sit the remains of a medieval fortress, while the town of Visoko itself served as Bosnia's capital during the Middle Ages. Yet these are not what the region has become famous for in recent years. In 2005, Bosnian-American businessman and author Sam Osmanagich began running a media campaign, starting with local Bosnian news outlets. In articles, he claimed that, while visiting his home country earlier that year, he went to the largest pyramid-shaped hill and noticed similarities between the flat-faced hills and pyramids he had visited around the world. At the site, he pulled out his compass and discovered that all four sides of the hills faced the cardinal directions of North, South, East, and West. Early the following year, he tasked a team of geologists from the University of Tuzla with analyzing core samples from the hills, and it is here, already, that the narratives begin to diverge. The team reported that Visocica Hill was composed of the same materials as the surrounding mountains. Namely, alternating layers of clay, sandstone, and conglomerate. Despite this public assessment, Osmanagich sought and secured funding and approval for excavations, which he began in 2006, culminating in his book that same year, *Bosnian Valley of the Pyramids*. In the book, and in subsequent interviews, Osmanagich asserts that Visocica and four other nearby hills were actually ancient pyramids made of massive concrete blocks, for which he claimed to have found undeniable evidence. According to his theory, the tallest of these, dubbed the Pyramid of the Sun, dwarfed the Great Pyramid of Giza by over 250 feet (over 80 meters) and predated it by at least 8,000 years, with alleged radiocarbon dating placing it to between 12,000 and 14,000 years ago. The other four hills he named the Pyramid of the Moon, Dragon, Love, and Earth, stating that they were all part of a massive pyramid complex interconnected through underground tunnels. Because his findings were heavily promoted at the time, many people around the world, along with the Bosnian government, became invested, viewing it as a potential discovery that could rewrite history as we know it. Those in the archaeological community, however, were far more skeptical. In the summer of 2006, Boston University geologist Robert Schoch decided to investigate the pyramids for himself. After 10 days, he left disappointed, concluding that they were little more than mundane geological formations known as "flatirons" in the United States. Others in the academic community were less restrained and did not hold back their opinions. That same year, the European Association of Archaeologists released a statement condemning both Osmanagich and the Bosnian government for supporting him. They called the endeavor a "cruel hoax" and urged the government to stop backing a fallacy that detracted from the real history of Visoko. When Osmanagich attempted to have the pyramids designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the association's president, Anthony Harding, personally intervened, along with 25 other scholars representing six countries, to prevent it. Mark Rose, then online editor for *Archaeology Magazine*, noted similarities to claims Osmanagich had made in his earlier book *The World of the Maya*, in which he posed similar pseudo-archaeological ideas, including that the Maya were descended from Atlanteans. Likely in response to the heavy criticism, the Bosniak-Croat Federation's minister of culture labeled his work "unreliable" and blocked the renewal of excavations in 2007. However, Prime Minister Nedžad Branković quickly overruled him, stating that the government would not interfere in a project that had drawn global interest. A promise the government would keep. To this day, Osmanagich continues to lead excavations at the Bosnian Pyramids and the associated archaeological park, defending his theory. In 2025, he even submitted a multidisciplinary evaluation of his findings to the *Journal of Biomedical Research & Environmental Sciences*. In it, he claimed to have discovered proof of human construction in the form of Fibonacci spirals and other geometric shapes, along with evidence that the pyramids emit electromagnetic fields and ultrasounds, allegedly used for healing and communication. Unsurprisingly, most in the archaeological community continue to reject his claims, seemingly growing more frustrated with each new announcement. Today, the Bosnian Pyramids are widely regarded as "pseudo-archaeology," promoted in part by the government for tourism purposes, which they have undeniably supported. According to one case study, the Bosnian Pyramids attracted over 2.1 million visitors to the region between 2005 and 2024, boosting the local economy. However, if anything, the pyramids have proved disappointing to nearly everyone involved. While some tourists who make the journey believe in their validity, many leave underwhelmed, having expected a true ancient pyramid complex. Those invested in the project, meanwhile, remain frustrated by the archaeological community's refusal to accept its claims, while the broader academic community is disappointed that an entire government has embraced what they view as a large-scale hoax. ## Oak Island Today, most people have heard of this entry, largely thanks to *The Curse of Oak Island*, which began airing its 13th season in 2026. A season the History Channel's website promised would feature the "ultimate plan to solve the 230-year-old treasure mystery." The island itself is a 140-acre piece of land located off the southern coast of Nova Scotia, Canada, in Mahone Bay, and gets its name from the abundance of oak trees it is home to. The key attraction on the island, and the one that has drawn treasure hunters for over two centuries, is a 13-foot (4-meter) wide, 100-foot (30.5-meter) deep hole, affectionately referred to as the "Money Pit." The history of the pit goes back to 1795 when, according to legend, a 16-year-old Nova Scotia boy named Daniel McGuinness discovered a depression in the ground that he and his friends began digging. They reportedly found a circle of stones lining the pit's interior and two wooden platforms, each ten feet apart, essentially forming a manmade shaft. Since this was shortly after the Golden Age of Piracy had ended, when Nova Scotia frequently saw figures like Bartholomew Roberts and Ned Low conducting summer raids on villages and ships, piracy had become a local cultural staple. As such, pirate myths and legends became commonplace, eventually finding their way to Oak Island. Rumors began circulating that the mysterious hole could be the final resting place of the notorious Captain Kidd's treasure, buried to protect it from greedy thieves. Initially, McGuinness's story seems to have been steeped in oral tradition, as the first printed account did not appear until an 1862 edition of the *Liverpool Transcripts*. This has left room for speculation and alternative theories, including that he may have been older than legend suggests or that he never existed at all. Regardless, McGuinness's story spread like wildfire after 1862, with news outlets across the globe reprinting it, often with the lingering question of pirate treasure in tow. In fact, these reports didn't even circulate until well after companies had begun attempting excavations into the Money Pit, with the first effort coming in the early 1800s by the Onslow Company. According to later accounts, the group dug down, finding more wooden platforms every 10 feet and making it to just past a depth of 90 feet, where they reportedly uncovered a rectangular stone with strange markings on it. These were later transcribed in the 1860s as reading, "Forty Feet Below Two Million Pounds Are Buried." However, the stone was reportedly lost shortly after translation. After discovering the stone, the shaft allegedly flooded on the Onslow Company, forcing them to abandon their venture. In 1849, a local group called the Truro Company reportedly gave it their best effort. They drilled boreholes down into the Money Pit, allegedly finding wood, bits of metal including a gold chain, plant fibers such as coconut, and more, before the pit flooded once again. To continue excavating, the team concluded they needed to locate the source of the flooding and stop it, so they turned their attention to nearby Smith's Cove, where they believed it originated. Before long, however, the Truro Company reportedly ran out of funding and was forced to leave. Still, their reports fueled speculation that the Money Pit had been designed with intentional booby traps, meant to flood the shaft as soon as anyone came close to retrieving Captain Kidd's treasure. A narrative whose legend grew with each retelling in the media. However, it is again worth noting that these ventures predated formal reporting on Oak Island, and many have since suspected that much of what was "discovered" during this period was either embellished or entirely fabricated. Regardless, it was reporting on these events, from the 1860s onward, that fueled treasure hunts, archaeological digs, and eventually entertainment for the next 160 years, as that was essentially how the story progressed. A new group would arrive, inspired by promises of pirate treasure, uncover a bit of wood or metal, which would then be reported on by the media, and the team would ultimately be forced to give up, either due to lack of funding or sheer disappointment. They would occasionally find artifacts of questionable authenticity or unclear meaning, after which others, newly inspired, would take up the call and launch another dig. At times, accidents even proved fatal, reportedly six in total, which helped give rise to the titular "curse" myth, though this too has been questioned. Perhaps one of the most notable figures to become enthralled with Oak Island's Money Pit, at least before the present day, was future president Franklin D. Roosevelt, who joined excavations with the Old Gold Salvage Group in 1909 before they, too, left disappointed. In 2006, brothers Rick Lagina and Marty Lagina sought to fulfill a childhood dream and purchased 50% of the island's land, eventually gaining the support of the History Channel, which debuted their show in 2014. Likely to keep the show entertaining for a broader audience, many episodes tend to focus on non-archaeological aspects, such as the titular curse or various borderline fringe theories. Over the years, these have included claims that the island hosted the Knights Templar, housed the Ark of the Covenant, concealed William Shakespeare's lost works, or held Marie Antoinette's missing jewels; that the Aztec traveled thousands of miles to hide gold there from the Spanish; or even that the Money Pit itself is merely a distraction from the real treasure location. And on and on. Despite the constant promotion of sometimes far-fetched theories, the brothers clearly believe in their mission, dedicating years and millions of dollars to the project. It is worth noting, however, that they have also earned far more from the show's immense profitability than they have spent on the search. Thanks to this funding, they have been able to conduct more extensive work, uncover more legitimate artifacts, and make greater strides than any who came before them on the island. Beginning in the show's fourth season, the team brought on Laird Niven, an expert in regional history who often serves as the "straight man," urging caution with each discovery and casting doubt on more fantastical claims. This skepticism is widely shared by the broader archaeological community, as the show's, and the project's, popularity and polarization have occasionally proven problematic. While the team does make legitimate discoveries, the show's tendency to connect them to fringe theories rather than offer grounded archaeological interpretation often leaves a poor impression within academia. Throughout the seasons, across Oak Island, the Lagina brothers have uncovered a stone road in a swamp, metal coins and artifacts, pottery from the Mi'kmaq people, and countless colonial-era items. Each time, the show frames these finds as potential proof of pirate treasure or the Knights Templar, exciting both the crew and its audience, only for Niven to consistently temper such claims with more realistic interpretations, earning him the nickname "Negative Niven." Based on the available evidence, Oak Island most likely served as a colonial, or even pre-colonial, site for trade, ship repair, and other services. A view supported by many archaeologists and historians. The so-called booby traps that flood the pit are often attributed by experts to natural underground fractures and caves that collapse when disturbed, creating sinkholes and flooding. In truth, many believe Oak Island does possess genuine historical significance, and the Lagina brothers have contributed substantially to that understanding. However, the persistence of long-standing legends, combined with the show's tendency to emphasize treasure and myth over historical accuracy, often leaves historians disappointed. As often are viewers who expect the discovery of a vast pirate hoard or hidden Templar cache, rather than consistent archaeological evidence pointing to a colonial hub. ## Noah's Ark In the Bible, sometime after creating man, God noticed that his creation had become corrupted, violent, and evil. Displeased, he decided to flood the Earth, sparing only the righteous Noah and his family, who built an ark and were tasked with saving two of every animal, except the dinosaurs and unicorns. Then, according to Genesis 8:4, as the rains finally settled, "on the seventh day of the seventh month, the ark came to rest on the mountains of Ararat." A location some have taken to be the dormant volcano with the same name along Turkey's eastern border, while others have interpreted the pluralized "mountains" as indicative of Urartu, an Iron Age kingdom that encompassed eastern Turkey, western Iran, and Armenia. As such, it was a kingdom surrounded by several mountain ranges, including the Lesser Caucasus, the Taurus Mountains, and the Pontic Range. Because of this openness to interpretation, several locations have been proposed as the final resting place of Noah's Ark, only to be immediately rebuked or disproven, much to the chagrin of biblical archaeologists and theologians everywhere. Claims of the ark's discovery first began in the 19th century. Curiously, most early hunts weren't based on small discoveries requiring follow-ups or research-based theories, but on blatant firsthand claims of openly seeing an ark, or pieces of it, perched on a mountainside. In 1876, British attorney and politician James Bryce climbed Mount Ararat, where he claimed he'd found an ancient piece of intentionally cut wood located far above the limit of naturally occurring trees, which he insisted was undoubtedly a fragment of the ark. Around six years later, an avalanche on the mountain reportedly destroyed several villages. Inspired, journalist George McCullagh Reed published an April Fool's Day prank in the opinion column of the *New Zealand Herald* in 1883 under the pen name "Pollex." In the article, he claimed the avalanche had uncovered Noah's Ark for the world to see, and, almost immediately, news outlets across the globe began reprinting the story for months afterward. While some recognized the prank, others took it seriously, and that November Reed was forced to print a retraction, apologizing for the hoax. Despite his apology, however, the story had already gained traction and, together, Bryce and "Pollex" had unknowingly lit a fire that would continue burning into the present day. In the years that followed, countless claims emerged pinpointing Mount Ararat as the resting place of Noah's Ark, leading to numerous expeditions. One story alleged that a 1917 expedition by Russian soldiers discovered the ark on the mountain just days before the Bolsheviks took over, while another, from 1948, claimed that Kurdish farmers had uncovered a massive ship's prow about two-thirds of the way up the slope. Yet another asserted that an oil engineer personally spotted the ark in 1954 from a helicopter while circling the mountain. And so the Mount Ararat rumors persisted, continuing well into the present day. Of those to take up the call at the mountain, few were as prolific as American astronaut James Irwin, the eighth man to ever set foot on the Moon. While on his lunar mission, Irwin reportedly experienced a religious epiphany and, the following year, left NASA to found the High Flight Foundation, an evangelical organization based in Colorado Springs. Through his evangelical connections, Irwin eventually became intrigued by the stories emerging from the Turkish mountain and sought to excavate the potential site himself. In 1982, largely because of his celebrity status, the government allowed him to lead an expedition to find the ark. An attempt that swiftly ended in disaster when Irwin wandered off from the group and fell from the mountain trail, leaving him badly injured. After being rescued and treated in a hospital, however, Irwin was more determined than ever and, over the next five years, personally attempted five more expeditions up the mountain before being told to stop for medical reasons after his 1987 trip. Yet the following year, he still sent the High Flight Foundation to excavate the site in his stead, albeit under different leadership. However, none of these attempts yielded any results, and any of the claimed sightings at Mount Ararat were ultimately dismissed when properly examined by independent researchers and institutions. In more recent years, hunters for Noah's Ark have instead turned their attention to a site 18 miles (29 km) to the south, near the Iranian border. There, in 1959, a Turkish army captain and cartographer named İlhan Durupınar was reviewing mapping photographs when he noticed a 515-foot (157-meter) long geological formation in the mountains shaped like a boat. Before long, the wider world caught wind of his discovery, naming the site after him, with many speculating that the earth had gradually covered the ark in the time since the flood. The very next year, a team led by evangelist George Vandeman was dispatched to inspect it; they returned swiftly, determining it to be a natural geological formation. Despite this, Christian archaeologists, theologians, treasure hunters, and even the government eventually took up the call. Most notably, American nurse anesthetist and pseudo-archaeologist Ron E. Wyatt, who claimed to have made nearly 100 biblical discoveries in his lifetime, including the "living" blood of Christ, the remains of Sodom and Gomorrah, and, of course, Noah's Ark at Durupınar. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Wyatt visited the site at least three separate times, promoting it as the true location of Noah's Ark the entire time. Efforts that ultimately prompted the Turkish government to designate it a national park in 1986. In the 1990s, teams were even dispatched to drill core samples at the site, attempt excavations, and conduct further research. Another major supporter, who would eventually become one of its most disappointed advocates, was American salvage expert David Fasold, who wrote *The Ark of Noah* in 1988, detailing his belief in Durupınar as the ark's resting place. Yet after spending years leading research at the site, he was forced to concede in 1996, co-authoring a paper with petrologist Lorence G. Collins. Together, they stated unequivocally that the site was a geological formation composed of mud and rock that merely resembles a giant boat by pure coincidence, and nothing more. And yet, not everyone was deterred and, even today, others continue to take up the call. In recent years, a team called Noah's Ark Scans, led by Andrew Jones, has been working at the site and claims to have made several discoveries. They assert that, through the use of ground-penetrating radar, they have identified subsurface structures resembling corridors, rooms, ship decks, and more. Additionally, they claim to have found evidence of decomposed wood through soil testing. In 2025, this once again led to articles from major media outlets, including the *New York Post*, which touted Durupınar as the Noah's Ark site with secrets still to unveil. However, many archaeologists and academics remain highly skeptical, even within the Christian community, as they have heard such claims before. At this point, most assume it will ultimately amount to little more than unverified assertions that leave theologians disappointed once again. Others have been more direct in their assessments. As Jodi Magness, an archaeologist and explorer for National Geographic, stated, "No legitimate archaeologist does this. Archaeology is not treasure hunting…It's a science where we come up with research questions that we hope to answer by excavation." ## Key Takeaways - Media hype often leads to public disappointment when archaeological digs yield little. - The Newport Tower in Rhode Island was confirmed to be a 17th-century windmill. - Point Rosee in Newfoundland was initially thought to be a Viking settlement but was later found to be a natural formation. - The Bosnian Pyramids are widely regarded as a pseudo-archaeological hoax despite government support. - Oak Island's Money Pit has been the subject of extensive excavations and media attention, but no significant treasure has been found. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### What is the Newport Tower? The Newport Tower is a round stone tower located in Touro Park, Newport, Rhode Island. It stands at 28 feet tall and features arched entryways, eight columns, oddly placed open windows, and a floor-level fireplace. ### What are some of the theories about the Newport Tower's origin? Some theories suggest the Newport Tower was built by the Portuguese noble Miguel Corte-Real, the Knights Templar, or even the Vikings. However, academic research indicates it was likely a 17th-century windmill built by Benedict Arnold I. ### What was the outcome of the archaeological investigation led by William S. Godfrey? The investigation discovered artifacts dating to the 17th century, including tobacco pipes, iron nails, and pottery fragments. Godfrey concluded that Benedict Arnold I built the tower before 1677, disappointing those who believed in pre-Colonial origins. ### What is Point Rosee and why was it significant? Point Rosee is a site in Newfoundland where Sarah Parcak used satellite imaging to identify potential Viking activity. Initial excavations in 2015 found bog iron and earthen features, but further investigation in 2016 revealed these to be natural formations. ### What is the Bosnian Pyramids controversy? The Bosnian Pyramids controversy involves claims by Sam Osmanagich that several hills near Visoko, Bosnia, are ancient pyramids. Academic geologists and archaeologists have dismissed these claims, stating the hills are natural geological formations. ### What is the Oak Island Money Pit? The Oak Island Money Pit is a 13-foot wide, 100-foot deep hole on Oak Island, Nova Scotia. It has been the subject of numerous treasure hunts and archaeological digs, with many theories about its origins, including claims of pirate treasure or hidden historical artifacts. ### What is the current understanding of the Oak Island Money Pit? The Money Pit is likely a colonial or pre-colonial site for trade and ship repair. The so-called booby traps that flood the pit are attributed to natural underground fractures and caves. ### What are some of the claims about Noah's Ark's location? Claims about Noah's Ark's location include Mount Ararat in Turkey and the Durupınar site near the Iranian border. Various expeditions and studies have been conducted, but most findings have been dismissed as natural geological formations. ### What is the Durupınar site and why is it controversial? The Durupınar site is a geological formation in Turkey shaped like a boat, which some believe could be Noah's Ark. However, extensive research has shown it to be a natural formation, disappointing those who hoped it was the ark. ### What is the significance of the Newport Tower's radiocarbon dating? Radiocarbon dating of the Newport Tower's mortar revealed it originated between 1635 and 1698, confirming it as a 17th-century structure. 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[https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-17211415](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-17211415) - [https://tourcroatia.co.uk/are-they-lying-to-you-about-the-bosnian-pyramids/](https://tourcroatia.co.uk/are-they-lying-to-you-about-the-bosnian-pyramids/) - [https://www.robertschoch.com/bosnia.html](https://www.robertschoch.com/bosnia.html) - [https://medium.com/@ashlynb1684/the-bosnian-pyramids-of-visoko-a-case-study-critiquing-semir-osmanagićs-pseudo-archaeological-9c896fd3b616](https://medium.com/@ashlynb1684/the-bosnian-pyramids-of-visoko-a-case-study-critiquing-semir-osmanagićs-pseudo-archaeological-9c896fd3b616) - [https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.314.5807.1862a](https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.314.5807.1862a) - [https://www.academia.edu/129498674/Bosnian_Pyramids_Against_All_Odds_A_Case_Study_in_Vision_Driven_Tourism_2005_2025](https://www.academia.edu/129498674/Bosnian_Pyramids_Against_All_Odds_A_Case_Study_in_Vision_Driven_Tourism_2005_2025) - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oak_Island](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oak_Island) - 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[https://owen-schaefer.medium.com/the-real-curse-of-oak-island-is-the-show-s-terrible-producers-2258e6bd41b0](https://owen-schaefer.medium.com/the-real-curse-of-oak-island-is-the-show-s-terrible-producers-2258e6bd41b0) - [https://www.history.com/shows/the-curse-of-oak-island/articles/curse-of-oak-island-top-theories](https://www.history.com/shows/the-curse-of-oak-island/articles/curse-of-oak-island-top-theories) - [https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/article/noahs-ark-archaeology-search-science](https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/article/noahs-ark-archaeology-search-science) - [https://answersingenesis.org/creationism/arguments-to-avoid/special-report-amazing-ark-expose/?srsltid=AfmBOorbrU6GXMDxV75j8lalXwicW8-c4xnGnfB-mm5aAs7MIhXuTbqe](https://answersingenesis.org/creationism/arguments-to-avoid/special-report-amazing-ark-expose/?srsltid=AfmBOorbrU6GXMDxV75j8lalXwicW8-c4xnGnfB-mm5aAs7MIhXuTbqe) - [https://www.originallifemagazines.com/product/life-magazine-september-5-1960/](https://www.originallifemagazines.com/product/life-magazine-september-5-1960/) - 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[https://www.nytimes.com/1982/08/21/world/around-the-world-ex-astronaut-injured-while-climbing-ararat.html](https://www.nytimes.com/1982/08/21/world/around-the-world-ex-astronaut-injured-while-climbing-ararat.html) - [https://noahsarkscans.com/](https://noahsarkscans.com/) - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Durupınar_site](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Durupınar_site) - [https://www.csun.edu/~vcgeo005/bogus.html](https://www.csun.edu/~vcgeo005/bogus.html) - [Hero image source](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/22/Bronze_age_or_Early_Iron_Age_cairn_tomb_Partille_municipality_Sweden_on_June_21_2026_view_2.jpg) by R. Henrik Nilsson / openverse, by. ## Related Coverage Simon Whistler https://sideprojects.pub/article/companies-with-surprising-links-to-cults https://sideprojects.pub/article/companies-with-surprising-links-to-cults Thu, 02 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT There are a lot of companies and products with surprising origin stories. Everyone knows that Coca-Cola once contained cocaine and that Listerine was a powerful surgical antiseptic and floor cleaner, but there are plenty of other examples. For instance, before treadmills were used as a form of exercise, they were a form of punishment for prisoners that also provided useful work like grinding grain. And of course Ferruccio Lamborghini founded his luxury car company out of spite because Enzo Ferrari was rude to him. However, sometimes these origin stories aren't just surprising, they're concerning. Today we'll be looking at a few prominent companies with deep ties to religious cults, some of which are still wholly owned by the cults to this day. ## Purina You're probably familiar with the brand Purina from their lines of pet foods, but those aren't the only products that the company made. Purina was founded by William Danforth in 1894 as Purina Mills. The company's goal was to sell feed for farm animals that they referred to as "chow." You may have seen Purina Puppy Chow and Purina Cat Chow at the grocery store, as those products still use that original name, but they also made horse chow, pig chow, rabbit chow, and for some reason monkey chow. However, the same year that Purina started up its animal feed business, a man named Webster Edgerly purchased a large amount of farmland in New Jersey. This land was going to be home to the members of his cult, known as Ralstonism. Edgerly had graduated from law school in 1876 and was a practicing lawyer, but that wasn't his primary interest. The same year he graduated, he formed a group known as the Ralston Health Club. The organization was based on Edgerly's teachings from a number of books he wrote under the pseudonym Everett Ralston, which was also the basis for the group's name. Between those published under the Ralston pen name and his real name, Edgerly wrote dozens of books of a somewhat religious nature, preaching of a utopian society. He also published 82 books under the pseudonym Edmund Shaftesbury that were essentially self-help books. These books were also key to the beliefs of the Ralston Health Club, later renamed Ralstonism, and were published by Edgerly's Ralston Company. As with most cults, the majority of the beliefs and teachings of Ralstonism were insane. There was a lot of pseudoscientific gibberish about things like personal magnetism. For example, Edgerly wrote that by picking up a marble off a table and swinging it around, a person could increase their personal magnetism and thus attract more members of the opposite sex. He also believed that people should only walk on the balls of their feet and never in a straight line, otherwise their "vital forces" would leak out. Edgerly's views on marriage were more than a little unusual as well. He believed that every man should have a sort of trial marriage with someone old enough to be his grandmother. Presumably this was meant to teach the man how to be an adequate husband and lover, and once the probationary marriage was complete each man should then marry a girl 20 years younger than him. And of course, couples were to have sex once every eight days. No less, and absolutely no more. But perhaps the most important part of Edgerly's teaching as it pertained to Ralstonism was the desire to create a new Caucasian race that was free from impurities. Those who joined him in New Jersey would be the founding members of the new race, and he advocated for all racially impure males to be castrated at birth. However, while most of Ralstonism was insane, not quite everything was. Many of Edgerly's self-help books focused on actual good advice about hygiene, diet, and exercise. Those books would also be filled with non sequitur racist rants, though this was only one generation removed from the Civil War, so perhaps it didn't seem unhinged to people back then. Regardless, one of the recommendations made regarding diet was the consumption of whole grain cereals for breakfast, which was both gaining in popularity at the time and sensible advice. And that's where Purina came in. In 1898 they decided to branch out from animal feed into people feed, and Danforth decided to base his recipe on one that appeared in one of Edgerly's books. He reached out for an endorsement, which was received, and Ralston Wheat Cereal went on sale that year as a hot breakfast cereal. Despite being a crackpot cult leader, Edgerly was still well known and respected; it was even known that Queen Victoria had a full collection of his books. Unsurprisingly the Ralston Wheat Cereal was a hit, and so Purina Mills and the Ralston Company merged to create Ralston Purina. The Ralston side of the company was responsible for cereal production, and they created several popular cereals such as Chex and Cookie Crisp. These cereals were branded with the Ralston name until 1998 when the brands were sold off to General Mills. ## Yogi Tea Harbhajan Singh Puri was born in 1929 in Punjab, British India, what is now Pakistan. His family fled to New Delhi during the partition of India in 1947, after which he attended college and received a master's degree in economics. About 15 years later, he moved to North America, first staying in Toronto before settling in Los Angeles. The year was 1968, and it was the perfect time for Puri to have arrived in Los Angeles. The city was fresh off the heels of the Summer of Love, and LA was still completely overrun by hippies. These hippies made the perfect audience for Puri as he introduced Sikhism to Western society. The Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee, a bureaucratic organization responsible for managing Sikh temples and their jurisdictions, had given Puri the title of Siri Singh Sahib, making him the official leader of Sikhism in the Western world. As such, Puri began going by the name Yogi Bhajan while acquiring followers. However, as impressive as all of that sounded to gullible hippies, none of it was true. Puri had spent his 15 years after college as a low level government employee, mostly working as a customs officer. Not only was he not an official ambassador of Sikhism for the West, but the president of the committee condemned Puri and his teachings, many of which were considered "forbidden and immoral" violations of Sikh customs. But the Westerners didn't know any of this, and much of what Puri taught aligned with what the hippies already believed anyway. His early work in North America mostly focused on teaching yoga, with an emphasis on tantric yoga, but in the summer of 1969 Puri founded 3HO. The name stood for the Healthy, Happy, and Holy Organization, and it was also referred to as Sikh Dharma International. Puri used 3HO to spread what was seen in the East as a bastardized version of Sikhism. He claimed that his teaching of meditation, yoga, and vegetarianism, and the practices of wearing all white and of men not cutting their hair or beards were all part of the Sikh religion. While this was all appealing to members of 1960s and 70s counterculture in the United States (except for the part about not being able to wear their tie-dyed clothes anymore), most of it was a lie. Naam Simran and Kirtan are both forms of Sikh meditation, and it's true that traditionally Sikh men did not cut their hair or beards. However, they are not required to wear white, be vegetarian, and they do not practice yoga. Regardless, Puri was able to lie his way into being a prominent member of the community and recruiting many members to 3HO. The early converts were mostly hippies, but as they grew they began to branch out. And of course, Puri had to also tighten his grip on his followers. In standard cult fashion, members of 3HO had to cut off everyone else in their lives, sign over their assets or buy property in the organization's name, and work long hours in 3HO businesses. Members were forced into arranged marriages where men had total control over their wives, and following his death in 2004 Puri was subject to numerous credible claims of sexual abuse and assault. The cult's members were also kept sleep deprived and malnourished, but at the end of their long and grueling shifts, they would always be treated to Puri's special blend of tea. And as it turns out, the tea was really good. Because he was going by the name Yogi Bhajan, his students referred to it as Yogi Tea. And in 1984, the cult began manufacturing and selling the tea en masse. Yogi Tea has since grown into one of the best selling tea companies in the United States, with almost $60 million in sales annually. However, this isn't the only company that the 3HO cult is responsible for. One of Puri's converts was a man known as Gurutej Khalsa, the name he took after converting to 3HO's version of Sikhism. He attempted to join the military and to find work in law enforcement, but he found that his beard and turban made it impossible to do so. Undeterred, in 1980 he founded a security company called Akal Security which was then donated to 3HO. The security company was originally staffed entirely by cult members and was used to guard local stores and restaurants. It quickly grew, and was able to secure government security contracts thanks to the US government's policy of always going with the cheapest available option. They have acquired many lucrative contracts and have been responsible for providing security to airports, military bases, embassies, and even the White House. While price was the major factor in the early contracts, obviously Akal Security must be good at what they do if they have been able to continue acquiring these government contracts for decades. And since 2000, Akal Security, who is still wholly owned by 3HO's parent organization Sikh Dharma International, has secured over $3.5 billion in government security contracts. ## Acellus Academy In 2013, Acellus Labs was founded by Dr. Roger Billings. The company focused on online learning with their Acellus Learning System, an online curriculum that could be used by schools or for parents that were homeschooling their children. In 2015 they also created Acellus Academy, an accredited school with the ability to give high school diplomas. Acellus Labs was under the umbrella of Billing's other business venture, the International Academy of Science. For years the curriculum was utilized by a number of public schools, and many homeschooled children were taught entirely through Acellus Academy. However, it wasn't until 2020 that the program became the matter of controversy. Due to the pandemic, all schooling was switched to remote learning which resulted in more children using the Acellus curriculum. Perhaps more importantly, many parents were also now working remotely as well, which meant that they were home to see exactly what Acellus was teaching their children. And they were not happy. Many people found the curriculum created by Acellus to contain racist, misogynistic, or otherwise objectionable content. There were reports of religious content being included in subjects when it wasn't appropriate and not being taught in a historical context. Even ignoring the arguably subjective complaints regarding the content being taught, a review by the Department of Education found the material to contain repetitive tasks with "low cognitive demand," and the online tools were often glitchy or poorly designed, with navigation bars covering up text that appeared on screen as part of the lessons. All of these complaints caused people to look further into the company behind these educational tools, and then into the man behind that company. As it turns out, Dr. Roger Billings received his doctorate from the International Academy of Science, the unaccredited institution that he personally founded. Many of the other teachers working for Acellus also received degrees from the International Academy of Science, and they had no teaching credentials from accredited universities. Looking further into Billings, it was discovered that he was also the former head of the Church of Jesus Christ in Zion. This was an offshoot of the Mormons, and it was founded in 1984 based off the teachings of Billing's friend, Kenneth Asay. Asay claimed to be the reincarnation of Joseph Smith, and one of the key reasons for the split with the Mormon Church was the belief that it was man's divine responsibility to take more than one wife. Former members of the Church of Jesus Christ in Zion have referred to the organization as a polygamist cult, with Billings allegedly having 38 wives and at least 70 children. However, information regarding this can be difficult to find or verify. Billing officially distanced himself from the church in public statements as early as 2004, and he has worked tirelessly to scrub the internet of anything that might connect him to the church, as well as attempting to remove all negative press about Acellus from the internet. According to reporting, he has gone so far as to threaten people with legal action for making disparaging comments about Acellus's curriculum on internet forums, and any attempt to look into Acellus or Billings is likely to result in countless dead links to pages that he has since had removed. Despite his public claims, however, experts believe that he is still the head of the cult. And while Billings has done his best to sanitize his appearance online, there are still the employee reviews of Acellus Academy on the career website Glassdoor, a website that specializes in anonymous and honest company reviews that the companies cannot alter or delete. Seeing as Billings is a former (if not current) cult leader, it should come as no surprise that the company was described as feeling like a cult. Management was made up entirely of Billings and his family members, people were expected to work long hours with no benefits, most people lived on a campus directly across the street, and employees were not even allowed to bring their own food to work, even if they had strict dietary restrictions. But even if Acellus Academy is a poorly run company founded by a cult leader that produces questionable, problematic, and sometimes even factually inaccurate educational material, there was one thing that even the most negative company reviews from employees all agreed on: it was pretty cool having free Starbucks in the company's cafeteria. ## Key Takeaways - Purina's origins are tied to Ralstonism, a cult led by Webster Edgerly, who promoted pseudoscientific beliefs. - Yogi Tea was created by Harbhajan Singh Puri, who founded the 3HO cult and sold the tea to members. - Akal Security, a company owned by the 3HO cult, has secured over $3.5 billion in government contracts since 2000. - Acellus Academy, founded by Dr. Roger Billings, faced controversy for its curriculum and ties to a polygamist cult. - Billings, the founder of Acellus Academy, has attempted to scrub negative information about his company and cult ties. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### What is the origin of the name 'Purina'? Purina was originally founded by William Danforth in 1894 as Purina Mills. The name 'Purina' comes from the combination of 'Purina Mills' and the 'Ralston Company,' which merged to create Ralston Purina. ### What was the original purpose of treadmills? Before treadmills were used as a form of exercise, they were a form of punishment for prisoners that also provided useful work like grinding grain. ### What is the connection between Purina and the Ralstonism cult? Purina was founded the same year that Webster Edgerly, the leader of the Ralstonism cult, purchased land in New Jersey for his followers. Purina's founder, William Danforth, based his recipe for Ralston Wheat Cereal on one that appeared in one of Edgerly's books, leading to a merger between Purina Mills and the Ralston Company. ### What are some of the unusual beliefs of the Ralstonism cult? The Ralstonism cult had beliefs such as increasing personal magnetism by swinging a marble, walking on the balls of feet to avoid leaking vital forces, and advocating for a trial marriage with someone old enough to be one's grandmother before marrying a much younger person. ### Who founded the 3HO cult and what does the name stand for? Harbhajan Singh Puri, who went by the name Yogi Bhajan, founded the 3HO cult. The name 3HO stands for the Healthy, Happy, and Holy Organization. ### What is the connection between Yogi Tea and the 3HO cult? Yogi Tea was created by Harbhajan Singh Puri, also known as Yogi Bhajan, the founder of the 3HO cult. The tea was originally made for cult members and later became a commercially successful product. ### What is Akal Security and its connection to the 3HO cult? Akal Security is a security company founded by Gurutej Khalsa, a convert to the 3HO cult. The company is wholly owned by 3HO's parent organization, Sikh Dharma International, and has secured over $3.5 billion in government security contracts since 2000. ### What controversies surround Acellus Academy? Acellus Academy faced controversies due to its curriculum containing racist, misogynistic, or otherwise objectionable content. The curriculum was also found to have repetitive tasks with low cognitive demand, and the online tools were often glitchy or poorly designed. ### Who is Dr. Roger Billings and what is his connection to Acellus Academy? Dr. Roger Billings is the founder of Acellus Labs, which created the Acellus Learning System and Acellus Academy. Billings is also the former head of the Church of Jesus Christ in Zion, a polygamist cult, and has been accused of having 38 wives and at least 70 children. ### What is the Church of Jesus Christ in Zion and its connection to Dr. Roger Billings? The Church of Jesus Christ in Zion is a polygamist cult founded based on the teachings of Kenneth Asay, who claimed to be the reincarnation of Joseph Smith. Dr. Roger Billings was the former head of this church and has been accused of having multiple wives and children. ## Sources - [Original Side Projects video: Companies with Surprising Links to Cults](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8H_9EoomyI) - [Hero image source](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3e/Asbury_Park_Boardwalk_New_Jersey_2024.jpg) by Euthman / openverse, by. ## Related Coverage Simon Whistler https://sideprojects.pub/article/discoveries-proved-everything-wrong-about-vikings https://sideprojects.pub/article/discoveries-proved-everything-wrong-about-vikings Thu, 02 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT It's been almost a thousand years since the end of the Viking Age. But its people still fascinate us today. For centuries, they were the diehard Scandinavians who raided, traded and ruled across Northern Europe. The legacy of their long-dead civilisation lives on – in myth, if not in memory. The passing of time has cemented what we think we know. Legends tell of a brutal, bloodthirsty people, wearing horned helmets and raiding monasteries. Some of these stories are probably true, but others deserve a closer look. Because, throughout history, finds have cropped up that shed new and interesting light on the Vikings. Things that make us rethink what we "know" about them. Books, films and television shows have all created stereotypes and assumptions. But a lot of them are just wrong. As ever, the truth is a lot more nuanced than fiction. So today, we're going to look at the real Vikings, and the discoveries that proved all of us wrong. ## Debunking the Viking "look" When we talk about Vikings, most of us imagine a certain aesthetic. It probably runs along the lines of a big, strong axe-wielder with blonde hair. Grubby, snarling, and in definite need of a bath. Maybe they have a bushy beard and a helmet with two horns sticking out of the sides. Of course, when it comes to the helmet, we can put that to bed right now – we know they didn't wear those. But actually, not all Vikings were the rough, tough, indestructible type either. Analysis of Viking skeletons has revealed a lot about what they really looked like. According to Denmark's National Museum, the physical build of a Viking was much like our own – just slightly more muscular because their work was more physical. And, from studying hundreds of skeletons found in Denmark, researchers can tell that they certainly weren't always at peak physical fitness. There are clear signs that they'd have suffered from aching joints and dental problems, just like the rest of us. In other words, they were only human. And interestingly, during Viking times, men and women looked more alike. Female skulls reveal features like prominent brow ridges, while males had a less prominent jaw than they typically do today. This meant that women appeared more masculine, and men more feminine. This ambiguity poses a problem for osteoarchaeologists, because it makes it harder to determine a skeleton's sex based on skull features alone. Instead, they need to look at other areas, like the width of its pelvis, to make a final call. Archaeology has also turned up some fascinating finds, proving Vikings took a lot more care over their cleanliness and appearance than we might expect. Items like tweezers, ear picks and tooth picks have all been found. In 1000AD, a Spanish-Arabic merchant traveller visited the Viking town of Hedeby. He described seeing both men and women wearing eye make-up to enhance their beauty. In England, Viking men were apparently popular with local women due to their combbed hair, pleasant appearance, and comparative cleanliness. Hair does seem to have been a big deal – for men and women alike. It was usually long – especially for women – and well cared for. For men, beards were popular, and well groomed. One man even took the name Sweyn Forkbeard, presumably in honour of his facial stylings. Among women, hair was often dressed and tied up. Depictions of Vikings in runic stones and bronze figures show people who are tidy and presentable. Combs are common Viking finds. All the same, these were people who did need to be tough. The Icelandic sagas, written just after the Viking Age, describe men adept at running, jumping and throwing. Children were praised for growing strong and being physically fit. But this wasn't just vanity or family pride: it was training that would be crucial to their future survival. ## Viking women broke the mould There's a prevailing myth that Viking men went out to raid and conquer, while their womenfolk stayed at home. In many cases, this was true. We know that Viking wives were more geographically settled than their husbands, and they did labour as housewives and mothers. But it wasn't always like that. Women in Viking societies had much more mobility and freedom than we might assume. Some of them were even fierce fighters. In the 1870s, the archaeologist Hjalmar Stolpe discovered the grave of a Viking warrior at what was once the city of Birka, in Sweden. It seemed a fairly typical warrior's grave. The skeleton within was accompanied by grave goods like a sword, an axe, and a small iron knife. There were spearheads, arrowheads, and the remains of two sacrificed horses. The finds would later be described as "the complete equipment of a professional warrior". A silver coin found among the things meant it could be dated to between 940 and 950AD. The "male warrior's" grave was documented, given the designation Bj 581, and considered interesting, but standard. But, as you've probably guessed, Stolpe had made a mistake. Even osteoarchaeologists at the time should have been able to tell that this was a woman. It was only in 2017 that the truth finally came to light, when researchers at Uppsala University carried out genome testing on one of its teeth and arm bones. This confirmed that the remains were those of a woman. This was a major leap in academic understanding. The fact that this archetypal Viking grave belonged to a woman redefined the mapping of gender roles in Viking times. No longer could we safely assume that all women stayed home. But there was more, because this raised the possibility that not only could women fight, but they could hold power. Study of the items in the grave showed that the body wasn't just a run-of-the-mill warrior, but a high-ranking officer. A set of gaming pieces was among her things, proving that she had knowledge of strategy and tactics. Her sword had been used, and showed the kind of wear that came from a skilled owner. The 2017 study, led by Charlotte Hedenstierna-Jonson, proved that "the individual in grave Bj 581 is the first confirmed female high-ranking Viking warrior". Some remains had been found with weapons before, but never to this extent. Technically, this shouldn't have been as surprising as it was. Ever since the Middle Ages, stories had portrayed female Viking warriors. Some were described as "shield maidens" fighting alongside men, but one early text even had a female lead. Named Inghen Ruaidh, or "Red Girl", she was said to have led a Viking fleet across the sea to Ireland. The Greenlandic Lay of Atli – a poem written in the 12th century – contained the lines, "she took a naked sword and fought for her kinsmen's lives, she was handy at fighting, wherever she aimed her blows." If you've watched programmes like Vikings and The Last Kingdom, it'll probably sound familiar. Until this discovery, though, the characters were often dismissed as "mythological embellishments" by Viking scholars. There's also evidence that other women at least joined in with expeditions. Concave brooches worn by female Vikings have been found in many of the places we know their menfolk settled. Countries like Russia, England and Iceland. This leads to the obvious assumption that their wives or daughters went there too. So, women could fight, and they could travel. But they could also work for themselves. Recent archaeology has found clear evidence of textiles industries dominated by female entrepreneurs. This story was largely missed by past archaeologists – partly because it wasn't considered that important, but also because textiles just don't last well. Naturally, cloth will decompose away long before something like metal. But, in 2009, Michèle Hayeur Smith from Brown University started examining textiles fragments held in various collections. She found that beneath all the soil and dirt, there were pointers to a thriving, successful industry. While men were away, the women of a household wove fabrics that brought in serious money. Towards the end of the Viking Age, as silver became scarcer, these cloths were used as a form of exchange. They had a real, tangible value. This doesn't mean that women weren't concerned with domestic work like cooking and housekeeping. But as a body of finds, these discoveries showed that their worlds might not have been as narrow as people once believed. ## They weren't all Scandinavian We've already looked at their physical build, but Vikings' bodies can tell us other things, too. DNA sequencing of remains found across Europe and Greenland has proven that not all Vikings were Scandinavian. In fact, as a people, they were far more diverse than we previously thought. Research carried out by Cambridge University debunked a whole raft of assumptions. Firstly, it found that in some burial sites, so-called "Vikings" weren't actually Vikings by birth. Skeletons found in Scotland proved to be those of locals who'd adopted the Viking identity. After their homeland was invaded, residents in Orkney had presumably taken on the incoming culture and identity. There, typically Viking burials, featuring swords and other grave goods, contained bones with no Scandinavian DNA. Although, as a note here, the name "Scandinavia" actually came after the Viking period. Instead, the DNA identified was local: genetically, the people buried there were Pictish. And this apparent flow of new "Vikings" went in other directions, too. Pictish DNA was found in Viking burials in Norway, showing that some Scots people went overseas. And skeletons found in Greenland included women originally from Britain. We don't know exactly how this all played out, and how or why these people travelled, but it becomes clear that there was a fair amount of intermingling going on. As the journal Science neatly points out, it seems that the term "Viking" was more of a job description than a genetic inheritance. You could be a Viking even without the blonde plaits. This leads to another finding. The research concluded that many Vikings had brown hair, rather than blonde. And even Scandinavian Vikings had high levels of non-Scandinavian DNA. Some burials were identified as having Saami ancestry, which was an Indigenous group genetically closer to East Asians and Siberians. This suggests that even before Viking times, populations were moving back and forth across Europe. ## Traders, as well as raiders This evidence of travel takes us neatly to our next point. Because, although we often think of Vikings as violent raiders, this wasn't always how they operated. There's also evidence of them becoming major players in a global trade network. At the Viking settlement of Birka, excavated grave sites revealed thousands of imported artefacts. These were exotic, valuable items, like Chinese silks, Islamic coins, and glass beakers. On the Isle of Skye, just off Scotland, the Storr Rock hoard, discovered in the 1890s, included silver coins identified as dirhams. These were found to have been minted by the Samanid Dynasty, in modern-day Uzbekistan. Because they're so far from home, archaeologists have concluded they were probably traded for luxury goods. The items found, across multiple sites, shows that Scandinavia's trading arms stretched all the way to north-west Russia, to Byzantium, and to the Muslim caliphate. The Ocksarve hoard, found in Sweden's Gotland, contains coins from the Byzantine Empire, which may have been paid in exchange for Viking slaves. Another theory is that Viking warriors served as soldiers in the empire's Varangian Guard, offering military service as another form of trade. A bit like Viking mercenaries. And, the sheer number of coins found in some hoards proves that these weren't just random spoils from a raid. They're more likely to have been large payments, made as part of a serious economy. And if so, what were the Vikings themselves trading, other than slaves and warriors? We can find strong clues at the historic border complex of Hedeby, in present-day Germany. During the Viking Age, this was – confusingly – in Denmark, and stood as one of its most important trading hubs. Positioned between the Frankish Empire to the south, and the Danish Kingdom in the north, it became the place where two worlds met. The meeting point for continental Europe and Scandinavia. When Hedeby was rediscovered at the turn of the 20th century, it gave up a treasure trove of information. For more than 300 years, the site had been a thriving emporium. Archaeology proved that this had been a busy urban centre. It had roads for overland movement and a harbour for merchant shipping. There were shipwrecked cargo vessels. And importantly, there were workshops, where artisans and craftspeople created items for sale. The people here were antler carvers, blacksmiths, toolmakers, and textiles workers. They used early forms of mass production, like moulds. But there were other artefacts that had clearly been on longer journeys to get there. These finds showed that goods like ivory, pottery and – of course – large amounts of silver were coming into Hedeby. The discovery of weights, made from bronze and lead, tell us that traders used a standardised system for exchange. And some of Hedeby's residents were rich. Excavated tombs contained fine gold jewellery and gemstones. They hinted at a cosmopolitan mix of different cultures. So yes, Vikings undoubtedly went on raids, but they also created, traded, and stored up wealth. As Gareth Williams, Viking expert at the British Museum, has said, "their society was so much more than murder and violence." ## They had an advanced legal system It's tempting to think of the Viking Age as a chaotic, lawless chapter in world history. Admittedly, the Vikings spread terror by invading other territories. There, they flouted laws as they looted and destroyed. But they also had a complex and advanced legal system of their own. At home, they abided by laws and had clearly enshrined rights. The Viking justice and administration system was tied to Things. We're not talking a heap of vague "things" here, but the Viking noun 'Things'. These were assemblies where free people – not slaves – would gather to make important decisions and settle legal disputes. They were like an early form of parliament or court, usually held outside. We can still find traces of Things around Europe, in the spots where Vikings settled. If you see the place name 'ting', chances are it once held one of these sites. Locations like Tingwall in Orkney and Thingvellir in Iceland became places to gather. While they were there, they also traded and socialised. Once a year, a General Assembly was held, lasting around two weeks. Known as the Althing in Iceland, this was the main assembly for the whole country, where laws were spoken and major announcements made. First held in 930, it's the oldest legislature in the world. Standard Things took place more regularly, on a local level. They were led by a law-speaker: someone who was able to remember the laws, and remind everyone what they were. Not much was written down, so having a good memory was crucial. We've already talked about the role of women in society, but in law, they had certain freedoms too. Viking sagas contain multiple accounts of women divorcing their husbands and remarrying. Icelandic sagas in particular refer to advanced divorce laws. For instance, if a Viking male abandoned his wife and didn't sleep with her for three years, she could divorce him. If he hit his wife three times or more, she could divorce him. If he lost his money and was plunged into poverty, she could – again – divorce him. Women could own and inherit property in their own right. While men were away, they were able to manage farms. In lots of ways, Viking women got a better deal than their Medieval counterparts. Despite this, repercussions for rule-breakers could be severe. As well as remembering laws, the law-speaker was in charge of handing down punishments. These ranged from "not so bad" to yikes, depending on the severity of your crime. Something like stealing from a neighbour would result in a fine. For Vikings, everything had a value – known as its wergild or weregild – which then had to be paid back as compensation. And when I say that everything had a value, I mean everything had a value; even people. If you killed your neighbour's wife, they could choose to take compensation for her life, rather than pursue any other line of justice. The amount you'd have to pay depended on the victim's social rank and status. Not everything could be settled with a fine, though. If you killed someone, but chose to admit it openly, you might be outlawed. This doesn't sound too bad, but it meant being ostracised forever by your community. Outlaws were no longer cocooned by Vikings laws, either, meaning they could be killed without repercussions. He – or she – was literally outside the law, and forfeited any rights, property, and protection. They often went to live in the wilds of the forests or mountains, desperately avoiding others in hopes of staying alive. A full outlaw was known as a "man of the forest" or "wolf". If you just did something a bit bad, you might be sentenced to lesser outlawry, meaning you could return after three years. Or, you and your family might be able to scrape together the wergild to buy back your place in society. Other punishments were far worse. And this is where things get a bit more "Viking". Let's say you've insulted someone else's wife. They'll be within their rights to call for a holmgang: a deadly duel to restore honour, usually held on a small island or "holm". These weren't 18th century gentlemen's duels, where a small amount of bloodshed was enough to satisfy everyone. A holmgang could be brutal and often ended in death or serious injury. Killing your opponent in a holmgang didn't count as unlawful, and carried no punishment. Or, perhaps you might have been going on trading journeys but keeping some goods for yourself. Get caught and you could be literally tarred and feathered. As if this wasn't painful enough, you'd then be forced to run between two parallel lines of men, who'd pelt you with stones. If you didn't die in the process, your punishment was considered complete. But a penalty you really wouldn't want to pay was the trial by ordeal. There were different forms of ordeal, including picking a stone out of boiling water, walking over hot coals, or carrying a red-hot iron. If you healed and survived, you were considered to be protected by God, and therefore innocent. However harsh the punishments, these laws and systems created a unified society. Most Vikings lived together peacefully. Multiple generations shared a longhouse and worked together on a family farm. It was undoubtedly a hard life, but it could also be pleasant. Unless you had the misfortune to be a slave, of course. ## They enjoyed music and culture If certain TV shows are to be believed, Viking "culture" was limited to fighting, tattooing and human sacrifice. There's no doubt these were violent times, but the average Viking might not have been as bloodthirsty as we think. They could still appreciate the finer things in life, and even kick back with some tunes. Archaeologists have turned up a wide range of musical instruments from the Viking period, including horns, flutes, and various types of harp. In a Viking settlement in York, they've even found Jorvik panpipes. These weren't panpipes as we might imagine – rather than the huge bag and pipe arrangement, they were very small, made from boxwood, and designed to fit in your hand. They apparently worked by having air blown across the top; a bit like making sound by blowing across the top of a bottle. Obviously, this was tame compared to modern "Viking" music – it played between five and seven notes – but every Viking rocker starts somewhere. And more seriously, of course, they'd all be playing together, so you'd have multiple instruments at one time. We can get a sense of their music from early songs that were written in runes. The earliest, which translates to 'I dreamt a dream' was actually sung in an episode of 'Vikings'. But when it comes to singing, the Viking people didn't get rave reviews. The traveller I mentioned earlier might have admired their make-up, but he described the singing of those he met as "reminiscent of a dog's howl, only even more bestial". All the same, we can probably assume that the Vikings themselves enjoyed it. And there were probably cultural differences informing opinions here. Another massive form of entertainment was storytelling. In fact, a lot of what we think we know about Viking history comes from these stories. Originally, they were spoken and shared as part of a rich oral tradition. This type of oral storytelling was – and is – the backbone of many different cultures, from the Celts to the people of sub-Saharan Africa. A skald, who was a saga poet, was a highly respected figure in Viking society. These were professionals, who won hearts by affirming what it meant to be a Viking. And it was a skilled job. Skalds had to remember reams of stories and poems, and tell them in a way that captured people's attention. Their words were passed on from one generation to another, to prevent the tales being forgotten. Over time, their works were written down to become a distinct literature of their own – although this came later than the Viking period. Skalds were also tricky characters. They could praise local lords – for a generous fee, of course – or they could help to tear them down. Reputation was everything to Viking rulers. Praise could help to gain and keep followers and build important alliances. Good poems basically preserved their achievements in amber, keeping them alive for future generations. If they were good enough, they'd also spread as more people retold the story. As part of this, skalds were the press and PR experts of their day. But first and foremost, they were entertainers. During tough winters, they kept spirits up and brought people together. In Norse mythology, the god Odin took the gift of poetry by drinking mead. It was said that true poets and scholars were those Odin chose to bless by dispensing the same mead to. For this reason, they held an elevated status. Because of this oral tradition, we might assume that Vikings couldn't, or didn't, write. But this isn't strictly true. Literacy wasn't widespread, and was more common among the elite classes, but it did exist. During the Viking Age, Norse people used a runic alphabet known as Younger Futhark. This had only 16 characters, or 'staves', although there were different versions of some runes, and some might be carved back to front or upside down. Because characters were usually carved into a surface, Viking writings tend to be fairly short – it was a labour-intensive process. Today, our sources for runic writings are things like large memorial stones. Dedicated to important people, they often include their names and their various achievements. Because they're one of the only contemporary records of Viking history, they provide intriguing nuggets of information relating to events at the time. In Denmark, the Jelling Stone declares that Harald Bluetooth had "won all of Denmark and Norway and made the Danes Christian". Alongside runic inscriptions, some stones were decorated, showing what was essentially Viking art. The Sigurd Carving, found in Sweden, features scenes from the saga of Sigurd Fafnesbane, known as Sigurd the Dragonslayer. Pictures show the character of Fafnir, who has transformed himself into a dragon – or an enormous snake, depending on which version you read – being killed by Sigurd. Another character, the treacherous Regin, lies decapitated on the ground. The story was one of many that would later influence JRR Tolkien's 'Lord of the Rings' series. Music and storytelling were important parts of Viking culture, but during downtime, they also played games. Excavations have found preserved dice and board games pieces made from intricately carved wood and bone. Chess emerged at the end of the Viking period, and games of Nine Men's Morris have been found in ship burials in Sweden and Norway. This was a two-player board game, in which each player aims to create rows of three pieces. It was a battle far less bloody than their usual MO. ## Many of them were Christian Our view of Viking religion is usually tied to Norse gods like Odin and Thor. At the start of the Viking Age, the Old Norse religion, also known as Norse paganism, was the dominant belief system. Warriors worshipped these gods of strife, and believed that they needed to die in battle to reach Valhalla. But many people don't realise that during the Vikings' later years, many had converted to Christianity. Rather than appeasing multiple gods, they switched to just one. This is a stark reframing of the Viking narrative. What happened to all those tales of raided monasteries and murdered monks? Well, this still happened, but it wasn't the sum total of Viking activity. For a large part of the Viking Age, the old beliefs endured. At this time, Christian buildings were simply valuable sources of treasure. In 793AD, the Vikings famously made a devastating attack on the church of St Cuthbert in Lindisfarne. They killed or enslaved its monks, looted its valuables, and burned its buildings. A record made by survivors described how the Vikings came, with "plunder and slaughter" to destroy the church. It was a shocking act, striking right at the root of Christianity in Northumbria; "the very place where the Christian religion began in our nation". It became one of many Viking raids around the coasts of Britain, Ireland and modern-day France. So, it's surprising that less than 200 years later, some of the most important and prominent Viking rulers would be leading the Christian charge. Of course, this shift didn't happen overnight. It's even suggested that some of the first introductions to the new faith happened because of those monastic raids. As items like crosses made their way back to Scandinavia, they exposed communities to Christian beliefs. But there were practical reasons for integration. Even in the early Viking Age, Viking traders might wear a convenient crucifix to build bridges with Christian traders. Countries like modern Germany were already Christian, and other parts of Europe belonged to the Holy Roman Empire. When they got home, though, they'd revert back to "the old way". But, as kingdoms were conquered and changed hands, new rulers brought their own agendas. Danish kings like Harald Bluetooth were baptised, and slowly, the new ways spread. And so, from the 900s onwards, there was a transition period as elements of the two religions co-existed. We can see this in archaeological finds like the Mammen grave, in Denmark's Central Jutland region. Dating to 970 or 971AD, this lavish grave contained items that clearly show the merging of both religions. Although it's a pagan-style chamber grave, it contained a wax candle, associated with Christianity, and an axe with motifs that could be either Norse pagan or Christian. A soapstone mould, found in Trendgaarden and dating from the same century, was used to cast both Christian crosses and pagan amulets in the shape of Thor's hammer. The hybrid approach to religion even comes through in Viking names. During the pre-Christian period, children's names were linked to the gods or their enemies. We see choices like Thorsten, which is linked to the god Thor, and Orm, which references the Midgard serpent. As Christianity spread, Hebrew and Latin names came into the mix. In the 10th and 11th centuries, we start finding variations on names like Michael, John, and Esther. Christianity also comes through in the Viking memorial stones I mentioned earlier. Many of these display inscriptions relating to the new religion. The large Jelling Stone even has one face dedicated to Jesus, with outstretched arms. Most contain Christian messages, asking for God's protection over the dead person's soul. The saga of Erik the Red, which describes the Viking exploration of North America, sheds an interesting light on this period. In it, we meet Olaf the White, a Viking conqueror, who is married to Aud the Deep-Minded; a Christian. Erik the Red himself has a son, Leif, who is charged with preaching Christianity. He rescues and converts shipwrecked sailors, along with lots of other people. This saga wasn't written down until around the 12th century, so we can take it with a pinch of salt – but it does support the kind of religious climate we think existed at the time. All of this leads us to the interesting truth that Vikings didn't all conform to the brutal, Valhalla-loving, "death for glory" stereotype. They were baptised and given clean white clothes. They attended church. They were no longer permitted to eat horsemeat, or leave their unwanted newborn children outside to die. But this doesn't mean Christianity ushered in a new, peaceful era. In Denmark, willing converts were often allowed to keep elements of their old faith and merge the two. But in Norway, King Olaf the first burned pagan temples and killed those who wouldn't convert. Even after converting to Christianity, he led one of his generation's biggest Viking attacks on England. It culminated in a major battle, the Battle of Maldon, which ended in the Vikings being paid off. Olaf's men were given 10,000 Roman pounds of silver to leave in peace. According to one monk, writing at the time, Olaf played a part in converting five countries to Christianity, but he also earned the moniker "horg breaker", referencing his destruction of Nordic sacred sites. Old Viking habits die hard. ## They settled in North America For a long time, the evidence for Viking settlement in North America was shaky. Historians knew they'd reached the continent's tip, but they didn't know exactly when, and believed they hadn't stayed for long. Descriptions of extensive Norse voyages to America, found in the Viking Vinland Sagas, were often chalked up to legend. But, announced in 2021, fresh evidence changed all that. Archaeologists working at the Vikings' so-called "temporary" settlement of L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, were finally able to provide a definitive date for their occupation. A new dating technique proved that trees felled by the Vikings had been cut down in 1021, giving a precise pinpoint in their timeline. And work at the site showed something else. It hadn't just been a short-lived settlement. It was a "base camp" for other expeditions. From here, researchers said, "other locations, including regions further south, were explored." This resurrects a theory that had already risen and fallen a few years before. In 2016, "space archaeologists" seemed to find evidence of a second Viking site, to the south of the first, in Newfoundland. At Point Rosee, satellite imagery showed what looked like a lost settlement. It was triumphantly described as a discovery to "rewrite the history of Vikings in the New World". These globe-trotting Scandinavians, it seemed, had extended their reach further than we'd ever thought. But ultimately, the finds didn't stack up. Within a couple of years, serious doubt was cast on whether this was a Viking site at all. Today, L'Anse aux Meadows remains the only confirmed settlement in North America. All the same, its study has been significant. Dating the camp to 1021 gives a known year for direct contact between the "Old" and "New" worlds. Before this, we knew that travellers had linked up various continents; some of them long before. But 1021 now marks the date when Vikings closed a loop around the world. With the Norsemen's arrival, human migration had fully encircled the globe. ## Conclusion Like all lost civilisations, the Viking world had its secrets. Stereotypes and long-held assumptions can sketch a crude outline of who they were, but it's archaeological legwork that really fills in the detail. Vikings were strong and fierce, but took care of their appearance. They were often brutal, but could also be fair. They took slaves, but granted unusual freedoms. Their Age was a mass of curious contradictions. Big discoveries, like lost towns and carved monuments, have confirmed or challenged chapters of Viking history. With evidence like runic inscriptions, we can give dates to rulers and landmark political moments. But the tiny details can be just as compelling. Pottery sherds trace trade lines across the sea, and metalworking moulds show how two religions lived side by side. It's discoveries like these that bring the real history – and its real people – to life. Even so, the old myths and legends will probably remain. And before we go, there's just time for one more. You may even have been shouting it every time the word 'Viking' came up. That's right – it's the name. We call them Vikings today, and this term has long been accepted, but technically it's not quite right. The Old Norse term 'vikingr' originally referred to the act of piracy. You would "go viking", rather than being a Viking. But language, as ever, evolves. Eventually, the term's use changed, so that it referred to the pirates or raiders themselves; they became Vikings. During their own time, though, people had all sorts of other names for them. In what is now Britain, for instance, they were called Heathens, Northmen, or just Foreigners. But for the purposes of history, they're Vikings. The sometimes-bloody, often-bearded, raiders and traders from the north. ## Key Takeaways - Vikings were not always the brutal, bloodthirsty people depicted in legends. They took care of their appearance and had a nuanced culture. - Viking women had more mobility and freedom than previously thought. Some were fierce fighters and held high-ranking positions. - Not all Vikings were Scandinavian. DNA evidence shows they were a diverse group, with many having brown hair and non-Scandinavian ancestry. - Vikings were significant traders, not just raiders. They participated in a global trade network, exchanging goods with various cultures. - Vikings had an advanced legal system with clear rights and punishments, including trials by ordeal and deadly duels to restore honor. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### Did Vikings wear horned helmets? No, Vikings did not wear horned helmets. This is a myth that has been debunked by historical evidence. ### What did Viking skeletons reveal about their physical appearance? Viking skeletons showed that they had a physical build similar to modern humans, with slight muscular differences due to their physical work. They also had signs of aching joints and dental problems, indicating they were not always at peak physical fitness. ### How did Viking men and women differ in appearance? During Viking times, men and women looked more alike. Female skulls had prominent brow ridges, while males had a less prominent jaw. This ambiguity made it harder for osteoarchaeologists to determine a skeleton's sex based on skull features alone. ### What evidence shows that Vikings cared about their appearance? Archaeological finds include tweezers, ear picks, and toothpicks, indicating that Vikings took care of their cleanliness and appearance. A Spanish-Arabic merchant described seeing both men and women wearing eye makeup in the Viking town of Hedeby. ### Were all Vikings Scandinavian? No, not all Vikings were Scandinavian. DNA sequencing of remains found across Europe and Greenland has shown that Vikings were more diverse than previously thought, with some having local or non-Scandinavian DNA. ### What evidence shows that Vikings were traders as well as raiders? Archaeological finds at Viking settlements like Birka and Hedeby reveal thousands of imported artefacts, including Chinese silks, Islamic coins, and glass beakers, indicating that Vikings were major players in a global trade network. ### What was the role of women in Viking society? Viking women had more mobility and freedom than previously assumed. Some were fierce fighters, and there is evidence of female high-ranking warriors. Women could also own and inherit property, manage farms, and engage in textile industries. ### What was the Viking legal system like? Vikings had a complex legal system centered around Things, which were assemblies where free people gathered to make decisions and settle disputes. They had clearly enshrined rights, and women had certain freedoms, including the ability to divorce and own property. ### Did Vikings enjoy music and culture? Yes, Vikings enjoyed music and culture. Archaeologists have found various musical instruments, and there is evidence of storytelling and oral traditions. They also played games like chess and Nine Men's Morris. ### Did Vikings convert to Christianity? Yes, during the later years of the Viking Age, many Vikings converted to Christianity. This is evident in archaeological finds, such as the Mammen grave, which contains both pagan and Christian items, and in Viking memorial stones with Christian inscriptions. ## Sources - [Original Side Projects video: The Discoveries That Proved Everything Wrong About the Vikings](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DelLncsB4KI) - [Hero image source](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/02/Wikimedia_Northern_Europe_Meeting_2026_group_photo.jpg) by Ivo Kruusamägi / openverse, by-sa. ## Related Coverage Simon Whistler https://sideprojects.pub/article/historys-worst-archaeologists https://sideprojects.pub/article/historys-worst-archaeologists Thu, 02 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT The study of archaeology is surprisingly ancient. For example, the son of Ramesses II, Prince Khaemwaset, is often referred to as the first Egyptologist because of his work in restoring and identifying ancient Egyptian monuments. And this was taking place in the 13th century BC. However, while archaeology in some form has existed since ancient times, it wasn't until the mid to late 1800s that it was refined into a careful, scientific endeavour. From the Medieval Period until that shift to a scientific method, archaeology was generally carried out by antiquarians. Some antiquarians were scholars, but most were just rich dudes who wanted cool, old stuff for their personal collections. Their efforts were less about preservation and more about finding the most beautiful, ancient pieces of art they could get their hands on. They essentially were just glorified treasure hunters who focused only on finding the most beautiful and potentially expensive artifacts and pieces of artwork they could find, discarding or destroying the more mundane items that would actually help historians understand the lives of past civilizations. Given that, it's no surprise that many of these earlier archaeologists employed some pretty terrible methodology that permanently erased valuable knowledge about the past from the face of the Earth. ## Jacques de Morgan Jean-Jacques de Morgan was born in France in 1857. The son of a geologist, Jacques also took an interest in geology, as well as studying entomology and prehistory. But, it was as a mining engineer that he initially made a name for himself, particularly for his work with tin mines. However, he maintained an interest in ancient history and prehistory, and this lead Jacques to travel to Persia in the 1890s. His goal was to retrace the routes used by the Assyrian Campaigns in Elam, though he did get distracted a bit after discovering huge petroleum reserves that he felt could be profitable. Eventually Jacques arrived at the small village of Shush, located near the ruins of the ancient city Susa. Susa had been the capital of Elam for over 2,000 years, after which it spent another couple centuries as the winter capital of the First Persian Empire. Atop a hill surrounded by castle ruins, Jacques discovered some old flints and pieces of ceramic. Realizing this might be of archaeological interest, Jacques contacted Gabriel de Mortillet, curator of the Museum of National Antiquities in Saint-Germain (whom he had already become acquainted with through his father). Susa had already been the site of a British excavation in the 1850s and a French one in the 1880s, but clearly some things had been missed. France was eager to establish a monopoly of archaeological research in Persia, so they cut a deal with the Persian government for Jacques to lead excavations at the location. As Jacques saw it, though, there was just one problem with all of this. The castles that had formerly stood in Susa were in ruins, so there was no suitable base of operations for himself and his team. The logical solution would have been to take up lodging in the village of Shush, or perhaps to build temporary residences nearby. And if you thought either of those seemed like a reasonable solution, clearly you were not born into the French aristocracy. Jacques ordered the construction of Shush Castle, a castle built atop the very site they planned on excavating. That sounds like a disruptive and time consuming project, but they were able to shortcut the process quite a bit. After all, it's not like they had to transport a bunch of freshly cut stone to the location, not when there was already plenty of it lying around going unused. Shush Castle was built by dismantling and reassembling the ruins of Darius the Great's Apadana Palace and the Chogha Zanbil Ziggurats of ancient Elam. This would serve as a base of operations for French archaeologists all the way until World War I, and all they had to do to build it was mutilate the existing ruins. To be fair, the excavations in Susa did result in a number of major historical finds, most notably the Victory Steele of Naram-Sin from the 23rd century BC. In 2015, Susa was declared a Unesco World Heritage Site. While this was done to preserve Susa in general rather than the castle Jacques built, the castle is now ironically protected from the exact sorts of activities that led to it being built in the first place. ## Heinrich Schliemann Heinrich Schliemann wasn't like most antiquarians. While they were typically born into wealth, Heinrich was born into poverty in Neubukow, Germany in 1822. His mother died when he was a child, so his father sent him to stay with his uncle, who was a pastor. He attended school until he was 14, but the family was too poor to send him to university. Instead he became an apprentice grocer, working for five years before he injured himself from too much heavy lifting. Following that, Heinrich became a cabin boy on a boat bound for Venezuela. Just 12 days into the voyage, the boat was destroyed at sea. He and the other survivors washed up in the Netherlands, so he just stayed in Amsterdam for a few years, working his way up from being a messenger boy to becoming a representative for an import/export firm. In 1850, Heinrich learned that his brother Ludwig had died, but not before becoming extremely wealthy in the California gold rush. He left for California and used the inheritance from his brother to start a bank in Sacramento, buying and selling gold dust. However, when complaints started coming in that the gold dust he sold them came in under weight, he went back to Germany, sold off his American business, and moved to Russia. Heinrich used the money he had made to live the high life, making wealthy friends and then marrying the wealthy niece of one of those wealthy friends. From there he became a profiteer, cornering the market in saltpeter, sulfur, and lead, then selling them to the Russian government who needed those items to make ammunition for the Crimean War. After selling off all his reserves, Heinrich had made enough money to retire at the age of 36. This left him with the time and money to pursue his true passion: the lost city of Troy. This was where Heinrich was actually different from most antiquarians of the day. As we mentioned earlier, they were predominantly treasure hunters searching for artifacts to either increase their personal wealth or fill out the British Museum. But Heinrich wasn't after riches, he wanted to prove the historicity of Homer's Troy, as it appeared in the Odyssey and Iliad. Heinrich identified what he believed to be the location of Troy, located in modern day Hisarlik, Turkey. The site had previously been excavated once already and Heinrich's initial examinations left him unimpressed. But a local expert (who also happened to own the land Heinrich would be digging on) convinced him to keep going. This time, however, Heinrich decided to take a much more forceful approach. He dug a trench 17 meters (56 feet) deep, revealing nine buried cities. Unfortunately, creating this trench was done with absolutely no care for what they were digging through, to the point that Heinrich heavily employed the use of dynamite to get his trench completed. While he did successfully find the ancient city of Troy, Heinrich also blew up a large portion of it in the process. The aggressive digging and explosions also disrupted and shifted some amount of the remaining ruins, ruining the timeline that a more careful excavation would have preserved. ## Arthur Evans Sir Arthur John Evans was born in 1851 into a wealthy and well connected family. His father, John, had made a fortune thanks to the family's paper mill business. The business had actually been founded by John's uncle, but John became a partner in the company after marrying his uncle's daughter, which is to say his first cousin. But John's reputation wasn't built purely on the family fortune. He was also a well respected scholar of geology, archaeology, and numismatics (the study of currency). John was even knighted in 1892 for his work as an antiquarian, with his personal collection totaling over 12,000 artifacts. While Arthur did inherit his father's interest in archaeology and ancient artifacts, it seems he may not have been so lucky when it came to intelligence. In a letter written by Arthur's grandmother, she referred to him as being "a bit of a dunce", particularly compared to his father. He was still able to attend Brasenose College, part of the University of Oxford, and he graduated in 1874 with a first-class degree that he very much did not earn. Arthur was supposed to be studying modern history, but he ignored all of his university work to pursue matters of ancient history instead. Despite failing his exams, the school was convinced to give him a degree anyway, in large part because of his father's social standing. After graduation, Arthur traveled around the Balkans. Part of this was for networking and scholarly research, but he also wanted to act as a spy in the revolutionary upheaval that was taking place. When he returned to England, he became a journalist for the Manchester Guardian. Initially he wrote about his experiences in the Balkans, then he became a correspondent in the region. This career ended in 1882 after he was arrested as an agent provocateur for writing anti-Austro-Hungarian propaganda. Though he wasn't convicted, he was sent back to England. There, he became keeper of the Ashmolean Museum, which was in the process of converting from a natural history museum to an art and archaeology museum. For years he remained the museum's keeper, while also traveling the world with his wife to explore archaeological sites. Following her death, however, he fell into a deep depression. Before his wife's death he had purchased some ancient stones at a flea market with unidentified writing on them, so he decided to travel to Crete where he believed the writing may have originated. A couple decades earlier a Cretan archaeologist, Minos Kalokairinos, had began excavations of a Bronze Age palace on the island. In 1900, Arthur undertook extensive excavations of the site, revealing what he claimed to be evidence of the Minoan Civilization. The palace had a maze-like quality to it, so Arthur believed this had been the palace of King Minos, and home to the minotaur of Greek myth. This belief was reinforced by the discovery of frescos on the palace walls depicting bulls, and some other bull-related artwork. But there was a huge problem for Arthur. The palace, originally constructed around 1900 BC and destroyed around 1350 BC, was in ruins. You might understandably be thinking that this sort of thing is to be expected in archaeology. The remains of an ancient palace that had been destroyed and buried underground for centuries was obviously going to be in rough shape. Sure, the wooded supports were rotted away and the palace was being held up by the surrounding rubble, but that's just how it goes sometimes, right? Well Arthur disagreed. The palace was currently in shambles, but what if it wasn't? What if he could restore it to its former glory by rebuilding the damaged and rotting parts of the palace using steel-reinforced concrete? Chances are that already sounds like a bad idea. It's one thing to perform careful restoration of ancient sites using contemporary methods, but rebuilding it with modern materials and techniques is quite a bit different. Also, Arthur wasn't basing his reconstruction on evidence of how the palace had originally looked, much if it was based on vibes. He added pieces to the construction that had not originally been there, redesigned things that were there, and repainted the palace in colours of his choosing. Entire frescos were added pretty much entirely by the imaginations of Arthur and his painters. Some of the paintings had been preserved well enough that they could be restored at least somewhat faithfully, but many were so damaged that there was little to no original work to base the new paintings on. Although much of the history of the palace was irreparably destroyed thanks to Arthur's decision to renovate the building, he has remained a popular figure in the area for bringing attention and tourism to Crete. He is also credited with discovering the writing systems Linear A and Linear B in tablets found during the excavation, though examples of Linear B had been seen prior to this. ## Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin Thomas Bruce, of the formerly royal House of Bruce, was born in 1766. His older brother died at the age of seven, making Thomas the new male heir and thus the 7th Earl of Elgin. He received the sort of education one might expect of a nobleman, followed by a brief military career. Although Thomas's time in the Scots Guard was limited, he continued to receive honorary military ranks by virtue of being part of the aristocracy, eventually rising all the way to lieutenant general in 1812. Following his actual time in the military, Thomas was elected as a Scottish representative peer for the House of Lords in 1790. He remained a member of Parliament for 17 years, though he was rarely able to attend Parliament due to his other professional duties. In 1791 he became a temporary ambassador for Austria while the permanent ambassador was sick. He was then sent as the ambassador in Brussels until the French conquest of the region. Thomas then served as ambassador to Prussia for a few years, before becoming the ambassador to the Ottoman Empire in 1798. So far, nothing in his life indicated that Thomas would have had any interest in archaeology. Although he was certainly rich, he didn't share the lust for treasure hunting that defined your typical antiquarian. But what Thomas did have was an embassy that he felt would look a whole lot cooler if it had a bunch of ancient Greek artwork in it. This decision was prompted by a discussion with archeologist and fellow diplomat Sir William Hamilton, though the idea still seems to have originated with Thomas. Anyway, in the summer of 1800, Thomas dispatched several skilled draftsman, modelers, and the renowned painter Lusieri to Athens. And the original plan wasn't anything too crazy. At his own expense, Thomas had hired these men to make paintings of the ancient monuments and create plaster molds of sculptures and artifacts. His stated goal was to make his embassy "beneficial to the progress of the Fine Arts in Great Britain". At the time, there was nothing wrong with any of this. The paintings were obviously fine, and plaster molds were relatively common back then, though we now know how damaging they can be to the original pieces. Regardless, none of this was out of the ordinary. However, late in the summer of 1801, over a year after this project had begun, Thomas presented a royal decree allegedly from the central government of the Ottoman Empire, who controlled Athens at the time. According to the document he presented, not only was Thomas allowed to make casts of the sculptures, but he could remove any stones or sculptures he wanted. What followed was an unrepentant looting of Athens, with Thomas's men breaking off about half of the Parthenon frieze, portions of the temple of Nike Apteros, and dozens of other ancient sculptures and artifacts, including a marble throne. When it was time to send the first shipment back to Great Britain, Thomas's brig became shipwrecked during rough weather. All of the crew members were saved, but the cargo sunk to the bottom of the Mediterranean. After two years most of it was recovered, and it eventually made its way to England where it was put on display at the British Museum. Even at the time, this was all highly controversial. Many around the world, including in Great Britain, decried Thomas's acts as nothing but vandalism and theft. Lord Byron even wrote a poem about how awful Thomas's actions were. There was also the matter of the decree Thomas had produced to justify this theft. While the British Museum has the Italian translation made by Thomas's embassy, no official copy of this alleged edict has ever been found. Almost as if it was a lie. The British government did purchase the stolen goods from the Ottoman Empire in 1816 for £35,000 (less than half of what Thomas spent acquiring them), but Britain's ownership of the Elgin Marbles remains highly controversial and is disputed by Greece. ## Giovanni Battista Belzoni Giovanni Battista Belzoni was born in Padua, Italy in 1778. He was the son of a barber, and one of 14 children. He moved to Rome at the age of 16 and studied hydraulics, though his initial plan was to join a monastery. The French invasion of Rome put an end to those plans, though, so in 1800 he moved to the Batavian Republic (now the Netherlands) where he became a barber like his father. It's said that he fled to England in 1803 to avoid going to prison, though it's unclear exactly what charges he was facing. Some sources describe him as a sort of political agitator, while others say that it was legal troubles over debts and financial disputes. Regardless, he moved to England where he married an Englishwoman named Sarah Banne. Being a barber wasn't cutting it in England though, so Giovanni made the only logical career choice for a 6'7 man in the early 1800s: he became a strongman in a traveling circus. This lasted for about 10 years, with Giovanni and his wife traveling around England and much of Europe. In 1815 he left the circus and traveled to Malta, where he met a diplomatic emissary of Muhammad Ali, the de facto ruler of Egypt. Muhammad was working on agricultural reclamation projects for Egypt, so Giovanni traveled there to demonstrate a hydraulic machine he had created that he believed could raise the waters of the Nile for irrigation. The machine worked, but Muhammad ultimately did not go ahead with the project. Once again Giovanni found himself unemployed in a new country, so he met with the British consul to Egypt, Henry Salt. Seeing what a big, strong man Giovanni was, Henry sent him to the temple of Ramesses II to go fetch a 7.25 ton bust of Ramesses so that it could be shipped back to the British museum. Thus began Giovanni's career as an archaeologist. While he did make a number of important archaeological discoveries, his career was largely defined by brute force rather than scholarly precision. Temple doors were opened with battering rams, fixtures were ripped off walls with crowbars, and massive holes were broken into walls to allow Giovanni and his team to pull large sculptures and sarcophagi through. When he became the first person in modern times to discover the interior of the temple at Abu Simbel, he and his companions carved their names into the wall of the ancient structure like graffiti. Admittedly, that last bit was shockingly common at the time. Early archaeologists didn't have much of a concept of preservation (as evidenced by everything we've discussed today), so it was all about personal glory and fame. Archaeologists would carve their names into structures to show that they were the first person to discover it, ensuring their place in history. Although Giovanni's contributions to the British Museum were enormous, so too was the damage he did to ancient Egyptian temples. But while he may have caused irreparable damage to the history of the ancient locations, at least any future generations who visit Abu Simbel will know "Giovanni wuz here". ## Key Takeaways - Archaeology evolved from ancient practices to a scientific discipline in the late 1800s. - Early archaeologists, often wealthy individuals, prioritized personal collections over preservation. - Jacques de Morgan's construction of Shush Castle destroyed ancient ruins for his base of operations. - Heinrich Schliemann's aggressive excavation methods damaged the ancient city of Troy. - Arthur Evans reconstructed ancient sites with modern materials, altering historical accuracy. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### Who is considered the first Egyptologist? Prince Khaemwaset, the son of Ramesses II, is often referred to as the first Egyptologist because of his work in restoring and identifying ancient Egyptian monuments. ### What were antiquarians primarily interested in? Antiquarians were generally rich individuals who wanted cool, old stuff for their personal collections. Their efforts were less about preservation and more about finding the most beautiful, ancient pieces of art they could get their hands on. ### What did Jacques de Morgan build in Susa? Jacques de Morgan ordered the construction of Shush Castle, built atop the very site they planned on excavating, using the ruins of Darius the Great's Apadana Palace and the Chogha Zanbil Ziggurats of ancient Elam. ### What was Heinrich Schliemann's goal in excavating Troy? Heinrich Schliemann wanted to prove the historicity of Homer’s Troy, as it appeared in the Odyssey and Iliad, rather than seeking riches like most antiquarians. ### What method did Heinrich Schliemann use to excavate Troy? Heinrich Schliemann dug a trench 17 meters (56 feet) deep, revealing nine buried cities, using dynamite to speed up the process, which caused significant damage to the site. ### What did Arthur Evans believe about the palace he excavated in Crete? Arthur Evans believed the palace he excavated in Crete was the palace of King Minos and home to the minotaur of Greek myth, due to its maze-like quality and bull-related artwork. ### What controversial actions did Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin, take in Athens? Thomas Bruce dispatched men to Athens to remove about half of the Parthenon frieze, portions of the temple of Nike Apteros, and dozens of other ancient sculptures and artifacts, which he then sent to the British Museum. ### What was Giovanni Battista Belzoni's initial career before becoming an archaeologist? Giovanni Battista Belzoni was a strongman in a traveling circus before becoming an archaeologist, known for his brute force methods in excavations. ### What significant damage did Giovanni Battista Belzoni cause to ancient Egyptian temples? Giovanni Battista Belzoni used battering rams, crowbars, and other forceful methods to extract artifacts, causing irreparable damage to ancient Egyptian temples, including carving his name into the walls of the temple at Abu Simbel. ## Sources - [Original Side Projects video: History's Worst Archaeologists.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwHQMirzP4s) - [Hero image source](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8c/Shahpouri-House-in-Shiraz-Persia-Photo-by-Hossein-Amini.jpg) by PersianDutchNetwork / openverse, by-sa. ## Related Coverage Simon Whistler https://sideprojects.pub/article/most-disastrous-speeches-of-all-time https://sideprojects.pub/article/most-disastrous-speeches-of-all-time Thu, 02 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT By Kevin Jennings If there's one thing people love, it's to run their mouths. And while different nations allow for varying degrees of freedom of speech, people will happily remind you that freedom from speech does not mean freedom from consequences. Of course, the extent of those consequences may vary. Some people may only experience a blow to their reputation, while others could be financially ruined. And in at least one instance, saying the wrong thing at the wrong time resulted in the loss of the United States presidency. ## Gerald Ratner's Crap Speech Viewers in the US may not recognize the name Gerald Ratner, but the Ratner Group was once one of the most successful jewelry chains, particularly discount jewelry. The group owned over 1,000 stores in the United States, such as the Kay Jewelers chain, but few if any stores in the US actually used the Ratner name. Gerald was born in London in 1949, and jewelry stores were the family business. However, once he became CEO in the 1980s, he was able to build up the company to new heights. This was all thanks to observations he made as a child at the Petticoat Lane Market. Gerald noticed that "the people who shouted the loudest and appeared to give the best offers sold the most". That lesson stuck with him throughout his life, and it became the foundational principle for the chain of discount jewelry stores. Rather than focusing on the rarity, prestige, and extravagance of their jewelry, the stores hung neon posters offering deep discounts on their products. While many people believed that the advertisements were as tacky as the products that Ratner's was selling, the gimmick still worked. And it has continued to work across multiple industries, most notably the mattress industry where every retail store has been running "going out of business" sales nonstop since the 1990s. By 1990, the Ratner Group reached a peak value of £840 million. Gerald had worked hard as CEO and Chairman for over a decade, and his efforts had really paid off. You might think it would be hard to undo that level of success, but Gerald managed to bring it all crashing down in a matter of minutes. On April 23, 1991, Gerald gave a speech at the Royal Albert Hall during a conference of the Institute of Directors, a professional organization for company owners big and small. In what can only be described as an attempt to be funny, Gerald decided that he was going to ridicule the quality of his company's own products. He talked about a fake coffee table book that he described as being in poor taste, even though the company sold over 250,000 copies of it. He went on to say, "We also do cut-glass sherry decanters complete with six glasses on a silver-plated tray that your butler can serve you drinks on, all for £4.95. People say, 'How can you sell this for such a low price?', I say, 'because it's total crap.'" After that he mentioned gold earrings that Ratner's sold for less than a pound. He described the price as being "cheaper than a prawn sandwich from Marks and Spencer's, but I have to say the sandwich will probably last longer than the earrings." In Gerald's defense, the audience did seem to find his comments entertaining. But the rest of the general public did not. Almost overnight, the company's value fell by £500 million. Gerald stepped down as chairman of the company and hired a new chairman to try to rehabilitate the company's image. The new chairman did so by firing Gerald a year later and changing the company's name to Signet Group, removing the Ratner name entirely. By the time Gerald was fired, the company's value had fallen to just £33.7 million, less than 5% of its peak value just two years earlier. ## Neville Chamberlain's "Peace for Our Time" You may often hear references to the appeasement of Nazi Germany, and how attempts to appease a totalitarian state will always be unsuccessful. Such was the case with the Munich Agreement of 1938. On September 17, Hitler began a low-intensity, undeclared war on Czechoslovakia. When the First Czechoslovak Republic was created in 1918 following the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, there were millions of ethnic Germans living on the nation's border near Germany and Austria. This area was named the Sudetenland, and the ethnic German residents had not been given a choice on whether or not they wanted to be part of Czechoslovakia. Legally they were supposed to be equal, but Germans in Czechoslovakia faced severe discrimination. When the Great Depression hit, it was the German residents that were hit hardest. It was based on these factors that Hitler wanted to take control of the Sudetenland, which he wanted people to believe was his last territorial claim in Europe. Just days after Germany's war began, England and France were both requesting that the Czechoslovakian government cede the Sudetenland to Germany. Fighting continued for over a week, until an emergency meeting was held between Germany, England, France, and Italy on September 29th and 30th. Czechoslovakian representatives were notably absent from the meeting, even though they were in the city at the time. All parties involved quickly agreed to Hitler's terms and signed the Munich Agreement, a treaty that would require Czechoslovakia to cede the Sudetenland to Germany. Czechoslovakia obviously didn't want to do this, but between the military assaults and diplomatic pressure, there didn't seem to be another option. After the treaty was signed on September 30th, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain returned to England where he gave a speech about the treaty they had signed, reading the agreement out for spectators. Later that day he stood outside 10 Downing Street and again read the treaty, adding, "My good friends, this is the second time in our history that there has come back from Germany to Downing Street peace with honour. I believe it is peace for our time. We thank you from the bottom of our hearts. Now I recommend you go home and sleep quietly in your beds." Hopefully you already know what happened next, but less than a year after Chamberlain declared "peace for our time", Hitler invaded Poland and began the Second World War. The phrase "peace for our time" became famous for how disappointingly ironic it turned out to be, and as a reminder of the futility of appeasement. It has since been referenced by everyone from JFK to Monty Python to Iron Man. Two months after Chamberlain's speech, Isaac Asimov wrote a short story in which World War II broke out in 1940, partly inspired by Chamberlain's prediction of "peace for our time". Asimov had found Chamberlain's analysis of the situation to be detached from reality, though he later admitted he was too conservative in thinking Germany would wait until 1940 to launch a full scale war. ## Theresa May's Conservative Party Conference Speech Every once in a while, a speech will be labeled a disaster unrelated to the actual contents of that speech. This was the case for Theresa May's speech at a conservative party conference in October of 2017 where, while the words themselves were largely unremarkable, it was everything else surrounding the event that made it an entertaining disaster. May had been appointed Prime Minister in July of 2016, two days after becoming the Leader of the Conservative Party. Her appointment came after the resignation of her predecessor, David Cameron. Although he had wanted to remain in the EU, Cameron had decided to call the Brexit referendum as an attempt to quash infighting within the Conservative Party and to weaken his opposition. But as you all know, the plan backfired. Voters opted to leave the EU, after which Cameron resigned. This left May with the unenviable position of having to negotiate a Brexit deal, even though she had also been opposed to leaving the EU. There was also the (accurate) public perception that Boris Johnson, who had been in favour of Brexit, wanted to become Leader of the Conservative Party. None of that was what May's speech was actually about that night, but it does provide the background for the first and largest interruption to the speech. About halfway through May's speech, comedian Simon Brodkin (dressed up as his character Lee Nelson), emerged from the crowd and approached the podium. He told Theresa, "Boris wanted me to give you this", and handed her a P45, the document a person is given when they are fired for being redundant. Simon then turned to Johnson, gave him a thumbs up, and said, "Job done, Boris!" He was understandably escorted out of the venue following this, but it was a dramatic interruption to the speech that also raised a lot of questions about the security of the Prime Minister. To her credit, and after the initial shock of a random person walking right up to her while she was on stage, May was able to laugh this off and make a joke about the situation. But that was one of the last clear statements she was able to make, as the second half of her speech was repeatedly interrupted by a nonstop coughing fit. Chancellor Philip Hammond came to the stage and gave her a cough drop, though this didn't help; the coughing continued for the rest of May's speech. It wasn't until the final minutes of the speech that the audience witnessed the most ironic mishap. On the wall behind May's podium was the conference's slogan, "Building a country that works for everyone." As the speech neared its end, letters from that slogan began falling off the wall, onto the floor. None of these issues through May's speech were her fault, and she handled them all quite well, given the circumstances. But the speech remains a disaster not just because of all the things that went wrong, but because that's all anybody can remember about that night. That, and that Boris Johnson needing to by told be those around him to stand up while everyone else was giving May a standing ovation. While lots of people remember the sight of a comedian handing the Prime Minister a P45 on stage, very few could actually tell you what her speech that night was even about. ## Elon Musk's "Funding Secured" This statement wasn't a speech in the traditional sense, but it was still a very public statement. On August 7, 2018, Elon Musk tweeted, "Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured." He followed up by saying, "Investor support is confirmed. Only reason why this is not certain is that it's contingent on a shareholder vote." That would have been an exciting announcement for anyone who owned Tesla stock, which was valued at about $344 before Elon's tweet. The only problem was that the statement wasn't true at all. Elon later claimed to have been in talks with a Saudi sovereign wealth fund about securing funding to take the company private, but no specific purchase price had been worked out. In short, the funding was in fact not secured. To the average person, that might seem like a minor distinction and just a man exercising his free speech. But even in America free speech has limits, and according to the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, the statements were a crime. In fact, they were potentially two crimes: fraud and market manipulation. Because the alleged sale price was going to be over 20% higher than the share price, Tesla stock saw a predictable bump in value following Elon's announcement. However, that lasted about all of a day. Because it's very illegal for the Chairman and CEO of a company to make the sort of public statements Elon did if they aren't true, the Securities and Exchange Commission immediately began investigating, demanding to see proof that the company was about to commence such a sale. Tesla's stock price began falling once news of the SEC investigation broke, and a month after the initial tweets the price had fallen 25% from where it was before the tweets. Tesla and Elon were facing civil and possibly even criminal prosecution, and a costly legal battle against the SEC threatened to bankrupt Tesla, which had lost $2 billion the previous year. As such, they opted to come to a settlement agreement instead. Tesla and Elon were each required to pay $20 million in fines, Elon was forced to step down as Tesla's chairman, and a team of Tesla executives were required to approve any of Elon's future tweets that contained substantive information about Tesla. However, Elon was still allowed to remain CEO of the company. There was also a class action lawsuit filed against Elon by a number of Tesla's investors. This lawsuit dragged on until 2023, when a jury acquitted Elon. That may not be the end of the story though, as the plaintiffs indicated that they were interested in appealing that decision. While Elon had enough money not to be personally bankrupt by the $20 million fine, that's still a whole lot of money to lose over a single tweet. And that's before taking into account all of the court costs from the class action lawsuit. Of course, since $20 million is such a meaningless amount of money compared to both the US federal budget and Elon's personal wealth, it does call into question why the SEC would have even agreed to such a lenient settlement in the first place. ## Herbert Hoover's "The Worst Is Behind Us" In a way, Herbert Hoover was a victim of his own success. Hoover was born into poverty in 1874, and orphaned at the age of 10. Afterwards he lived with his uncle, and dropped out of school at the age of 13 to become an office assistant for his uncle's real estate company. Hoover studied bookkeeping, typing, and math at night school, and in 1891 he was somehow accepted to Stanford University, despite failing his entrance exams. Initially Hoover planned to study engineering, but he switched his major to geology. This turned out to be a wise decision, as an internship with the United States Geological Survey convinced him to pursue a career as a mining geologist. Keep in mind this was 1800s California, where gold mining was all the rage. He graduated in 1885, and after a year working as a mining scout, he was hired by a London based mining company with mines in Australia. Hoover was paid $5,000 per year (about $166,000 today) to work as a manager in the Australian goldfields. Just a couple years into this job, he was made a junior partner after impressing the owners by bringing in cheap immigrant labour and fighting against workers' rights, such as minimum wage. His career just kind of spiraled from there, and by 1914, at the age of 40, Hoover owned his own consulting company, had mining investments on every continent (except Antarctica), and was worth over $4 million (about $130 million today). Thanks to the trajectory of his own life story, Hoover believed in the ideas of American individualism and exceptionalism. As an American, all you had to do was work hard and pull yourself up by your bootstraps, and anything would be possible. Assuming you were white that is, particularly the late 1800's America's version of white, so no filthy Italians or Irish. Anyway, that would be a useful attitude to have as someone selling self-help books or something, but not a particularly good attitude for the President of the United States to have during a global Great Depression. In 1929, Hoover said that "Any lack of confidence in the economic future or the strength of business in the United States is foolish." Note that this statement would have come mere weeks after the devastating collapse of the stock market. That was a really bad take, but to be fair the collapse had just happened. Reality hadn't yet had enough time to set in and disillusion Hoover from his dogmatic belief in some mythical, American ideal. This became even more evident a year later when Hoover made his most famously horrible statement regarding the Great Depression, a statement he made in 1930: "The worst is behind us." For anyone unaware, there were still nine more years of the Great Depression left, and it was definitely going to get worse. Despite Hoover's insistence that the worst had already past and that there was no need for the government to provide aid to starving Americans who could succeed if only they worked harder, reality continued to prove otherwise. The public began referring to shanty towns as Hoovervilles, to newspapers used as cover by the homeless as Hoover blankets, and to pant pockets that were turned inside out and completely empty as Hoover flags. His repeated doubling down on that 1930 statement and his refusal to accept the reality that gumption alone would not protect Americans from the state of the global economy resulted in a landslide defeat in 1932, with FDR unseating Hoover as president with an overwhelming 90% of electoral votes. Note that Hoover's 1928 presidential win had also been a landslide victory, so the voting public turned against him in record numbers. To be fair to Hoover, though, it's not like he wasn't trying to help. He may have been vehemently opposed to direct federal aid for children and elderly Americans who were starving to death, but he did offer up $2 billion of taxpayer money to help rescue banks and insurance companies. ## Key Takeaways - Gerald Ratner's speech about his company's products led to a £500 million drop in value. - Neville Chamberlain's 'peace for our time' speech was ironic, as war began shortly after. - Theresa May's speech was disrupted by a comedian and a persistent coughing fit. - Elon Musk's tweet about taking Tesla private resulted in legal consequences and fines. - Herbert Hoover's optimistic statements about the economy were proven wrong by the Great Depression. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### Who is Gerald Ratner? Gerald Ratner was the CEO of the Ratner Group, a successful jewelry chain, particularly known for discount jewelry. He was born in London in 1949 and built up the company to new heights in the 1980s. ### What was the impact of Gerald Ratner's speech at the Royal Albert Hall? Gerald Ratner's speech at the Royal Albert Hall in 1991 led to a significant drop in the company's value, from £840 million to £33.7 million within two years. He was eventually fired, and the company changed its name to Signet Group. ### What was the Munich Agreement of 1938? The Munich Agreement of 1938 was a treaty that required Czechoslovakia to cede the Sudetenland to Germany. It was signed by Germany, England, France, and Italy, with Czechoslovakia notably absent from the meeting. ### What was the outcome of Neville Chamberlain's 'Peace for Our Time' speech? Less than a year after Chamberlain's speech, Hitler invaded Poland, starting World War II. The phrase 'peace for our time' became famous for its ironic and disappointing outcome. ### What happened during Theresa May's Conservative Party Conference speech in 2017? Theresa May's speech was interrupted by a comedian who handed her a P45 document, and she suffered a persistent coughing fit. Additionally, letters from the conference's slogan fell off the wall behind her. ### What was the consequence of Elon Musk's 'Funding Secured' tweet? Elon Musk's tweet led to an SEC investigation and a settlement where Tesla and Musk each paid $20 million in fines. Musk was forced to step down as Tesla's chairman, and a team of executives had to approve his future tweets containing substantive information about Tesla. ### What was Herbert Hoover's famous statement during the Great Depression? Herbert Hoover famously stated in 1930 that 'The worst is behind us,' which turned out to be incorrect as the Great Depression continued for another nine years. ### What was the public's reaction to Herbert Hoover's handling of the Great Depression? The public referred to shanty towns as 'Hoovervilles,' newspapers used as cover by the homeless as 'Hoover blankets,' and empty pockets as 'Hoover flags.' Hoover's insistence that the worst was over led to his landslide defeat in the 1932 election. ## Sources - [Original Side Projects video: Most Disastrous Speeches of All time.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5v7pWzBu8Q) - [Hero image source](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/72/Munich_Agreement_%28M%C3%BCnchener_Abkommen%29_1938-09-30_Neville_Chamberlaine_showing_the_Anlo-German_declaration_%28%22Peace_for_our_time%22%29._Heston_Aerodrome%2C_west_of_London%2C_England._Narodowe_Archiwum_Cyfrowe_3_1_0_5_268_3_1_111334_No_known_cop.jpg) by Photographer/studio not provided. Public domain photo according to Narodowe Archiwum Cyfrowe, the national archive of Poland. / openverse, by-sa. ## Related Coverage Simon Whistler https://sideprojects.pub/article/priceless-artifacts-destroyed-by-human-stupidity https://sideprojects.pub/article/priceless-artifacts-destroyed-by-human-stupidity Thu, 02 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT Idiocy needs no introduction. For as long as humans have been making nice things, there have always been people around to ruin them. Armed with an awe-inspiring combination of stupidity and ignorance, people have destroyed priceless paintings, ancient tombs, archaeological sites, and much, much more. Today we're going to cover the most ridiculous of these instances, with everything from blowing up the ancient city of Troy to straight up bulldozing historical sites. ## Schliemann's Troy This video will cover many artifacts that have been damaged or destroyed by a serious lack of critical thinking, but what if instead of just a single artifact, someone were to destroy an entire ancient city? Well, that's exactly what happened in the 1870s in Turkey. Meet Johann Ludwig Heinrich Julius Schliemann, born in Germany in 1822. Schliemann was a remarkably intelligent fellow, reportedly being conversational in 13 languages, including Russian, Arabic, Greek, and Latin. He used his wits to make a quick buck everywhere he went, such as setting up a bank in California during the Gold Rush, and selling it for a huge profit after six months, after which he moved to Russia and cornered the market on lead right at the outbreak of the Crimean War, selling a fortune worth of ammunition to the Russian Empire. By age 36, his various business ventures had made him wealthy beyond his wildest imagination, and decided that for the rest of his life he would dedicate himself to his dream: archaeology. Specifically, Schliemann had a keen interest in the stories of Homer, and ancient civilizations around the Mediterranean, and he had a burning desire to investigate the mysteries of the ancient city of Troy, the supposed location of an epic battle between the Greeks and the Trojans, as described in the Iliad. But before we get into his archaeological escapades, let's get a few things straight about Schliemann. First of all, for as smart as he was, it's pretty clear in hindsight that he wasn't the most honest guy around. In his autobiography he claimed that he was in California when it officially became a state in 1850, and he was granted US citizenship. However, other sources place him across the world in St. Petersburg at the time, and, according to records, he didn't get US citizenship for another 19 years. Schliemann also claimed that before heading off to California, he met and had dinner with Millard Fillmore, the 13th president of the United States. However there is no evidence of his attendance and it's likely that he simply read about the meeting in the local papers and added himself to the story after the fact. And his fishy dealings wouldn't end with business, as they extended into his archaeological endeavors as well. In 1868 he visited sites of ancient Greece and published a book, which he submitted to the University of Rostock, for which he was awarded a PhD. However, later analysis showed that much of his work was simply translations or interpretations of others contemporary works. Regardless, he was working his way to becoming a prominent member of the archaeological community, and set his sights on finding the lost city of Troy. After coming up empty handed in a few hypothesized locations, he ran into an Englishman named Frank Calvert, a fellow amateur in the field who had also been looking for Troy for many years. Calvert convinced Schliemann to begin excavating at a site called Hissarlik, which he eventually agreed to and began digging in 1870. After just three years, digging had uncovered layers correlating to nine different cities, aptly named Troy 1-9, with 9 being the nearest to the surface. But Schliemann did not have the delicacy or care that comes with modern archaeological training. In his haste to reach the treasures of the Trojan War, which he assumed was in Troy 2, he dug huge trenches, destroying artifacts all along the way, and, in his biggest lack of judgment, used dynamite to more quickly pass through the levels. After brutalizing Troy 9 through 3, he finally spotted gold, which he assumed to be the jewelry belonging to Helen of Troy, and announced his success at locating the legendary city. Turns out, they were about thousand years too old to be from the estimated time of the Trojan War, meaning that IF this were indeed the correct location, the remains of Troy were likely in one of the higher levels that he had so explosively cast aside. One professor in 2012 remarked that Schliemann was able to achieve what the Greek's never could, that is, completely annihilate Troy. He essentially shoveled and blasted his way through the earth, picking up trinkets as he went with no documentation of their location, surroundings, or anything else that might give them some historical context. Heaps of treasures were then smuggled out of the Ottoman Empire and sold to the highest bidder, with most of the artifacts ending up in Germany. It's quite a shame because the destroyed layers not only had the possibility of containing artifacts from Troy, but also thousands of years of other history. Who knows what secrets we might have uncovered if it hadn't been for Schliemann all those years ago. ## Expensive Accidents Sculpted more than 300 years ago, the Statue of the Two Hercules is a detailed, intricate sculpture featuring two figures of Hercules holding the emblem of Cremona, a city in northern Italy. On top of the emblem is a beautifully sculpted crown, or, should we say, WAS a beautifully sculpted crown. Unfortunately, this statue, which had managed to remain unscathed for hundreds of years without an issue, was damaged in 2015 by a pair of tourists who climbed on top of it to take a selfie. They allegedly wanted to take a photo to show how big the statue was, but it seems they may have underestimated their own size, because while climbing around, one of them grabbed the crown, and, under the weight of the tourist, it broke right off, fell to the ground, and shattered. Locals were outraged that a historic symbol of their town had been treated so recklessly by a pair of foreigners, whose identities and nationalities were never revealed. But this wasn't the only such case in the region, as it seems Italy may be some sort of magnet for unintelligent tourists. Just a month before the Hercules incident, a Japanese woman faced charges after writing her name on the dome of the Florence Cathedral with an eyeliner pencil, and in 2013, also in Florence, an American man accidentally broke the finger off of a 600 year old statue of the Virgin Mary. He said he was trying to compare his finger to the statue's, but local authorities were confused about how this plan could possibly include bending the statue's finger and snapping it off. And the incident with the two Hercules wasn't even the only selfie-related destruction in Europe at the time. Just a year later, Portugal would be the next victim of an ill-conceived photo op, when a man climbed up to take a photo with the statue of Dom Sebastiao, which was displayed between two doorways in the Rossio Railway Station in Lisbon. The statue's 126 year lifespan came to an end when the man, who remained unnamed in the media, accidentally knocked it over, sending it tumbling to a shattering death on the floor of the train station. ## Construction Carnage As stupid as it is to ruin a statue while trying to take a selfie with it, at the very least, those responsible had no destructive intent behind their actions. However, the same cannot be said for these next couple incidents. First up is the Nohmul complex, an ancient ceremonial site used by the Maya people. First used as far back as 250 BC, it's one of the oldest and most important archaeological sites in Belize, featuring several hundred mounds, dozens of small buildings, and a central temple. The temple was quite large, with a roughly square base with sides 50 meters long, with its highest point more than 17 meters tall. It was this central temple, the largest and arguably most important structure of the entire complex, that was almost entirely destroyed by a construction company. On May 13, 2013, contractors working with De-Mar's Stone Company showed up to the site with bulldozers and excavators and smashed up nearly 70% of the temple, crushing up its limestone to be used as gravel for a road they were building in a nearby village. Photos showed the excavator clawing away at the sloping side of the pyramid, and loaded vehicles heading off with what was once part of the structure. It might have been somewhat understandable if they'd bulldozed one of the many mounds, having mistaken it for a natural hill, but the temple was a large and unmistakable structure, not to mention the fact that the ruins were widely known in the area. The head of the Belize Institute of Archaeology noted, "These guys knew that this was an ancient structure. It's just bloody laziness." After an investigation, charges were placed against four people, the foreman, the excavator driver, and the managing directors of the company. Each were fined the equivalent of about 3,000 dollars, and made a public apology, stating that the company would take steps to make sure nothing of the sort ever happened again. But this sort of minimal fine is exactly why this keeps happening in Belize. One professor said, "I don't think I am exaggerating if I say that every day a Maya mound is being destroyed for construction in one of the countries where the Maya lived." And it's not just a problem where the Maya used to live. On the other side of the world, a similar issue faces Chinese archaeologists, who constantly have to deal with the destruction of ancient sites that happen to be blocking the path of construction crews. In 2013, archaeologists in Guangzhou returned to a site they were in the middle of excavating to find that nearly all of it had been plowed through with bulldozers and excavators. The area had been cordoned off with red tape, but workers extending the Guangzhou Metro had ignored this and destroyed at least 5 of the sites. According to the archaeologists, the sites were ancient tombs, between 2 and 3 thousand years old. When they were destroyed, they were still filled to the brim with artifacts, inscriptions, and much more evidence of what life was like in the region long ago. Even more frustrating is that the construction team, who had not even received permission to build there, deliberately moved aside the researchers tools, equipment, and field notes before flattening the area, so they clearly knew that it was still being researched and decided to mow it down regardless. A few years earlier, the city of Nanjing faced a similar tragedy, when construction workers building a new IKEA branch destroyed another archaeological site that was in the middle of being researched. There were about 10 tombs in total, dating back to the 'six dynasties' period about 1800 years ago. Under Chinese law, companies destroying ancient tombs can be fined anywhere from the equivalent of 6 thousand to 60 thousand dollars, but these fines are hardly enforced, and, even when they are, companies would rather just pay the fine and get on with their project than sit around and wait for researchers to examine every nook and cranny. It's sad, but to many big businesses, deadlines are far more important than preserving history. ## Erasing History But of all the destruction in this video, perhaps none are as tragic as this final entry. The Buddhas of Bamiyan were two giant statues carved into the side of a cliff in central Afghanistan. Dated to 570 and 618 AD, they were carved directly into the sandstone cliffs, with the so-called Western Buddha reaching 55 meters in height, and the smaller Eastern Buddha reaching 38 meters in height. The statues represented an important part of local culture and history. Long ago, the location was described by Chinese travelers along the Silk Road as a hub of Buddhism, and was a well-known landmark in the region, even a site of pilgrimage for Buddhists. There are even rumors that a third statue existed at some point. Bamiyan's problems began long ago. On four separate occasions throughout the centuries, invaders tried to destroy or deface the statues, either by cracking the stone or, in one case, directing cannon fire at it. But the statues stood strong, and remained the tallest standing figures of Buddha in the entire world. That was, until 2001. Beginning in March of that year, the Taliban, in a classic showcase of their critical thinking skills, decided that the statues were nothing more than offensive idols, and their destruction was ordered by their leader Mullah Omar. Anti-aircraft guns and artillery were fired at the statues, which caused a lot of damage, but failed to completely destroy them. After a few weeks, the Taliban resorted to having men rappel down the side of the cliff and place explosives in holes in the statues, which were later detonated along with anti-tank mines placed at the base of the carvings. In the end, there was almost nothing left of the once great works of art, immediately sparking protest from both the international community and from locals, who said they were forced to assist the Taliban with the demolition. Mullah Omar claimed that the issue was purely religious and bothered no one, and even exclaimed, "What are you complaining about? We are only waging war on stones." But despite trying to frame the destruction as a religious right, the Islamic world staunchly opposed the move. 54 member states of the Organization of the Islamic Conference met and condemned the statue's destruction, even including Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, who officially recognized the Taliban's government. Saudi Arabia called the action 'savage', and Pakistan did all they could to stop the demolition. In a meeting with Pakistan's interior minister, Omar was asked why he found it his religious duty to destroy the statues when so many Muslim rulers had allowed them to stand for so many centuries. Omar simply replied, "Maybe they did not have the technology to destroy them." This was a man simply bent on destroying something beautiful. He disregarded repeated requests from Japan to transfer the statues out of the country free of cost, brushed aside 36 different letters from UNESCO offering various solutions, and ignored even his own people who protested the destruction. In the end, UNESCO's director called the move not only an offense to Buddhism, but a "...crime against culture. It is abominable to witness the cold and calculated destruction of cultural properties which were the heritage of the Afghan people, and, indeed, of the whole of humanity." Several governments expressed interest in rebuilding the Buddhas of Bamiyan after the ousting of the Taliban by the United States during the war in Afghanistan, but, given the recent resurgence of the Taliban back to power after the US withdrawal, this is an option that seems less and less probable, and the cliffs where the great Buddhas once stood will remain empty. ## Key Takeaways - Schliemann's excavation of Troy destroyed layers of history due to his reckless methods. - Tourists have damaged historic statues in Italy and Portugal while attempting selfies. - Construction companies in Belize and China have destroyed ancient sites for development. - The Taliban destroyed the Buddhas of Bamiyan in 2001, despite international protests. - Minimal fines and lax enforcement encourage the destruction of historical sites. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### Who destroyed the ancient city of Troy? Johann Ludwig Heinrich Julius Schliemann destroyed the ancient city of Troy in the 1870s using dynamite and heavy excavation methods. ### What was the Statue of the Two Hercules? The Statue of the Two Hercules was a detailed, intricate sculpture featuring two figures of Hercules holding the emblem of Cremona, a city in northern Italy. ### How was the Statue of the Two Hercules damaged? The Statue of the Two Hercules was damaged in 2015 by a pair of tourists who climbed on top of it to take a selfie, causing the crown to break off and shatter. ### What is the Nohmul complex? The Nohmul complex is an ancient ceremonial site used by the Maya people, featuring several hundred mounds, dozens of small buildings, and a central temple. ### What happened to the Nohmul temple? The central temple of the Nohmul complex was almost entirely destroyed by a construction company in 2013, which used bulldozers and excavators to crush it into gravel for a road. ### What were the Buddhas of Bamiyan? The Buddhas of Bamiyan were two giant statues carved into the side of a cliff in central Afghanistan, dated to 570 and 618 AD, representing an important part of local culture and history. ### Who destroyed the Buddhas of Bamiyan? The Taliban destroyed the Buddhas of Bamiyan in 2001 using anti-aircraft guns, artillery, and explosives, despite international protests and offers to preserve the statues. ### What was Schliemann's method of excavation at Troy? Schliemann used dynamite and dug huge trenches, destroying artifacts and layers of history in his haste to reach the treasures of the Trojan War. ### How did the destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan affect the international community? The destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan sparked protests from the international community and was condemned by 54 member states of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, including Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. ### What was the consequence for the construction company that destroyed the Nohmul temple? Four people from De-Mar's Stone Company were fined the equivalent of about 3,000 dollars each and made a public apology, but the minimal fine was criticized for not deterring such destruction. ## Sources - [Original Side Projects video: Priceless Artifacts Destroyed by Human Stupidity](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nog05QVU-d8) - [Hero image source](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b6/Presidential_Complex_of_Turkey_2023.jpg) by Ayratayrat / openverse, by-sa. ## Related Coverage Simon Whistler https://sideprojects.pub/article/quartz-crisis-almost-end-watch-industry https://sideprojects.pub/article/quartz-crisis-almost-end-watch-industry Thu, 02 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT As long as there have been artisans and craftsmen, there has been competition. In 1750 B.C. a Sumarian artisan by the name of Ea-nasir received a complaint on his low quality copper compared to that of the others in the ancient city of Ur. Many Roman artisans rushed to create and then improve purple dye and become fabulously wealthy from the nearly limitless coffers of the Roman elite. In the modern age, Google and Apple push each other to make cutting edge innovations to consumer technology in a quest for market domination. However, one of the most interesting accounts of companies racing to achieve technology that was right on the brink of proliferation took place far in the background while the Cold War and the Space Race captivated the world's attention. This is the little known story of the quartz crisis. This race to develop computerized timekeeping, and bring it to the mass market, brought many giants of luxury to their knees. ## Early Timekeeping For millennia, the improvements to tools for accurate timekeeping was a slow crawl. From our ancient ancestors who simply used the position of the sun in the sky, to early sundials in Egypt, and eventually mechanical clocks in 14th century Europe, the goal of accurately marking the current time was an inexact and rarely agreed upon task. No two cities had the same time and would set their clocks by solar noon, the time when the sun is directly overhead. This caused huge issues as rail lines started to make rapid mass transportation a reality for the first time in the 19th century. On a train journey from New York to Chicago, the conductor would have to keep track of the time, not just for those two cities, but also each city along the route which could be a few minutes to a half an hour off from each other. To further confuse things, the rail companies themselves set their own time that was independent of all of the cities. To keep up with these changes, miniaturized pocket watches were developed. Many modern watch brands can trace their origins to this time period when the demand for timepieces boomed. This confusing and clunky method of organizing the many time zones ambled along for many years, and was eventually unified in 1883 in America and across the rest of the globe the following year. This established the time zones roughly as they are today. However, this didn't solve all of the issues surrounding the timing of trains. The imprecise ticking was the ticking of a time bomb. In 1891 in the small town of Kipton, Ohio, just outside of Cleveland, two trains collided at full speed. Nine people died, most of them postal workers. The subsequent investigation revealed that a slow pocketwatch was to blame for the needless tragedy. The eastbound train's conductor had a timepiece that was four minutes slow, causing them to be late and still on the tracks while another engine barreled toward them. This disaster led the locomotive industry to invest into ultra accurate timepieces. Webster Ball, a local jeweler and a watchmaker, was given the task. He succeeded and BALL watches became the railway standard as well as a luxury status symbol that persists to today with BALL watch company still using their status as Rail Standard timepieces in their marketing. The strict regulation of all of their pieces also inspired the Official Swiss Chronometer Testing Institute (COSC) to offer independent standardization which many luxury brands still use today. World War One saw a move from pocket watches to wrist watches. Their invention is often incorrectly attributed to Louis Cartier seeing military tanks from his upstairs room and inspiring him to design the now iconic Cartier Tank wristwatch. By the Second World War, watches were no longer just a luxury for the ultra wealthy, but were a tool for the everyman as the mass production of war goods brought their prices down significantly. ## The First Digital Timepieces Across the channel at Bletchley Park in the English countryside a group of scientists were trying to break the Nazi Enigma code. Alan Turing and many other brilliant scientists worked with brand new technology that allowed for machines to complete equations faster than the greatest mathematicians. These new computing machines helped win the war for the allies and would change the rest of human history. Computers quickly evolved from a singular code breaking tool to a few industrial machines. Then in the 1960's the technology proliferated in nearly every sector. Although they were still not adopted by the general public because of its exorbitant cost and difficulty in usability. However, several executives and engineers in Japan thought this computerized technology could be used by everyone and started working on a world changing invention. For the two centuries before World War II, Switzerland had been the unchallenged behemoth of timepieces. A few American companies such as the aforementioned BALL watches and Timex had some distribution in the states, but it paled in comparison to the Swiss giants. However, the newest competition in innovation wouldn't come from the Swiss establishment or the secondary, but still profitable, American market. It came from a region none of the competition had even considered, Japan. Although Seiko is a household name today, it didn't have that position until the middle of the 20th century. It was established at the end of the 19th century and was a largely local success with limited foreign distribution. However, it did the same task as BALL by keeping railway time. The brand was also the primary supplier of timepieces for the Japanese military during the WWII, infamously worn on the wrists of the pilots, including the feared kamikaze. In the post war period, their use as military tools translated into universal recognition in the country. Foreign soldiers who had come across the tools found the pieces to be well made and reliable which added to demand. When Tokyo hosted the 1964 Olympic Games, their branding finally brought the company to global prominence. Also as a first, Seiko had made some prototype quartz regulated full sized clocks which were used as backup timers in the marathon, a preview of the technology that would soon sweep the globe. In the background of all this, there had been some small steps in miniaturized computer watchmaking both in Japan and abroad. The American brand Elgin made one of the very first battery powered watches which sold under the Bulova Accutron line. The piece skeletonized its first design to allow all of the internals to be viewed, giving it the futuristic marketing term Spaceview. However, its design isn't the one that would be picked up and mass produced the world over because the watch let off a low audible hum. The hum was also an integral part of the piece's design as it kept time using a tuning fork that vibrates from the sound at a specific frequency, so there was no way to remove it. Although the hum was marketed as a futuristic feature, in practice, it was an annoyance for many consumers who probably thought that they had tinnitus until realizing the buzzing in their ear was from the timepiece on their wrist. It was a fun novelty, but not a new standard in timekeeping. The Accutron was a success of concept, but wasn't the industry changing leap forward that Bulova had been hoping for. Using an audible hum and tuning fork wasn't a feasible solution to digital timekeeping, so they searched for a new solution. Little did they know, Seiko already had one in mind and was on the verge of a breakthrough. ## The Miracle of Quartz As a mineral, Quartz has many properties that make it an oddity of nature and ideal for computerization. When quartz is etched into the shape of a tuning fork, similar to the one used in the Bulova logo, the fork shape crystal becomes the oscillator. When an electrical current travels through the quartz, it vibrates at precisely 32,768 vibrations per second. Miniaturized computers can be used to count these vibrations and keep time with accuracy that simply wasn't possible before. Although many different competitors were refining the technology, Seiko beat them all to market releasing the Seiko Quartz Astron on Christmas day 1969. Retailing at $1,250 (around $9,000 today,) it was a luxury product, but priced competitively to other luxury pieces. That being said, it was well on the higher end of the scale. For reference, the 1970 Rolex Submariner retailed for $250 for the stainless steel model ($2000 today) and the 18k gold model sold for $2000 ($15,000 today) placing the Astron as a mid range luxury product. Many even considered it good value as it was also cased in the same 18k gold of the higher end Submariner. The piece was an instant success. Having a computerized wristwatch was a sign of wealth and status, and other brands quickly scrambled to release their own version of the new digital trend. Among these, one of the most popular was the Pulsar from American turned Swiss brand Hamilton. The Pulsar was one of the first watches with a digital display, utilizing LED lights that were only viewed when the button on the side was pressed. This futuristic design, coming both in stainless steel and in gold, was particularly successful appearing on the wrists of the rich and famous from Roger Moore's James Bond in the 1973 classic Live and Let Die to sitting President of the United States, Gerald Ford. Omega released their take on the quartz watch in 1974 with the Omega Marine Chronometer which bragged of its accuracy of no more than twelve seconds per year off of perfect time. They then followed it up with the Omega Chrono-Quartz as the first dual digital and analog chronograph just in time for the 1976 Montreal Olympic games. Even Rolex jumped on the quartz trend releasing their classic Oyster Perpetual as the Rolex Oysterquartz. However, luxury quartz watches were a bubble that was bursting underneath the entire Swiss Watch Industry. ## Industrial Fallout The thing about technology is that it always seems to improve. While the first quartz movements were expensive and only accessible to wealthy consumers, the technology evolved at a breakneck pace. While mechanical movements were constructed by hand using skilled laborers, quartz movements became much more inexpensive and easier to mass produce with less human labor, further driving down their cost. Adding to this, the Liquid Crystal Display, or LCD, had solved battery issues. Other watches needed annual or semiannual battery changes, but the LCD panels were efficient enough to keep the display ticking for multiple years or even a full decade before a change was needed. By the 1980's, quartz watches weren't a luxury anymore. Expensive luxury quartz watches from brands like Omega and Rolex were not only unfashionable, but associated with the cheap watches for mass consumption. Nobody wanted them. Dozens of brands with long and storied histories failed. Notably, the American giant Hamilton who had just a few years previously moved operations to Switzerland to raise their profile had utterly failed, selling their name to avoid completely vanishing from the industry. Elgin watches, founded in 1864, liquidated their company and went bankrupt. Most devastatingly, Omega, a Swiss icon since 1848 and one of the most iconic brands in all of fashion, was on the brink of complete collapse. Banks refused to deliver bailout loans assuming they would never be able to pay them back. Even Seiko, who's market cap had exploded due to their continuing market domination and had an incredible amount of cash on hand, decided against acquiring them at their neutered valuation, unsure if they would ever be profitable again. A few major players were able to avoid the worst effects of the crisis, although none were completely unaffected. Rolex's unrivaled name recognition along with their hesitancy to embrace quartz technology on a large scale allowed them to weather the worst of the crisis. They doubled down on their commitment to classic mechanical timepieces as a luxury good which is still the status quo for modern luxury brands. Some wondered if the industry that had been dominated by the Swiss for nearly two centuries would drift across the continents in Japan. Seiko had grown from a local success to a global sensation in a few short years and were bolstering their product line across the board. They introduced the Seiko 5 as a budget focused automatic line to capitalize on those who were hesitant to switch to computerized watches. They similarly invested heavily into their Grand Seiko line that was made to compete with the highest of Swiss luxury brands and products. However, Seiko wasn't the only Japanese brand capitalizing on this trend. Citizen watches had been operating in the country since the beginning of the 20th century, but used the market as an excuse to start ramping up production and investing in budget focused quartz watches. Also, the calculator company Casio introduced their own version of digital watches and saw instant success with unprecedented global market penetration. Casio calculator watches are still one of the most iconic symbols of the 1980's and the constant companion for Marty McFly in the Back to the Future Series. There were many who were convinced that the age of Swiss watches were over. Even the Swiss government was concerned since their economy, which was often touted as the strongest and one of the most stable in all of Europe, if not all of the world, was largely intertwined with the industry. They had survived two world wars, but it wasn't clear if they would survive global competition. However, despite all of the devastation, there was a phoenix in the financial ashes of this crisis. ## Swatch and Learn With Seiko declining to purchase Omega in 1983, the future of the company was grim. In a desperate bid to keep the company afloat, the two largest Swiss watch companies, both of whom owned dozens of popular brands, merged to attempt to salvage the floundering industry. They scoured the world for a CEO with the skills to take a series of hastily merged and failing companies back through the uncharted waters. Eventually, Nicolas Hayek was tasked with steering this Titanic away from the iceberg that it had already hit. Hayek himself is an incredibly interesting figure who could easily warrant his own video. His role in the eventual recovery of the company is referenced in business textbooks since he pulled unprecedented success from the jaws of defeat. His amazing success becomes less surprising when one sees that Hayek was uniquely certified for the position. He was trained in mathematics, chemistry, and physics and was the CEO of a successful Swiss engineering firm at the time. He had the economic chops as well as knowledge of Swiss culture and its workforce. He also had the technical know-how to make insightful decisions and save the legendary brands from utter collapse. One of the first decisions was for Omega not to attempt to beat Seiko at their own game. Having Omega produce quartz watches when they were associated with budget pieces undercut the luxury image they had built. They would take Rolex's lead and lean hard into mechanical pieces as artistic tools made by artisans and preserve their status as a luxury brand. Lastly, and most importantly, they would create a new brand that would fill the roll of cheap everyday pieces for anyone to use. It would function as a second watch, so the name Swatch was picked. Swatch, in direct contrast to the higher end brands, would be plastic pieces that could be manufactured cheaply, have designs swapped regularly, and produced at a huge scale. They also used pop artists such as Kieth Haring to contribute to designs. Hayek himself could be seen in public wearing up to eight different Swatches all at once. Swatch was enormously popular. Omega weathered the storm and slowly gained market cap back. Tissot acts as an entryway for new watch enthusiasts, especially touting their partnership with major cultural icons such as their exclusive advertising rights with the NBA. The other brands in the collective have freedom to operate as individuals in their design and marking, but with shared production to bring the prices down for everyone. To punctuate this massive change, the company rebranded as the Swatch Group, under which they still operate as one of the largest fashion collectives in the world. Hayek's plan had succeeded more spectacularly than anyone dared to hope for. It also turned out particularly well for Hayek financially who had invested heavily in stock of the flailing company which made him a multibillionaire. ## Success Through Crisis Although Swatch was the most public and likely the most impressive entity coming through the quartz crisis, they were far from the only success. One of the other unlikely successes came from a brand in the so-called Holy Trinity of luxury watches, Audemars Piguet. Having a space in the industry considered "High Horology" and offering boutique luxury products, quartz watches were not serious competition. Their market even floated above the level that Rolex and Omega sat as consumer luxury. Their customers were the old monied elite that rarely concerned themselves with fads and were incredibly slow to adopt new technologies until proven permanent. Even then, the technology had to fit into their established view of their luxury products for them to adopt it, and quartz did not fit in. Even with their privileged position, they realized that they needed something to compete with the marketing buzz that Seiko was generating. In their quest to create buzz, they accidentally created one of the most iconic pieces that watchmaking has ever produced. Designer Gérald Genta created the luxury stainless steel sports watch with the 1972 release of the AP Royal Oak. This piece of modern classic art with exposed bolts, an integrated bracelet, and a blue textured dial was a luxury watch that was meant for the everyday. This was considered a big departure from their oeuvre of sophisticated dress watches. Demand for the piece immediately shot through the roof. The importance of the Royal Oak really cannot be overstated. There have been very few times in any industry when a singular product has such an incredible impact. One of the few proper comparisons would be how the iPhone changed the market of smartphones and mobile technology overnight. Even today, the Royal Oak is the one of the best selling pieces and maintains a constant waitlist that all but the most privileged of clients must wait in, sometimes for upwards of a decade or more before being given the privilege of spending $50K on a single piece. AP has made dozens of alternate versions in different colors, with different complications, and composed of different materials. Each one sells out instantly at whatever price they decide to set it at. They may as well have been given a license to print money. A recent version of this piece used the Marvel comic character Black Panther as a design focus. It was limited to 250 pieces and sold at retail for a quarter of a million dollars. The line sold out immediately. This success had a knock-on effect in the rest of the industry. Along with making Genta the top designer in watchmaking, a role he would hold for the rest of his life until his passing in 2011, every company designed their own steel sports watch with an integrated bracelet and a blue dial. Most famously, Genta was tasked with designing a similar product for another member of the Holy Trinity, Patek Philippe. Genta trapped lightning in a bottle once again in 1976 with Patek Philippe Nautilus. Although the Royal Oak seemed like a once in a generation success, the Nautilus somehow managed to achieve this for the second time in four years. The demand for this product was just as overwhelming as the Royal Oak and both designs still command the same demand half a century later. A time period that was an unmitigated disaster for the vast majority of Swiss watch companies was one of the most successful for these two horological giants. ## Watchmaking Today The quartz crisis changed the industry of watchmaking forever, but in another ironic twist, it saved it from a future disaster. The utility of smartwatches that integrate with smartphones could have signaled the end for traditional timepieces. However, that didn't happen. In fact, there has been a resurgence in interest in traditional mechanical wristwatches. Smartwatches such as the Apple Watch have created a new generation of horological enthusiasts that have their entry point into the hobby as a smart watch. Mechanical watches are selling better than ever. Robust manufacturing facilities and the proliferation of off the shelf mechanical movements have created a cottage industry of microbrands that design watches for niche markets at competitive prices and release in limited quantities. Brands such as Monta, Boldr, and Zelos that started as small artisanal brands have risen to become big players in the marketplace. In another stroke of irony, Seiko has pivoted almost entirely away from quartz movements. While other Japanese competitors such as Casio and Citizen traffic heavily in the space of consumer quartz watches, Seiko is more focused than ever on their mechanical movements. The aforementioned Seiko 5 line which they started in the 60's is still running strong today and received a brand new design refresh in 2020 to start moving Seiko's profile upmarket and away from their computerized competitors. This does not mean that Seiko has stopped innovating in watchmaking. In fact, they are responsible for one of the biggest innovations in horology since the quartz watch. Seiko released the Spring Drive movement in 1999 which is a combination of mechanical components and a quartz regulator to have an incredibly accurate watch with a perfect sweep of the second hand, harkening all the way back to the Bulova Accutron. The Swatch Group is still one of the major players in the industry and uses the number of powerful brands at its disposal to corner various portions of the watch market. One area of focus has been their development of the movement manufacturer ETA which was part of the merger back in 1983. Along with being one of the top distributors of watch movements from Switzerland, it also is constantly innovating to make better movements for their in-house brands. One of their recent advancements adapted some of their most popular movements to stretch the power reserve on their watches to 80 hours, allowing a watch to be put in the box on Friday evening and picked up on Monday morning running on time, ready for use. Hamilton may have failed in the 70's but they were also revived in Hayek's saving of the industry as part of the Swatch group. They straddle the border between the consumer and enthusiast market and use that position to bring in newcomers to the hobby. They are particularly close with Hollywood productions seeing their timepieces in many enormous blockbusters from Interstellar to Avengers. In stark contrast to the glitz glam of Hollywood, they still produce many of the classics made for the US military in World War II and Vietnam. More so than nearly any time in the past, the world of horology is open to enthusiasts from every price range from pragmatists looking to tell the time quickly, to master artisans who have worked for generations to refine pieces of functional art. Hundreds of brands from all over the world contribute designs to fit certain niches or push boundaries of analog technology. The old stalwarts are ticking away as regularly as any of their timepieces, slowly improving these mostly superfluous, but still delightful everyday tools. It is an industry that has something to offer for nearly everyone, aiding in a task that everyone does every single day, glancing down to check the time. ## Key Takeaways - The quartz crisis of the 1970s and 1980s led to the near-collapse of many Swiss watch brands. - Seiko's introduction of the Quartz Astron in 1969 marked a significant shift in timekeeping technology. - The Swiss watch industry recovered through strategic mergers and the introduction of the Swatch brand. - High-end brands like Audemars Piguet and Patek Philippe thrived by focusing on luxury mechanical watches. - The quartz crisis paved the way for a resurgence in mechanical watches and a diverse watch market. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### What was the Quartz Crisis? The Quartz Crisis was a period when the introduction of quartz watches led to a significant decline in the traditional watch industry, particularly affecting Swiss watchmakers. ### How did the Quartz Crisis affect traditional watchmakers? The Quartz Crisis led to the failure of many traditional watch brands due to the cheaper and more accurate quartz watches that could be mass-produced. ### What was the first digital timepiece? The first digital timepiece was the Seiko Quartz Astron, released on Christmas day 1969. ### How did the Swiss watch industry recover from the Quartz Crisis? The Swiss watch industry recovered through the creation of the Swatch brand, which focused on affordable, stylish watches, and by emphasizing the luxury and craftsmanship of mechanical watches. ### What role did Nicolas Hayek play in the recovery of the Swiss watch industry? Nicolas Hayek was tasked with steering the merged Swiss watch companies through the crisis. He created the Swatch brand and focused on mechanical watches to preserve the luxury image. ### What was the impact of the Seiko Quartz Astron? The Seiko Quartz Astron was an instant success and led to other brands scrambling to release their own versions of digital watches. ### How did the introduction of LCD panels affect the watch industry? LCD panels solved battery issues, allowing quartz watches to keep the display ticking for multiple years before a battery change was needed, making them more practical and affordable. ### What was the significance of the Audemars Piguet Royal Oak? The Audemars Piguet Royal Oak, released in 1972, became one of the most iconic and successful watch designs, leading to a resurgence in luxury sports watches. ### How did the Quartz Crisis change the watch industry forever? The Quartz Crisis led to a resurgence in interest in traditional mechanical wristwatches and the creation of a cottage industry of microbrands designing watches for niche markets. ## Sources - [Original Side Projects video: The Quartz Crisis: The (Almost) End of the Watch Industry](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Pl-CewTAl8) - [Hero image source](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/53/Egypt_2022_at_the_pyramids.jpg) by SYGUIR / openverse, by-sa. ## Related Coverage Simon Whistler https://sideprojects.pub/article/strangest-mysteries-found-in-nature https://sideprojects.pub/article/strangest-mysteries-found-in-nature Thu, 02 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT With the speed at which technology is advancing at the moment, it often seems that we are fast running out of things to discover about the universe we live in. However, this — much like many things we, as a species, like to believe — is totally untrue. Not only are there still many things about the universe, our own galaxy, and our own planet that we do not yet understand — in spite of the best efforts of various sciences — but there are also countless mysteries involving the myriad plants, minerals, and animals that inhabit the globe alongside us. In today's article, we shall take a look at some of those mysteries. ## Immortal Jellyfish For most of us, the basic timeline of life is pretty well understood: you are born, you grow older, and eventually, you die. Even for those who believe in some sort of life after death — in whatever form that may be — it is almost universally accepted that such existence would be non-corporeal and that once the physical body dies, that is the end of it. However, as previously hinted at in the introduction, nature has a funny way of hurling spanners into the gears of what we think we believe, and there is at least one creature to whom this does not apply. Enter the immortal jellyfish, or to use its scientific name, *Turritopsis dohrnii*. Although not immortal in the way usually portrayed by Hollywood, this tiny little specimen — measuring about 4.5 mm (0.177 inches) — has the power to revert to a younger version of itself if damaged or threatened. Therefore, assuming it is not eaten, digested, or destroyed in some other manner, it can, theoretically at least, live forever. But how does it work? As you may have guessed by its inclusion in this article, scientists are not entirely sure. The process, referred to as *transdifferentiation*, is exceptionally rare and, according to the official website of the immortal jellyfish, is explained thusly: > "By undergoing transdifferentiation, an adult cell, one that is specialized for a particular tissue, can become an entirely different type of specialized cell." What this means in practice is that once the original jellyfish deteriorates to the point where it can no longer function — whether due to old age or damage sustained from an attack by a predator — it can simply morph back into a polyp and start all over again. Whilst it is unlikely that this ability could ever be utilised by humans, scientists are extremely interested in discovering exactly how it works. You may not be able to completely regenerate yourself once your body reaches the end of its useful service life, but if transdifferentiation could be introduced to human cells, it could potentially be used to repair things like brain damage caused by prion diseases or any number of other degenerative conditions. ## The Hessdalen Lights You don't have to look very hard online to find examples of places that reportedly experience more than their fair share of strange flashing lights, floating orbs, and other such visual disturbances. Usually, these things eventually turn out to be either hoaxes or mundane daily occurrences, like reflections from a nearby road. The Hessdalen Lights, though, are a little different. In a 7½-mile stretch of the Hessdalen Valley, located in central Norway, a regularly occurring phenomenon has been baffling scientists and members of the public for years. As to exactly what that phenomenon is, this description from *New Scientist* sums it up quite eloquently: > "Sometimes the lights are as big as cars and can float around for up to 2 hours. Other times they zip down the valley before suddenly fading away. Then there are the blue and white flashes that come and go in the blink of an eye, and daytime sightings that look like metallic objects in the sky." Reports of these lights go back at least 100 years, but in the early '80s, activity seemed to have dramatically increased — or, perhaps more likely, more press outlets got wind of them, and they quickly became everything from a point of interest for visiting tourists to conclusive proof for ufologists that we were indeed being visited by beings who are not of this Earth. But what are they really? Well, there are many, many theories, several of which have been put forward by the aforementioned ufologists. The most recent theory, which also has the most plausible-sounding scientific explanation, still sounds like something out of a sci-fi novel. Extensive — and we really do mean extensive — investigations of both the phenomena and the area have been carried out. It was discovered that rocks on one side of the river are particularly rich in zinc and iron, whereas rocks on the other side contain large amounts of copper. It has been hypothesised that, as the river water — which just happens to be rather sulphurous due to its proximity to nearby mines — passes between these rocks, it generates electricity, rather like a huge, naturally formed battery. If this is correct, then it is certainly not beyond the realms of possibility that other gases produced by mining may become ionised. When certain gases are ionised, they produce various colours depending on the gases involved. Furthermore, several reports claim that unusual electrical fields have been detected in the area, which could explain why these clouds of ionised gas move in the peculiar ways that people have reported. As far as we were able to ascertain, research into this is still ongoing, and a definitive answer as to exactly what is going on has not yet been decided upon. If the natural battery theory turns out to be correct, then it could very well have wide-reaching implications for the future of energy gathering. ## The Dancing Forest Usually, forests are pretty predictable. The trees grow straight upwards in order to compete for light sources. You might get the odd specimen that has grown in a particular direction to take advantage of, say, a gap in the canopy where more light shines through, but that's about it. One particular group of trees in Russia, though, is a little different. Nicknamed the *Dancing Forest* and located between the Baltic Sea and the Gulf of Finland, this 800-square-foot group of trees really is unlike anywhere else in the world. If you were to take a stroll through this particular forest, you wouldn't immediately notice anything out of the ordinary as you entered. Some of the trees are a little slanted, but otherwise, they appear to be pretty ordinary pine trees. However, as you move towards the centre, the trees become anything but ordinary. The curvature of the trunks, only slightly noticeable at the edges, increases to such a degree that some of them are even spiralised. The strangest part? Nobody can explain this. Well, that's not entirely true. Lots of people have tried to explain it, but nobody seems to be able to agree on a definitive answer. Here are the two most popular suggestions. According to the website *Russia Beyond*: > "A number of scientists have tied the anomaly to *Rhyacionia buoliana* caterpillar activity. The creatures feed on pine shoots, eating more of the top reins and less of the side ones. As a result, the tree ends up growing sideways. These caterpillars primarily feed on pines younger than 10 years old. The most optimal feeding conditions for the pest are provided by pines that grow in soil with insubstantial groundwater and lacking nutrition — such as that present in the area." Although this theory appears to be perfectly logical, there is a slight problem. The affected trees only form a very small part of the forest and, according to at least one expert on these caterpillars, if there were enough of them around to cause this much damage, there is absolutely no reason why they would have limited themselves to just a few trees. The second theory, most often referred to as the *wind theory*, suggests that as the pines grew as saplings, sand from the dunes — the same dunes that the forest was planted to help fortify — was blown up against them, forcing them to bend. As and when the wind changed direction, the process would repeat itself on the other side, and this is what led to the bizarre-shaped trunks. This theory does appear to have some merit given that, once the trees reach a certain height — perhaps the height above which sand might reach — they appear to grow as straight and true as any other pine tree. Dissenters claim, however, that there is no possible way this process could have resulted in the more extreme spirals that can be found. Of course, as we mentioned earlier, where there is mystery, there will always be those who believe that nefarious forces are at work, and the Dancing Forest is no different. Although we were unable to find any serious claims from people who believe there was alien involvement, a disturbingly large number of people genuinely seem to believe that the deformed trees are a result of residual dark magic. Apparently, the site was originally a place of pagan worship, and the dark power called forth to open portals to other realms never quite dissipated. This power is said to be directly responsible for the unusual tree growth, the feelings of unease experienced by visitors, and the *fact* that various psychics have claimed they are drawn to the place. Whilst we don't have an answer for you, we can at least say with some degree of certainty that it's probably not that last one. ## Cows Might Be Magnetic **Magnetoreception**, or the ability to navigate using the Earth's magnetic field, is a well-established ability among many animals. Most people are aware that birds use this method of navigation, but it is also used by fruit flies, turtles, and perhaps deer and cows. In 2008, a paper published in *Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences* by researchers at the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany, claimed that an extensive study of images from Google Earth seemed to indicate that cows—and apparently deer—aligned themselves with magnetic north or south while grazing. According to an interview that the lead researcher gave to NPR, the whole experiment started by accident. Initially, after studying naked mole rats and discovering that they always slept in the southernmost point of their dens, they wondered if humans would do the same thing while camping. They consulted Google Earth to look at tent placement. Unfortunately, after hours and hours of research, the team discovered that tents were rather difficult to find with any degree of accuracy—but there were cows. Lots and lots of cows. > "We just stopped looking at camping people and started to look at cows. It was almost an accident." After examining almost 9,000 images of cows, the team concluded that: > "Most of them actually align in a north-south direction, and this held true regardless of where the sun was or how the wind blew." The validity of these claims has been, shall we say, somewhat contentious. At the time, many independent researchers seemed to be rather impressed. For example, Richard Holland, a biologist who has studied magnetoreception in bats at the University of Leeds, told NPR: > "It's a very clever use of Google Earth, and the evidence is quite compelling. It does seem that these animals are detecting the Earth's magnetic field and using it to point in a north-south direction." Several years later, however, a group of Czech researchers attempted to replicate these findings and were completely unable to do so. The team wrote in the *Journal of Comparative Physiology*: > "Two independent groups participated in our study and came to the same conclusion that, in contradiction to the recent findings of other researchers, no alignment of the animals and of their herds along geomagnetic field lines could be found." These directly conflicting results led to each group politely contradicting each other in the press, each trying to discredit the findings of the other. As it stands at the moment, it seems more likely than not that cows do possess this ability, although it is clear that more research is definitely needed. ## Key Takeaways - The immortal jellyfish can revert to a younger state through transdifferentiation, potentially living forever. - The Hessdalen Lights in Norway are a mysterious phenomenon with a plausible explanation involving natural electricity. - The Dancing Forest in Russia features trees with unusual shapes, with theories attributing it to caterpillars or wind. - Cows may align with magnetic north or south while grazing, suggesting potential magnetoreception abilities. - Many natural mysteries remain unexplained, highlighting the ongoing need for scientific research and discovery. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### What is the immortal jellyfish? The immortal jellyfish, or Turritopsis dohrnii, is a small jellyfish that can revert to a younger version of itself if damaged or threatened, potentially allowing it to live forever. ### How does the immortal jellyfish achieve its immortality? The immortal jellyfish undergoes a process called transdifferentiation, where an adult cell can become an entirely different type of specialized cell, allowing it to morph back into a polyp and start over again. ### What are the Hessdalen Lights? The Hessdalen Lights are a phenomenon in the Hessdalen Valley, Norway, where strange lights of various sizes and behaviors appear, sometimes floating for hours and other times moving quickly before fading away. ### What is the most plausible theory about the Hessdalen Lights? The most plausible theory suggests that the lights are caused by a natural battery effect, where sulphurous river water passing between rocks rich in zinc, iron, and copper generates electricity, ionizing gases and creating the lights. ### What is the Dancing Forest? The Dancing Forest is a group of trees in Russia with unusually curved and spiralized trunks, located between the Baltic Sea and the Gulf of Finland. ### What are the popular theories about the Dancing Forest? The two most popular theories are that the trees were affected by Rhyacionia buoliana caterpillars or that wind-blown sand caused the trees to bend and grow in unusual shapes. ### Do cows have magnetoreception? There is evidence suggesting that cows may align themselves with the Earth's magnetic field while grazing, but the findings are contentious and require more research. ### How was the study on cows and magnetoreception conducted? The study involved analyzing images from Google Earth to observe the alignment of cows while grazing, with researchers initially studying the alignment by accident. ### What is transdifferentiation? Transdifferentiation is a process where an adult cell can become an entirely different type of specialized cell, allowing the immortal jellyfish to revert to a younger state. ### What is the significance of the Hessdalen Lights for energy gathering? If the natural battery theory is correct, the Hessdalen Lights could have wide-reaching implications for the future of energy gathering, as it demonstrates a natural process of generating electricity. ## Sources - [Original Side Projects video: Strangest Mysteries Found in Nature](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPK84N-xaqc) - [Hero image source](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/47/Heiligenhafen_sunset_-_Baltic_Sea_-_2025_%2855256656656%29.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=original) by Karlheinz Klingbeil from Germany / openverse, by. ## Related Coverage Simon Whistler https://sideprojects.pub/article/the-5-most-devastating-days-in-human-history https://sideprojects.pub/article/the-5-most-devastating-days-in-human-history Thu, 02 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT From the 1976 earthquake that took a quarter of a million lives in a single day, to the 2004 tsunami that levelled countless coastlines, humanity has endured some truly horrific 24-hour periods. These are the days that remind us just how fleeting life is, and that no matter how bad you think things are, they could always be a whole lot worse. The good news is that thanks to early warning systems, many of the disasters on this list could be avoided, or at least significantly mitigated, today. The bad news is that humanity tends to ignore the warning signs until it's too late, raising serious questions about whether our worst days are behind us. All we can really do is remember the tragedies, try and learn the lessons taught in blood, and take a proactive approach. As to whether we'll recognise the warning signs in the future and take the necessary action remains to be seen. Or to put it another way; there really is no telling if we're ignoring warning signs right now, though we'll certainly know that we did miss warning signs if, or when, things once again go terribly wrong. ## 1976 Tangshan Earthquake When it comes to sheer, catastrophic devastation, there are few events as horrific as the 1976 Tangshan Earthquake. The event is remembered as not only one of the most destructive natural disasters in China's history, but as one of the worst natural disasters in recorded history. The earthquake struck 27th July in Tangshan, a Chinese city noted for being both an industrial coal mining cornerstone of the country, and for being a major railway hub. The earthquake was determined to be of XI intensity, or extreme, as determined by the Modified Mercalli Intensity Scale. To put that into context the scale only goes as high as XII, and very few earthquakes are ever rated as X or above. This in itself would have been enough to make the earthquake a catastrophe, but matters were made considerably worse by the quake occurring at 3:42AM, meaning that the majority of residents were inside, fast asleep, and completely caught off-guard. To properly understand how severe the devastation was; there have technically been more severe earthquakes recorded, but what really determines the impact isn't the severity of the earthquake itself, but rather its location. In this case, the destructive potential of the Tangshan Fault had been drastically underestimated, and so the construction of buildings had been allowed directly on the Faultline itself. Structures stretched for kilometres alongside the Faultline in both directions, which is the equivalent of establishing a city on the banks of a bubbling volcano. More tragic still is that virtually none of the buildings had been given the necessary reinforcement to withstand even a minor earthquake, so an earthquake of this magnitude was nothing short of an absolute worst-case scenario. Estimations are that 85% of the buildings within the 140km zone of the epicentre collapsed within minutes of the earthquake striking, with similar casualty rates for all highways, and for most of the extensive networks of railway bridges. Beyond the primary 140km zone, the impact was still considered a VI on the intensity scale, with 10% of buildings collapsing, and major services severed, including water, and electricity, leaving critical rescue services dramatically hindered. Looking at the primary earthquake, it was measured to be of a 7.6 magnitude according to the Chinese surface magnitude scales, with shockwaves travelling along the fault for hundreds of kilometres in both directions. The epicentre is estimated to have been around 12km beneath the southern district of Tangshan, relatively shallow as far as earthquakes are concerned, which resulted in fault surface displacement of around 3 meters. This by extension manifested in severe surface rupturing for around 8 kilometres directly through Tangshan City. Looking at specific incidents, we mentioned that Tangshan is an industrial city with a focus on coal mining, and at the time the disaster struck around 10,000 miners were underground. The quake cut critical electricity supply, meaning that there was no illumination, no ventilation, no working lifts, and all water pumps were rendered inoperable. The lack of water pumps in particular was a serious problem, given that the concrete liners keeping out ground water were ruptured. Multiple mineshafts were subsequently flooded, creating an absolute nightmare situation. Despite all this, reports are that, miraculously, most of the miners escaped with their lives, though some were trapped underground for as long as 2 weeks. It took nearly a year and a half for mining operations to fully recover. Meanwhile, the railroads running through Tangshan were likewise completely unprepared for an earthquakes, with rails running for several kilometres across loose clay and sand surfaces, many of which immediately collapsed. At the time of the quake, 28 freight trains and 7 passenger trains were travelling through the area, resulting in 7 freights and 2 passenger trains derailing. 43,000 emergency workers were mobilised to assist with the devastation, though they were heavily impaired by the lack of electricity and access to emergency equipment. As tragic as all of this was, if you know anything about earthquakes, you'll know that while the main event is devastating in itself, it's the aftershocks that often take the most lives. In the case of the Tangshan Earthquake, there was a long sequence of several aftershocks, each almost as powerful as the first. An initial aftershock struck just three and a half hours after the main event, measuring a 6 magnitude. Another struck the afternoon of the primary quake measuring between 7 and 7.4, focused on the northeastern end of the fault. Severe aftershocks continued for months following, and have been felt as recently as 2012, 2016, and the most recent in 2020, some of which were powerful enough to be felt in Mongolia and Korea. In total, the official death toll of the Tangshan Earthquake comes in at around 148,022 in Tangshan City, plus 103,919 severely injured, as well as 69,210 deaths in the Tangshan Prefecture, plus 63,620 seriously injured. Today Tangshan is recognised as a leader in earthquake safety standards, with the extensive reconstruction having adopted the highest level of earthquake resistant architecture in the world. ## 1970 Bhola Cyclone From one of the worst earthquakes in history, to one of the worst tropical cyclones, we have the 1970 Bhola Cyclone, otherwise known as the Great Cyclone. It goes without saying, but this is another event known as one of the worst humanitarian disasters in recorded history, ultimately leading to serious political upheaval and a rapid change in government. The cyclone originated on November 1st, referred to as Tropical Storm Nora, over the South China sea. The storm remained in position for a few days, degenerated into a remnant low, much less of a concern than a cyclone, and moved to the Gulf Of Thailand on the 4th. At this point the storm had more or less been written off, but as we'll soon see the climate is anything but predictable, and the worst tends to happen with virtually no warning. The remnant low contributed to a new atmospheric depression in the Bay Of Bengal, November 8th, and the low point of pressure began it draw in air, translating to a gradual intensification of what had already been downgraded to a minor concern. At about this time, the storm also began to crawl gradually northward. The India Meteorological Department upgraded the storm to a cyclone, and even as the severity continued to intensify the Eastern Pakistan coastline, 12th November, was hit with three-minute sustained winds of 185km/h, and one-minute sustained winds of 240kh/h. At this point, you're perhaps thinking that at least the people of Pakistan had plenty of time to prepare, but, sadly, we now have to go into why there had been almost no preparation of any kind. Reports reveal that there had been a serious breakdown of communication across the board, partly due to political friction, and partly due to incompetence. It's been widely suggested that Indian weather authorities were well aware of the storm, but may not have shared the critical information with East Pakistani weather authorities. Furthermore, the warnings issued by the Pakistan Meteorological Department had been done so incorrectly, with the most vulnerable coastal regions receiving the message as a "great danger signal," as opposed to a "No. 1," which was the accepted terminology. Hence, when the storm hit, citizens had done virtually nothing to prepare, leading to a disaster that shook the region to its core. The exact death toll is unknown, but the Tangshan Earthquake and Bhola Cyclone are often listed side by side, with fatalities generally thought to be comparable. In the case of the Bhola Cyclone, however, there is a lack of solid information, with fatalities potentially being as high as between 300,000 and 500,000. A meteorological station at Chittagong, 95km east of where the storm made landfall, recorded winds of 144km/h before the anemometer was ripped off. A ship anchored in the same area recorded peak gusts of 222km/h, at roughly the same time as a 10-meter storm surge rampaged through the Ganges Delta, and up towards, the largest and busiest port in Bangladesh. Several seagoing vessels were severely damaged, and the local airports were under at least a meter of water for several hours. The worst to be hit were undoubtedly Bhola Island and Hatiya Island, located off the coast. Bhola Island, also known as Dakhin Shahbazpur, was all but entirety entirely destroyed; rice crops were wiped out, countless structures were levelled, and it's estimated that a horrific 45% of the 167,000 population of the Tazumuddin district were killed, translating to 14% of the entire island. Of those that did survive, many were afflicted by a phenomenon that became known as cyclone syndrome, referring to severe lacerations of the limbs and chest, self-inflicted as survivors clung to trees to avoid being swept away. Across all impacted coastlines, it's estimated that 3.6 million were left homeless, with total damage coming in at a staggering US$701 million. Reports say that 85% of homes on the coastline were destroyed, 9,000 offshore fishing boats were rendered useless, and 46,000 fishermen were killed of the 77,000 that lived on the coastline. This in turn resulted in approximately 65% of all fishing capacity being hamstrung; an especially dire situation given how many relied on fish for their daily meals. Add to this that an estimated 280,000 cattle were also lost, and the long term devastation cannot be overstated. A month after the storm, over 150,000 in the area were relying on relief aid for at least half of the food required to stave off malnutrition. The 1970 Bhola Cyclone itself was an unimaginable tragedy, but the months following the devastation brought even more chaos, albeit of the political kind. As residents attempted to rebuild their lives, severe political upheaval erupted, the full extent of which we won't go into here. The short version is that East Pakistani political leaders were heavily critical of relief efforts, citing "gross negligence," combined with "callous indifference." In the general elections that followed soon after the disaster, December, and due to the boycotting of leftist parties in both East and West Pakistan, the Awami League won in a landslide victory. These events ultimately culminated in another tragedy, also best left for a different discussion. Today the Government Of Bangladesh, along with the Bangladesh Red Crescent Society, rely on the Cyclone Preparedness Programme, established in 1973. The Programme consists of 76,000 community volunteers across 3801 villages, focusing primarily on early warning systems, but also capable of rapid mass evacuations. ## 2004 Sumatra-Andaman Earthquake The 2004 Sumatra-Andaman Earthquake was responsible for the worst tsunami disaster in history, and one of the deadliest natural disasters of the 21st century, referred to as the Boxing Day Tsunami. The earthquake that triggered the event occurred off the west coast of Aceh in northern Sumatra, Indonesia, 26th December, 2004. A rupturing of the fault between the Burma and Indian plates was the catalyst, and the resulting earthquake ranks amongst the top 3 ever recorded, well above the Tangshan quake mentioned earlier. Initial reports put the magnitude at an 8.8, but this was later revised by the United States Geological Survey to around 9.3. For context, the event was so severe that the entire planet vibrated by as much as 10mm, the faultline ruptured along a 1,200-kilometre stretch, additional earthquakes were triggered as far away as Alaska, and the reverberations were measurable for up to a week after the original event. Residents felt the shaking in Bangladesh, India, Thailand, Sri Lanka and the Maldives, but in this case the epicentre was around 160km off the western coast of Northern Sumatra. So, it wasn't the quake itself that caused widespread devastation, but rather what followed shortly after. Now, the death tolls of the Bhola Cyclone and Tangshan Earthquake were high primarily due to a failure of early warning systems, which left populations completely unprepared. But the Boxing Day Tsunami occurred in 2004, so surely some sort of early warning system must have been present, right? Sadly, no, even in 2004, and even with the tsunami taking hours to reach land in some cases, there was still virtually no warning, and populations were again completely unprepared. There was, simply put, no tsunami warning system in the Indian Ocean even in 2004, with the argument being that there hadn't been a major tsunami on that side of the world since the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa. Additionally, even when offshore earthquakes do occur, there is no guarantee they will cause a tsunami, as was the case with a similar 8.7 magnitude quake in March 2005. So, although the 2004 earthquake had been detected, no subsequent tsunami warning followed, given that a correlation had not yet been established. On the other hand, there were very clear early warning signs on multiple coastlines, with residents in Aceh, Phuket, Khao Lak, and Penang witnessing an incredibly unusual occurrence; the ocean receding dramatically, exposing the seabed beneath. Sadly, in most cases the phenomenon wasn't recognised for what it was, and it's reported that many residents even went to the beach to witness the bizarre event firsthand, all but guaranteeing their deaths. In only a few cases the warning signs were recognised, including one incident on Maikhao Beach in Phuket city, where a 10-year-old British tourist, Tilly Smith, had recently studied tsunamis in geography class. Thanks to her recognising the telltale signs, she and her parents successfully evacuated the beach. Meanwhile, on the Indonesian island of Simeulue, local folklore spoke of such warning signs, with the information having been passed down verbally following a similar earthquake and tsunami that occurred in 1907. The islanders fled to the hills after the earthquake, and after the ocean receded, and most survived the event unscathed. In all other cases residents were not so lucky, with the worst hit being Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Thailand, India, the Maldives, Myanmar, Somalia, and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. There is no definitive number of lives lost in the first 24-hour period, but estimates put the total at between 220,000 to as high as 300,000. Properly summing up the full extent of the chaos and destruction across multiple coastal cities is almost impossible, but eyewitness accounts from Aceh, the closest major city, give some idea of what was experienced. Aceh locals reported first witnessing the ocean receding and exposing the seabed, prompting some to venture out and start collecting stranded fish. This was followed by a first wave which rose gently to the foundations of coastal buildings, and assumptions were that this harmless wave would be the extent of it. But what followed was described as a 12m high "black giant," "mountain," and "wall of water," surging into the city, and sweeping away entire buildings. One report indicates that the water level was as high the second story windows of residential buildings 3.2km inland, with the water still showing no signs of dissipating. Another horrific account describes that in the seaside section of Ulee Lheue the streets were flooded with a 6m surge that had carried debris and bodies for 40kms from other, distant coastal areas. In an incident that has now become legend, an electric generator barge, weighing 2,600 tons, was carried nearly 3km inland and dumped, destroying 2 houses and killing the residents. After the devastation subsided, rather than attempt to remove or dismantle the barge, it was secured and designated a tourist attraction, now referred to as the Museum PLTD Apung. Needless to say, the area of the city facing the Indian ocean was all but entirely levelled, with the 12m high, 3 to 4km long tsunami essentially acting as an eraser. The total cost in damages to all effected countries came it at a staggering $10.75 billion, and those displaced numbered 1.7 million. The worldwide humanitarian response raised $14 billion in 2004, equating to around $23 billion in 2025. The United Nations established the Indian Ocean Tsunami Warning Mitigation System in 2005, which is operational today. ## 1945 Bombing Of Tokyo When talking about singularly destructive wartime events, most default to the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But there is another, often overlooked event that may have been considerably worse, at least looking at it from a 24-hour perspective. We certainly aren't trying to diminish the atomic bomb catastrophises, and are aware that the fallout was much worse in the long term. But for most devastating 24-hour periods, the 1945 bombing of Tokyo by the United States Air Force was arguably more destructive. The bombing raid took place in March 1945, and marked a deliberate change in tactics by the USAAF. Up until that point, the Airforce had focused on precision airstrikes against key enemy targets, primarily industrial facilities and military compounds. But those raids had proven largely unsuccessful, requiring that bombers make visual contact with targets before dropping bombs. This meant daytime missions which were, for obvious reasons, significantly more dangerous, with pilots forced to take the worst of established air defences. To counter the danger of air defences, pilots flew at high altitudes, mitigating some of the threat. By extension, high altitudes also meant that bombs were scattered by the wind and often completely missed intended targets, making the missions costly, both in terms of military resources and soldiers' lives. The decision was therefore made to instead focus on much broader, more destructive bombing raids against entire populated areas. In contrast to the precision-oriented daytime missions, pilots would instead fly at night, maintain low altitudes, and as opposed to focusing on singular, high value targets, were instead free to engage entire populated areas. In 1945 the target had been the entire city of Tokyo itself, and 279 Boeing B-29 Superfortresses obliterated eastern Tokyo in the most destructive air raid in human history. Now, there is a broader conversation here about the morality of directly targeting citizens, but we won't be going into that right now. What we will say is that the US is far from the only country to greenlit such attacks, and in fact, Japan itself had conducted many similar attacks on Chinese cities throughout World War 2, rarely ever even attempting precision attacks. Chongqing in particular, China's provincial capital, was all but entirely destroyed by Japanese air raids before the end of the war. In fact, the last 10 months of World War 2 saw an increase in area attacks across the board, with virtually all involved countries shifting from precision targeting to area bombing. In the last 10 months of the war, area bombing accounted for roughly half of all American attacks on Germany, including major operations conducted in Berlin and Dresden, with about 14 percent of all bombs dropped over that period being incendiary. Similarly, British Bomber Command focused on destroying German cities from as early as 1942 until the end of the war, with incendiary explosives accounting for roughly 21 percent of all bombs dropped. But speaking of area attacks, what exactly is the difference between incendiary bombs and precision bombs? The M69 Incendiaries dropped on Tokyo consisted of a system that sprayed napalm in a general area, then ignited it. M69s were most effective when dropped in clusters, with the intention being to start as many uncontrollable fires as possible in as short period as possible. As opposed to destroying key military facilities, the idea was to simply terrorise a population and cause widespread destruction, crippling a country's economy, and by extension crippling its military efforts. In the case of the Tokyo attack, after first targeting a military compound, pilots were ordered to switch to the Tokyo districts deemed to be the most flammable, namely those consisting of structures made of bamboo. Estimates are that 330,000 M69 incendiaries were dropped and an area of 41 square kilometres was transformed instantly into an inferno. The operation was deemed an enormous success, and the blazing firestorms are speculated to have destroyed an estimated 267,171 Japanese buildings, leaving over 1 million homeless, and over 100,000 killed in a 24-hour period. On the other side of the equation, Japanese air defences were almost completely helpless in resisting the attack. Approximately 638 anti-aircraft guns were involved, along with 90 counter-fighter aircrafts, but even combined these forces were easily overcome. The Japanese 1st Anti-Aircraft Division and 10th Air Division were expecting, and were trained for, high altitude planes conducting daytime attacks. The low flying planes at nighttime were nothing short of an unstoppable curve ball, and Japanese defences managed to shoot down only 14 bombers and damage an additional 42, amounting to just 96 USAAF aircrew fatalities. 30 minutes after the bombing started, the Tokyo fire department was losing control of the situation. After an hour, attempts to fight the fire were abandoned, and efforts instead turned to guiding civilians to safety, and rescuing those trapped in burning buildings. By the end, 125 firemen and 500 civil guards lost their lives, along with 96 fire engines that were completely destroyed. It took Tokyo an estimated 2 decades to fully recover from the event, though some districts still show signs of the devastation to this day. The 1945 bombing of Tokyo is remembered at two official memorials, several neighbourhood memorials, and at a the privately owned Center of the Tokyo Raids and War Damage. ## 1916 Battle Of Somme When it comes to wartime casualties suffered in a single day, relating to direct soldier conflict, there are many battles to take into account, and many depressing lists of fatality numbers to comb through. One of the worst conflicts, with perhaps the highest casualty numbers in a 24-hour period, is the first day of 1916 Battle Of Somme, fought between the British Empire and French Republic versus the German Empire. The Battle Of Somme took place between 1st July and 18th November, in total more than three million men fought, and to this day the battle is considered one of the costliest in human history. We won't go into the deeper details of World War 1, but the nutshell version of this particular battle is that at the Chantilly Conference in December, 1915, The Allies agreed upon a combined offensive which included France, Russia, Britain and Italy, with the Somme offensive in particular being undertook by a united Franco-British army. The initial plan was that the more robust French forces would handle the central offensive, supported by the British who only had limited armies in the area at that time. But the agreed upon plan was thrown into turmoil when the Imperial German Army attacked France, triggering the Battle Of Verdun. As a result, French divisions intended for Somme were diverted, and a rapid restructuring was forced. The best possible compromise saw the far less capable British armies assigned to the principal effort of the Somme conflict, and the outcome was one of the worst single days ever recorded for a ground offensive. To properly understand why it all went so wrong; the British Expeditionary Force, sent by Britain to support France, already had a long and complicated story prior to this, but most relevant to our story is that the army had been reinforced, having already fought multiple battles and suffered serious casualties. As such, numbers had been bolstered by the Territorial Force and Kitchener's Army, both of which were almost entirely made up of volunteers. The Territorial Force came about due to the Territorial And Reserve Forces act of 1907, which aimed to bolster soldier numbers without resorting to conscription. Kitchener's Army, otherwise dismissively referred to as Kitchner's Mob, was likewise made up of volunteers, and as the nickname suggests, the army was considered to not be a particularly effective military force. Adding to the dilemma was a rapid recent expansion of the British military across the board, which had created not only an acute equipment shortage, but a massive number of vacancies for senior commanders and specialist positions. In a desperate attempt to create some sort of operational structure, many retired officers were called back into battle, but were accompanied by a wave of inexperienced newcomers, none of which were fit to hold senior positions. Douglas Haig, who had previously been a lieutenant-general in command of I Corp, was promoted to command the First Army in early 1915, and was then quickly moved on to command the British Expeditionary Force by December of the same year. At the time he took command the BEF had ballooned to 5 armies and 60 divisions, with reports saying that so few of the newcomer senior officers were competent that Haig simply gave commands direct to soldiers, since he wanted to avoid mistakes made by incapable subordinates. It was under these circumstances that the British headed to Somme to do battle, but, unfortunately, this isn't the worst of it. 2016 saw the 100th anniversary of the battle, and as part of the remembrance hundreds of soldier's letters were published, forgotten interviews were released, and other, crucial information came to light. It was this new information that revealed two disgruntled soldiers betrayed allied plans to German interrogators weeks prior to the battle, giving Germany plenty of time to prepare defences for the attack. The new defences included an impeccably organised series of Sperrfeuerstreifen, or artillery barrage sectors, as well as deeply entrenched communication lines dug 6 feet deep and running for 8km to the artillery batteries. The German defences did have weaknesses, such as the front trenches being on forward facing slopes, but Germany still had an overwhelming advantage on the first day, and the inexperienced British soldiers took the full brunt. The Battle Of Albert was the first phase of the Battle Of Somme, taking place between the 1st and 13th July. You may be surprised to hear that the first day was largely a success for the attacking Franco-British forces, but this, unfortunately, doesn't include the primary British offensive. Predictably, the attacking British soldiers were all but entirely devastated. The Allies had conducted preparatory artillery bombardments leading up to the offensive, starting 24th June, with the push following on the 1st July. The French Sixth Army and right wing of the British Fourth Army managed a resounding defeat against the German Second Army, achieving what was reported as "complete success." The primary British Attack, on the other hand, failed across the board, with it reported that there were close to 60,000 British causalities in a single day. Several truces were agreed on so that the mountains of dead and dying British soldiers in the no man's land could be recovered. British losses in the first 24 hours of the battle were, simply put, unprecedented, and even now the first day of the Battle Of Somme is the single worst defeat in the entire history of the British army. In comparison, the French Sixth Army suffered just 1,590 casualties, and the German Second Army between 10,000 and 12,000, bringing total casualties in a single day to somewhere around 75,000. The Battle Of Somme continued for an additional three more phases, amounting to 12 significant battles, with the last, the Battle of the Ancre, occurring between the 13th and 18th of November. Over the course of the entire battle, total casualties came to around 1 million, including 419,654 British, 200,000 French, and 450,000 German. ## Key Takeaways - The 1976 Tangshan Earthquake was one of the deadliest natural disasters, with 252,000 fatalities. - The 1970 Bhola Cyclone caused extensive devastation, with fatalities estimated between 300,000 and 500,000. - The 2004 Sumatra-Andaman Earthquake triggered a tsunami, resulting in 220,000 to 300,000 deaths. - The 1945 bombing of Tokyo by the United States Air Force killed over 100,000 people in a single day. - The first day of the 1916 Battle of Somme resulted in nearly 60,000 British casualties. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### What was the deadliest earthquake in recorded history? The 1976 Tangshan Earthquake is one of the deadliest earthquakes in recorded history. ### How many people died in the 1976 Tangshan Earthquake? The official death toll of the Tangshan Earthquake is around 148,022 in Tangshan City, plus 103,919 severely injured, as well as 69,210 deaths in the Tangshan Prefecture, plus 63,620 seriously injured. ### What was the magnitude of the 1976 Tangshan Earthquake? The earthquake was measured to be of a 7.6 magnitude according to the Chinese surface magnitude scales. ### What was the deadliest cyclone in recorded history? The 1970 Bhola Cyclone is one of the deadliest cyclones in recorded history. ### How many people died in the 1970 Bhola Cyclone? The exact death toll is unknown, but fatalities are potentially as high as between 300,000 and 500,000. ### What was the deadliest tsunami in recorded history? The 2004 Sumatra-Andaman Earthquake triggered the worst tsunami disaster in history. ### How many people died in the 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami? Estimates put the total number of lives lost in the first 24-hour period at between 220,000 to as high as 300,000. ### What was the deadliest air raid in human history? The 1945 bombing of Tokyo by the United States Air Force was the most destructive air raid in human history. ### How many people died in the 1945 bombing of Tokyo? The bombing left over 1 million homeless, and over 100,000 killed in a 24-hour period. ### What was the deadliest battle in a single day during World War I? The first day of the 1916 Battle of Somme is one of the worst single days ever recorded for a ground offensive. ## Sources - [Original Side Projects video: The 5 Most Devastating Days in Human History](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uaqc47U8jBM) - [Hero image source](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bc/Tangshan_Earthquake_Monument_2.jpg) by E2568 / openverse, cc0. ## Related Coverage Simon Whistler https://sideprojects.pub/article/unexpectedly-advanced-technology-ancient-china https://sideprojects.pub/article/unexpectedly-advanced-technology-ancient-china Thu, 02 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT As we journey through the annals of history, the grandeur of ancient European technology stands as an impressive beacon of human achievement. From the majestic arches of the Roman Aqueducts, to the enigmatic Antikythera mechanism, the period is absolutely filled with advanced technology that captivates the imagination. But, as interesting as such European examples are, they have been exhaustively discussed by both academic and popular historians alike, and as a result they have overshadowed some amazing ancient technology found in the rest of the world. Today we will be doing our bit to write this wrong, by bringing you the stories of five amazing pieces of technology from arguably the world's most advanced ancient state: China. So, let's get right into it! ## The Compass Many moons ago, more than a thousand years before the Western world had their first rendezvous with the magnetic whispers of the compass needle, the Chinese already had the technology mastered – but not in the way you might initially imagine. For them, it was an invention that blurred the line between the mystic and empirical, an invention that was as much about science as it was about the supernatural, an invention not to conquer the world's physical frontiers, but to delve into the unseen energies of the universe. The earliest surviving reference to the Chinese compass, known as the 'south-pointer', comes from 'The Book of the Devil Valley Master', dating from around the 4th century BC. Crafted from lodestone, a naturally magnetized mineral, these early compasses took the shape of a spoon, placed on a square bronze plate etched with astronomical symbols and markings which were thought to reflect the fundamental cosmic order. It was within this cosmic order that the south-pointer danced, aligning itself with Earth's magnetic field to guide geomancers in aligning tombs and buildings harmoniously with the universe's life energy, Qi. These compasses were central to the practice of feng shui, a system of establishing harmony between people and their surroundings. The south-pointer was an unseen hand that brought the heavens and earth closer, guiding people to live in rhythm with the universe, a sacred key to unlock the mysteries of the cosmos. However, the winds of change were strong, and as the Song Dynasty took command of China in the 10th century AD and changed the country forever, so too did the compass change. In this period the Chinese, pragmatic in their approach to life, began to recognize the potential of the compass outside its metaphysical domain, and so the compass found a new purpose — navigation. With this newly refined compass in hand, Chinese ships began to venture further into the unknown, and chart out new lands that previously could only be found through fluke of fate. By the time of the Northern Song Dynasty in the 11th century AD, the lodestone spoon design had evolved into magnetized needles floating in water, a design more familiar to our modern eyes. However, these compasses were distinct, still pointing south; a vestige of their geomantic origins. They also now had the added practicality of also indicating the wind direction thanks to further refinement and innovation. For perspective, let's have a quick look at the compass in the west. It first arrived around the 12th century AD, having made its way to Europe from China thanks to the extensive trade networks of the Silk Road, a full 1,600 years after it had been initially invented in China, and 200 years after the Chinese had started using it for navigation. For the Europeans, who until then had relied on the stars, the sun, and astrolabes for navigation, the compass completely revolutionised their maritime capabilities. They also tweaked the Chinese design, making it point north in line with their 'north-at-the-top' style of cartography. ## Irrigation There are few things as important to a civilisation as water. It is a most essential facet of survival, and without it life, never mind civilisation, would be extinguished before it could even take root. Now it's no secret that ancient Europe was no stranger to advanced irrigation, as the many Roman aqueducts that litter the continent attest too, but for the Chinese, their irrigation works were just a tad grander, as exemplified by the Grand Dujiangyan Irrigation System. The system dates back to 256 BC, during the Warring States period, when Li Bing, the Governor of the Qin State, was presented with a daunting task: to tame the capricious Min River. The waters had a nasty tendency to flood, decimating crops, homes, and lives. A man of unprecedented foresight and intellect, Li Bing decided that to address the challenge, the river itself would have to be remoulded. The resulting irrigation system comprised a network of levees, an artificial island that functioned as a colossal water splitter, and a diversion canal. Together, these components harnessed the river's force, gently guiding it through a labyrinth of irrigation channels and breathing life into the fertile Chengdu plains. The result? The river was pacified, the floods were ousted, and prosperity flowed through the region. More impressive still, the system is still fully functional to this day, and continues to nourish a staggering 668,700 hectares of land, a living, breathing testament to ancient China's mastery of water. From here it only continues to get more impressive, as the Dujiangyan project was far from ancient China's only masterstroke in irrigation. The most impressive of all would be The Grand Canal, which for many centuries was the world's longest man-made waterway. By the time it was completed in the 5th century BC it spanned over 1,800 kilometres, and formed a colossal aqueduct that brought an unfathomable amount of water from the bountiful south to the arid north. With references to the canal being in the past tense, you are probably now wondering what happened to the Grand Canal. Was it poorly built and so did not survive? Did some great disaster bring it to destruction? Well, no, nothing nearly that disastrous. The Grand Canal remained the world's largest artificial water way from its completion in the 5th century BC right through till 2017, when it was absorbed into the South–North Water Transfer Project, a 21st century re-imagining of that ancient vision, and today, the old canal plays a part in delivering one billion cubic-metres of water a year to the thirsty citizens of China. Now, juxtapose this with ancient European progress in the realm of irrigation technology. The Romans were indeed commendable builders, as reflected in their impressive aqueducts, but they simply didn't produce anything on the scale of these enormous projects, truly proving just how advanced ancient China's technology was. ## Earthquake Detector European seismoscopes can date their history back to 1703, when French physicist Jean de Hautefeuille invented a device which used a mercury filled bowl that spilled into one of eight equally distanced receivers to warn of an impending earthquake. Certainly, this was a most impressive invention, but, in what is becoming something of a trend, a Chinese inventor beat him to the post by over a thousand years. The Chinese inventor in question was Zhang Heng. A certified polymath, Zhang was a scholar, inventor, mathematician, poet, artist, and astronomer of the Han dynasty. It is unclear exactly when he invented his seismoscope, but we do know that he presented it to the Imperial Court in 132 AD, a full 1,571 years before Hautefeuille's example. It was a peculiar-looking device, reminiscent of a giant bronze vessel, about six feet in diameter. Perched atop it were eight evenly spaced dragon heads, marking the primary compass directions. Each dragon clutched a bronze ball in its mouth, and beneath them sat eight corresponding bronze toads, with gaping mouths ready to catch the balls, and when an earthquake struck, even hundreds of miles away, it sprang into action. The ground's tremors would propagate through the device, causing one of the dragon's mouths to open and release its bronze ball into the toad's mouth below. This gave an immediate, audible alarm, and the dropped ball's position provided a rough estimation of the quake's direction. Legend has it that the Han court initially wrote Zhang's seismoscope off as a useless gimmick. They highly doubted its ability to actually warn of an earthquake, but one thing they did not doubt was the beauty of the device, and so it sat in the Imperial Palace as an ornament to be fawned over by all who walked through those grand halls. But after six years of this, in 138 AD, the device activated. This puzzled the courtiers, who hadn't felt any tremors, and so in their mind, the device's status as a boondoggle was cemented… for a few days anyway, because soon after an exhausted messenger arrived with news of a catastrophic earthquake in Longxi. The court was astounded, and once they'd peeled the egg off their faces, they had no more doubts about the reliability of Zhang's seismoscope. Despite its historical prominence, the inner workings of Zhang Heng's seismoscope remain shrouded in mystery. Various attempts to reconstruct it have been made, most notably by the Chinese scientist Wang Zheng in 2005. His model utilized a pendulum and a sophisticated cradle mechanism to achieve the direction-indicating effect, and he successfully detected several earthquakes during his tests, but ultimately, without collaborating historical evidence, we will never know for sure EXACTLY how it worked. Regardless of the specifics, Zhang Heng's earthquake detector serves as a testament to the technological marvels achieved by ancient China. In a world devoid of electronics, Zhang Heng managed to devise an instrument sensitive enough to detect seismic activity over vast distances, a truly impressive achievement. ## Paper As we continue to traverse the rich offerings of ancient Chinese technology, we are inevitably drawn towards an invention that, at first glance, appears rather humble. Yet, this unassuming innovation has become an irreplaceable cornerstone of human civilization. We speak of course, of paper. It's perhaps not the first thing that springs to mind when contemplating the realm of advanced technology, but nonetheless, the creation of paper is exceptionally important, as it facilitated a litany of later technological advancement; the low cost of paper leading to the mass production and portability of written information, which in turn directly led to an explosion of literature, science, and arts, shaping the intellectual landscape of societies. It also led to the subsequent development of printing in the Tang Dynasty, which in turn meant that information could be duplicated and distributed on an unprecedented scale, ultimately leading to the Renaissance and the Enlightenment in the West. It all began nearly 2,000 years ago, amidst the illustrious era of the Han Dynasty, and under the enlightened reign of Emperor Wu. Within the emperor's court served Cai Lun, a eunuch who was a highly skilled artisan. Cai Lun was assigned the formidable task of finding a practical alternative to the existing unwieldy materials used for writing, namely bones, bamboo slips, and silk. Despite their functional utility, these materials were far from ideal — they were either excessively heavy, exorbitantly expensive, or necessitated an undue amount of labour to produce and inscribe. Undaunted by the magnitude of this challenge, Cai Lun embarked on a journey of relentless experimentation, with his perseverance finally bearing fruit in 105 AD, when he introduced a groundbreaking solution to the emperor. His invention was a thin, lightweight, pliable, and affordable sheet crafted from macerated plant fibres. The process Cai Lun devised was ingenious; he soaked discarded linen rags, hemp, bark from mulberry trees, and fishing nets in water until they decomposed into fibres. These fibres were then mashed into a pulp, evenly spread on a flat, porous surface, and left to dry. The end result was a revolutionary new material — paper. The emergence of paper ushered in a revolution in communication. It drastically reduced the cost of producing writing materials, thereby rendering them accessible to a wider demographic. It facilitated the evolution of sophisticated documentation systems, enabling the recording of historical events, the creation of scientific texts, and the birth of accessible literature. Paper acted as a catalyst, accelerating the dispersion of knowledge, and easing the administration of the extensive Chinese empire. In simple terms, paper was a game-changer. Furthermore, ancient Chinese artisans displayed unparalleled innovation in creating unique types of paper tailored for specific applications: durable hemp paper which was perfect for creating books, delicate rice paper designed for artistic endeavours, and tea paper explicitly used for wrapping the much-revered tea leaves. This degree of specialization highlighted the Chinese commitment to craftsmanship and their deep understanding of the versatile applications of paper. It is also worth noting that while traditional wisdom credits Cai Lun with the invention of paper, recent archaeological findings suggest the technique may predate his time. Ancient paper fragments, discovered at locations like Fangmatan, Dunhuang, and Yumen, indicate rudimentary paper making existed as early as 179–141 BC. However, these early innovations did not permeate society as Cai Lun's did, meaning he was unaware of these prior developments. Therefore Cai Lun's method, which was embraced, celebrated, and recorded, became the enduring basis of all future paper making. So therefore, despite the obscured chronology, Cai Lun is hailed as the 'inventor' of paper both by the ancient Chinese, and ourselves in the modern day. As for Europe, paper making was introduced around the 11th century, nearly a full 1,000 years after its invention in China, having found its way to the continent along the Silk Road. Initially, the production of paper was a laborious process, and its spread was slow, but with the advent of water-powered paper mills during the 13th century, the scale of production grew significantly, and by the 15th century, Europe had finally fully caught up with ancient China. ## Gunpowder We really have saved the best till last here, because of all ancient China's great inventions, probably none have done more to shape the modern world than gunpowder, which emerged during the second century AD. Gunpowder's emergence was born not from the strategic thinking of military minds, but from the pursuits of ancient alchemists exploring the mysteries of nature. Ultimately, we don't know for sure who invented gunpowder, but it is typically attributed to Wei Boyang, a writer and Taoist alchemist of the Han Dynasty who is often dubbed the "father of alchemy", who scribed the earliest known reference to gunpowder in 142 AD. His work describes a three-part composite substance that would "fly and dance with violent enthusiasm". Historians and scientists alike have come to the consensus that this is an early more primitive form of what we now know as gunpowder. Despite this early breakthrough, the true potential of gunpowder would remain untapped for centuries. Chinese alchemists persisted in experiments with Wei Boyang's dancing powder, but they did this with the hope of discovering the elixir of immortality, a cure-all that would grant eternal life – quite ironic given what their powder would eventually go on to be used for. This continued work was sponsored by wealthy and influential patrons like Emperor Wu, who understandably, was rather keen to unlock the secrets of immortality, particularly during his later years. During the Jin dynasty in 300 AD, another significant stride was made by the Taoist philosopher Ge Hong. In his text *The Master Who Embraces Simplicity*, he meticulously documented the ingredients and the method of producing gunpowder. His experimental approach involved heating saltpetre, pine resin, and charcoal among other carbon materials, which yielded a purple powder and arsenic vapours, mirroring the reaction exhibited by true gunpowder. The first solid reference to what we can firmly label as gunpowder comes from the Tang dynasty in 808 AD, appearing in a text titled *The Secret of the Golden Elixir of the Great Emperor*, and then about half a century later in a Taoist text known as the *Essentials of the True Essence and Wonderful Way*. The formula detailed a concoction of six parts sulphur to six parts saltpetre to one part birthwort herb. These early texts also carried warnings of startling explosions and catastrophic accidents that resulted from the misuse of the substance – clearly identifying it as modern gunpowder. It is unknown exactly when gunpowder stopped being used just as a pyrotechnic, or a supposed elixir of immortality and took on its true martial role, but we do know that it probably happened during the Song Dynasty, and absolutely no later than 1044 AD. This is because in this year a military manual, the *Complete Essentials for the Military Classics*, was written, and in this manual we have not only an explicit (and therefore repeatable) formula for gunpowder, but we also have detailed descriptions of the various weapons that could use it. But note, while this MAY have been the point that the military application of gunpowder was realised, as we absolutely cannot rule out that one person may have invented all of these weapons themselves, the sheer quantity of them featured makes it extremely unlikely, thereby implying that gunpowder weaponry had been proliferating throughout China prior to this date, and that the author of the text simply collated it in one place. These early weapons were also rather… different, than what we might imagine an early gunpowder weapon to look like. Take, for instance, the "swallow-tail" incendiary, fashioned from straw bound together and slathered in fat or oil. When a city was under siege, defending soldiers would ignite this incendiary, lowering it onto the enemy's wooden structures, setting them ablaze. Its airborne counterpart, the "flying incendiary," was similar in design but was launched from a swape lever within the city walls, descending onto the enemy by an iron chain. Then, there were the incendiary bombs and grenades. The "fireball," was loaded with gunpowder and launched using a trebuchet. Upon impact, it would ignite, creating a raging inferno within the enemy's ranks. More explosive variants, like the "thunderclap bomb", contained a higher percentage of gunpowder encased in a rigid bamboo container, which trapped the expanding gas, creating a more potent explosion. But the most notable of all of these gunpowder weapons was the "fire-lance", a bamboo tube on the end of a wooden stick, which was loaded with lumps of metal and stone, and then used its gunpowder to propel those lumps into the enemy. If this process sounds familiar, that will be because the fire-lance is the direct ancestor from which all modern firearms are ultimately derived, and if a legacy like that doesn't prove that ancient China had unexpectedly advanced technology, then we don't know what will! ## Key Takeaways - Ancient China developed advanced technologies long before Europe, including the compass, irrigation systems, and paper. - The Chinese compass, invented around the 4th century BC, was initially used for geomancy and feng shui. - The Grand Dujiangyan Irrigation System, built in 256 BC, is still functional and irrigates vast areas of land. - Zhang Heng's earthquake detector, presented in 132 AD, could sense seismic activity hundreds of miles away. - Gunpowder, developed by Chinese alchemists, revolutionized warfare and was first used militarily by the 11th century. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### When and where was the compass first invented? The compass was first invented in China more than a thousand years before the Western world. The earliest surviving reference to the Chinese compass, known as the 'south-pointer', comes from 'The Book of the Devil Valley Master', dating from around the 4th century BC. ### What was the primary use of the early Chinese compass? The early Chinese compass, or 'south-pointer', was primarily used for geomancy and feng shui, aligning tombs and buildings harmoniously with the universe's life energy, Qi. ### How did the Chinese compass evolve over time? By the time of the Northern Song Dynasty in the 11th century AD, the lodestone spoon design had evolved into magnetized needles floating in water, still pointing south and indicating wind direction. ### When and how did the compass reach Europe? The compass reached Europe around the 12th century AD via the Silk Road, about 200 years after the Chinese started using it for navigation. Europeans modified it to point north, aligning with their cartography style. ### What is the Grand Dujiangyan Irrigation System and when was it built? The Grand Dujiangyan Irrigation System was built in 256 BC during the Warring States period. It was designed by Li Bing to tame the Min River and bring prosperity to the Chengdu plains. ### What is the significance of the Grand Canal in ancient China? The Grand Canal, completed in the 5th century BC, was the world's longest man-made waterway, bringing water from the south to the arid north and facilitating trade and communication. ### Who invented the earthquake detector in ancient China and when? Zhang Heng, a polymath of the Han dynasty, invented the earthquake detector and presented it to the Imperial Court in 132 AD. ### How did Zhang Heng's earthquake detector work? Zhang Heng's earthquake detector was a bronze vessel with eight dragon heads and toads. When an earthquake struck, one of the dragons would release a bronze ball into the toad's mouth below, indicating the direction of the quake. ### Who invented paper in ancient China and when? Cai Lun, a eunuch and skilled artisan, invented paper in 105 AD during the Han Dynasty. He created a thin, lightweight, and affordable sheet from macerated plant fibers. ### What impact did the invention of paper have on ancient Chinese society? The invention of paper facilitated the mass production and portability of written information, leading to an explosion of literature, science, and arts, and shaping the intellectual landscape of societies. ## Sources - [Original Side Projects video: The Unexpectedly Advanced Technology of Ancient China](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOJwcj-IoA0) - [Hero image source](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/03/Chinese_Noctule_imported_from_iNaturalist_photo_182175527_on_10_January_2023.jpg) by (c) zhangshen, some rights reserved (CC BY) / openverse, by. ## Related Coverage Simon Whistler https://sideprojects.pub/article/unintentional-eureka-moments-historys-most-incredible-accidental-discoveries https://sideprojects.pub/article/unintentional-eureka-moments-historys-most-incredible-accidental-discoveries Thu, 02 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT There have been a lot of great scientific discoveries over the centuries that took a lot of hard work and dedication. However, sometimes they happen entirely by accident. Today we'll be looking at some of those accidental inventions including penicillin, microwaves, implantable pacemakers, friction matches, synthetic plastics, and chocolate chip cookies. ## Greatest Accidental Scientific Discoveries By Kevin Jennings Scientific advancement is a tireless and often fruitless endeavor. It can take decades or even centuries for difficult advancements to be achieved as researchers painstakingly analyze a problem from every possible angle trying to find a solution. It's usually a slow and deliberate process, and major breakthroughs are rarely made overnight. Rarely, but not never. Sometimes these breakthroughs happen entirely by accident. A scientist could discover a new and practical application for their research that wasn't the intended result, or their experiment may reveal something completely unrelated. Today we'll be looking at some of the greatest scientific discoveries that were completely unintentional. ## Penicillin Penicillin was discovered entirely by accident by a man described as a careless lab technician. Fortunately for the rest of the world and for all of medical science, that lab technician, Sir Alexander Fleming, must not have been terribly fastidious about cleaning his equipment. Fleming worked for the Laboratory of the Inoculation Department at St. Mary's Hospital in London. He had been conducting research into the flu virus, and part of his research involved growing a culture of staphylococcus bacteria. He left the culture to grow, then went on vacation for two weeks. When he returned from his vacation, the results of Fleming's carelessness were immediately visible. The culture plate where he was growing the staph bacteria was full of penicillium mold. However, he noticed that the presence of the mold was hindering the growth of the bacteria. Further examination showed that the mold was producing a chemical to protect itself, which he named penicillin. In 1929, Fleming published his discovery in the *British Journal of Experimental Pathology* and presented it to the Medical Research Club. Surprisingly, no one really cared at first. Maybe his colleagues didn't understand the gravity of this discovery, or perhaps they just thought it was a coincidence. Fleming would continue his research with penicillin until 1931, and the project would be picked up again years later, but the first human trial wouldn't begin until 1941. One of the big deterrents may have been how difficult it was to procure meaningful quantities of penicillin. Though a large farm of penicillium mold was created for research, only a couple milliliters of the chemical could be harvested each week. The result was that the subject of the first human trial died not because the penicillin wasn't working, but because they didn't have enough to give him a full course of antibiotics. Fortunately, the process of growing mold to mass produce penicillin has greatly improved, and the world has never been the same since the discovery of antibiotics. All of this, because one lab technician wasn't great about washing and sterilizing his equipment. ## Microwaves Microwave ovens are one of the greatest conveniences in the modern kitchen, and they were developed entirely by accident by one of America's largest defense contractors: Raytheon. More specifically, they were discovered by the engineer Percy Spencer. Despite being a self-taught engineer, Percy was already well known and highly regarded within Raytheon prior to this discovery, with several patents already under his belt. He was described as having a "knack for finding simple solutions to manufacturing problems." At the time of this invention, Percy was working on increasing the power of magnetron tubes that would be used in military radar equipment. One day, as lunchtime was approaching, he reached into his pocket to pull out a snack. It is most widely reported as a Mr. Goodbar, though there is some debate over exactly what delicious treat he was expecting to indulge in. Whatever the snack originally had been, when Percy's hand went into his pocket instead all he found was a warm, sticky mess of peanuts. It occurred to him that the microwaves may have resulted in heating up the food, but he needed to be sure. If it was indeed a chocolate bar in his pocket, those have a pretty low melting point so he would need more evidence to prove it was the microwaves produced by the magnetron that caused the effect. The next day, Percy brought in something to deliberately heat up. It was something that required a much higher temperature than was needed to make chocolate melt, and it was among the most fitting choices possible. The first food intentionally cooked with microwaves was popcorn. He placed the kernels directly next to the magnetron tube, and once they popped he shared the popcorn with the entire lab. The second experiment was to heat up an egg, which exploded in the face of one of Percy's coworkers. The magnetron was creating a low density electromagnetic field, as it was simply emanating from the tube. Percy decided to create a high density field by building a metal box that the magnetron would feed energy into. Because there was no way for the microwaves to escape, food placed inside the box would increase in temperature at an extremely high rate. Thanks to Percy's sweet tooth, we now all have the ability to turn a tub of macaroni and cheese from something that is frozen solid into something that is far too hot to eat in about 6 minutes. ## Implantable Pacemakers External pacemakers were first created in 1950 and first used in 1952. The machines were large, painful, and most importantly they were external. A patient on a pacemaker could not leave the hospital, instead normally being hooked up to one for about a week until it was believed that their heart would continue to keep pace as normal. In 1956, this would all begin to change. American engineer and inventor William Greatbatch was trying to create a device that would record a person's heart rhythm. Greatbatch was an accomplished inventor who would hold over 325 patents in his lifetime. But sometimes, even the most skilled engineers can make mistakes. The mistake in this instance was using the wrong size resistor for his device. Rather than just recording a heartbeat as intended, his device was releasing intermittent charges of electricity. The rhythm of these charges almost exactly mimicked that of a human heartbeat. This device was still just a malfunctioning recorder and couldn't be used as an internal pacemaker, but it did make Greatbatch realize that an internal pacemaker could be possible. All that was left to do was to build one. Seeing as he had almost created one by accident, designing a machine to serve this purpose would barely be a challenge for the skilled inventor. After fiddling with the design and some extensive animal testing, Greatbatch's internal pacemaker was first put to use in humans in 1960. However, he wasn't the first to market with an internal pacemaker. The first pacemaker was implanted in Sweden in late 1958, but it failed after only three hours. It was replaced, but the new pacemaker lasted only two days. Greatbatch's design was a vast improvement on the earlier Swedish model largely because it used primary cells rather than rechargeable batteries. ## Friction Matches The first self-starting matches were developed in 1805 by French chemist Jean Chancel. The heads of the matches consisted of chemicals like sulfur, and to ignite them they were dipped into a bottle made from asbestos that contained sulfuric acid. Though the matches worked, they were as dangerous as they were expensive so they never caught on. Just over 20 years later in 1826, English chemist and pharmacist John Walker would invent a much more practical and cost effective solution. Walker was already interested in trying to create something like a matchstick. There were already plenty of mixtures that were known to easily ignite and explode, but these weren't useful if you were just trying to light a small fire rather than blow something up. Walker was trying to find a compound that could easily transmit a flame from the source of the ignition onto something that would burn slower, like a piece of wood. One day, he was mixing yet another compound that he hoped might do the trick. He noticed that a dried clump of his mixture containing mostly sulfur and sulfide of antimony was stuck on the end of his mixing stick. Walker scraped the end of his stick against the hearth to remove the clump, and it ignited. By complete accident, Walker had just invented the very thing he had been trying to invent in the first place. He quickly identified that the key to ignition was to scrape the compound along a rough surface, and began making and manufacturing boxes of matches. Unfortunately, he wouldn't get any credit for this invention for quite a while. Though his matches worked, they weren't perfect. One of the common problems was that the matches would sometimes burn so hot that the head of the match would burn off from the rest of the matchstick and fall onto the floor, the furniture, or the person holding the match. Because there were still improvements to be made, Walker wasn't interested in patenting his invention. Unfortunately for him, another London chemist, Samuel Jones, was very interested in patenting it. Jones patented and sold his own variation of Walker's matches that he named "Lucifers." These still had problems, most notably violent explosions upon striking the match that would sometimes send sparks flying considerable distances. Considering Jones patented someone else's invention then billed himself as the inventor of the friction match, it seems safe to assume that he didn't really care about such trivial safety concerns. ## Synthetic Plastic Leo Baekeland was a Belgian chemist working out of Yonkers, New York. Leo was already wealthy thanks to having invented Velox photographic paper, but that wasn't enough to stop his research. He had turned his attentions to a new project, trying to find a synthetic replacement for shellac. Shellac had long been used as both a wood finish and food glaze, but it was always in short supply at the turn of the 20th century when Leo was working on his research. At the time, shellac was still produced naturally from the secretions of lac insects, so the supply would always be dependent on the supply and production of the insects. Though he would eventually succeed in this goal, that product would not go over well. That didn't really matter though because he was already rich, and his accidental invention was only going to make him richer. While experimenting with phenol and formaldehyde to try to produce a synthetic alternative to shellac, he instead created the world's first synthetic resin known as Polyoxybenzylmethylenglycolanhydride. He called the product Bakelite, naturally naming it after himself, but today we know it better as plastic. Though plastics existed beforehand, none were completely synthetic before this. They relied on organic compounds such as cellulose from plants, which meant that much like shellac, supplies would be limited by the amount of the organic component that could be produced. Bakelite posed no such problem, and after filing a number of patents Leo immediately got to work producing as much of the material as he could. The importance of this discovery did not elude him at all, and he immediately speculated on the "thousand and one…articles" it could be used to make. Bakelite was an immediate success, and by 1910 he was already doing enough business to necessitate expansion of his production. For better or worse, this accidental discovery of synthetic plastic has revolutionized the world. Students can now major in Plastics Engineering in college, and roughly 380 million metric tons of plastic are produced each year. That's a huge number, so to give you some idea of scale it is roughly the combined weight of every person on Earth; we would never have been able to produce that amount of plastic each year if we had to rely solely on those that used organic components. A massive industry, an entire branch of science, and a serious environmental concern that costs Americans billions of dollars every year are all the result of one man's accidental discovery because he wanted to help people keep their furniture looking shiny. ## Chocolate Chip Cookies We end today with an amazing discovery from the field of culinary science, the chocolate chip cookie. Cookies have been around since the 7th century, but adding chocolate was a much later addition. Until the 16th centuries when conquistadors returned to Europe from the Americas, the continent was largely or even wholly unaware that the cacao tree even existed. Once they had it, it remained prohibitively expensive for centuries. The introduction of chocolate into cookies seems to have first taken place in the late 1800s, with Cadbury filing a patent for chocolate coated cookies in 1891. Everyone's favourite chocolate sandwich cookie, Hydrox, was then introduced in 1908 and was shortly followed by the cheap imitation brand Oreo in 1912. These seem to be among the earliest chocolate flavoured cookies, but chocolate chip cookies were still nearly 30 years away. This major culinary breakthrough would not take place until the late 1930s at the Toll House Inn in Whitman, Massachusetts. Ruth Graves Wakefield, one of the owners and operators of the inn, had decided to bake chocolate cookies for her guests. Upon discovering she was out of baker's chocolate, she instead decided to chop up a bar of Nestle semi-sweet chocolate. As we mentioned when discussing the invention of the microwave oven, chocolate has a low melting point so Ruth assumed that the chocolate would just melt and disperse among the rest of the batter. As we know now, her reasonable assumption was incorrect. Though the chocolate softened, it remained trapped within the batter where it had been placed. Guests loved the cookies, and by 1938 she had published her recipe. In 1939, Nestle purchased the Toll House name and the rights to publish the recipe on their products. After trying to develop a bar that was easier to chop up, they instead released bags of morsels, also referred to as chocolate chips, so that the cookies could be easily made. While this is the most commonly told version of the story, and Nestle's purchase in 1939 is definitely accurate, there's dispute as to whether the chocolate chip cookie was an accident or not. Ruth held a degree in household arts and had built the Toll House Inn's reputation on the back of her extraordinary desserts, so there's a good chance she knew exactly what would happen when she put the cut up chocolate into her cookies. Though people can't agree whether the invention of the chocolate chip cookie was an accident or intentional, we can all agree that it was delicious. ## Key Takeaways - Penicillin was accidentally discovered by Sir Alexander Fleming due to mold growth on his bacteria culture. - Percy Spencer's melted chocolate bar led to the invention of microwave ovens. - William Greatbatch's resistor mistake resulted in the creation of implantable pacemakers. - John Walker accidentally invented friction matches while trying to create a flame-transmitting compound. - Leo Baekeland's attempt to replace shellac led to the accidental discovery of synthetic plastic. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### How was penicillin discovered? Penicillin was discovered accidentally by Sir Alexander Fleming when he returned from vacation to find penicillium mold hindering the growth of staphylococcus bacteria in his culture plate. ### Who invented the microwave oven? The microwave oven was invented accidentally by Percy Spencer, an engineer at Raytheon, when he noticed that microwaves from a magnetron tube melted a chocolate bar in his pocket. ### What was the first food intentionally cooked with microwaves? The first food intentionally cooked with microwaves was popcorn. ### How were implantable pacemakers first developed? Implantable pacemakers were first developed by William Greatbatch, who accidentally created a device that mimicked a human heartbeat while trying to record heart rhythms. ### Who invented the friction match? The friction match was invented by John Walker, who accidentally ignited a compound he was mixing by scraping it against a rough surface. ### What was the first synthetic plastic? The first synthetic plastic was Bakelite, created accidentally by Leo Baekeland while experimenting with phenol and formaldehyde. ### How were chocolate chip cookies invented? Chocolate chip cookies were invented by Ruth Graves Wakefield at the Toll House Inn in Whitman, Massachusetts, when she chopped up a bar of Nestle semi-sweet chocolate and added it to her cookie batter. ### What was the original purpose of the experiments that led to the discovery of Bakelite? Leo Baekeland was trying to find a synthetic replacement for shellac, a wood finish and food glaze produced from the secretions of lac insects. ### What was the first human trial of penicillin like? The first human trial of penicillin in 1941 failed because there wasn't enough penicillin to give the subject a full course of antibiotics, not because the penicillin wasn't working. ### What was the first external pacemaker used for? The first external pacemakers, created in 1950 and used in 1952, were large and painful, and patients could not leave the hospital while hooked up to them. ## Sources - [Original Side Projects video: Unintentional Eureka Moments: History's Most Incredible Accidental Discoveries](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JN5latIb-3s) - [Hero image source](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/17/Millennium_Mills%2C_Royal_Victoria_Dock%2C_London_-_2023-06-04.jpg) by The wub / openverse, by-sa. ## Related Coverage Simon Whistler https://sideprojects.pub/article/world-leaders-who-survived-multiple-assassination-attempts https://sideprojects.pub/article/world-leaders-who-survived-multiple-assassination-attempts Thu, 02 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT The frequency of assassinations of heads of state has varied wildly throughout history. Because these events are usually the result of political strife, the more peaceful and prosperous a time period is the less likely there are to be assassination attempts. Or at the very least, the less likely there are to be successful ones carried out by professionals. But crazy people are always going to be crazy, and receiving death threats is a daily occurrence for most heads of state. Most of these threats aren't credible, yet it can sometimes be impossible to predict which lunatics are actually planning to follow through with their threats. Even the most popular rulers aren't safe from such attacks, though some proved themselves to be nigh impossible to actually kill. Of course, not all of these failed assassination attempts were performed by amateurs, either. Today we'll be looking at world leaders who survived multiple assassination attempts, including several hundred failed attempts by the CIA on the same target. ## Queen Victoria Queen Victoria had the second longest reign of any British monarch, and she is one of the most popular British monarchs of all time as well. Though her popularity did suffer following the death of her husband, Prince Albert, this was a temporary result of her self-isolation while in mourning. This dip in popularity was also largely restricted to England itself, as her isolation wasn't noticed by the larger British Empire who never would have seen Victoria in person anyway. However, despite her incredible popularity, Queen Victoria was the target of eight assassination attempts by seven different men over a span of more than four decades. The first attempt came just three years into Victoria's reign, and the failed assassin was an 18 year old man named Edward Oxford. Edward was a violent and troubled child who was prone to "fits of unprovoked, maniacal laughter". His behaviour was impulsive and erratic, which caused problems when he came of working age. He worked at a number of pubs, though each time he was fired after just a few months. Edward had this tendency to violently assault customers, something which didn't go over well with his employers. Three days after losing his final job, Edward purchased two pistols which he practiced firing in the garden, though presumably just with powder and no ammo. On June 10, 1840, Edward traveled to Constitution Hill near Buckingham Palace. Victoria and her husband would usually take a carriage ride each evening, so crowds gathered on a nightly basis to catch a glimpse of their beloved queen. At around 6 pm the carriage left Buckingham Palace, and Edward fired a pistol. He missed and declared that he had another, so he fired again before the crowd tackled and subdued him. At trial he was found not guilty by reason of insanity and sent to an asylum. Two years later, a 19 year old named John Francis would try to assassinate the queen by similar means. After his attempt to open a tobacco shop failed and he was caught trying to rob his landlord, John purchased a gun in May of 1842 and waited for Victoria's evening carriage ride, but when the carriage past his gun didn't fire. John escaped, but Prince Albert had noticed the gun pointed at the carriage. The next day, again at Constitution Hill, John leapt from the crowd and fired at the carriage. Because he had noticed the would-be assassin the night before, Albert had ordered the crowd to be filled with police, so John was immediately detained, charged with high treason, and sentenced to death. After much deliberation, Victoria decided to be lenient and commuted his death sentence, instead exiling him to Tasmania. Barely a month later, another teenager would try to take out Victoria outside Buckingham Palace. Seventeen year old John Bean had become obsessed with the attempt made by Edward Oxford, particularly with his sentence. Edward had learned to paint, play the violin, and to speak French and German while in the asylum. Reporting made it sound like a luxury vacation, and for John who suffered from both dwarfism and a hunchback, this sounded like a dream come true. If he fired a gun at the queen then either he would be executed or sent to an asylum, either of which John felt would be a dramatic improvement over his current lot in life. Although John was arrested after his attempt, he didn't receive either of those punishments. Because his gun was filled with paper and tobacco instead of actual ammunition, the judge ruled that he had never intended to actually harm the queen. He was instead sentenced to 18 months in prison, and the incident was downplayed as much as possible in an attempt to stop future assassination attempts. This may have worked, as the next attack didn't occur until 1849, seven years later. William Hamilton was born in Ireland, and he was the first of the attackers that it was even speculated had a political motive, though these allegations were never proven. His attempt went just like the others, firing a pistol at the royal carriage on Constitution Hill. And just like all the others, he missed his target. He was found guilty of treason and sentenced to a punishment worse than death: life in Australia. More specifically, seven years hard labour in Australia. While some papers had speculated that William was an Irish revolutionary, others believed getting transported to Australia had actually been his hope all along. A year later, Victoria would come face to face with her fifth would-be assassin. He was the only one not to use a gun, and also the only one to actually injure her. Robert Pate was a former military man from a wealthy family, but by his late 20s he had already been allowed to quietly retire from the military on account of his growing insanity. Despite his fragile mental state, his wealth still had allowed him to be considered a respectable gentleman. He was seen as a harmless eccentric until June 27, 1850. Victoria had been visiting her sick uncle in Piccadilly, and that evening, as her carriage left her uncle's mansion, Robert lunged forward and struck Victoria in the head with his metal tipped cane. The blow left Victoria with a black eye and a scar on her forehead, and a better positioned strike with that weapon could have been fatal. Fortunately, the wounds were superficial and she made a public appearance later that night. Robert was sentenced to seven years hard labour in Tasmania, though he was given preferential treatment and light work for most of his sentence on account of his wealth. The next attempt on Victoria's life wouldn't come until 22 years later, at the hands of 17 year old Arthur O'Connor. Arthur was from a family of prominent Irish revolutionaries, and he dreamed of following in their footsteps. His dream was to die a hero's death, and he intended to do this by making a massive public spectacle. Arthur's intended goal was to put a gun to Victoria's head and force her to sign an order releasing a group of Irish republican prisoners. After waiting for the guards to be distracted, he scaled the fence to Buckingham Palace, but he was captured before he could get close enough to the queen to put his plan into action. He was sentenced to one year in prison and 20 strokes of a whip. Rather than becoming a legendary Irish hero, he was mocked in the newspapers and denounced by the Irish republican movement. The final assassination attempt came in 1882. While most of the assassins had little to no motive, Roderick Maclean was reported as having a very clear motive. Roderick was born into a reasonably well off family, with his father being the owner of a popular magazine named Fun. The family wound up losing all of their money and Roderick suffered an accidental blow to the head as a child, presumably resulting in traumatic brain injury. But even though his personality and temperament were drastically changed, he still dreamed of being a writer. So when he mailed his poetry to Queen Victoria and she sent back a curt reply, he decided he had no choice but to kill her. He purchased a gun in Portsmouth then walked over 60 miles to Windsor so he could take a shot at regicide. Before the assassination attempt, he also sent a letter to his sister in which he blamed his actions on her. Roderick was angry that he was only being given an allowance of 6 schillings per week instead of 10, and said this fueled his hatred of the aristocracy and of "that old lady Mrs. Vic". Roderick's shot missed and he was immediately apprehended. At trial he was found "not guilty, but insane", which was not a surprising verdict. He had already been declared legally insane two years earlier and been a resident at multiple asylums. Victoria, however, was furious over the verdict, and she pushed for a change to British law that would allow for a verdict of "guilty, but insane". The following year she got her wish when the Trial of Lunatics Act of 1883 was passed. ## Pope John Paul II We generally don't think of the pope as someone who is likely to fall victim to assassination, though it used to be relatively common. In the early days of Catholicism, popes were routinely martyred, and there was a stretch of 102 years in which seven different popes were assassinated. But that was over 1,000 years ago, and it's been over 700 years since a pope is alleged to have been assassinated. But that's only because Pope John Paul II survived two attempts on his life within the span of a single year. The first attempt came on May 13, 1981. John Paul was entering St. Peter's Square to address a crowd when Turkish citizen Mehmet Ali Ağca fired a Browning 9 mm pistol from the crowd, striking the pope multiple times in the abdomen. John Paul lost almost three quarters of his blood and required five hours of surgery. Although the attack was a surprise, the assailant was less of one. Two years earlier, it was reported in The New York Times that Ağca had claimed responsibility for the murder of a Turkish newspaper editor. In the same article it said that Ağca promised to kill the pope if he didn't cancel his trip to Turkey that was planned for November of 1979. The trip was not canceled, so Ağca sought revenge on the pope who he blamed as being responsible for the Grand Mosque seizure that year. That was the official story, at least, though many have put forth other motives. The CIA believed that Moscow and the Soviet Union were the ones to hire Ağca, or at the very least they believed that pushing that narrative would help keep public opinion firmly against the Soviets. Some more conspiratorial motives have been proposed as well, though the Moscow narrative is the only one to have received a lot of widespread support, something that has continued to this day. Ağca was captured in the crowd by a nun and several spectators who were able to detain him until police arrived. He was sentenced to life in prison in Italy, though this was a bit redundant as he was already supposed to be serving life in prison in Turkey for the murder of the newspaper editor. Ağca had actually escaped prison six months before traveling to the Vatican, though he would not escape a second time. Two and a half years after the assassination attempt, Pope John Paul II visited Ağca in prison and spoke with him privately for 20 minutes. To this day it is unknown what they talked about, but the pope publically stated that he forgave his would be assassin. In 2000, after Ağca had served nearly 20 years of his life sentence, the Italian president pardoned Ağca at the direct request of John Paul. He was then transferred back to Turkish prison for another 10 years before being paroled. But before all of that happened, on May 12, 1982, just one day before the anniversary of the first assassination attempt, John Paul was attacked in Fatima, Portugal by Juan María Fernández y Krohn, a disgruntled member of the clergy. While the first assassin was believed by many to have been in league with the Soviets, the second assassin believed that the pope was the one who was working with the Soviets. John Paul had been in attendance at the Second Vatican Council, also known as Vatican II, and he had continued to implement the modernized policies put forth by the council. For example, if you've ever attended a Catholic mass that wasn't performed in Latin, Vatican II is the reason why. Juan was opposed to the reforms of Vatican II, and he believed that John Paul was a communist agent sent by Moscow to infiltrate the Vatican. As the pope traveled through Fatima, Juan, dressed in his traditional clergy attire, emerged from the crowd and shouted, "Down with the Pope, down with the Second Vatican Council". He then stabbed John Paul with the 16 inch (40 cm) bayonet of a German Mauser rifle, though he had not gotten close enough for the wound to be fatal or even particularly deep. Believing he had completed his mission, Juan allowed himself to be arrested without a fight. He was sentenced to seven years in prison and excommunicated from the church. Unlike with Ağca, John Paul never publically forgave Juan for the assassination attempt. ## Fidel Castro When it comes to failed assassination attempts, there is no world leader in history more iconic than Fidel Castro. The United States and Cuba had been allies, and the US was willing to look past what an authoritarian Fulgencio Batista was because it was deemed beneficial to the nation. But once Castro seized power and made Cuba the first communist nation in the western hemisphere, the relationship between the two nations dramatically changed. The CIA wanted Castro dead, and they wanted him dead immediately. Arguably the first attempt was the Bay of Pigs Invasion in 1961. It wasn't an assassination attempt strictly speaking, but had it been successful there was a good chance it would have resulted in Castro's death. However it was not successful, it was a disaster. The invasion was launched by 1,400 Cuban exiles supported by the United States military, and things went horribly. Following this botched invasion, the CIA decided to resort to more direct, covert means of taking out Castro. In total, it is believed that the CIA planned at least 634 assassination attempts, though not all of the plans were enacted. Many definitely were enacted, though obviously unsuccessfully. One of the most popular methods of attempt to kill Castro was to poison him with botulinum toxin, one of the deadliest toxins known to humans and also what they use to perform Botox. Many of these attempts involved getting people close enough to Castro that they could poison his food, though they also tried to poison cigars with botulinum. Usually the would-be assassin would either get caught by Castro's security or get cold feet and abandon the mission, though sometimes they simply failed. An employee at a restaurant Castro frequented was paid off by the CIA to poison Castro's chocolate milkshake with botulinum, but the employee was so nervous that he accidentally destroyed the poison capsules while trying to open them. While poison is a pretty standard form of assassination, some of the CIA's plans were much less orthodox. Similar to the poison cigars, there were also allegedly plans for exploding cigars. That story is less substantiated than the others, so it may have been an urban legend created by someone who watched one too many Looney Tunes cartoons. However, there was a very legitimate plan created by the CIA to blow up Castro using cartoon style violence. Castro was a big fan of scuba diving, so the plan was to plant a big, beautiful seashell in an area where he was known to dive. The shell would be filled with explosives and set to detonate as soon as it was picked up. This sounds like a ridiculous plan, as it would rely on Castro diving in the area the shell was planted, seeing the seashell by the seashore, and finding it so irresistible that he just had to pick it up. And while that all is a ridiculous and luck based plan, that's not the reason the CIA never enacted it. They simply couldn't find a seashell large enough to fit the amount of explosives necessary to kill Castro. But maybe the CIA wasn't cut out for murder. The government is supposed to enforce laws, not violate them, so perhaps this was just too far out of their wheelhouse. To that end, they offered the mafia $150,000 to assassinate Castro. The mafia declined the money, instead promising to do it for free because they loved their country. And that was definitely the real reason, not because they wanted to have leverage over the president. However, the mafia wasn't any more successful than the CIA had been. They tried a combination of botulinum toxin and good, old fashioned gun violence, but nothing worked. One assassin who got closest was a former lover of Castro's, Marita Lorenz. Marita's father was a captain on luxury cruise ships, and she happened to be on board one of these ships with him near Cuba shortly after Castro took power. Castro and some of his men boarded the ship, and he and Marita began having an extended affair. Over the course of this affair, Marita claimed to have become pregnant with Castro's child. She then said that when she told him, he drugged her and she awoke in a hospital with her pregnancy having been terminated. She went back to the United States with no plan to return to Cuba following that, but she wound up making one more trip. Marita's mother had worked for the OSS, the precursor organization to the CIA, and her mother's contacts saw a way to both take out Castro and give Marita the revenge she desired for her forced abortion. She was given botulinum pills and called to meet with Castro again. He sent a private plane to pick her up, but she couldn't poison him. Some accounts say that she couldn't bring herself to, while others say that the pills she was storing in a jar of cold cream melted in the heat and became unusable. During her rendezvous with Castro, she confessed to having been sent there to kill him, though she denied working directly with the CIA. In response to this, Castro handed her his pistol and told her to shoot him, but she couldn't do it. According to Marita, Castro wasn't surprised at all, telling her, "You can't kill me. Nobody can kill me." Since the assassination attempt failed and they were already in the room together, they just decided to have sex instead. In 1976, President Ford signed Executive Order 11905 in an attempt to reform the intelligence community. It explicitly stated, "No employee of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, political assassination." Despite this, the CIA's attempts on Castro's life continued all the way until at least the year 2000, when Cuban exiles led by a CIA operative attempted to blow up Castro at a speaking engagement in Panama. These are just some of the attempts on Castro's life, but there were many more. The CIA even had plans to assassinate his reputation instead, though these were pretty ridiculous. Some of those plans involved removing Castro's beard or making him trip balls on LSD while giving a radio speech. All of the CIA's plans may have been failures, but nobody can say they weren't at least trying to be creative. ## Key Takeaways - Queen Victoria survived eight assassination attempts over four decades, despite her popularity. - Pope John Paul II survived two assassination attempts within a year, one by a Turkish citizen and another by a disgruntled clergyman. - Fidel Castro faced at least 634 assassination attempts by the CIA, including creative but unsuccessful methods. - Many assassination attempts on heads of state are driven by political strife or personal grievances. - Some assassins were motivated by mental illness or personal issues rather than political reasons. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### Who was the first person to attempt to assassinate Queen Victoria? The first attempt on Queen Victoria's life came from an 18-year-old man named Edward Oxford. ### How many assassination attempts did Queen Victoria survive? Queen Victoria survived eight assassination attempts by seven different men over a span of more than four decades. ### What was the motive behind Roderick Maclean's assassination attempt on Queen Victoria? Roderick Maclean attempted to assassinate Queen Victoria after she sent a curt reply to his poetry, which fueled his hatred of the aristocracy. ### How many assassination attempts did Pope John Paul II survive? Pope John Paul II survived two assassination attempts within the span of a single year. ### What was the motive behind Mehmet Ali Ağca's assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II? Mehmet Ali Ağca attempted to assassinate Pope John Paul II because he blamed the pope for the Grand Mosque seizure and had previously threatened to kill the pope if he didn't cancel his trip to Turkey. ### What was the motive behind Juan María Fernández y Krohn's assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II? Juan María Fernández y Krohn attempted to assassinate Pope John Paul II because he believed the pope was a communist agent sent by Moscow to infiltrate the Vatican. ### How many assassination attempts did Fidel Castro survive? The CIA planned at least 634 assassination attempts on Fidel Castro, though not all of the plans were enacted. ### What was one of the more creative assassination attempts planned by the CIA on Fidel Castro? One of the more creative assassination attempts planned by the CIA involved planting a large, explosive-filled seashell in an area where Castro was known to scuba dive. ### What was the CIA's response after President Ford signed Executive Order 11905? Despite Executive Order 11905 explicitly stating that no employee of the United States Government shall engage in political assassination, the CIA's attempts on Castro's life continued all the way until at least the year 2000. ## Sources - [Original Side Projects video: World Leaders Who Survived Multiple Assassination Attempts](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kk-bLURbXoU) - [Hero image source](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ef/Conferentie_Restoring_Justice_for_Ukraine_-_Toespraak_procureur-generaal_voor_Engeland_en_Wales_Victoria_Prentis.jpg) by Ministerie van Buitenlandse Zaken / openverse, by-sa. ## Related Coverage Simon Whistler https://sideprojects.pub/article/worlds-most-powerful-non-nuclear-weapons https://sideprojects.pub/article/worlds-most-powerful-non-nuclear-weapons Thu, 02 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT History and warfare were forever changed in 1945 when the United States dropped two atomic bombs, covering the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with an inferno the likes of which the world had never before witnessed. The introduction of nuclear weapons and mutually assured destruction meant that wars would be forever changed, right? Well, fortunately for everyone, they haven't been used in combat since, though plenty have been tested by several nations, and the largest of which, the Tsar Bomba, was detonated by the Soviet Union with a force of more than 50 megatons. But after the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in 1963, nations began to only test these bombs underground, and the idea of using them on another country became less and less likely as the cold war fizzled out. Although humanity more or less collectively agreed to not nuke itself into oblivion, wars continued around the globe, and likewise, weapons continued to evolve. Some of these weapons stand out from the rest in terms of power and lethality, so, without further ado, here are some of the world's most powerful non-nuclear weapons. ## Mother of All Bombs The GBU-43/B MOAB, whose name officially stands for Massive Ordnance Air Blast, and unofficially stands for Mother of all Bombs, is a satellite guided bomb weighing over 21,000 pounds with a blast yield equivalent to 11 tons of TNT. The MOAB's casing is a thin layer of aluminum, weighing only about 2,900 pounds. The rest of the bomb's weight comes from its explosive filling, which is nearly 19,000 pounds of H6, an explosive composition that is about 1.3 times as powerful as pure TNT. The thin casing around the explosive allows it to quickly detonate just as it's hitting the ground instead of attempting to penetrate through the surface before exploding. This is because the MOAB is not designed to destroy industrial or fortified targets, but instead is an anti-personnel bomb for large open spaces or hard-to-reach places such as tunnels, caves, or canyons. The MOAB is designed to be deployed at high altitude from the gigantic C-130 Hercules. The bomb, which is roughly the size of a bus, rests on a cradle in the cargo bay which slides backward and releases the bomb from the aircraft. As the bomb cradle begins to slide out, a parachute deploys that pulls the bomb all the way out of the C-130 and into its proper orientation in the air. After the parachute and cradle disconnect, fins on the side of the bomb, in coordination with GPS, guide the MOAB on its path toward its target, which can be more than 3 miles away, keeping the aircraft that deploys it out of range of anti-air defenses. The MOAB was designed by the United States in the early 2000s for use in the Iraq war as a dazzling part of the so-called "shock and awe" that would showcase the military's power, but despite being designed, developed, and tested in under a year, the plans to use it in Iraq never got off the ground. Marc Garlasco, a former senior intelligence analyst at the Pentagon, said that the MOAB wasn't used in the initial stages of the Iraq invasion because it carried an unnecessary risk of killing civilians. The bomb would have to sit on the military's shelves for over a decade before it was finally used. In 2017, the MOAB saw its first combat usage when it was dropped on a tunnel system in northeastern Afghanistan that was being used as a weapons depot and to hide ISIS militants. It was seen as the perfect target for such a bomb — the tunnels would be difficult and costly to take with ground troops, and the caves that made up a large part of the structure would be naturally resistant to traditional bombs, especially considering the fact that some of them were up to 300 meters deep. After the bomb was dropped, the Afghan Army reported that the explosion had killed 94 ISIS combatants and that there were no civilian casualties, and US President Donald Trump reported that the attack was a "huge success." There was, however, some backlash after the attack. Locals reported to their province that a schoolteacher and his son were killed in the explosion, and former Afghan president Hamid Karzai condemned the attack, saying, "This is not the war on terror, but the inhuman and most brutal misuse of our country as testing ground for new and dangerous weapons." Because of this and its massive price tag, it's unclear if or when the MOAB will be used again. An important note here is that the MOAB is the most powerful nonnuclear bomb ever used in combat, but it's not the largest ever invented. For example, the Massive Ordnance Penetrator, or MOP, weighs 30,000 pounds, and the FOAB, or Father of all Bombs, is a Russian made bomb that, though it weighs less than the MOAB, has a blast yield up to 4 times as powerful. This is because it is a thermobaric bomb, meaning it essentially ignites the oxygen around the blast to create a larger, hotter explosion. The FOAB, however, has not been used in combat and US defense analysts, as expected, question the validity of Russia's claims. ## Anthrax The bombs we just covered were powerful because of their immense size, but now we're going to turn our attention to the microscopic. Bioweapons are an ancient part of warfare, even mentioned in classics such as the Iliad and the Odyssey, where water wells were poisoned, and arrowheads were dipped in decomposing corpses or even manure. But perhaps the deadliest biological agent that has ever been weaponized is Anthrax. Anthrax is an infection resulting from one of the 89 known strains of the bacteria *Bacillus anthracis*. Apart from intentional infection, it is an incredibly rare disease around the world — the United States, for example, sees an average of only 1-2 infections per year. But its infectious potential and high mortality rate make it the perfect candidate for a lethal bioweapon. The infection can occur through injection, skin contact, or ingestion of contaminated materials, but Anthrax is most deadly when its spores are inhaled. If an infection develops in the lungs, the mortality rate is higher than 50%. Anthrax spores were first weaponized during the First World War, but on a small scale and mostly against livestock. Imperial Japan began experimenting with the disease in the 1930s, killing thousands of prisoners of war in the process. The Allies also began serious research into its use during WWII with plans to turn the anthrax spores into little edible cakes and drop them to German cattle, but they later cancelled these ideas and incinerated the cakes. This testing, however, along with the development of anthrax bombs, contaminated Scotland's Gruinard Island so heavily that it was completely quarantined until it was decontaminated nearly 50 years later in 1990. Throughout the latter half of the 20th century, dozens of countries experimented with and developed weaponized anthrax, leading to the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention, a treaty which banned the production and stockpiling of bioweapons, which over 183 countries have signed, most notably at the time the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union. Following this, anthrax production was ceased around the world and arsenals of it were disposed of… except in the Soviet Union. The USSR continued its production under some secrecy until it was exposed following the 1979 Sverdlovsk incident, where nearly 70 people were killed by a leak in nearby anthrax production. Initially the Soviet Union denied that the origin was a bioweapon, claiming that the infection was from infected meat and went to extensive lengths to cover up the accident, but eventually conceded and admitted that the cause was a militarized aerosol from a nearby testing facility. The Soviet Union was also home to the infamous 'Anthrax Island', which housed between 100 and 200 tons of anthrax spores. This site was abandoned in 1992 but wasn't decontaminated for another 10 years. The deadliness of anthrax once again hit the news following the 9/11 attacks when envelopes contaminated with the spores were mailed to US political offices and media outlets, resulting in 22 infections and 5 deaths. Since then, the US Postal Service has installed biohazard detection systems at its major distribution locations, but the attacks showed how easily a single person could use anthrax for nefarious purposes. The other issue with anthrax is that if left untreated, the spores can lay dormant for over a century before infecting a host. Russian researchers recently estimated that over a million anthrax infected reindeer carcasses lay beneath arctic permafrost, which could become hazardous to nearby wildlife if the ice continues to melt. Fortunately, if someone is infected, vaccines and a number of antibiotics have been developed to treat anthrax infections, but there's no way to know what new strains are being cooked up somewhere in a lab. ## Chemical Warfare The First World War showed the world the horror of chemical weapons. The most widely used chemical agent was mustard gas, which while not always fatal, was pure agony to encounter. Mustard gas was launched in artillery shells at the trenches of both sides on the Western Front, where it would stick to skin, eyes, and get into the lungs. Soldiers inflicted with mustard gas could develop blindness, permanent lung problems, internal and external bleeding, and a fatal exposure could take weeks to kill. The oily liquid would also seep into the soil which could remain contaminated for months. But both sides were also tampering with more lethal gases. Germany was the first to develop chlorine gas, which would ride a gentle breeze to enemy trenches, which could then asphyxiate anyone unlucky enough to spend too long in the cloud. But chlorine had some downsides, mainly its highly visible greenish yellow cloud. Both sides were constantly in a race to develop better masks to protect their soldiers from gas while trying to create even more deadly forms of the weapon. This culminated with the creation of phosgene gas, a colorless agent that was even more lethal than chlorine. The first German attack with a combination of phosgene and chlorine gas killed more than 1,100 troops, most of which died less than 24 hours after contact with the gas. By the end of the war, 190,000 tons of chemical weapons were produced, and mustard, phosgene, and chlorine gas attacks were estimated to have caused more than 1.3 million casualties. Hundreds of thousands of civilians were also exposed to chemical weapons, thousands of which died in the years following the wars due to scarring of the lungs and cancers in various organs. Following World War 1, the Geneva convention banned the use of chemical weapons, but several world powers hadn't signed the treaty, namely Japan and the United States. During World War 2 The United States considered the use of chemical weapons in the planned invasion of the Japanese mainland, but after the Japanese surrender this was no longer necessary. And though both sides refrained from using chemical weapons on battlefields during the war, they all continued to research and develop newer and more fatal chemicals. Perhaps the deadliest chemical weapon developed during World War 2 was Sarin, a German made chemical weapon known as a nerve agent. It was developed accidentally while German scientist Gerhard Schrader was tinkering with pesticides to protect farms and orchards from beetles. After combining cyanide and phosphorous, the result was so deadly that the German army was notified of the invention. Schrader continued experimenting with the agent, and eventually created Sarin, a colorless, odorless, and tasteless liquid. Sarin is estimated to be 26 times deadlier than cyanide, and more than 500 times deadlier than chlorine gas. Initial symptoms include chest pain and a runny nose, but as sarin attacks the nervous system, victims quickly lose muscle function in their body and suffocate in as little as one minute after exposure. Sarin can also remain on a person's clothes for up to 30 minutes, meaning it can easily spread to anyone that stays close to the victim. The Nazis developed over 12,000 tons of sarin, but Hitler was reluctant to use the chemical agent and it stayed in storage for the remainder of the war. Historians have speculated the reason for his hesitancy, including his own brutal experiences with toxic gas in the first world war, but the most likely cause was his fear of allied retaliation on his own troops. While most of the weapons mentioned in this video have been banned and aren't being actively produced around the world, weapons continue to evolve, and governments are always researching new frontiers. It's even possible that one day, nuclear weapons won't be the most powerful, as antimatter bombs have the potential to take the crown. From railguns to orbital weapons, there's probably a lot of top-secret stuff being developed of which the public is entirely unaware. ## Key Takeaways - The MOAB, used in Afghanistan in 2017, is the most powerful non-nuclear bomb used in combat. - Anthrax, a deadly bacteria, has been weaponized since World War I and remains a threat. - Chemical weapons like mustard gas and sarin caused over 1.3 million casualties in World War I. - The Geneva Convention banned chemical weapons post-World War I, but development continued. - The Soviet Union secretly continued anthrax production despite the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### What is the MOAB and what does its name stand for? The MOAB, or Massive Ordnance Air Blast, is a satellite-guided bomb weighing over 21,000 pounds with a blast yield equivalent to 11 tons of TNT. Unofficially, it is known as the 'Mother of all Bombs'. ### How does the MOAB differ from traditional bombs? The MOAB is designed as an anti-personnel bomb for large open spaces or hard-to-reach places such as tunnels, caves, or canyons. Its thin casing allows it to detonate quickly upon impact rather than penetrating the surface. ### When and where was the MOAB first used in combat? The MOAB was first used in combat in 2017 when it was dropped on a tunnel system in northeastern Afghanistan that was being used as a weapons depot and to hide ISIS militants. ### What is anthrax and why is it considered a lethal bioweapon? Anthrax is an infection resulting from the bacteria Bacillus anthracis. It is considered a lethal bioweapon due to its high mortality rate, especially when inhaled, and its ability to remain dormant for over a century. ### What was the impact of the Sverdlovsk incident involving anthrax? The Sverdlovsk incident in 1979 resulted in nearly 70 people being killed by a leak in a nearby anthrax production facility. The Soviet Union initially denied the origin was a bioweapon but eventually admitted it was from a militarized aerosol. ### What are some of the effects of mustard gas? Mustard gas can cause blindness, permanent lung problems, internal and external bleeding, and a fatal exposure can take weeks to kill. It can also contaminate soil for months. ### What is sarin and how deadly is it? Sarin is a nerve agent developed during World War 2. It is colorless, odorless, and tasteless, and is estimated to be 26 times deadlier than cyanide and more than 500 times deadlier than chlorine gas. Exposure can lead to suffocation in as little as one minute. ### What is the most powerful non-nuclear bomb ever used in combat? The MOAB (Massive Ordnance Air Blast) is the most powerful non-nuclear bomb ever used in combat, though it is not the largest ever invented. ### What is the difference between the MOAB and the FOAB? The FOAB, or Father of all Bombs, is a Russian-made bomb that, though it weighs less than the MOAB, has a blast yield up to 4 times as powerful. It is a thermobaric bomb, meaning it ignites the oxygen around the blast to create a larger, hotter explosion. ### What was the impact of chemical weapons during World War 1? During World War 1, chemical weapons such as mustard gas, phosgene, and chlorine gas caused more than 1.3 million casualties and resulted in the Geneva Convention banning their use. ## Sources - [Original Side Projects video: The World's Most Powerful Non-Nuclear Weapons](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqYKLCGeoMA) - [Hero image source](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a1/001126-IraqMuseum-IMG_8269-2.jpg) by Safa.daneshvar / openverse, by-sa. ## Related Coverage Simon Whistler https://sideprojects.pub/article/10-absolutely-brutal-historical-torture-methods https://sideprojects.pub/article/10-absolutely-brutal-historical-torture-methods Thu, 25 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT Torture! Or as some call it "enhanced interrogation", where the only thing being "enhanced" is your chance of dying. And that was doubly true in the past. Throughout all of history, us humans have developed unique and creative methods of maiming and killing each other in ways that cause unimaginable amounts of pain. And that's what we're covering today. We're going to delve into the nasty parts of the past where others dare not go, to look at the different instances of torture that our species have used to butcher each other, showing as much regard for their fellow man as I have for bottles of shampoo. Get ready to have your stomach well and truly churned. ## Number 10 – Rat Torture One of the simplest methods of torture perhaps ever concocted, is also one of the cruellest. First developed by the Chinese and Romans, but later perfected in Medieval Europe, "rat torture" as it's known, involved having a person lay on their back, usually strapped to a table when one or several rats were placed inside half a cage upon the torso. The cage would then be heated either by a flame or hot coals and the rats, desperate to escape the heat, would attempt to burrow through the victim's stomach to escape. It was used effectively during the Dutch revolt as a form of torture to gain information, with those suffering from it being quick to give up what they knew or be eaten alive. If someone was not supposed to survive the ordeal, some sources state that the rats were made hungry first and cuts would be made on the person's torso, which then combined with the heat would cause the rats to feast as they burrowed inside, slowly killing the person over hours or days of agony as they ate away at the victim's intestines. Unless stopped quickly, infections like peritonitis would also see this method kill people after the fact. Of all the torture methods humans have invented, few are as horrific as the ones left up to the whims of hungry, frightened animals. ## Number 9 – The Rack One of the most infamous torture methods ever devised was known as the rack. Utilised for over 2,000 years as a brutal instrument of pain, its iconic design struck fear into prisoners and criminals from antiquity to the Middle Ages. The most common design features a square frame raised slightly off the ground, with rollers attached to both ends. Rope or chains would be attached to the rollers via a rachet mechanism and when the victim was placed upon it, torturers began the stretching process. As the rollers began tightening, it would force a person's joints to extend. Soon they would begin to pop and eventually would completely dislocate. Muscles in the arms and legs would be rendered completely ineffective and if stretched enough, it could even tear entire limbs off. That's not all, the rack was horrendous because it could also be used as a simple restraint, meaning it could be combined with other forms of torture like having fingernails ripped out or being burned with torches. One version even has a roller in the middle with metal spikes on it, in this variation the victim is laid face down and as they're stretched, they're slowly gored to death by the rotating mechanism. It's believed to have originated in ancient Greece where Herostratus, an arsonist who burned down the Temple of Artemis around 400 BC was stretched on the rack until he died. Almost two millennia later, Guy Fawkes was racked after his infamous gunpowder plot failed in the late 1500s. But incredibly, it would not be outlawed in Britain until 1708. ## Number 8 – Breaking on the Wheel Of all the execution methods and torture methods that existed in medieval Europe, breaking on the wheel had to be among the worst of the worst. It was not just an execution, but by the time the torture was over, if you weren't already dead you'd be practically begging someone to put you out of your misery. Reserved for some of the worst crimes that people could commit, executioners would take a large wagon wheel, and tie their victim's limbs to it, before bludgeoning them with cudgels, clubs or metal bars, whatever could be used to ensure that bones were shattered and joints were dislocated. Most executioners would start with the arms and legs before moving inwards to finish the culprit off with a blow to the head or spine. After the victim was dead, they would leave the body on the wheel in a public place as a warning to others, sometimes placing it on a pole and hoisting it into the air for people to view as a gruesome display of the state's power. But sometimes, the victims would survive the initial torture and simply be left to die in agony on the wheel afterwards. It was popularised in Europe's Middle Ages but even saw use as far back as ancient Rome. With the Roman historian Titus Flavius describing a similar execution, quoting here; "They fixed [the prisoner] about a great Wheel, whereof the noble-hearted youth had all his joints dislocated and all his limbs broken…the whole Wheel was stained with his blood." It has been a torture and execution mainstay then for over a millennium, the last use of the wheel in Europe was in the late 18th century but apparently it saw continuous use until the 19th in South America. Grizzly. ## Number 7 – The Spanish Boot For having such an amusing name, this method of torture was anything but. The boot, sometimes known as the Spanish Boot or the Malay Boot, was a kind of device in a range of designs all with the same goal in mind, to crush the leg and cause immense pain to the person wearing it. The most basic kind of boot was first devised in Scotland, where rawhide was wettened and bound around the victim's leg, before heating it over a fire, causing it to constrict, and placing immense pressure on the leg. But the design gradually progressed as it travelled. A common version involved wooden planks fastened around the leg going from the ankle to the knee. Then wooden stakes would be driven into the top of the boot using a mallet, as each stake was driven in, the pressure on the leg mounted, causing severe pain, trapped nerves, broken bones, and even loss of consciousness. Metal versions were also eventually devised that could be tightened with screws, with spikes on the inside to shred the leg as the pressure grew. It was used as a means to get confessions out of criminals and sometimes was made to the exact specifications of the person in question's leg. Not the kind of shoe fitting you'd like to attend. It was utilised well into the 18th century in parts of Europe. In The Free Church of Scotland, Charles McCrie wrote in 1894 that; "So excruciating were the agonies of the victims and so piercing their shrieks that even hardened officials hastened out of the room when these engines of torture were brought in, and it was found necessary to pass an order of Council that members keep their seats while 'the question' was being thus 'put.'" ## Number 6 – The Scavenger's Daughter It must have been an interesting time in the Middle Ages to be a torture engineer, constantly having to come up with new and inventive ways to harm people. For example, what if someone said "you know the rack?" what if we built something that was just as cruel but did the exact opposite?" Well, you'd end up with the "scavenger's daughter." Sometimes going by "Skeffington's Gyves", named after it's inventor, Sir William Skeffington, the device's concept was simple. It was a metal hoop or an A-frame that was designed to keep the victim hunched over. The head, arms and feet would be placed into the device at the top, middle and bottom points before tightening it, bringing a person's knees up and forcing their head down. This forced the body into a highly uncomfortable and compressed position, with almost no freedom to move whatsoever. In the hooped designs, the body is also forced to kneel in a praying position by placing the main element over the spine rather than the neck, which emphasised the humiliation of the punishment, on top of making it hard to breath, and causing muscle cramps. Some designs even incorporated spikes that pushed into a person's body, further dissuading movement. Those subjected to it were said to suffer lasting physical and psychological trauma. It was mainly used in medieval England, particularly in the Tudor era. English Catholic priest Luke Kirby was subjected to the gyves in 1580, writing "I am bound and charged with gyves, yet am I loose and unbound towards God." ## Number 5 – Thumbscrews Have you ever heard of those Chinese finger traps? The ones that you played with as a kid, and predictably got your fingers stuck in, causing you to panic? Well imagine that, but much, much worse. Thumbscrews, sometimes called "thumbekins" or "pilliwincks" were a common design of torture device seen throughout medieval Europe designed to provide a small, but highly effective way of delivering pain. Designs varied but the common elements included a small bracket housing two pieces of metal with a screw running through the centre. An unfortunate victim's thumbs would be placed between the metal pieces before the screw was slowly tightened, squeezing them together, crushing the thumbs, and causing excruciating pain. They saw use throughout Europe with specific references and examples to them during the Scottish Middle Ages, but also in France, Spain and Russia throughout the 15th-18th centuries. Variations even included pointed spikes to pierce one's flesh, as if having your digits flattened wasn't painful enough. They were mainly used as a method of extracting information or as punishment for minor offences, although the British Royal Armory Museum also reports that they were used in the asylum known as "Bedlam" when ordinary methods to cure violent patients wouldn't work. A truly ghastly invention, which was able to dose out extreme anguish for a device so small. Perfect for the torturer on the go. ## Number 4 – Molten Gold Cocktail Yes, it's not just something that happened in that one episode of game of thrones, being executed via molten gold was actually a thing that has happened in history. Except reality is always worse than whatever the entertainment industry can dream up. As molten gold was rarely poured over a person's head such as in George R. R. Martin's masterwork, but instead was poured down a person's throat. Now this is horribly painful and can kill you in about 100 different ways. Molten gold reaching the stomach, throat and lungs would blister them and send you into shock before killing you in short order, the steam itself from your own body's moisture might cook you from the inside or make your organs burst, and if you manage to survive all of that somehow, the gold solidifying in your throat would cause you to suffocate. It is a brutal way to die, often withheld for the greediest condemned as a form of irony. Several people have met their end this way. The most modern case was in 1599, when Spanish conquistadors tried to levy taxes against a group of Jivaro Indians who lived in Ecuador. The Spanish governor of Logrono found out first hand just how the natives wanted to deliver him his gold. It's also reported that Manius Aquillius was executed by Mithradates in the same way all the way back in 89 BC. Some are sceptical of how common this kind of execution really was, however. The story of the Jivaro Indians may have been concocted to justify later atrocities made against the natives by the Spanish, whilst accounts claiming that Marcus Licinius Crassus was executed just like Aquillius was, have been deemed unreliable. Ultimately gold is valuable and there are many humiliating and ironic ways to end somebody's life without wasting it in this manner or causing a right old mess trying to recover it. It's not practical, but it is flashy and effective. ## Number 3 – Keelhauling Necessity is the mother of invention. It's easy to torture and maim somebody when you have access to a castle, a dungeon and all the sadistic equipment you could ever want. But what about on the open water when all you have is a ship? Well, unbelievably, it might be even worse. Keelhauling is an old practice said mostly to be used by navies and pirates in the 17th and 18th centuries, usually to punish wayward sailors. The victim would first be suspended by a rope from the mast of the ship that was held taut by other sailors, with weights attached to the victim's legs. When the sailors released the rope, the victim would be plunged into the water down one side of the ship and underneath the bottom, known as the keel, before being hoisted back up on the other side. Now obviously, being dunked into freezing cold seawater isn't pleasant, but that would be the least of one's worries. The underside of a ship was often covered in hard barnacles whose edges would slash the victim's body as they were dragged underneath it. Combine that with the saltwater and lack of oxygen, and you have a highly gruesome experience. However, it's clear that keelhauling was supposed to be just a punishment and not an execution, with the archived Universal Dictionary of the Marine from 1780 stating that the victims would get "sufficient intervals to recover from the sense of pain". How kind of them. Two Egyptian sailors were keelhauled in 1882 according to the UK's parliamentary record for looting and murder, whilst one famous painting depicts an admiral's surgeon hoisted just before the grizzly deed. This is one for time travellers to avoid at all costs. ## Number 2 – Scaphism To see one of the most disgusting torture and execution methods ever devised, you have to go all the way back to ancient Persia and scaphism, also referred to as "the boats". The first mention of scaphism comes from the Greek-Roman philosopher Plutarch, who stipulated that this particularly gruesome death went as follows. The victim, usually who had been prosecuted for what was seen as a really bad crime, would be placed either within the hollowed-out trunk of a tree, or as per the name, between two boats fashioned together, with holes cut just large enough for their hands and head to poke out the top and sides. Then the contraption was placed on its back, and with the victim unable to move, the horror began. Copious amounts of milk and honey would be force-fed into the victim's mouth. Such a concoction would cause significant distress in the stomach, causing diarrhoea and the sweet, disgusting mess would attract insects and vermin that would slowly eat the victim alive in a torture that could be prolonged for an awfully long time. Plutarch stated that Mithridates, a Persian soldier, not the same one from the gold example, was sentenced to scaphism for murdering a man named Cyrus the younger. He endured this fate for 17 whole days before his death. Unlike with thumbscrews for example, there is no evidence remaining of anyone who endured scaphism and so there are sceptics of its existence. It could be a story made up by the Greeks to make the Persians appear barbaric, and it certainly does, but considering the other horrendous ancient methods of torture and execution that existed for certain in this very video, scaphism would not have been out of place. ## Number 1 – Impalement This one's just sadistic. It's also one of the longest-running execution methods humanity has ever devised. Impalement isn't necessarily what you would expect. In the modern day, one may hear "impalement" and assume a stake thrust through the torso. A horrible and traumatic way to die, yes, but that would be a mercy compared to what impalement actually was. You see impalement wasn't a sideways affair… but an… "upwards" one. Culprits of various crimes would have a sharp, long wooden stake inserted into them from beneath, they would then be raised up, allowing gravity to push the stake into their body until they died, which caused untold agony for the hours or even days it would take to succumb. After the person died, the stake would then continue to penetrate the person's body, sometimes reappearing through the neck, chest or even the mouth. To prolong the suffering, a blunter stake would be used, and various methods would be utilised to stop a person sinking onto it too quickly. Nobody did impalement quite like Vlad, the Wallachian ruler who in the 13th century impaled 20,000 people. But impalement has quite a long history. One of the earliest records of it was in the 18th century BC in Babylon where King Hammurabi ordered a woman to be executed via impalement for killing her husband. It was a common execution method for women. It's also not that recently that it was last documented. During the Armenian genocide of the 19th century, Aurora Mardiganian, a survivor, saw women assaulted and impaled at the hands of the Ottoman Empire. In a biographical film of her life, these events were deemed so horrific that the impalement was replaced with crucifixion. It is truly one of the worst ways to die. ## Conclusion And that was 10 methods of historically horrible torture. One of the most mind-bending things about these methods is just how recently some were still being used, even up to only a couple of hundred years ago. We like to think that humanity has long since moved passed this kind of brutality, but the reality is very different. In the darkest recesses of the world, where nobody can see, things just as bad as what we've described today are likely happening to people all over the planet. Let this video be a stark reminder to you all that regardless of time period, location or technology. People are cruel. Thank you for watching. ## Key Takeaways - Historical torture methods were often designed to cause immense pain and suffering. - Torture devices like the rack, the wheel, and thumbscrews were used extensively in medieval Europe. - Some torture methods, such as rat torture and scaphism, involved prolonged agony and horrific deaths. - Impalement was a particularly brutal and long-lasting method of execution used across different cultures and time periods. - Many of these torture methods were used relatively recently, within the last few hundred years. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### What is rat torture? Rat torture involved strapping a person to a table and placing one or several rats inside a half cage on their torso. The cage was then heated, causing the rats to burrow through the victim's stomach to escape the heat. ### How was the rack used as a torture device? The rack featured a square frame with rollers and a ratchet mechanism. Victims were placed on the rack, and as the rollers tightened, their joints would extend, pop, and eventually dislocate, causing immense pain and potential limb dismemberment. ### What was breaking on the wheel? Breaking on the wheel involved tying a victim's limbs to a large wagon wheel and bludgeoning them with cudgels or metal bars to shatter bones and dislocate joints. The victim was often left to die in agony on the wheel. ### What was the Spanish Boot? The Spanish Boot was a torture device that involved binding a victim's leg with rawhide or wooden planks and then constricting it with heat or wooden stakes driven in with a mallet, causing severe pain, broken bones, and sometimes loss of consciousness. ### How did thumbscrews work? Thumbscrews were small devices with a screw running through two metal pieces. A victim's thumbs were placed between the metal pieces, and the screw was tightened, crushing the thumbs and causing excruciating pain. ### What was the Scavenger’s Daughter? The Scavenger’s Daughter was a metal hoop or A-frame device that forced the victim into a hunched, compressed position with their head, arms, and feet secured. This caused muscle cramps, difficulty breathing, and psychological trauma. ### What was keelhauling? Keelhauling involved suspending a victim from a ship's mast with weights attached to their legs and then releasing the rope, causing the victim to be dragged underwater along the ship's keel, which was often covered in barnacles. ### What was scaphism? Scaphism involved placing a victim in a hollowed-out tree trunk or between two boats with holes for their head and hands. They were then force-fed milk and honey, attracting insects and vermin to slowly eat them alive. ### What was impalement? Impalement involved inserting a sharp, long wooden stake into a victim from beneath and raising them up, allowing gravity to push the stake into their body until they died, causing prolonged agony. ### When was the rack outlawed in Britain? The rack was not outlawed in Britain until 1708. ## Sources - [Original Side Projects video: 10 Absolutely BRUTAL Historical Torture Methods...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IG2MXYSBS00) ## Related Coverage Simon Whistler https://sideprojects.pub/article/10-unsolved-cryptic-messages-and-codes https://sideprojects.pub/article/10-unsolved-cryptic-messages-and-codes Thu, 25 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT Throughout history, humans have left behind messages—some carved in stone, others scribbled on paper, and even a few transmitted through radio waves. Some were meant to be read by all, while others were designed to remain hidden, known only to a select few. But not all of them have been understood. Some remain locked behind codes and cyphers that no one has ever cracked. These aren't simple puzzles. They are messages that have defied the brightest minds, frustrated the greatest codebreakers, and resisted the power of modern artificial intelligence. Some have existed for centuries, their meaning lost to time. Others were created within the last few decades and still mock those who try to solve them. A few may hold forgotten knowledge, buried secrets, or the key to a truth we've yet to uncover. Others may lead nowhere at all, designed only to mislead, confuse, and provoke curiosity. ## The Voynich Manuscript – The Book No One Can Read A book with no known author. A language no one has ever seen before. Strange plants that don't exist. Diagrams of celestial bodies that don't match our sky. Hundreds of pages of symbols and illustrations, carefully inked and preserved for centuries, yet completely indecipherable. This is the Voynich Manuscript—the most mysterious book in the world. Discovered in 1912 by an antique book dealer named Wilfrid Voynich, this medieval manuscript has defied every attempt to understand it. Radiocarbon dating indicates it was written sometime between 1404 and 1438 but in an unknown script composed of characters that do not appear in any recorded language. Some of the symbols resemble letters. Others look like numbers. However, despite over a century of study, no one has been able to translate a single word. The manuscript is filled with detailed illustrations—botanical sketches of plants that have never been identified, astronomical charts that do not match the known constellations, and anatomical diagrams of human figures floating in pools of liquid. Some pages fold out like maps, revealing complex star charts and networks of interconnected symbols. The handwriting is meticulous, and the ink is expertly applied, yet the meaning behind it all remains a mystery. Over the years, countless theories have emerged. Some believe the manuscript is an elaborate hoax created in the Middle Ages to fool collectors and scholars. Others insist it must be an unknown language, a forgotten dialect encoded in symbols only its author could understand. Some suggest it could be an encrypted medical text filled with ancient knowledge lost to time. A few have even speculated that it might not be from this world at all—that it could be evidence of something beyond human understanding. ## The Kryptos Sculpture – A CIA Puzzle That's Still Unsolved Hidden in plain sight, standing outside the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency, is a sculpture containing one of the world's most famous unsolved codes. It's called Kryptos, and for over thirty years, it has taunted some of the world's best cryptographers, intelligence analysts, and puzzle enthusiasts. The sculpture, created in 1990 by artist Jim Sanborn, is made of curved copper sheets with four encrypted messages engraved into its surface. Three of those messages have been deciphered, but the fourth remains unsolved. The first section of the code contained a poetic phrase: "Between subtle shading and the absence of light lies the nuance of illusion." The second was a set of coordinates pointing to a location just outside the CIA headquarters. The third contained a cryptic reference to Howard Carter, the man who discovered the tomb of Tutankhamun, along with the phrase: "Can you see anything?" "Yes, wonderful things." But the final section—ninety-seven characters long—has never been cracked. Over the years, some of the world's greatest codebreakers have attempted to solve it. The CIA and independent cryptographers have all worked on the puzzle. Even the National Security Agency, which specialises in breaking the toughest codes on the planet, hasn't been able to decipher it. Sanborn has offered only two small clues to help codebreakers along the way: the word "Berlin" and the word "Clock." But what they mean and how they fit into the final solution are still unknown. Some believe the final message holds a deeper secret—something Sanborn intended to be revealed only after all four sections were solved. Others think it's just an intellectual challenge, a puzzle meant to outlive its creator. ## The Tamam Shud Case – A Murder Wrapped in a Cryptic Note A dead man on an Australian beach. No ID, no known cause of death, no missing person report that matched his description. Just a well-dressed corpse lying against a seawall, a half-smoked cigarette resting on his collar. The only clue? A tiny scrap of paper hidden in his pocket, with two words printed on it: Tamam Shud. The phrase comes from *The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam*, a book of Persian poetry. It means "It is finished." But what exactly was finished? His life? A secret mission? A cryptic farewell? The mystery began on December 1, 1948, when the unidentified man was discovered on Somerton Beach in Adelaide, Australia. He had no visible wounds. His body showed no signs of struggle. An autopsy revealed that his organs were in an unusual state, as if he had been poisoned—but no trace of poison was found. His teeth and fingerprints didn't match any known records. Then came the real twist. Weeks later, a local man walked into a police station with a copy of *The Rubaiyat*. He said he had found it in his car, parked near the beach, around the same time the body was discovered. The last page was missing—the very page that contained the words Tamam Shud. That wasn't all. Inside the book, detectives found something even stranger: a series of seemingly random letters written in faint pencil: **WRGOABABDMLIAOIWTBIMPANETPMLIABOAIAQCITTMTSAMSTGAB** To this day, no one has cracked it. Cryptographers, military intelligence, and amateur sleuths have tried to decode the meaning of these letters, but the sequence remains a mystery. Adding to the intrigue, the book also contained a phone number. It led police to a local woman named Jo Thomson, who denied knowing anything about the dead man. But when officers showed her a cast of his face, she seemed visibly shaken. She refused to talk about it. Years later, her family hinted that she might have known more than she admitted. Some believe the Somerton Man was a spy—perhaps caught in the crossfire of Cold War espionage. Others think he was involved in an illicit affair, a criminal operation, or something even stranger. In July 2022, Professor Derek Abbott and genealogist Colleen Fitzpatrick announced that DNA analysis identified the Somerton Man as Carl "Charles" Webb, an electrical engineer and instrument maker born in Melbourne in 1905—but the circumstances of his death—and the meaning of the code—remain unsolved. ## The Zodiac Killer's Unsolved Ciphers – Messages from a Murderer A shadowy figure in a dark hood. A string of brutal murders. A killer who taunted the police and the press, sending cryptic letters filled with puzzles, threats, and a chilling promise: "I like killing people because it is so much fun." Between 1968 and 1974, the Zodiac Killer terrorised Northern California, claiming responsibility for at least five confirmed murders—though he hinted at many more. Unlike other serial killers, he didn't just vanish into the night. He wanted attention. He wanted to be known. And he wanted the world to crack his cyphers. He sent four coded messages to newspapers, daring readers to decipher them. The first one, a 408-character cypher, was cracked in 1969 by a schoolteacher and his wife. It revealed a disturbing message about his obsession with killing. But the second, a 340-character cypher, remained unsolved for over fifty years. It wasn't until 2020 that a team of cryptographers finally broke the code. The decrypted message read: "I hope you are having lots of fun trying to catch me… I am not afraid of the gas chamber because it will send me to paradise all the sooner." Despite this breakthrough, two of the Zodiac's cyphers remain unsolved: the so-called Z13 and Z32. The Z13 contains just thirteen characters, possibly spelling out the killer's name. The Z32, allegedly revealing the location of a bomb, has never been decoded. Experts have tried every known decryption technique, including analysing letter frequencies, running computer algorithms, and comparing the symbols to known codes. But these two cyphers continue to defy all attempts at solving them. Some believe the messages are a hoax designed to frustrate investigators and leave behind a false trail. Others think the Zodiac deliberately made them unsolvable, encrypting them in a way only he would understand. The Zodiac Killer was never caught. His identity remains unknown, and his motivations unclear. His cyphers, letters, and taunts are all that's left of his twisted game. ## The Phaistos Disc – A Message from a Lost Civilization A single clay disc, no bigger than a human hand, covered in symbols that no one has ever deciphered. A language that appears nowhere else in history. A message that has remained unread for over 3,500 years. The Phaistos Disc was discovered in 1908 in the ruins of an ancient palace on the island of Crete. It is made of fired clay and covered on both sides with 241 symbols arranged in a spiral pattern—with 45 distinct signs, depicting a range of images, including human figures, animals, plants, and tools. The symbols were not carved by hand but stamped into the wet clay using some form of early printing technique—a process thought to have been unknown in the ancient world. The meaning of the disc has baffled scholars for over a century. The symbols depict a mixture of familiar and strange images—human figures, animals, tools, plants, and abstract shapes. Some resemble characters from the ancient Minoan script known as Linear A, but the writing does not match any known language. What does it say? Some believe it is a hymn or religious text, a prayer offered to forgotten gods. Others think it could be a legal document, an early attempt at recording laws or decrees. Some have even suggested that it is a game board, a children's toy, or a hoax created by the Minoans themselves. Despite decades of study, no one has been able to decode the Phaistos Disc. There is no other known text in the same script, no Rosetta Stone to provide a translation. Without more examples of the writing, solving the puzzle may be impossible. ## The Shugborough Inscription – The Key to the Holy Grail? Standing in the gardens of Shugborough Hall, deep in the English countryside, is a monument covered in symbols that have defied explanation for over two centuries. The stone carving, known as the Shepherd's Monument, features a relief of a classical painting—shepherds pointing toward an inscription carved below them. The inscription itself is simple yet baffling: **D.O.U.O.S.V.A.V.V.M.** Ten letters, no spaces, no explanation. The monument was commissioned in the 18th century by Thomas Anson, a wealthy aristocrat with known ties to secret societies. Some believe the letters are an unsolved code—one that could reveal the location of the Holy Grail. For years, speculation has run wild. Some have claimed it is a hidden message from the Knights Templar, pointing to a secret treasure buried in England. Others think it is a Masonic cypher, a secret left behind by those with forbidden knowledge. Some believe it is linked to the Rosicrucians, a shadowy mystical order that flourished in the 17th century. Theories about the inscription's meaning vary. Some suggest it is a Latin phrase, possibly a religious or philosophical statement. Others believe it is an acrostic, with each letter representing a word. Some cryptographers have even tried linking it to historical cyphers, but no solution has been universally accepted. Even Charles Darwin, famed for his theory of evolution, tried to crack the Shugborough Inscription. So did Charles Dickens. Both failed. In 2004, codebreakers from Bletchley Park analysed the cypher but did not reach a conclusive interpretation. To this day, no one knows what the ten letters stand for, why they were carved into the monument, or their true purpose. A meaningless engraving—or a message that could change history? ## The Chinese Gold Bar Ciphers – A Treasure Wrapped in Mystery Gold bars, covered in cryptic symbols, stamped with numbers, riddled with strange Chinese characters and unknown codes. A fortune worth millions—but more valuable than the gold itself is the mystery engraved upon it. In 1933, seven gold bars were allegedly gifted to General Wang in Shanghai, each inscribed with a series of complex codes, ancient scripts, and references to financial records. The bars contain a mix of Chinese characters, Latin letters, and numerical sequences, some arranged in grid-like patterns that resemble traditional encryption techniques. The Chinese inscriptions reference a substantial transaction exceeding $300 million, purportedly deposited into the Shanghai branch of a U.S. bank. Some believe the inscriptions reveal details of secret wartime transactions between Chinese and American banks. Others think they point to hidden wealth, a coded record of lost gold reserves stashed away during World War II. For decades, codebreakers have tried to decipher the engravings, but no one has been able to make full sense of them. The messages could be financial records, historical documentation, or something even more obscure—possibly a cypher known only to the people who created it. Despite cryptographers and historians' efforts, the inscriptions' meaning remains a puzzle. The gold bars exist, and the messages are real, but the key to understanding them is still missing. ## The Beale Ciphers – A Hidden Treasure That May Never Be Found A secret buried in the hills of Virginia. A hidden fortune in gold and silver, said to be worth over 60 million dollars in today's money. Three coded messages, locked behind an encryption that has never been cracked. This is the mystery of the Beale Ciphers—one of the greatest unsolved treasure hunts in history. The story begins in the early 1800s with Thomas J. Beale, a man who supposedly discovered a vast treasure while prospecting in the American West. Fearing that he or his men might not survive to retrieve it, he encrypted the treasure's location in three separate cyphers, locked the key to the code inside an unknown document, and entrusted a small iron box containing the messages to a Virginia innkeeper. Then, he vanished. Decades later, the box was opened. Inside were three sheets of paper, each filled with seemingly random numbers. The second cypher was cracked in 1885 using the Declaration of Independence as the key, revealing a message that described the hidden treasure in detail—gold, silver, and jewels buried underground. But the other two cyphers are still unsolved. One is said to contain the exact location of the treasure, and the other supposedly lists the names of the men who discovered it. But without the key, neither has ever been deciphered. Some believe the solution is still hidden in a forgotten historical document, waiting for someone to make the connection. Treasure hunters have searched the Virginia countryside for decades, digging in places they believe fit the description. Some claim to have found clues, but no one has ever uncovered the gold. Sceptics argue that the whole story might be a hoax designed to send people on a wild chase for something that never existed. But others believe the cyphers are real—that a fortune still lies buried beneath the earth, its secret locked inside a code that has resisted decryption for over 200 years. ## The Rohonc Codex – A Language That Doesn't Exist A book filled with over 400 pages of mysterious script, written in an unknown language, using an alphabet that appears nowhere else in history. A text so bizarre that even the best linguists and cryptographers have failed to decipher a single sentence. This is the Rohonc Codex—one of the most puzzling and unexplained manuscripts ever discovered. No one knows exactly where it came from. The earliest known record of the codex dates back to the early 19th century when it was found in Hungary. It was named after the city of Rohonc, where it was kept for years before being passed to the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. However, despite extensive study, no one has been able to determine who wrote it, when, or why. The script itself is unlike anything ever seen before. It contains nearly 200 distinct symbols, far more than any known alphabet. Some of the letters appear to resemble ancient Hungarian, Sanskrit, or even early Romanian writing, but they don't match any known linguistic system. Unlike most texts, the codex doesn't seem to follow a clear left-to-right or right-to-left pattern. Some researchers believe it might be a highly sophisticated cypher, while others suggest it could be a forgotten language lost to time. The pages are filled with strange illustrations—scenes of knights, castles, crosses, military battles, and religious imagery. Some images appear to depict biblical stories, while others seem entirely unique, unlike anything from recorded history. But without a translation, their meaning is pure speculation. Over the years, theories about the codex's origins have ranged from the believable to the bizarre. Some say it was created by an unknown medieval sect, encoding their teachings in a secret script. Others believe it's a hoax, an elaborate prank designed to confuse scholars. Some even suggest it might be an attempt to document an entirely fictional civilisation—a book written in a language that never existed. Despite multiple attempts to decode it—including efforts from professional codebreakers and AI-assisted linguistic analysis—the Rohonc Codex remains unreadable. ## The Unsolvable Some codes are meant to be solved, while others are meant to remain mysteries. Across centuries and continents, these cryptic messages have defied historians, cryptographers, and puzzle enthusiasts alike. Some might be hoaxes, elaborate deceptions crafted to mislead. Others could be the keys to forgotten knowledge, their secrets still waiting to be unlocked. Some hold the promise of hidden fortunes, while others may never have been intended to be understood at all. Time has erased the context of many of these messages. The people who wrote them are long gone, and the civilisations that created them are buried beneath history. And yet, the codes remain—staring back at us from old manuscripts or carved into stone—printed in letters that refuse to reveal their meaning. ## Key Takeaways - Throughout history, humans have created codes and cyphers that remain unsolved. - Some of these cryptic messages may hold forgotten knowledge or hidden secrets. - The Voynich Manuscript is a medieval book with an unknown language and indecipherable symbols. - The Kryptos Sculpture at the CIA headquarters contains a famous unsolved code. - The Tamam Shud Case involves a mysterious death and an encrypted note. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### What is the Voynich Manuscript? The Voynich Manuscript is a medieval manuscript discovered in 1912 by Wilfrid Voynich. It is filled with detailed illustrations and symbols in an unknown script, and its meaning has defied all attempts at translation. ### What is the Kryptos Sculpture? The Kryptos Sculpture is a sculpture outside the CIA headquarters containing four encrypted messages. Three of these messages have been deciphered, but the fourth, containing 97 characters, remains unsolved. ### What is the Tamam Shud Case? The Tamam Shud Case involves a dead man found on Somerton Beach in Australia in 1948 with a scrap of paper containing the words 'Tamam Shud.' A copy of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam found nearby contained a coded message and a phone number leading to a local woman, but the case remains unsolved. ### What are the Zodiac Killer’s unsolved ciphers? The Zodiac Killer sent four coded messages to newspapers between 1968 and 1974. Two of these ciphers, known as Z13 and Z32, remain unsolved despite extensive efforts by cryptographers. ### What is the Phaistos Disc? The Phaistos Disc is a clay disc discovered in 1908 in Crete, covered in 241 symbols arranged in a spiral pattern. The symbols do not match any known language, and the disc's meaning has remained unread for over 3,500 years. ### What is the Shugborough Inscription? The Shugborough Inscription is a stone carving at Shugborough Hall featuring the letters 'D.O.U.O.S.V.A.V.V.M.' The meaning of these letters has been debated for over two centuries, with various theories suggesting it could be a hidden message from secret societies. ### What are the Chinese Gold Bar Ciphers? The Chinese Gold Bar Ciphers refer to gold bars inscribed with complex codes and ancient scripts. These bars were allegedly gifted in 1933 and contain references to financial records, but their meaning remains a puzzle. ### What are the Beale Ciphers? The Beale Ciphers are three coded messages supposedly created by Thomas J. Beale in the early 1800s. One cipher was cracked in 1885, revealing details of a hidden treasure, but the other two, which contain the location and names of the discoverers, remain unsolved. ### What is the Rohonc Codex? The Rohonc Codex is a book filled with over 400 pages of mysterious script in an unknown language. Discovered in Hungary in the early 19th century, it contains nearly 200 distinct symbols and strange illustrations, but its meaning has not been deciphered. ### Why are some cryptic messages and codes unsolved? Some cryptic messages and codes remain unsolved due to a variety of reasons, including the loss of context over time, the complexity of the encryption methods used, and the possibility that they were designed to be indecipherable or to mislead. ## Sources - [Original Side Projects video: 10 Unsolved Cryptic Messages and Codes](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nAf1FEk39Ro) ## Related Coverage Simon Whistler https://sideprojects.pub/article/100-history-facts-that-will-shock-you https://sideprojects.pub/article/100-history-facts-that-will-shock-you Thu, 25 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT Welcome to yet another mega compilation of facts scoured from the deepest corners of the internet. Today we're diving into the whole of human history, covering one hundred facts from the 20th century all the way back to beginning of civilization, from all corners of the earth. So sit back, relax, and hopefully you'll learn something new today. ## The Russian Baltic Fleet had a disastrous voyage in 1905 During the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905, the Russian Empire faced a dire situation in the Far East, with its Pacific fleet having been badly damaged by the Japanese. In a desperate bid to regain control, Russia decided to send its Baltic Fleet on an epic 18,000-mile journey around the world to confront the Japanese navy—a mission that would go down as one of the most comically disastrous voyages in naval history. The fleet set sail from St. Petersburg in October 1904, and almost immediately, things went wrong. Off the coast of Britain, the Russian fleet mistakenly opened fire on a group of British fishing vessel, thinking they were Japanese torpedo boats, killing three civilians. This incident, known as the Dogger Bank Incident, nearly triggered a war with Britain. Thankfully that was avoided, but the troubles didn't end there. To make matters worse, the fleet's journey around Africa and through the Indian Ocean was plagued by logistical nightmares, breakdowns, and accidents. The fleet was so poorly managed that at one point, it ran out of coal and had to buy supplies from a passing German merchant ship. At one point the fleet also mistook a Swedish merchant vessel for an enemy ship, and then later fired at one of their own ships after also mistaking it for a Japanese one. And after all that, after mistaking every possible ship for a Japanese vessel, they finally reached Japan and encountered their first enemy ship… and immediately mistook it for a friendly Russian boat. By the time the Japanese mustered their forces, the Russian Baltic Fleet was exhausted, and they were defeated in a devastating naval battle, forcing Russia to sue for peace shortly after. ## Spain used to throw platinum into the ocean As the Spanish Empire built up their presence across Latin America after the discovery of the New World, extracting the region's precious metals and shipping them back to Europe was a top priority. However, when the Spanish first encountered platinum, they didn't yet understand its true value or rarity. Initially, they believed it to just be an inferior version of silver, which is actually how the metal got its name, *platino*, or little silver. This led to platinum being an extremely cheap metal at the time, and counterfeiters began alloying it with other metals to create fake silver coins. Eventually this became such a problem that the Spanish Crown issued a decree in 1735 ordering all confiscated platinum to be thrown into the sea. But because records weren't kept on how much was actually dumped, we have no way to know exactly how much platinum Spain threw into the ocean, however, it was likely quite a bit, as their colonial mining and shipping industries were extensive, transporting an estimated 150,000 tons of silver out of South America between the 16th and 18th centuries. Knowing that today a single kilogram of platinum is worth around 30,000 USD, if the total quantity of confiscated and dumped platinum was even a small fraction of their silver, they may have tossed tens of millions of dollars' worth overboard. ## Alexander the Great held a drinking contest that killed several contestants Alexander the Great is famous for his military power and tactical genius, having commanded an army that conquered much of the known world before he even turned 30. But as with many armies throughout history, the intensity of their celebrations often rivaled those of the battles themselves. One such example took place in 324 BC, in the city of Susa. It was here that Alexander's army held a drinking contest of sorts as part of the funeral procession for Calanus, an Indian philosopher. The winner of this drinking contest was a man named *Promachus*, a common soldier, who claimed first place after drinking an estimated 13 liters of unmixed wine. His prize for first place was a golden crown, but, unfortunately, he didn't have much of an opportunity to enjoy his newfound riches, because within three days, *Promachus*, and forty-one other contestants, died of alcohol poisoning. ## Liberia once held the most rigged election in history History has no shortage of corrupt governments or leaders undermining elections to stay in power, but none of them can compare to Libera's general election in 1927, which has been referred to as the most fraudulent in history, even earning it a Guinness World Record. The two candidates were Charles King, running for reelection, and Thomas Faulkner, representing the People's Party. In total, only around 15,000 people registered to vote, which is why it was surprising when the votes were counted and it was announced that Charles King received 230,000, while Faulkner only got around 9,000. In total, this was equal to a voter turnout in the realm of nearly 1600%, and of course a landslide victory for King, who cheerfully entered his third term. There is, perhaps, a fitting ending though, as this fraudulent term was filled with never-ending controversies, including accusations of slave labor, and King would eventually resign before finishing his presidency. ## The moon landing had to be altered at the last second Niel Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin taking mankind's first steps on the moon is one of the most iconic moments not just of the 20th century, but of all of history, but just before they landed on the lunar surface, things almost went very, very wrong. You see, the lunar module utilized an autopilot system for landing, but as they approached the moon's surface, Armstrong realized that this autopilot was taking them into an area with lots of boulders and jagged, sharp rocks. This was the flank of a spot called the West Crater, and it would have been potentially catastrophic for the lunar module, as any damage to the vehicle could have made it impossible to take off again and meet back up with the orbiting space craft. Fortunately, Armstrong wasn't just any random guy they'd picked for the first ever manned moon mission. He'd spent seven years as a test pilot, pushing the limits of technology by taking experimental aircraft to higher speeds and even the edge of space. He'd been chosen for the moon mission because of this experience, and from his well-known calm demeanor in the face of the many dangers he'd encountered in his career. That training and unmatched coolness showed during the lunar descent, as Armstrong immediately identified the dangerous landing zone, and without hesitating, switched off autopilot to control the module himself. Carefully managing their remaining fuel, he steered the craft over the fields of boulders, until he could find a safer landing zone. Finding a flat spot with softer lunar soil, Armstrong carefully landed the lunar module, touching down successfully, and the rest is history. ## Chicago once lifted the whole city During the mid-19th century, Chicago's importance and population was starting to boom, which meant that some of the city's infrastructure issues needed to be addressed. Chief among these was the fact that city's elevation, especially at its center, was barely higher than that of Lake Michigan, which meant that the sidewalks and streets were constantly being flooded and left with huge pools of stagnant, often pathogenic, water. This was a public health nightmare, and it led to numerous infectious outbreaks, such as dysentery, typhoid fever, and even a six-year epidemic of cholera that killed thousands of people. By the 1850s, the city council agreed that something needed to change, and so they gathered the city's engineers and drafted a plan. Their solution? To simply raise the entire city center, in a massive engineering project that would become known as the Raising of Chicago. The first building to be raised was a four-story brick building that weighed over 750 tons, and it was lifted up using two hundred jackscrews being turned simultaneously. In the end, the building's ground floor was 6 feet higher than it had been previously. Perhaps the most impressive moment was the lifting of Lake Street, which was a solid row of interconnected brick offices, shops, and businesses. Lifting any of these individually would have caused serious damage to the rest, and so it was decided that the entire complex, amounting to about half of a city block, needed to be lifted up at the same time. Six engineers representing several firms worked as a team to get this done, requiring the manpower of 600 workers using more than 6,000 jackscrews, creating such an unbelievable spectacle that thousands of people came to watch, and were even allowed to walk around underneath the buildings after they'd been lifted. Another insane moment was the lifting of the Tremont House, a hotel that at the time was housing numerous VIP clients, including a US Senator. Many of the guests were completely oblivious to the engineering masterpiece taking place underneath their feet, and as the building was raised over the course of a few days, some patrons complained that the stairs seemed to be getting steeper. Any buildings that couldn't be raised, usually older wooden frames that couldn't survive the process, were instead relocated. This was done by placing them on rollers and scooting them to safer parts of town. One man wrote: > "Never a day passed during my stay in the city that I did not meet one or more houses shifting their quarters. One day… in the horse cars we had to stop twice to let houses get across" When everything was all said and done, central Chicago was around 6 feet higher up, the buildings, streets, sidewalks, all of it, and the city's public health had been forever improved. Well, except for the poorer neighborhoods. In many of these areas, the street was raised, but if the residents couldn't afford to have their houses lifted with it, they just stayed a bit lower, creating some sunken houses that are still there to this day. ## The oldest grape wine ever found is 8,000 years old As archaeologists continue to look for it, they keep finding older and older evidence of alcohol consumption by our ancestors, and recent findings in Georgia are right up this alley. Researchers excavating south of the country's capital, Tbilisi, unearthed pottery, 8 jars to be precise, from two neolithic villages that were estimated to be around 8,000 years old. This on is own is already an incredible archaeological discovery, but the real shocker was yet to come. Analysis of chemical residue on the inside of the jars revealed that they once held wine. Coupled with many of the jars bearing images of grape vines, it's clear that this is our earliest known instance of organized grape wine production, and perhaps even types of grapes bred specifically for it. ## Cortes had a unique way to communicate with the Aztecs The Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire was a brutal turning point in the history of the Americas, which saw the mighty Aztecs fall and the Spanish gain a foothold in Mexico. However, this vast campaign and successful assault on the Aztec capital would have never been possible without the hundreds of thousands of indigenous allies that sided with Cortes, eager to get revenge on the empire that had occupied and harassed them for years. The most important native ally was the Tlaxcala, but in order to establish an alliance with them, Cortes first needed to somehow speak to them, after all, he spoke Spanish, and they spoke Nahuatl, a language that likely no European knew at the time. Fortunately, he did have a unique way to communicate with them. Years earlier, a Spanish ship had crashed off the Yucatan Peninsula, and the 11 survivors were captured by the local Maya and scheduled to be sacrificed to the gods. 5 of the men met this sacrificial end, and a few died from disease, but two managed to escape, Aguilar and Guerrero. These two were ultimately captured by a different Maya tribe, but after working as slaves for several years, they earned their freedom, and became respected members of the society, with Guererro becoming a war chief, marrying a wealthy woman, and fathering the first children of European descent in the Americas. Crucially, throughout all these adventures, they both had learned the Maya language. Meanwhile, a Maya girl, known to the Spanish as La *Malinche*, was born in Aztec land but was kidnapped and sold into slavery at a young age, exposing her to both Nahuatl and Yucatec Maya. *Malinche* eventually ended up with the Spaniards after her tribe was defeated by them on the coast, and once Aguilar was recovered by Cortes, all the pieces fell into place. Cortes would speak Spanish to Aguilar, Aguilar would interpret into Maya to *Malinche*, and *Malinche* would interpret this into Nahuatl to other native tribes. If all these unusual events hadn't occurred just before his arrival, Cortes may have found himself unable to communicate and form alliances with the locals, and the history of central America could have gone very differently. ## The US tricked the USSR into selling them titanium At the height of the Cold War, the US needed a newer, faster, and higher-operating aircraft to spy on the Soviet Union, and began development on the iconic SR-71 Blackbird. However, due to the long timeframes that it would be maintaining ultra-high speeds, conventional airframes would melt under the heat generated by atmospheric friction. The engineers determined that the best possible solution was to make the plane from a titanium alloy, and eventually, the aircraft would be around 90% titanium to withstand these conditions. However, the United States didn't have enough stores of the metal to accommodate their needs for this new invention. To purchase the titanium, they were going to have to look international, and it just so happened that the USSR was the largest producer of it in the world at the time. According to Ben Rich, an engineer that worked on the aircraft at the time, the United States began working through fake shell corporations in multiple third world countries to purchase the ore from their rivals, securing enough to produce the legendary aircraft. Rich later wrote in his memoirs, > "The Russians never had an inkling of how they were actually contributing to the creation of the airplane being rushed into construction to spy on their homeland." ## There was once a car race from New York to Paris In 1908, an automobile race of epic proportions commenced in Times Square. Six cars from four nations were lined up, eager to be the first to drive from New York all the way to Paris. Those of you who have ever looked at a map may be wondering how that's possible, given the presence of the Atlantic Ocean between the destinations, but the plan was actually to drive westward. The route began in New York City, headed west across the entire United States, up the western coast of Canada, and across the frozen Bering Strait to the eastern edge of Russia, after which the whole of Russia and Europe would be crossed to end up in France and complete the race. The contestants faced brutal conditions, with little to no paved roads, or even roads at all, and this would be the first ever winter crossing of the United States in a car. At times they would even have to push themselves along railroads for hundreds of miles. The American team was the first to arrive in San Fransisco, where the route had already been slightly modified, with the teams taking a ship to Alaska instead of driving through Canada. However, once in Alaska, they determined that the conditions were impossible for a Bering Strait crossing, and the route was once again changed, this time taking the cars across to Japan and then Russia by ship. Only 3 teams ever made it to Vladivostok, Russia, and crossing the muddy plains of Siberia during the spring thaw was perhaps the greatest challenge of the entire race, with one team even earning a penalty of thirty days by crossing some of this portion inside of a railcar, as well as for skipping Japan. The winner was ultimately an American team led by George Schuster, who won the event by 26 days, the largest winning margin in any motorsport in history. ## Ancient India performed the first ever rhinoplasties While the phenomenon has become far safer and more widespread in recent decades, humans have a long history with cosmetic surgery. The first texts describing how to repair and reshape a broken nose are found in the Edwin Smith Papyrus, dating to Egypt's Old Kingdom around 5000 years ago. But fast forward a few thousand years, and techniques improved greatly. The ancient Indian text Sushruta Samhita describes what we can consider the earliest detailed rhinoplasties, with Sushruta laying out the steps for reconstructing a nose by taking a flap of skin from the cheek. The reconstruction of the nose was often vital to the patient's well-being as its removal was a severe but common punishment in India at the time for several crimes, including adultery. ## Rome loved a fruit so much they ate it to extinction Silphium, also called *laserwort*, was a plant in the Roman Empire that appears to have been incredibly popular. It's depicted on coins from the time and it seems that the city of Cyrene depended on its export for much of their economy, but the thing is, we aren't exactly sure what it was, because it seems to have gone extinct during Roman times. The Romans believed Silphium to be many things, an aphrodisiac, a contraceptive, a perfume, you name it. The plant was described as having thick roots, a hollow stock, and a black bark, with a scent similar to fennel and leaves similar to celery. There are a few theories for why it went extinct, the most widely supported is that it was *overfarmed* for sale in Rome, depleting the soil quality in the relatively small area it could grow, leading it its inevitable extinction. However, there are other theories, such as the fact that it may have been a hybrid whose offspring didn't produce fruit. Regardless, it's no longer around, and while a few modern plants bear some similarities, we will likely never know its exact properties. ## Teddy Roosevelt finished a speech after getting shot In October, 1912, U.S. President Teddy Roosevelt was giving a speech outside the Gilpatrick Hotel in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, when suddenly he was struck in the chest by a .38 caliber bullet. The wannabe assassin, John Schrank, was immediately tackled and disarmed by the crowd, and likely would have been seriously harmed or killed by the angry spectators, but Roosevelt quickly shouted for everyone to leave him unharmed. The police rushed onto the scene, taking Schrank into custody and hurrying to check on Roosevelt, insisting that he leave for the hospital at once. However, Roosevelt declined, deducing from his many years hunting and combat experience that because he hadn't coughed up any blood, the bullet certainly hadn't gotten deep enough to pierce his lung. And in fact, he was right. The bullet had been slowed considerably before piercing his skin, first having to penetrate his jacket, then his steel eyeglass case, and then a folded 50-page-thick copy of the speech he was giving. After standing back up and calming the crowd, he resumed his speech, announcing, > "Friends, I shall ask you to be as quiet as possible. I don't know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot—but it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose." Examinations later showed that the bullet was stuck in his pectoral muscle, and, just as Roosevelt had figured, had not struck anything vital. It was determined that it would be more dangerous to remove it than to leave it in, so they decided not to operate, and he carried it inside his chest for the remaining seven years of his life. ## 46 BC was the longest calendar year in history It's been known for quite some time that one earth year isn't exactly 365 days, it's actually more like 365.2422, which is why we need to insert a leap day every few years to keep the calendar synchronized with the earth's movement around the sun. But we didn't always have such a good grasp on the calendar, and before Julius Caesar took power, the Roman calendar was actually based on an older, outdated model, which itself was probably based on the moon, which had the year marked as only 355 days long. This meant that every year it drifted 10 days off of the solar year, and to make up for the difference, every couple year priests would insert an extra month of 20 or so days, basically leap month. However, this was not a long-term solution, as sometimes the priests forgot, and sometimes wars and other conflicts stopped them from carrying out their work, which was especially the case in the 1st century BC, leading to the active calendar being so far off the solar year that the months were not at all lined up with the proper seasons. Once Caesar took power, he took the advice of the top priests and reformed the entire calendar, creating a new one that would bring it in line with the sun, with the 12 months we are all familiar with having 30 or 31 days, and of course, the one month with 28. The Romans were well aware at this point that the solar year wasn't precisely 365 days though, and so they also prepared to add a leap day every 4 years to make up for this. This was a great plan, and the Julian calendar became the standard for more than a thousand years, only needing to be updated in the 16th century to more accurately place the leap years. However, you can't just change the calendar in an instant, and Caesar wanted it to begin fresh at the beginning of the following year, which would end up being January, 45 BC. The priests calculated that in order to catch up to the solar year at this desired time, the 355-day current year needed to have 90 extra days added to it, and so Caesar implemented three temporary months to extend the year, one that was 23 days, one that was 33, and one that was 34. Once the new year finally arrived, the Julian calendar was in place, and such measures would never be needed again, but it does leave 46 BC as the longest calendar year in history with a total of 445 days, and, understandably, was even nicknamed *annus confusionis*, or the year of confusion. ## Native Americans had clam gardens before the pyramids were built On the coast of British Columbia, several First Nation tribes, such as the Wei Wai Kum, maintain a highly unique food source, clam gardens. These are undersea walls that are built out of stones off the coast of shallow beaches, creating these sort of artificial tide pools that attract large numbers of shellfish, especially clams, which are then collected and eaten. But recently, archaeologists confirmed that this practice is far older than previously thought, with the findings of clam gardens that were constructed around the year 3500 BC, potentially making them older than even the Great Pyramids of Giza. And the more researchers looked for these stone walls, the more they found, noting that the entire coast of Vancouver Island and even down into Washington state seemed to be covered in ancient clam gardens. What's also interesting is that for, potentially hundreds or even thousands of years, clam gardens were often individually owned, and even children were allowed to construct small ones for themselves for practice, making clam gardening a vital part of the community. ## The first chess engine was a hoax In the late 1700s, a machine was unveiled that shocked the world. A mechanical human figure seated at a table, made of metal and gears and wires, and it was a fantastic chess player. It became known as the Mechanical Turk, and went on tour across Europe defeating strong chess players as it went. If its king was placed in check, it would nod three times, and if its queen attacked, it could nod twice. And don't even think about cheating, because if you played an illegal move, it would shake its head in disappointment. One traveler, Louis *Dutens*, tried to trick the Turk by taking his queen and moving it like a knight, but the automaton picked it back up and placed it in its original square. It was reported to play aggressive, attacking chess, and to generally defeat its opponents within 30 minutes, including some renowned players at the time. It even defeated Napoleon in 1809, and also played against a man regarded as one of the greatest of his era, Philidor, who did manage to beat the Turk, but called it "his most fatiguing game of chess ever". The machine traveled around the world, generating loads of profit for its creator everywhere it went. But of course, there was no artificial intelligence in the 18th century, and the mechanical Turk was nothing but a hoax. After the machine was lost in a fire in 1834, the owner's son published the explanation of how they'd kept up the charade. Inside the box was a small compartment for a real chess master to sit, of which the owner hired six or seven throughout his career. This secret operator was hidden from the outside world, and placed behind clockwork walls of gears and wood so that spectators could dramatically open the doors to the interior of the machine before each match and still not see the real human inside. Each chess piece on the board was connected to a magnet, which held another magnet on the bottom side of the machine, allowing the operator to see the moves being played and respond by gently guiding the magnets and machine's arms in return. Overall, the device was incredibly complex and thorough, and, having been designed with the intent to trick the average observer, it's no wonder that it fooled so many people during its time. ## Ancient China designed the first ever earthquake detector Credit for the first ever modern seismograph is usually given to the Italian physicist Filippo Cecchi, with his clever use of pendulums to allow one to record the exact timing of an earthquake and how long it lasted. However, mankind's efforts to detect seismic activity go back much, much further than this, and as far as we can tell, the earliest mention of such a device is in the year 132 AD, in ancient China. It was here that philosopher Chang Heng unveiled a device with a large urn and eight dragon heads facing in different directions. Each dragon held a ball in its mouth, and because they were so precariously balanced, if an earthquake occurred, the ball would fall out of the dragon's mouth, rolling down into the mouth of a carved toad sitting below. Allegedly, the orientation of the dragons could even determine the direction from which the earthquake originated, and supposedly detected one that occurred hundreds of miles away and that wasn't noticed by anyone other than the clever device. ## A mystery nuke detonated in 1979 Vela was the name given to a group of satellites launched by the United States to monitor Soviet nuclear tests, as both parties, and the majority of the world, had agreed to stop atmospheric nuclear testing in 1963. However, it wasn't the USSR that was responsible for what Vela saw in 1979. On the 22nd of September, the Vela Hotel satellite suddenly spotted a bright double flash of light, located near the Prince Edward Islands, roughly halfway between Antarctica and South Africa. Some speculated that the cause had been a meteor of some sort, but Vela had previously identified several nuclear explosions from the same, iconic double flash, and most experts concluded that it must have been a nuclear detonation. The only problem was, it was unclear who did it, because none of the major players at the time, the Soviet Union, the United States, Great Britain, etc., had any reason to perform such a test, let alone in such an odd location. Independent researchers in the years since have come to the conclusion that the most likely cause was a joint test between Israel and South Africa, and according to Seymour Hersh, a well-renowned American journalist, this was actually the third of such joint tests. It's believed that South Africa provided much of the uranium required for the atom bomb creation, and Israel provided much of the technical expertise, creating a secretive joint atom-bomb program. Today, both countries are officially nuclear-free, but if the vela incident truly was related to their program, this may not be the full truth. ## Cannons were used as sun clocks In the late 1600s, several European countries had a peculiar way to announce that it was noon, the firing of a cannon. These were called sundial cannons, and they required little to no human interaction to function, save from reloading. The way they operated was with a large lens placed above, such that when the sun was directly overhead, its light would focus through the lens and ignite the cannon's fuse. However, it isn't quite that simple, as the position of the sun changes throughout the year, meaning that the lens needed to be on a rotating platform that could be adjusted depending on the season. Most sundial cannons have been put out of commission over the years, but there is still one operating today, in a tower in *Atvidaberg*, Sweden, which was installed all the way back in 1853 and still fires once a day between May and August. ## Ancient Egyptians used honey to treat wounds The ancient Egyptians had some very peculiar beliefs about biology and the human body, such as believing that the circulatory system transported urine, tears, mucus, semen, and even feces around the body, but for all the stuff that they were completely lost on, they actually discovered quite a few useful things. One of these useful findings is their use of honey. In several ancient texts, honey is prescribed as a medicine for wounds, often used to cover them to allow them to heal. It might sound peculiar, and a bit sticky, but its actually very beneficial, as honey is a natural antibiotic that, if properly applied, would prevent bacteria from infecting the wound while it healed. In fact, if it stays in a sealed container and away from moisture, honey doesn't really go bad, and jars of it found in King Tut's tomb are likely still edible if you fancy an ancient snack. ## The Soviet Union had an all-women air force regiment in WW2 During the Second World War, women were generally kept far from the frontlines, and those who wished to support the war effort were often relegated to transport tasks, hospital staff, and other supporting roles. However, in the Soviet Union, Stalin warmed up to the idea of integrating women into combat roles after being persuaded by Major Marina *Raskova*, who convinced him that letting women into the fight was not only a necessity due to the conditions of the war, but also a great piece of propaganda for the nation. And so, Stalin permitted the creation of a few female volunteer regiments, the most famous of which was the 588th, better known as the Night Witches. Made entirely of female volunteers in their late teens and early 20s, the Night Witches were only allowed to use outdated interwar aircraft that had been designed for training, such as the wooden Polikarpov U-2 biplane. They made the most of these slow and older planes though, cutting their engines once they were approaching their targets and quietly gliding to them, breaking the silence only when they were on top of their targets and dropping their bombs. And it turned out that there were some advantages to being in such slow aircraft, as their speed was lower than the stalling speed of the Messerschmitt Bf 109, which made it very hard for German fighter pilots to shoot them down even if they managed to detect their arrival in time. They earned the name Night Witches thanks to their German targets, who likened the sound of their wooden aircraft to that of broomsticks. And, to make them even braver, the regiment didn't even carry parachutes until 1944, despite the fact that they would often have to reach out onto their wings to perform minor repairs midflight. Throughout the war, they flew over 23,000 sorties, and dropped 3,000 tons of bombs. In the end, 23 of the women would earn the legendary medal Hero of the Soviet Union. ## Shakespeare may have the first recorded "your mom" joke William Shakespeare, often regarded as one of the greatest writers in the English language, wasn't just a master of tragedy and romance, he also had a sharp wit to him, and his humor may have been well ahead of his time with the dropping of the earliest recorded "your mom" joke. In his play Titus Andronicus, written sometime in the early 1590s, Shakespeare includes a scene where the character Chiron says to Aaron "Thou hast undone our mother". Without missing a beat, Arron replies, "Villain, I have done thy mother." ## The main cause of death in the Dublin Whisky Fire wasn't fire On June 18, 1875, Dublin experienced one of the most bizarre and tragic disasters in its history—the Great Whiskey Fire. A blaze broke out in a malt house on the city's southwest side, and as the flames spread, they reached a large warehouse storing thousands of barrels of whiskey. The heat caused the barrels to burst, and a river of burning whiskey began flowing through the streets. The flaming river flowed down the hill toward the poorer parts of Dublin, turning the streets into a fiery hazard. Despite the terrifying sight, it wasn't the flames that claimed the most lives. As people fled the area, some had a different idea: they attempted to save the whiskey. Many locals began scooping up the flowing whiskey and drinking it straight from the streets. In the aftermath of the fire, it was revealed that while no one had died from the flames or smoke inhalation, there were 13 fatalities due to alcohol poisoning. ## The pirate capital of the world sank into the ocean Port Royal, located on the coast of Jamaica, was once known as the "wickedest city on earth." In the late 17th century, it served as the bustling capital of piracy in the Caribbean, attracting infamous pirates like Blackbeard and Henry Morgan. The city was notorious for its debauchery, wealth, and lawlessness, with taverns, brothels, and gambling dens lining its streets. But it had one fatal flaw, it had been built on a soft sand bar. Port Royal's hedonistic days came to an abrupt and catastrophic end on June 7, 1692, when a massive earthquake struck. The quake, estimated to be around 7.5 on the Richter scale, was followed by a tsunami, and the combined force of these natural disasters caused the sandy ground beneath Port Royal to liquefy—a phenomenon known as liquefaction. In just minutes, two-thirds of the city sank into the sea, dragging buildings, streets, and people down with it. It's said that 2,000 people died in the initial disaster, with another 3,000 succumbing to injuries and disease in the aftermath. Entire sections of the city were swallowed by the ocean, leaving behind a ghostly underwater ruin that still lies beneath the waves today. Some believed it to be divine retribution for the city's sins, others a classic tale of poor architecture, but whatever the case, it's one of the most intriguing instances of a bustling city being wiped completely off the map in an instant. ## Iceland is home to the world's oldest parliament Iceland, a land of stunning landscapes and rich history, boasts the world's oldest still-functioning parliament, known as the Althing. Established in 930 AD, the Althing was initially a national assembly where chieftains and representatives from across Iceland would gather annually at Thingvellir, a dramatic rift valley, to discuss laws, settle disputes, and make decisions. The assembly took place outdoors, with laws being recited from memory by the *lawspeaker*, a respected figure chosen to oversee proceedings. Any disputes or legal matters were handled by a system of courts, with punishments ranging from fines to outlawry, where a person could be legally hunted down by others. While the Althing has undergone many changes over the centuries—including a period of complete inactivity while the island was under Danish rule—it was reinstated as the national parliament of an independent Iceland in 1844, and moved to its current location in Reykjavík. Today, it operates as a modern legislative body, but its roots stretch back over a millennium. However, if you consider its periods of inactivity a disqualifier for the oldest parliament, there are a few other candidates, such as Tynwald Court, the legislature of the Isle of Man, which has been in continuous operation for perhaps a thousand years. ## Greece and Bulgaria went to war over a dog In 1925, tensions in Balkans reached a bizarre boiling point, leading to what is now known as the War of the Stray Dog. The incident occurred along the border between the two countries, near the town of Petrich, which was a hotspot for occasional skirmishes and heightened military presence. According to the story, a Greek soldier was chasing his runaway dog, which had crossed the border into Bulgaria. The soldier, ignoring the border in his pursuit, was shot by Bulgarian sentries, and this seemingly minor incident quickly escalated into a full-blown military conflict. Enraged by the death of their soldier, Greece demanded an apology and reparations, and when Bulgaria refused, Greek forces invaded the town of Petrich. What followed was a brief but intense conflict that saw several casualties on both sides. However, the League of Nations, a precursor to the United Nations, quickly intervened and called for a ceasefire. After an investigation, the League ordered Greece to withdraw its troops and pay compensation to Bulgaria. There is a second version of the events, one which involves Bulgarian soldiers crossing the border and killing a Greek captain, but the dog version caught on in history for obvious reasons. ## Wall street used to have an actual wall Long before the skyscrapers and centers of global finance, Wall Street had a very literal meaning – it was named after a physical wall. In the mid-17th century, when New York City was still the Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam, the area was constantly under threat from neighboring Native American tribes. To protect the growing colony, the Dutch constructed a sturdy wooden wall along the northern boundary of the settlement, running roughly along what is now known as Wall Street. The wall was completed in 1653, but it didn't last too long, as it was dismantled by the English after they seized control of the area in 1664. They renamed the city New York, and though the wall along the street is long gone, the name of the street stuck around. ## George H. W. Bush was almost cannibalized In late 1944, 9 American airmen crash landed on the island of Chichi Jima after their planes were shot down, and 8 of them were subsequently captured by the Japanese. This incident would become famous, because not only did the Japanese soldiers, at the orders of Lt. General Yoshio *Tachiabana*, beat and torture the American airmen, they then executed them and ate parts of their bodies. The only American pilot to evade capture and escape the horror was George H. W. Bush, who would later become the 41st president of the United States. In a 1947 war crimes trial, the four officers who partook in the cannibalism were hanged, and the other 30 soldiers who assisted them were sentenced to eight years in prison. ## Chocolate was a form of currency in ancient America Long before chocolate became the sweet treat we know today, it played a crucial role in the economies of ancient Mesoamerican civilizations, particularly the Aztecs and Maya. For these cultures, cacao beans were considered so valuable that they were often used as a form of currency. The beans were traded for everyday goods and services, from food and clothes to taxes and tributes. For example, a single cacao bean might buy you a small piece of fruit, while a hundred beans could get you a turkey. Cacao was so valuable that it was often counterfeited by nefarious criminals who would create fake beans from painted clay. But chocolate wasn't just about economics; it also had deep cultural significance. The Maya and Aztecs believed that cacao was a divine gift from the gods, and they used it in religious ceremonies and rituals. The beans were ground into a paste and mixed with water, spices, and sometimes honey to create a bitter, frothy drink that was believed to have powerful energizing and aphrodisiac properties. ## China exported grain throughout the Great Famine One of the most tragic episodes in modern history was the Great Chinese Famine, which occurred between 1959 and 1961 during Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward. The famine resulted in the deaths of an estimated 15 to 45 million people due to widespread starvation that resulted from forced collectivistic farming techniques and government mismanagement, making it one of the deadliest famines in human history. However, despite the desperate situation within China and the widespread starvation, Mao Zedong's government continued to export large quantities of grain abroad. At the time, Mao was determined to maintain China's image as a powerful and self-sufficient nation, and he believed that fulfilling export commitments was essential to securing political alliances and repaying debts to countries like the Soviet Union. This decision to prioritize exports over domestic needs exacerbated the famine, as grain that could have fed millions was instead shipped overseas. Even as reports of mass starvation and suffering finally reached the leadership, the government persisted with most of the exports, further deepening the crisis. ## Typhoons defended Japan from the Mongols...twice In the late 13th century, Japan faced the terrifying prospect of invasion by one of the most powerful *military* forces the world had ever seen—the Mongol Empire. Led by Kublai Khan, the Mongols launched two massive invasions against Japan in 1274 and 1281. But in both instances, Japan was saved by what they called the kamikaze, or "divine wind." During the first invasion in 1274, the Mongols assembled a formidable fleet and army, which successfully landed on Japanese shores and began to push inland. However, as they prepared for a major assault, a sudden and powerful typhoon struck, destroying much of the Mongol fleet and forcing the invaders to retreat. Undeterred, Kublai Khan launched an even larger invasion in 1281, this time with a fleet reportedly comprising over 4,000 ships and 140,000 men, with many gathered from China and Korea. The Mongols again landed on Japanese soil, and the situation looked dire for Japan. But, as fate would have it, another massive typhoon swept through, decimating the Mongol fleet and drowning tens of thousands of soldiers. The Japanese wrote about killing those that washed ashore clinging to drifting wood, except for those who were southern Chinese, as they successfully communicated that they'd been forced to join the Mongol armies. ## In WW1, French prostitutes charged more if they had syphilis During World War I, soldiers in France often sought the services of prostitutes, but there was a strange and dangerous twist in the market. Prostitutes who were known to have syphilis—an infection that was rampant at the time—actually charged a premium for their services. This might sound counterintuitive, but the reasoning behind it was tied to a bizarre and reckless mindset among some soldiers. These men believed that contracting syphilis and showing some concerning symptoms could earn them a temporary reprieve from the horrors of the front lines. They thought that by becoming infected, they could be sent to a hospital for treatment, which would keep them away from the battlefield for a while. As a result, some prostitutes capitalized on this by charging higher prices, knowing that certain soldiers were willing to pay extra for the "privilege" of contracting the disease. And another fun fact, the treatment for Syphilis at the time was an incredibly painful urethral irrigation, which really puts into perspective just how horrific trench warfare must have been for soldiers to prefer contracting the disease to fighting on the front lines. ## The Plain of Jars is a complete historical mystery Scattered across the central highlands of Laos lies one of the most enigmatic archaeological sites in the world: the Plain of Jars. This vast landscape is dotted with thousands of large, ancient stone jars, some of which are as tall as three meters and weigh several tons. The jars are spread across more than 90 different sites, with the largest concentration found near the town of *Phonsavan*. The origin and purpose of these stone jars, which date back to 1200 BC, remain a mystery. Some theories suggest that they were used as funerary urns, where the dead were left to decompose and be eaten by birds before their bones were later buried. Others speculate that the jars were used to collect rainwater, store food, or even ferment alcohol. Some stone lids have also been found that seem to fit the jars, indicating that perhaps many of them once had coverings, though this isn't known for certain. Adding to the mystery is that none of the jars seem to have been decorated, except for a single jar in Site 1. No written records from the culture that created the jars have been found, leaving archaeologists and historians to rely on local legends and scant archaeological evidence. One popular legend among the local Lao people is that the jars were used by a race of giants to brew and store large quantities of rice wine. ## A man burned the Temple of Artemis just to become famous In 356 BC, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, the magnificent Temple of Artemis in Ephesus, was deliberately set on fire by a man named Herostratus. His motive? He wanted to achieve eternal fame, even if it meant committing an act of unimaginable destruction. The Temple of Artemis was a grand structure, known for its incredible size and ornate beauty, dedicated to the Greek goddess of the hunt, Artemis. Herostratus, a relatively unknown figure, decided that the best way to ensure his name would be remembered throughout history was to destroy something of immense value, and figured that the temple was as valuable as anything could get at the time. Under the cover of night, he set fire to the temple, and the flames quickly engulfed the intricate wooden structure that covered the roof and ceiling, reducing it to ruins. The Ephesians were outraged by this senseless act of arson and, in an attempt to deny Herostratus the fame he sought, they sentenced him to death and declared it a law that his name should never be spoken or recorded. This decree, however, backfired spectacularly, as historians, intrigued by the story, recorded his name anyway. Thus, Herostratus technically achieved his goal of being remembered, albeit as a symbol of destruction, and, well, we aren't exactly helping the case by including him in this video. ## The US considered dying Mt. Fuji black in WW2 As the Pacific War neared the Japanese homeland, the US military began exploring ways they could engage in psychological warfare to speed up Japan's surrender. One of their more unusual ideas was to dye Mt. Fuji, Japan's most sacred and iconic mountain an unnatural and unsettling color, such as all black or blood red. The idea was that a fleet of bombers could be used to drop many tons of dye or paint onto Fuji's snow-capped peak, transforming its white summit into a stark, permanent reminder of the approaching war for anyone living in its shadow. But as interesting as it may have been, the plan was never put into action, likely due to logistical concerns and the worries of endangering many pilots' lives for something that might ultimately have no effect on the war. ## One of history's deadliest wars may have ended due to a mistranslation The Taiping Rebellion, which raged in the 1850s in China, was one of the deadliest conflicts not just in Chinese history, but in the history of the whole world, with an estimated death toll of 20 to 30 million, far outclassing the likes of the US Civil War and perhaps even WW1. Surprisingly though, this war wasn't the result of many large nations clashing, it was actually just a civil war inside of China, one that started because of a religious cult. A cult which started because the founder believed he was the younger brother of Jesus Christ. Hong Xiuquan, a failed scholar from southern China, experienced a series of visions in the 1830s after coming into contact with Christian missionaries and their teachings. In these visions, he claimed to have been visited by God and instructed that he was Christ's brother, and had been sent to rid the world of demons and establish a heavenly kingdom on Earth. Hong began preaching his beliefs, along with his own rewritten bible, attracting a large following among the disaffected and impoverished in southern China. His movement, known as the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, grew rapidly, advocating for radical social and religious reforms, including the communal sharing of wealth, gender equality, the abolition of traditional Chinese practices, and, on a more extreme note, the death penalty for drugs, alcohol, or prostitution. Perhaps the strangest rule was a complete and utter ban on any sexual relations, even between married individuals, though of course this rule didn't apply to Hong himself. In 1850, Hong's followers, now numbering in the hundreds of thousands, launched a rebellion against the ruling Qing Dynasty, aiming to overthrow the emperor and establish their own kingdom. The Taiping forces captured vast territories and even established their capital in Nanjing. However, the rebellion was marked by extreme brutality on both sides, with massive civilian casualties, especially as an inevitable famine swept over the land as farms were razed. The Qing Dynasty was finally able to crush the Taiping rebellion when Hong died in 1864, but his death may have been completely avoidable. You see, nearing the end of the conflict, Hong and his followers were besieged, and, running low on food, he ordered everyone to eat manna, which, if you're not familiar, is mentioned in the bible as the food God provided to the Israelites, generally interpreted as some sort of bread. However, the translation into Chinese at the time was a sweetened dew and medicinal herb, and so he began plucking weeds from the ground and eating them. He soon fell dangerously ill and died a couple weeks later. Following his death, the Qing Dynasty retook control of the city, and they took Hong's body, cremated it, and blasted the ashes out of a cannon to ensure his remains had no final resting place. ## The largest ever chariot battle might have been a draw The Battle of Kadesh was fought around 1274 BC, between the Egyptians and the Hittites. The battle is widely regarded as the first pitched battle in history, where both sides assembled their armies and clashed on the battlefield. It is also probably the largest chariot battle in history, with both sides employing thousands of them. But perhaps what the battle is more famous for is that both sides claimed a victory in it. Ramses II, known often for his grandiosity, depicts the battle as a glorious triumph for Egypt, with his own personal heroics included, of course. Massive reliefs of the battle are carved into temple walls across Egypt, honoring the day. However, the Hittite records tell a completely different story. While they acknowledge the ferocity of the battle, they also claim success, as from their perspective, they successfully prevented the Egyptians from capturing Kadesh and their army had not been decisively defeated. Ultimately, a peace treaty was signed between the two kingdoms, leaving them to peacefully spread their victory propaganda among their own people. ## Andrew Jackson tried to beat up his would-be assassin While Teddy Roosevelt called for his attempted assassin to be apprehended unharmed, Andrew Jackson had other ideas. On January 30, 1835, Jackson became the first sitting U.S. president to face an assassination attempt, and the way he responded forever solidified his reputation as a tough guy. As Jackson was leaving a funeral at the U.S. Capitol, a man named Lawrence stepped forward, drew a pistol, and fired at the president. Lawrence had previously been having dreams about former presidents telling him to kill Jackson, and he also had some unstable beliefs about the US government owing him money. Miraculously though, Lawrence's gun misfired. Undeterred, he pulled out a second pistol and fired again, but incredibly, this gun also misfired, probably due to the humid and damp weather that day. At that point, Jackson, who was 67 years old at the time, didn't hesitate. Instead of waiting for help, he charged at Lawrence himself, knocking the man over and beating him ferociously with his cane. The attack was so furious that bystanders, including Congressman Davy Crockett, had to pull Jackson off the would-be assassin to prevent him from killing the man on the spot. Lawrence was quickly subdued and later found to be insane, spending the rest of his life in an asylum. ## The United States stole bells from the Philippines for an entire century In 1901, during the Philippine-American War, U.S. forces committed an infamous act of cultural theft. After a brutal battle in the town of Balangiga on the island of Samar, where Filipino resistance fighters ambushed and killed dozens of American soldiers, U.S. troops retaliated with devastating force. As part of this response, and a bit out of spite, they seized some church bells as war trophies. These bells, known as the Balangiga Bells, were taken back to the United States and became a symbol of American victory, with two of them displayed at F.E. Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming and the third at a U.S. Army Museum in South Korea. For over a century, the Philippines repeatedly requested the return of the bells, but these pleas were largely ignored or met with resistance from various U.S. officials and veterans' groups who saw the bells as sacred military relics. It wasn't until 2018, after years of diplomatic efforts and growing pressure, that the United States finally agreed to return the Balangiga Bells to the Philippines, bringing them back home more than a century after they were taken. ## Medieval Christians were jealous of Viking hygiene Examining the skeletons and cultural records of Viking cultures, historians have found that they had surprisingly good hygiene, with everything from regular baths to a decent dental routine. Some old Norse poetry, such as the *Havamal*, even refers to the importance of starting each day your hair washed and combed, as you never know which day could be your last and you don't want to appear before the gods unkempt. Interestingly though, one confirmation of their cleanliness comes from the writings of their rivals, the Christians, who believed that such clean bodies were seductive to their women. In the year 1002, after the massacre of the Danes, one letter read, > "The Danes made themselves too acceptable to English women by their elegant manners and their care of their person. They combed their hair every day, bathed every Saturday, and even changed their garments often. They set off their persons by many such frivolous devices. In this manner, they laid siege to the virtue of the married women and persuaded the daughters, even of the nobles, to be their concubines." You think they would have taken this as a hint that bathing more often might be a good thing, but they reacted quite oppositely. In fact, Christian scholar Alcuin even wrote to a few kings that the English people were being raided by Vikings because God was punishing them for being too prideful in their appearance. In hindsight though, it does just sound like the priests were a bit jealous. ## The Great Fire of London helped save the city from the Blitz After the Great Fire of London devastated the city for four days in 1666, the center of the city was in ruins. However, with its destruction came the chance to rebuild it, and instead of constructing it once again from tightly packed wood structures, it was decided that stone would be put to use to help prevent the spread of a future fire. The 1667 Rebuilding Act aimed to do just this, instructing that every new building be made from brick or stone, and any buildings in violation of this code would be demolished. It also helped push the city to change the way their water pipes work, with plugs periodically placed, essentially the inklings of a fire hydrant system. But what these people couldn't have foreseen was that these changes would save lives hundreds of years in the future. Fast forward to World War 2, with Germany bombing London night after night. The Blitz was absolutely devastating to London, reducing much of it to rubble, but if it hadn't been rebuilt from less flammable materials, things could have been much worse. To see what might have been, we can look to Tokyo. Unfortunately for the Japanese, Tokyo had never been subject to something akin to the Rebuilding Act of 1667, and so by the time World War 2 rolled around, the densely populated city was still almost entirely made of wood. And the United States took full advantage of this with the Firebombing of Tokyo. In a single night, a squadron of bombers set fire to central Tokyo, leaving 100,000 dead and over a million homeless. One can only imagine how differently World War 2 would have gone if Germany had been able to pull something similar in London. ## Einstein's biggest blunder wasn't a blunder Not even a genius on the level of Einstein was immune to doubting his own work. When Einstein was working on his equations for general relativity, he introduced a term known as the cosmological constant, a variable intended to counteract the effects of gravity to maintain a static universe, which was the common model of the universe at the time. However, not long after, astronomer Edwin Hubble discovered that the universe was not static, but rather, expanding. This revelation made Einstein's cosmological constant seem unnecessary, and he regretfully referred to it as his greatest blunder. But the story later took an interesting turn. A few decades later, scientists discovered that the universe's expansion is not steady, but accelerating. This mysterious acceleration couldn't be explained by any current theories, leading to the revival of a force very much like Einstein's cosmological constant that counteracts the force of gravity, dark energy. So, in the end, Einstein was so smart that perhaps his biggest blunder was thinking he'd made his biggest blunder. ## The Polynesians probably got to the Americas before Columbus It was long taught that Columbus discovered the Americas, until it was determined that the Vikings had reached the coast of modern-day Canada a few hundred years earlier. And now, recent research indicates that another group might have also beaten Columbus, the Polynesians. The Polynesians were masters of the Pacific, spreading their culture far and wide as they moved between islands with their masterfully crafted boats and navigational skills, and it seems they may have made it much further than Hawaii and Easter Island. For starters, recent genetic research strongly indicates pre-Columbian contact, with a study from the journal Nature finding that populations in the Marquesas and Easter Island had genetic admixture with indigenous populations of South America, suggesting contact long before the arrival of Europeans. The authors narrowed this contact down to between 1150 and 1230 AD, with the mixture into Easter Island happening a few decades later. Then there are lots of other clues. Take for instance, the many words for the humble sweet potato, a plant which originates in the Americas and, mysteriously could also be found in eastern Polynesia before the discovery of the Americas. In Quechua, a language in the Andes, it is *kumal*, in the Marquesas, it is called *kuma'a*, in Samoa its *umala*, Rapa Nui it is Kumara, because many Ls were transformed into Rs in their language, a common linguistic occurrence, and so on. Looking at a map of the pacific, you can clearly see how the word for sweet potato transformed between languages as it was traded and introduced across the ocean. And this isn't just a random addition or subtraction of letters, the evolution of words as Polynesian languages morphed across the Pacific is a well-documented linguistic phenomenon, sometimes referred to as "dropping consonants out of their boats as they rowed". Though sweet potatoes aren't the only plants that are brought up as evidence. There is also the coconut. Coconuts were introduced to South America and the Caribbean by European settlers, as they are native to the areas around the Indian Ocean, but there are actually a couple types of coconut that were already present in South America before the plant was introduced by settlers, and they are found on the western coast. A study in the journal Genetic Resources and Crop Evolution investigated the origin of this plant, and suggests that a seafaring Austronesian society brought the coconut to South America around 2,250 years ago. And then there are parasitic worms. Yes, you head that right. Certain types of hookworms have been found in the remains of native Americans and in Asian populations, which wasn't able to be previously explained by the Bering Strait crossing theory. This is because these hookworms spread and lay their eggs in the soil, but they require a temperate of 22 degrees Celsius to stay alive. It would have been far too cold for this along the frozen Bering strait, which has led many to speculate that their arrival in the Americas came from a crossing of the Pacific, where it could have stayed warm throughout the trip. And these are far from the only pieces of evidence, with seemingly more uncovered the deeper we look. Of course, in any realm of science, we need to remain skeptical, but given the mounting evidence and general plausibility of earlier contact, it seems very possible that the Polynesians did indeed make contact with Native Americans before Columbus ever did. ## Paper clips were a sign of resistance in Norway The nation of Norway was largely caught by surprise when they were invaded by Nazi Germany in April, 1940, who quickly took control over the weaker country and fully occupied it. The main reasoning for the invasion was to gain access to Norway's vast natural resources, as well as their heavy water plant that would be vital for Germany's atom bomb program. But Norway wasn't content to just sit around and let the Nazis boss them around, and they organized one of the most successful resistances of the entire war, assassinating officials, sabotaging equipment, and even organizing larger-scale armed assaults. Before the resistance could catch on though, the movement needed to begin, and one of its earliest highlights was at Oslo University. It was here that students organized the first outbreak of civil disobedience, wearing paper clips on their lapels to signal their resistance to German occupiers and their allegiance to their nation. It seems like your average, everyday item, but the paper clip was symbolic, a sign of unity and solidarity, binding the people together. Eventually though, the Nazis caught on, and wearing a paper clip was made strictly illegal. Being arrested for wearing one could lead to severe punishment as it was associated with the resistance movement, but it still maintained its popularity until Norway was liberated. ## There were three US presidents in 1881 It began with Rutherford B. Hayes, who was the outgoing president in early 1881. He did not seek re-election, and his term ended on March 4, 1881. He was succeeded by James A. Garfield, who took office the same day as the 20th President of the United States. However, Garfield's presidency was tragically cut short. On July 2, 1881, just four months into his term, Garfield was shot by Charles J. Guiteau, a disgruntled office-seeker. Garfield survived the initial shooting but succumbed to his wounds on September 19, 1881, after months of suffering and medical complications. This made him the second U.S. president to be assassinated. Upon Garfield's death, Vice President Chester A. Arthur was sworn in as the 21st President of the United States on September 20, 1881. Arthur served the remainder of Garfield's term, making him the third president to hold office that year, something that has not happened since. ## People whipped themselves trying to cure the black death During the 14th century, the Black Death ravaged Europe, killing an estimated 25 to 30 million people—about a third of the continent's population. In the face of such a devastating and mysterious plague, people turned to desperate measures to seek divine intervention and redemption. One of the most extreme responses was the rise of the flagellants. The flagellants were groups of devout Christians who believed that the Black Death was God's punishment for humanity's sins. To atone and seek mercy, they practiced public self-flagellation—whipping themselves with leather straps, often embedded with metal spikes, as they marched from town to town. These processions could last for days, drawing large crowds as the flagellants chanted prayers, sang hymns, and whipped themselves into bloody submission as they marched from town to town. While they believed this extreme penance would ward off the plague, their gatherings likely inadvertently made the situation worse. The mass processions only helped spread the disease even faster, as large groups of people moved between towns and villages to watch them, spreading the disease amongst themselves more easily. ## Neanderthals created art, perhaps even before homo sapiens For a long time, Neanderthals were viewed as simple, brutish, distant relatives of modern humans, lacking the capacity for complex thought or culture. However, recent archaeological discoveries have turned that stereotype on its head, revealing that Neanderthals were, in fact, capable of creating art. In several caves across Europe, researchers have found evidence of Neanderthal artwork that dates back as far as 65,000 years—well before modern humans arrived in Europe. One of the most striking examples comes from a cave in Spain, where red ochre pigments were used to create abstract symbols and handprints on cave walls. These paintings are the oldest known examples of cave art, and they suggest that Neanderthals had a sense of symbolism and possibly even spirituality. Other findings, like engraved bones, shell ornaments, and tools decorated with geometric patterns, often buried with their owners, further demonstrate their artistic understanding. These discoveries suggest that Neanderthals had cognitive abilities and a cultural life that was far more sophisticated than previously thought, and also puts into perspective how humans ended up interbreeding with them, as they were a lot more similar to us than we previously gave them credit for. ## The Korean alphabet was invented to be easy to learn The Korean alphabet, known as Hangul, is one of the few writing systems in the world that can be attributed to a specific creator and date. It was invented in 1443 by King Sejong the Great of the Joseon Dynasty, with a clear purpose in mind: to be easy to learn and accessible to everyone, regardless of their social status or education level. Before Hangul was created, Koreans primarily used Classical Chinese characters, which were, and still are, very complex and difficult to learn, making literacy a privilege only available to the elite. To address this, King Sejong commissioned a group of scholars to develop a new script that would be simple, logical, and easy to understand. The result was Hangul, a phonetic alphabet that today consists of 14 consonants and 10 vowels, designed to represent the sounds of spoken Korean clearly and systematically. What makes Hangul particularly unique is that its letters are shaped to mimic the position of the tongue, mouth, and throat when producing each sound, making it intuitive and quick to grasp. The system was so effective that King Sejong famously described it as so easy "a wise man can acquaint himself with them before the morning is over, and even a stupid man can learn them in the space of ten days." ## Napoleon was once attacked by an army of rabbits Napoleon Bonaparte, the famed military leader who conquered much of Europe, once faced an unexpected adversary: a swarm of rabbits. This bizarre incident occurred in 1807, after the signing of the Treaties of Tilsit, when Napoleon decided to celebrate with a grand rabbit hunt. Napoleon's chief of staff, Alexandre Berthier, was tasked with organizing the hunt and went all out, gathering thousands of rabbits—some accounts say as many as 3,000. The rabbits were caged around the hunting grounds and released as soon as Napoleon and his party were ready. However, things didn't go as planned. Instead of fleeing in fear, the rabbits turned and charged directly at Napoleon and his hunting party. The rabbits, likely accustomed to humans from being kept in captivity, saw the men not as threats but as sources of food, and they swarmed toward Napoleon en masse. Napoleon tried to fend off the fluffy onslaught with his riding crop, but the rabbits overwhelmed him and his men. His marshals and aides joined in, trying to shoo the rabbits away, but the relentless wave of bunnies continued. In the end, Napoleon had to retreat to his carriage to escape the onslaught. ## The Pyramids used to have shiny, polished tops When we think of the Great Pyramids of Giza, we often picture their rough, weathered surfaces, but in ancient times, these iconic structures looked quite different. The pyramids were originally covered with a smooth, polished layer of white Tura limestone, which gave them a smooth, almost reflective surface. At the top sat a special capstone made of precious metal, which, while traditionally referred to as solid gold, most likely wasn't. It was more likely shell on a capstone and made of an alloy such as electrum, a natural alloy of gold and silver with traces of a few other metals. However, over time, this original shine was lost. Pieces of the metal were stolen or broke off, and the limestone eroded, leaving the rough, sandstone-colored pyramids we're familiar with today. ## The Sphinx once had a nose, and maybe a beard Standing at 66 feet tall and 240 feet long, the Sphinx is believed to have been carved around 2500 BC during the reign of Pharaoh Khafre, or perhaps much earlier. However, what we see today is not quite the Sphinx that ancient Egyptians would have known. At some point in its long history, the Sphinx lost its nose, leading to much speculation and legend. Contrary to popular myth, it wasn't Napoleon's soldiers who shot off the nose with cannon fire, as sketches from before Napoleon's time show the nose was already missing. The most widely accepted view among historians is that it may have been deliberately chiseled off by a Sufi Muslim leader in the 14th century, who viewed the Sphinx as a pagan idol after catching the locals worshipping it. Interestingly, there is also evidence that the Sphinx once sported a stylized pharaonic beard. Fragments of a stone beard, found at the base of the Sphinx, are now housed in the British Museum and the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. The beard may have been a later addition, perhaps added during a restoration in the New Kingdom era, around 1400 BC, to align the Sphinx more closely with the depictions of Egyptian kings. So, while we're used to seeing the weathered, mysterious face of the Sphinx gazing across the Giza Plateau today, in its original form, just like the pyramids, it must have looked quite different. ## Gutenberg did not invent the first printing press While his invention certainly revolutionized literacy in Europe, Johannes Gutenberg is often mistakenly credited with being the original inventor the printing press around the year 1440, but the truth is, the concept of printing had already been around for centuries. Long before Gutenberg, movable type printing was being developed and used in East Asia. The world's first known movable type printing press was invented in China around 1040 by Bi Sheng, a Chinese commoner during the Song Dynasty. Bi Sheng created movable type by carving individual characters onto small blocks made of clay and setting them into an iron frame. This allowed for the arrangement of characters in any order, making the printing of multiple copies much faster and more efficient than previous woodblock printing methods. A few centuries later, Korean printers took the technology even further by developing movable metal type, producing a complete printed book, a Buddhist text called the *Jikji*, in 1377—nearly 80 years before Gutenberg's Bible. ## Columbus used a lunar eclipse to scare natives During his fourth and final voyage to the New World, Christopher Columbus found himself stranded on the island of Jamaica in 1503, with his ships in disrepair and his crew desperate for supplies. At first, thelocal Taíno people provided Columbus and his men with food and resources, but as time went on, tensions rose, and the islanders grew weary of supporting the stranded Europeans. Columbus, however, had a trick up his sleeve—the European knowledge of astronomy. More specifically, he was aware that a lunar eclipse was predicted for the night of February 29, 1504. Using this information, he devised a plan to intimidate the Taíno into continuing to provide for his crew. Three days before the eclipse, Columbus met with the local Taíno chiefs and warned them that his Christian god was angry with them for withholding food and supplies. He claimed that in three days, God would make the moon disappear as a sign of his displeasure. When the night of the eclipse arrived, the moon slowly began to vanish from the sky, turning a deep red, just as Columbus had predicted. The frightened Taíno, seeing this celestial event as a divine sign, quickly agreed to resume supplying Columbus and his men with provisions. As the eclipse continued, Columbus pretended to pray and promised that he would ask his god to forgive the islanders. When the eclipse began to recede, the Taíno believed Columbus had restored the moon through his connection to the divine, and they continued to aid his crew until a rescue ship arrived months later. Hitler's health was a total disaster While Hitler was generally healthy throughout most of his early life, his health took a steep downward turn in his last decade or so, brought on by the stress of a losing war, being a severe hypochondriac, and a concoction of strong medications administered by his personal physician. Beginning in the mid-1930s, he complained of stomach cramps, digestive issues, colon complications, and heart palpitations, but doctors couldn't find any clear source of the issues. A non-cancerous mass was removed from his throat, and he started getting eczema on his legs. To manage his worsening anxieties, Hitler surrounded himself with doctors, but none would end up being more influential than Dr. Theodor Morell, his personal physician. Morell prescribed an astonishing array of treatments, including regular injections of vitamins, hormones, amphetamines, barbiturates, and other dubious "medications." Hitler's medicine cabinet was filled with dozens of different types of pills, powders, and liquids, which he took obsessively. By 1944, his already declining health was made exponentially worse when he was the victim of an attempted assassination, surviving a bomb blast at his Wolf's Lair headquarters. The explosion burst both of his eardrums, badly burned and swelled his left arm, and covered him in splinters and superficial cuts. By this point, one of his most striking symptoms, a trembling of the left hand and leg, was getting significantly worse, and he began holding them behind his back to hide them when speaking in public. He also suffered from severe insomnia, exacerbating all other symptoms he was experiencing. When he spoke to Hitler Youth soldiers in March 1945, he was bent over, walked slowly, was shaking, and could barely be heard. There has been a lot of speculation over the years as to what caused all of these issues, aside from the aforementioned extreme wartime stress. It's believed by some that he contracted syphilis during WW1, and though he received treatment, the symptoms may have returned in the late 1930s. Others have suggested Parkinson's, Huntington's disease, and even the possibility that he only had one testicle. India had the first hot tubs Long before the luxurious spas of today, the people of the ancient Indus Valley Civilization—one of the world's earliest urban cultures—were enjoying their own version of a hot tub. Around 2500 BCE, in what is now modern-day Pakistan, the city of Mohenjo-Daro was a well-designed urban center, with complete with streets, residential zones, and even early sewage canal systems. But one interesting finding was the common use of baths, and even bath houses, many of which, including the famed "Great Bath", have been found with many nearby furnaces. This had led to the speculation that the furnaces were used to heat water that would be poured into the bath, amounting to what might be history's earliest hot tubs. Alexander the Great wasted water to inspire his troops During his relentless campaign to conquer the Persian Empire, Alexander the Great led his army through some of the most challenging terrains on Earth, including the scorching deserts of *Gedrosia* (modern-day southeastern Iran and Pakistan). In 325 BC, as he and his men crossed this barren wasteland, they were tormented by extreme heat, thirst, and exhaustion. Many of his soldiers began to lose hope, fearing they would perish in the unforgiving desert, and many did, with the army losing an estimated 30,000 soldiers to the conditions during the 60-day march. One day, some scouts returned to Alexander with a precious gift: a helmet filled with water. Knowing that the water could be a small but vital relief for their desperately thirsty king, they presented it to him with great care. However, instead of drinking it, Alexander did something remarkable. He took the helmet, thanked the scouts, and, in full view of his parched and weary soldiers, poured the water onto the sand, refusing to drink even a drop unless all his men could share the same luxury. The last German surrender of WW2 was months after the war's end Most people think of the Nazi surrender on May 7th, 1945, as the official end of World War II in Europe. However, not all German forces got the message immediately—or were in a position to surrender right away. The last official German surrender actually took place months later, in a far-flung and unexpected location. The German weather station crew on the remote northern island of Svalbard, remained unaware of the war's end. Stationed there to provide crucial weather reports for the German military, the crew of Operation *Haudegen* continued their work, completely cut off from news of the outside world. It wasn't until September 4, 1945—nearly four months after Germany's official surrender—that a Norwegian seal-hunting ship arrived to inform them that the war was over. The ten-man crew was stunned by the news, and their surrender on September 4, 1945, marked the very last act of German capitulation in World War II. Early Vikings may have used a sun compass The Vikings were known for their incredible seafaring skills, venturing across the North Atlantic in longships to explore, trade, and raid distant lands. But how did they manage to navigate the open ocean with such precision, long before the invention of the magnetic compass? Recent discoveries suggest that the Vikings might have used an ingenious tool known as a "sun compass." The "sun compass" theory stems from a wooden fragment found in a Viking settlement in Greenland, which had a circular disk with a central pin. The disk was marked with concentric circles and may have been used to measure the position of the sun. By aligning the pin's shadow with specific markings, Vikings could determine their latitude, even when the sun was low on the horizon. What made this tool even more remarkable was that it could be used in conjunction with "sunstones," translucent crystals that polarize light. The most popular of these was probably Iceland Spar, or Calcium Calcite, an extremely clear crystal that can be found in the region. These stones could help the Vikings determine the sun's position even on cloudy or foggy days, which were common in the North Atlantic. By using the sun compass and sunstones together, Viking navigators could maintain their course across vast, open seas without any landmarks in sight. The oldest cheese in the world was found in Egypt While investigating a collection of jars found in the tomb of *Ptahmes*, a high-ranking Egyptian official from around 3 thousand years ago, scientists found an unidentified substance left in some of the jars. Imagine their surprise when chemical analysis revealed that the substance was none other than cheese. The lead researcher said, "The material analyzed is probably the most ancient archaeological solid residue of cheese ever found to date." They've since determined that it was made mostly from sheep's milk, and, while they deny actually tasting it, assert that chemical analysis shows that it was likely quite acidic with a strong, sour flavor. Dated to the 13th century BC, it's currently the oldest cheese ever found. Winston Churchill had a doctor's note to drink alcohol in the US Winston Churchill, the British Prime Minister known for his love of cigars and champagne, faced a potential problem when he visited the United States in 1931. During this period, the U.S. was still in the midst of Prohibition, a nationwide ban on the production, import, transport, and sale of alcoholic beverages. Churchill, however, was not one to let such a law interfere with his lifestyle. Shortly before his visit, Churchill had been in a car accident, which left him with some injuries, including some pain in his chest. Seizing this opportunity, his doctor wrote a note prescribing alcohol as part of his recovery. The note specifically stated, "the use of alcoholic spirits, especially at mealtimes, is an absolute necessity" due to the nature of his injuries. Armed with this official prescription, Churchill was able to legally obtain alcohol throughout his stay in the United States, and he continued to enjoy his favorite drinks while engaging in diplomacy and discussions with American officials. China built an entire fleet just to show off their money During the early 15th century, China embarked on one of the most impressive and ambitious naval projects in history under the leadership of Admiral Zheng He. The Ming Dynasty commissioned a fleet of gigantic treasure ships, known as *baochuan*, to sail the seas and showcase China's immense wealth, technological prowess, and political might. These treasure ships were unlike anything the world had seen before. Some were said to be nearly 400 feet long, though other scholars think this is quite the exaggeration and have scaled the numbers down a bit since. Regardless of their exact size, they each featured multiple decks, nine masts, and could carry several hundred passengers, along with massive amounts of cargo, including gold, silk, porcelain, and other luxury goods, which they were packed with. The fleet overall was made up of hundreds of ships, including supply vessels, troop carriers, and warships, all serving to support the mighty treasure ships and, in total, carrying more than 25,000 men. From 1405 to 1433, Zheng He led seven grand voyages across the Indian Ocean, visiting Southeast Asia, India, the Persian Gulf, and even the eastern coast of Africa. Several kingdoms wrote about the visits, and even many famous explorers got a glimpse of the grand fleet, including Marco Polo. What's unique about these expeditions is that they weren't aimed at colonization or military prowess, but rather to foster trade and to show off China's wealth, hoping to establish themselves as the cultural and financial center of the world. The USSR basically deleted the Aral Sea Once the fourth-largest lake in the world, the Aral Sea, located between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, was nearly "deleted" from the map due to a massive Soviet agricultural project. In the 1960s, the Soviet Union began an ambitious plan to turn Central Asia into a major cotton-producing region, dubbing cotton "white gold" and expecting the region to become a major source of wealth for the nation. To achieve this goal, Soviet planners began diverting the two rivers that fed the Aral Sea—the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya—into a complex network of irrigation canals. This allowed the previously arid plains to be transformed into farmland, but at a massive ecological cost: the water supply to the Aral Sea was drastically reduced. By the 1980s, the sea had begun to shrink rapidly. The consequences were disastrous—what was once a vast inland sea teeming with fish became a series of increasingly smaller and saltier lakes. The fishing industry, which had supported thousands of local jobs along its coast, collapsed entirely. Toxic dust storms, caused by the exposed seabed contaminated with agricultural chemicals, began spreading diseases and causing environmental havoc in the region. By the early 21st century, the Aral Sea had lost nearly 90% of its water volume, becoming one of the most dramatic examples of environmental mismanagement in history. Ancient cultures used meteors to make iron tools Long before humans learned to smelt iron from ore, ancient civilizations were already working with iron—iron that literally fell from the sky in the form of meteors. Ancient Egyptians, for example, crafted meteoric iron beads around 3200 BCE, nearly two millennia before the Iron Age, and ancient Inuit living in Greenland sharpened chunks of meteorite into harpoon tips and knives. But the most famous example is the dagger found in the tomb of the Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamun. The blade, which dates back to the 14th century BC, was crafted from meteoric iron and has been polished to a fine finish. Yugoslavia had a special luxury train for foreign diplomacy Built in the 1950s, and nicknamed the "Blue Train", Yugoslavia's diplomacy train was fitted with opulent accommodations, including lavish salons, a presidential suite, meeting rooms, a dining car that could seat dozens of guests, and even a room for the personal barber of Josip Tito. Tito used the Blue Train for domestic travel across the diverse regions of Yugoslavia and for international visits, receiving foreign dignitaries, heads of state, and political allies wherever possible. And of course, the train was heavily armored and guarded to ensure the highest levels of security, granting Tito the perfect place to negotiate his nation's precarious position in the Cold War. Throughout its years in operation, it hosted many high-profile guests, including Queen Elizabeth II, Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, and many more. Teddy Roosevelt had a rebellious daughter The eldest daughter of President Roosevelt, Alice, was one of the most rebellious and charismatic figures of early 20th century American society. Dubbed "Princess Alice" by the press, she was famous for her sharp wit and bold personality, defying social norms expected of women at the time. Growing up in the spotlight due to her dad's fame, her unconventional behavior quickly became a media sensation. She smoked cigarettes in public, drove around with boys late at night, stayed out partying into the early hours of the morning, and even carried around a pet snake in her purse, which she named Emily Spinach. She once famously buried a voodoo doll of Nellie Taft, the wife of President William Howard Taft, in the White House Garden just to make a point, and wasn't afraid to publicly criticize any political figure, including her family members. When asked about her behavior, her father told the press, "I can either run the country or I can attend to Alice, but I cannot possibly do both." Alice would live to age 96, and according to those that knew her best, she kept her rebellious nature and sharp wit throughout even her latest years. The first recorded joke is a fart joke Inscribed on a cuneiform tablet dating back to 1900 BC in ancient Sumer is what appears to be the world's earliest recorded joke, and it just so happens to be a fart joke. It reads, "Something which has never occurred since time immemorial; a young woman did not fart in her husband's lap." Obviously, the joke and its context have lost some of their humorous punch over the millennia, but it is absolutely fascinating to see that flatulence has been the source of jokes for about as long as humans have been writing them down. It also highlights that despite the thousands of years between us, we might not be as different from our ancestors as we think. Paraguay allowed Polygamy after the War of the Triple Alliance The war of the Triple Alliance was fought in the mid-19th century by Paraguay against an alliance made up of Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay, in a misguided effort to bolster the nation's power that quickly transformed into one of the bloodiest conflicts in Latin American history. And Paraguay got the worst of it, being dealt several decisive defeats and having their army essentially annihilated. Part of the problem was that Brazil had a "take no prisoners" approach, leading to thousands of captured men being slaughtered. In the aftermath of the war, Paraguay had lost so many men that they only made up 13% of the nation's population, and the country was now faced with the prospect of rebuilding their society with a drastic lack of male citizens. The result, against all traditional and especially Catholic norms, was to temporarily overrule the laws against polygamy, and encourage women to share their husbands with other women to help boost the population. Suffice to say, if you were a veteran of the war, you had no problem finding a wife. This unofficial policy was left in place for a couple decades and gradually shifted out of the norm as the nation's demographics began to recover. The Mongols used psychological warfare to take cities without a fight While the Mongols were known for their ruthless military tactics and devastating cavalry charges, they also employed psychological warfare to great effect, often causing entire cities to surrender without a single arrow being fired. Chief among these tactics was the use of fear and intimidation, as the Mongols were masters of creating an aura of terror around their forces. Before attacking a city, they would send messengers demanding immediate surrender, promising mercy to those who complied and utter destruction to those who resisted. These messengers would often be accompanied by stories of previous cities that had resisted Mongol attacks, only to be completely annihilated, with their populations massacred or enslaved. To further amplify the fear, the Mongols would sometimes employ tricks like lighting multiple campfires at night or using dummies and mannequins to make the attacking force appear much larger than they actually were. They also spread rumors and used spies to spread exaggerated tales of their cruelty and invincibility. On several occasions, this led to entire cities surrendering without a fight. However, it's no secret that the Mongols were ruthless, and even if a large city willingly let themselves be conquered, the town was often still razed and looted all the same. The term Aspergers was coined by the Nazis The term "Asperger's Syndrome" is named after Hans Asperger, an Austrian pediatrician who first described the condition in 1944. He identified a group of children who exhibited distinct behavioral patterns, including difficulties with social interactions, narrow interests, and strong verbal skills. He called these children "little professors" due to their ability to talk extensively about their specific interests. His research laid the foundation for what would later be known as Asperger's Syndrome, considered a form of autism for many years until the diagnosis was recently retired. However, the story is much darker than this. Asperger's work wasn't performed with the intent of learning more about these children or teaching them how to function in society, it was done to see if they would be of any practical use to the Nazi regime, and if they weren't, to simply use them for scientific experimentation or just have them outright euthanized. For many years, it had been believed that he was actually one of the good guys, who used his position to save children from such a fate, but historians began finding evidence that he supported their elimination, only protecting the kids he deemed highly intelligent. This is because recently discovered medical records show that he referred dozens of children to the Am Spiegelgrund clinic, which was widely known for its child euthanasia. While nearly 800 children would ultimately die in this clinic, Asperger himself went on to enjoy a long and fruitful academic career after the war until his death in 1980. Knowing this, it's quite unsettling that the diagnosis was named after him, and probably for the best that it's now no longer in use, with the symptoms now simply falling under the broader autism spectrum disorder. Surgeons used to wear bloody aprons to show their experience The Renaissance, often celebrated as a time of great artistic and scientific advancements, had its quirks, especially in the world of medicine. In the 16th and 17th centuries, surgery was a rough and ready practice. Surgeons were often seen as less prestigious than physicians, who primarily dealt with internal medicine and did not perform gruesome and often risky operations. To set themselves apart and attract clients, many surgeons took to wearing robes stained with the blood of their past procedures. The more blood, the better—it was a badge of honor that suggested they had performed many surgeries and had years of hands-on experience. Fortunately, this incredibly unhygienic trend eventually went out of style, and by the 1800s, cleanliness became the new norm, meaning you no longer had to worry about being contaminated with whatever diseases were present in the previous patient's blood. The Buddhas of Bamiyan had a tough life Carved into the cliffs of the Bamiyan Valley in central Afghanistan, the Buddhas of Bamiyan were once two of the world's most remarkable examples of ancient sculpture. These massive statues were carved directly into the sandstone cliffs around the 6th century AD by Buddhist monks. For centuries, they stood as the tallest standing Buddhas in the world, symbolizing the rich cultural heritage of the region. The statues were originally covered in vibrant paint and adorned with intricate details, which made them not only religious icons but also masterpieces of ancient art. They were part of a thriving Buddhist monastic complex that included hundreds of caves filled with frescoes and small carvings, making the Bamiyan Valley a major center for Buddhist pilgrimage and culture along the Silk Road. However, this also made them a target for those who opposed Buddhism and viewed it as a threat. The Mongols attempted to destroy the statues in 1221, followed by the Mughal emperor Babur in 1528. Later, another Mughal emperor, Aurangzeb, ordered heavy artillery to be fired at them, destroying their legs, and cannons were shot at them again in the 18th century by Persian king Nader Afshar. But they managed to survive all of this, and though they were a bit battered, they made it all the way until the 21st century, until they were finally destroyed by the Taliban. The Taliban declared that the statues were idols contrary to their interpretation of Islamic law, and needed to be removed. There were widespread international attempts to save the statues, with some countries like Pakistan offering to pay for their maintenance and preservation, and Japan even offering to literally design a new method to pick them up and move them, but all to no avail. The Taliban planted explosives along them and inside drilled holes, and in 2001, destroyed the 1500-year-old monument. The wheel was independently invented in the ancient Andes The invention and use of the wheel is often associated with the great civilizations of the Old World, like Mesopotamia, Egypt, and China, but it was also independently invented in ancient America. The fascinating twist, though, is that it was mainly used for toys rather than transportation or practical tools. Archaeologists have discovered small clay or wooden figurines with wheels attached, dating back to around 1500 BC, in several Mesoamerican cultures, including the Olmecs and the Maya. These wheeled toys, shaped like animals or carts, featured small axles and wheels, demonstrating that the concept of the wheel was well-known to these ancient civilizations. However, despite understanding the basic principles of the wheel, these cultures didn't ever use it for larger-scale applications like carts or chariots. There are several theories as to why this is the case, but the simplest explanation is that Mesoamerica's rugged and mountainous terrain made wheel-based transportation less practical, as opposed to the flat plains and deserts of the old world, as well as the fact that ancient American societies lacked large, domesticated draft animals like horses to pull wheeled vehicles. Bird poop used to be highly valuable During the 19th century, bird poop became a highly prized commodity, specifically in the realm of agriculture. Guano, the accumulated excrement of seabirds, bats, and other flying creatures, is incredibly rich in essential nutrients like nitrogen, phosphate, and potassium, making it an exceptionally effective natural fertilizer. The value of guano was discovered by European farmers in the early 1800s, who noticed its incredible ability to revitalize depleted soils and dramatically increase crop yields. This discovery sparked what became known as the "Guano Boom," with countries like Britain and the United States scrambling to secure vast quantities of guano to fuel their agricultural industries. The best guano deposits were found on remote islands off the coast of Peru and in the Pacific, where massive colonies of seabirds had been nesting and excreting for centuries. By the mid-19th century, these islands had become sites of intense international competition. To secure access, the United States even passed the hilarious Guano Islands Act in 1856, which allowed American citizens to claim any uninhabited island with the smelly deposits on behalf of the country. Peru became especially wealthy from guano exports, earning vast sums from this natural resource and temporarily transforming its economy. However, the guano boom eventually ended as deposits were depleted, and just as fears began rising that the world's farms wouldn't be able to sustain the growing global population, synthetic fertilizers were invented. The SS Baikal was a pretty big waste of money The SS Baikal was an ambitious project by the Russian Empire to create a massive icebreaking ferry for Lake Baikal, the world's deepest freshwater lake, located in Siberia. The reason they needed such a big boat was for the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway, a massive rail line intended to connect Moscow with the Russian Far East. However, Lake Baikal interrupted the rail line, and the terrain around the lake was deemed too rugged for train tracks, and so they decided to build a massive icebreaking ship to carry train cars and connect the two halves of the railway. Constructed in 1896, the SS Baikal was honestly a marvel of its time, weighing more than 4,000 tons. It was fitted with reinforced steel and powered by three steam engines, giving it the strength to break through Lake Baikal's thick ice. The vessel was shipped in parts and assembled on-site at the lake—a monumental effort in itself. However, the SS Baikal quickly proved to be a bit of a waste of money. Despite its powerful design, the ferry often struggled to break through the lake's thick winter ice, which could reach several feet in depth. It frequently became stuck and required significant repairs and maintenance, draining the program's funds. Additionally, the ferry could only operate during specific times of the year, and delays were common due to severe weather conditions. This was all such a hassle that within a few years the government went ahead and authorized the construction of Trans-Siberian Railway around Lake Baikal, making the ferry largely obsolete, and the ship ended up being used only sparingly until it was severely damaged during the Russian Civil War in 1918 and eventually scrapped. An 1857 shipwreck sparked a 1990s insurance battle The SS Central America was a US vessel that sank in a hurricane off the coast of South Carolina in 1857, carrying 578 passengers and crew, along with many tons of gold that had been mined in the California Gold Rush. The shipwreck was one of the greatest maritime disasters in American history, causing the loss of hundreds of lives and contributing to the financial panic of 1857. Along with the human tragedy, an estimated $2 million worth of gold—equivalent to well over a hundred million today—went down with the ship. For well over a hundred years, the shipwreck's location was a tantalizing mystery, with millions of dollars' worth of gold just waiting to be found. And found it was, by a treasure hunting team in the 1980s, who located the ship and retrieved the precious cargo using new remote-controlled submersibles. However, they didn't get to immediately ride off into the sunset with their newfound riches, and were instead immediately sucked into a fierce legal battle. You see, back when the ship had originally sunk, insurance companies across the US were forced to pay their clients hefty claims for the lost assets, and many of those companies were still around in the 1990s. They now wanted a cut of the treasure they'd been forced to pay for more than a century earlier, claiming that they had a right to significant compensation. The battle went on for years, but eventually a court ruling gave more than 90% of the findings to the treasure hunting team. Toronto once had a clown vs firefighter riot In the summer of 1855, Toronto experienced one of its most unusual public disturbances: a full-blown riot that began with a brawl between circus clowns and local firefighters. The trouble began when a group of clowns from the circus went to a local tavern called the Fireman's Hall after a performance. The tavern was a popular hangout spot for the city's Hook & Ladder Firefighting Company, whose members were known for their rough demeanor. At some point during the night, an argument broke out between the clowns and the firefighters over a local woman, escalating into a fistfight. The firefighting crew, angry but outnumbered, were initially beaten back and defeated by the clowns, but they soon regrouped and stormed the circus grounds, tearing through tents and causing chaos, destroying property, and fighting with various circus performers. At some point, a wagon was set on fire, causing the city's fire bell to be rung. However, when more firefighters arrived on the scene, they didn't bother putting out the flames, they instead ran to join their brothers in combat against the clowns. The riot turned so chaotic that the city's police were unable to contain it, and the militia had to be called in to bring back peace. In the aftermath, dozens of police and firefighters were fired. The invention of the elevator safety brake made skyscrapers possible In 1852, an American inventor named Elisha Otis revolutionized the world with the invention of the elevator safety brake. Before Otis's innovation, elevators were considered dangerous and unreliable, primarily used for transporting goods in factories or mines, rather than people. The biggest fear was that a hoisting rope might snap or a pulley could shatter, sending the elevator plummeting down its shaft. This happened on occasion, and wasn't a problem when the only cargo was bags of coal, but posed a serious hurdle for the safety of using elevators to transport human beings. Otis's solution was brilliantly simple yet highly effective. He developed a spring-loaded safety mechanism that would automatically engage if the elevator's cable broke. The device featured a system of wagon springs attached to a ratchet, which would instantly clamp onto the elevator shaft's guide rails if tension on the rope was lost. This safety brake essentially stopped the elevator car from falling, preventing potentially deadly accidents. To prove the effectiveness of his invention, Otis staged a dramatic demonstration at the 1854 New York World's Fair. Standing on a platform suspended high above the crowds, Otis ordered the rope to be cut. As the audience gasped in horror, the platform dropped only a few inches before the safety brake engaged, halting the fall. Otis turned to the crowd and confidently declared, "All safe, gentlemen, all safe!" The Ottomans had their own tulip craze You may have heard of tulip mania, a period in Dutch history when tulip bulbs suddenly became immensely valuable for a few years, a strange and unique piece of economic history. But what's less well-known is that the Ottoman Empire also had their own version, called the Tulip Era. The period, which roughly spanned from 1718 to 1730, was marked by a fascination with the flower that became a symbol of wealth, prestige, and refined taste. Tulips were brought to the Ottoman Empire centuries earlier, and had become a beloved flower in the gardens of Istanbul. But by the early 1700s, tulips reached the height of their popularity among the Ottoman elite. The ruling Sultan Ahmed III and his court were obsessed with cultivating rare and beautiful varieties, with some tulips fetching enormous prices due to their unique colors, shapes, and patterns. During this period, tulips permeated all aspects of Ottoman culture. Lavish tulip-themed parties and festivals were held, and the flower featured prominently in poetry, art, textiles, and even palace architecture. The tulip became a status symbol, with wealthy Ottomans competing to display the most exotic and valuable blooms in their gardens and homes. General MacArthur was fired for wanting to nuke China During the Korean War, General Douglas MacArthur clashed with President Harry S. Truman over how to conduct the conflict. MacArthur, who was a highly decorated and influential military leader, and a well-regarded war hero of the Second World War, had been initially successful in pushing back the North Korean forces, but was now faced with a tougher situation when China entered the conflict in late 1950. MacArthur, frustrated by the setbacks and convinced that a decisive victory required a stronger response, began publicly advocating for a much more aggressive strategy, including the possibility of expanding the war into China. He proposed bombing Chinese supply lines, blockading China's coast, and even using nuclear weapons to halt the Chinese advance and destroy key military targets across North Korea and China. However, President Truman and his advisors were deeply concerned about the potential consequences of such an escalation. They feared that expanding the war into China could lead to a broader conflict with the Soviet Union, potentially sparking World War III, a greater concern now that the Soviets were developing their own atom bombs. These ideas put a lot of tension between the general and the president, culminating in him writing a letter to a congressman attacking Truman's policies. Ultimately, MacArthur was fired for insubordination, a controversial move which was seen by some as ungrateful to the man's legacy, but by others as necessary to stave off an even bigger war. One of the Aztec's greatest warriors fell off a roof As the conquistadors and their native allies broke into the center of the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, the Aztec forces began to retreat, eventually being cornered in a market, where they prepared to make their last stand. They had now been constantly sacrificing and praying to their gods for weeks, hoping for some sort of relief, and their hopes were lifted when an owl warrior appeared on a rooftop, in full view of the Aztec army. The warrior, part of an elite class of soldiers called the Eagle and Jaguar knights, was dressed head to toe in a ceremonial owl costume, complete with an elaborate feathered headdress. In Aztec culture, owls were associated with darkness, death, and the underworld, and this warrior, considered to be among the best in the empire, wearing such a costume atop a temple was seen as a great omen of victory. However, the omen quickly changed when this grand warrior suddenly slipped and fell off the roof to his death. The accident was taken as the worst possible omen by the priests, who began foretelling of their impending defeat, which was delivered the next day. A newspaper once convinced Americans that there were bat-people on the moon In August 1835, the New York Sun, a popular American newspaper, published a series of articles that would become known as the "Great Moon Hoax." The articles claimed that a renowned astronomer, Sir John Herschel, had made incredible discoveries on the moon using a powerful new telescope. The reports, supposedly reprinted from a scientific journal, captivated readers with detailed descriptions of a fantastical lunar landscape filled with various forms of life. According to the Sun, Herschel had observed lush forests, oceans, and herds of strange animals like unicorns, two-legged beavers, and even bat-like humanoids he called "*Vespertilio*-homo." These "moon people" were said to be winged creatures with human-like features, who built temples and lived in a peaceful society. The stories included vivid illustrations and descriptions that enthralled the public, spreading quickly throughout the United States and even reaching Europe. For weeks, readers were spellbound by these sensational "discoveries," and the New York Sun enjoyed a massive surge in circulation and advertisement revenue. However, of course, it was all a fabrication. The articles were written by Richard Adams Locke, a reporter for the Sun, who later admitted that the stories were intended as satire to poke fun at some of the wilder astronomical theories of the time, as well as to mock the gullibility of the public. The funniest part is that the astronomer himself, Herschel, didn't even bother dispelling the myths, apparently finding it all rather amusing and noting that he wished his findings were so interesting, though he later became annoyed when people repeatedly asked him questions about it after the hoax had already been revealed. The world's oldest amputation was in southeast Asia. In 2022, archaeologists discovered the oldest known example of a successful surgical amputation, dating back more than 31,000 years. The evidence comes from a prehistoric skeleton found in a cave in Borneo, Indonesia. The skeleton belonged to a young individual who, for whatever reason, had undergone the removal of their lower left leg. By the clues remaining, it does appear that this removal was intentional and surgical in nature, making it the earliest known amputation. What's even more amazing though, is that the person survived the procedure, and, as indicated by how much the bone healed, it appears that the person lived for another six to nine years following the operation. Pythagoras believed beans were evil Pythagoras, the ancient Greek philosopher and mathematician best known for the Pythagorean theorem, founded a religious movement known as Pythagoreanism, which combined philosophy, mathematics, and mysticism. As part of his teachings, he imposed strict dietary rules on his followers, including an amusing ban on eating beans. The reasons for Pythagoras's aversion to beans are still debated among historians, but several theories exist. Some suggest he believed that beans contained the souls of the dead, given the belief in transmigration or reincarnation that was central to his philosophy. Another theory is that he had correctly associated beans with flatulence, and may have thought that passing gas interfered with spiritual purity and mental clarity. Plato was a champion wrestler before becoming a philosopher Before Plato became one of the most well-known philosophers of all time, he had quite an athletic youth, and was actually an accomplished wrestler. In fact, his real name was Aristocles; "Plato" was a nickname given to him by his wrestling coach, derived from the Greek word "*platos*," meaning "broad." This name likely referred to Plato's broad shoulders or strong physique, a trait that served him well in the wrestling ring. Plato came from a wealthy and influential Athenian family and received an education befitting his status, which included training in athletics. He was known to have competed in several wrestling competitions during his youth and was reportedly skilled enough to participate in the Isthmian Games, an event similar to the Olympic Games. Galileo's middle finger was preserved After Galileo died in 1642, the astronomer was buried in a modest grave. About a century later, his remains were moved to a more prominent tomb in the Basilica of Santa Croce in Florence to honor his legacy, and it was during this move that some admirers of Galileo decided to take some "relics" from his body. They took three fingers, a tooth, and a vertebra. The finger was later mounted on a marble base, and preserved for display, where it has been ever since. The first patents were granted in the 15th century The concept of patenting inventions and ideas dates back much further than you might think. In 1421, the first ever recorded patent was given to architect and engineer Filippo Brunelleschi, granting him complete control for three years over a type of barge he had invented that utilized unique hoisting gear to lift and transport marble from ships onto land. Another early patent was granted in 1449 by King Henry VI of England to a man named John of *Utynam*. John, a Flemish glassmaker, was awarded a 20-year monopoly on his innovative technique for making stained glass, which was used in the windows of the Eton College chapel. However, there are hints that patents may even be much older than this. In the ancient Greek city of Sybaris, for example, in 500 BC citizens were encouraged to seek out new inventions or techniques, and if successful, profits from said invention were reserved for the creator for a full year. Land mines date back more than 700 years While often viewed as a modern weapon of war, the use of land mines dates back several centuries, essentially back to the beginning of the use of gunpowder for large explosives in ancient China. In a military treatise known as the *Huolongjing*, the authors describe several devices that are similar to modern-day land mines. The first of these were hollow iron shells filled with gunpowder and buried as an army retreated, lit with long fuses that were specifically timed to detonate as the enemy marched over them. But the more refined versions didn't have a timer. One design describes a long length of bamboo that was filled with compressed gunpowder and iron pellets, and buried in the dirt. The mechanism for triggering its explosion wasn't fully understood for some time, but essentially, when an enemy stepped on the hidden bamboo, they would dislodge a pin, which would cause two metal plates to spark against flint, igniting the gunpowder. Emperor Sigismund was above the law…and grammar In the early 15th century, Sigismund of Luxembourg was a man of many titles, starting out as King of Germany, then eventually becoming King of Bohemia as well, adding King of Hungary and Croatia, and finally the coveted title of Holy Roman Emperor. However, despite his many achievements as a monarch, for some historians, there's one particular moment that shines above the rest. Between 1414 and 1418, numerous councils were held in order to try settling the religious schism that was dividing the Catholic Church. At one point, the emperor made a mistake in his Latin, allegedly using the wrong gender for a certain word, and a cardinal pointed out and corrected the mistake. Sigismund replied "Ego sum rex Romanus et super *grammaticam*", or, "I am king of the Romans and above grammar." This famous line has since earned him the nickname Super *Grammaticam* by several historians. The remains at skeleton lake are still a mystery Located in the Himalayas, *Roopkund* is a high-altitude glacial lake, surrounded by largely uninhabited, rocky land. It's not very large, and its depth is only about 10 feet on average, which is why it was so surprising when in 1942 hundreds of human skeletons were found at its edges. Originally, it was believed that everyone present had been killed in a single event sometime around the 9th century, but, in the years since, DNA analysis has given us more insight, showing that the remains come from three distinct groups of people, that died in 2 events, one around the year 800 AD, and the other around 1800. Thanks to the cold weather year-round and the often-frozen lake, many of the bodies were in remarkably good condition when they were found, some with flesh even still attached, allowing scientists to perform semi-thorough autopsies on their bones. What they found was that the cause of death for many were many small, blunt force impacts from above. This seems to coincide with some sort of legendary, deadly hailstorm, tales of which, interestingly enough, are present in the local oral folklore. To make things even weirder though, DNA analysis also revealed that many of the skeletons deposited in the 1800s were from the Mediterranean, specifically Greece and Crete. Who they were and what they were doing all the way out in the Himalayas is entirely unknown. The American Revolution had battles in Great Britain While most of the American Revolution's battles took place in North America, one of the war's most daring and unusual episodes occurred on the other side of the Atlantic—right on English soil. This bold action was led by John Paul Jones, a Scottish-born naval officer who became a hero of the American cause after fleeing to the colonies as a fugitive. In 1778, Jones commanded the Ranger, a ship of the Continental Navy, and launched a series of raids along the coast of England and Scotland. His most famous attack was on the English town of Whitehaven, where he and his crew landed in the dead of night. Jones's men spiked the town's cannons to prevent them from firing and set fire to a ship in the harbor, causing panic among the townspeople before the Americans fled to Ireland. Though the damage was minimal, the psychological impact was significant—this was the first time in living memory that British homeland soil had been attacked by a foreign force. Jones didn't stop there. Later, in 1779, commanding the Bonhomme Richard, he engaged in one of the most famous naval battles of the war against the British warship HMS Serapis off the coast of Yorkshire. Despite his ship being heavily damaged and on the verge of sinking, Jones refused to surrender, famously declaring, "I have not yet begun to fight!" He ultimately captured the Serapis after a brutal close-quarters battle, taking the new ship for himself as his previous one sank beneath the waves. Countess Elizabeth Bathory de *Esced* might have been history's most prolific serial killer Born in 1560 into a powerful family, Báthory was known for her beauty, wealth, and high social status. However, she gained infamy for something far more sinister—allegations that she tortured and killed hundreds of young girls within the walls of her castle. According to legend, Báthory lured peasant girls to her castle under the pretense of offering them work, only to subject them to horrific acts of cruelty. The most macabre tales suggest that she believed bathing in the blood of virgins would preserve her youth, earning her the grim nickname, the "Blood Countess." Reports of her brutality came to light when King Matthias II of Hungary ordered an investigation after hearing rumors of the atrocities. In 1610, authorities raided her castle and purportedly found evidence of her crimes, including bodies and imprisoned victims. Báthory was arrested and put on trial, where testimonies from witnesses and supposed accomplices painted a horrifying picture of her deeds. Though she was never officially convicted, likely due to her noble status, she was sentenced to life imprisonment and was confined to a small room in her castle until her death in 1614. Despite her terrifying reputation, some historians insist that she might have been framed, and suggest that the stories about Báthory were greatly exaggerated or possibly even entirely fabricated, likely as part of a political conspiracy to discredit her name and seize her vast lands and wealth. The longest marathon time in history was over 50 years This astonishing record belongs to a Japanese runner named *Shizo* *Kanakuri*, who began the marathon in the 1912 Stockholm Olympics alongside the rest of his competitors as normal. However, he wasn't in a great condition to run at the time, since the trip to Sweden had taken 18 days by boat and by the Trans-Siberian railway, leaving him exhausted and with barely any time to rest before the games *beagn*. To make matters worse, his body was not agreeing with the local food, and his coach was also sick. On top of all this, the race happened to coincide with a record-breaking heatwave in Sweden, causing dozens of competitors to drop out of the race, including one runner, Francisco Lazaro, who collapsed mid marathon and tragically died. So about halfway through the race, struggling with fatigue, dehydration, and an upset stomach, *Kanakuri* left the track, and stumbled into a nearby property where a garden party was being held. The family who owned the property gave *Kanakuri* a bunch of orange juice, which he happily chugged, and reportedly let him even take a nap in their house. However, embarrassed by his failure to complete the race, he then hopped on a boat and returned to Japan without notifying anyone in Sweden, and he was added to the local missing persons list. For decades he remained technically "missing" in Sweden, until one day a Swedish reporter found him working as a geography teacher in southern Japan. As part of a show for *Sveriges* Television, they offered *Kanakuri* the opportunity to return to Stockholm and complete the marathon, an offer which he quickly accepted. On March 20th, 1967, he resumed the marathon, stopping by the house that had fed him the first time around. The son of the original owners welcomed him, offered him orange juice again as per tradition, and explained that one of the family's treasured heirlooms was a gift that *Kanakuri* had given them all those years ago, a seemingly important Japanese scroll. But *Kanakuri* didn't remember giving them anything remarkable or valuable, and upon further inspection, he confirmed that the treasured heirloom he'd left at their house all those years ago was nothing more than a customs document. At last, he finished his race, with an official time of 54 years, 8 months, 5 hours, 32 minutes, and 20 seconds. After it was over, he commented, "It was a long trip. Along the way, I got married, had six children and 10 grandchildren." The last Egyptian hieroglyph was carved in 436 *AD* Egyptian hieroglyphs are one of the most ancient writing systems on earth, a system of symbols and marks that were in use for more than 3,000 years until they were phased out in favor of more sophisticated writing techniques, such as the Greek and Coptic alphabets. But the final hieroglyph to ever be inscribed came much later than you might expect, the year 436 AD, inscribed on the walls of the Temple of Philae, a religious site in southern Egypt dedicated to the goddess Isis. This inscription, known as the "Graffito of *Esmet*-Akhom," consists of a short prayer to the gods, and was written by a priest named *Esmet*-Akhom, who commemorated the worship of Isis long after the old Egyptian religion had been largely abandoned. It's not only the last-known hieroglyph to be carved, but also one of the final moments of worship for the ancient Egyptian gods. Playing cards were a currency in New France In the 17th century, the French colony of New France, modern-day Canada, faced a unique economic challenge as coins were in short supply. This scarcity of hard currency made it difficult for the colonial government to pay soldiers, civil servants, and suppliers, especially during periods when shipments of money from France were delayed or disrupted. To address this problem, in 1685, the intendant, a type of colonial administrator, of New France, Jacques de *Meulles*, came up with an ingenious solution—he decided to use playing cards as a form of temporary currency. The cards were cut into quarters, and each piece was assigned a value corresponding to different denominations. These "card money" pieces were then signed by the governor, the intendant, and the treasurer, making them official legal tender within the colony. The system worked surprisingly well. The playing card currency circulated alongside coins and other forms of money, and it's estimated that more than two million livres worth of card money was circulated before the British took over Canada in the 1760s. The Washington Monument was capped with aluminum because it was considered rare When the Washington Monument was completed in 1884, the pyramid at its top was capped with aluminum, which, at the time, was the largest single piece of aluminum in the world. The decision to use such a cheap metal might seem odd today, as it's the inexpensive one we use for foil to cover leftover dinner, but at the time, it was quite expensive. In fact, when the decision was made to cap the monument, aluminum had a price comparable to silver. However, just two years after the monument's completion, a new process was invented, the Hall-*Heroult* process, that made aluminum far easier to manufacture, and the price of the metal plummeted, making its presence at the top of the Washington Monument a bit funny in retrospect. Coca Cola once thwarted an assassination attempt During the build-up to the Soviet Afghan war of the 1980s, the USSR decided that the Afghan head of state, Hafizullah Amin, needed to be assassinated so that he could be replaced with a more easily manipulated leader. Eventually, they achieved this by directly assaulting his palace with armored vehicles, but only because their many attempts at a more subtle murder didn't seem to work out. First, the KGB tried to poison him, but the poison got to the wrong target and nearly killed Amin's nephew instead. Then, they tried to use a sniper, but he had improved his security measures and they could never get a clear shot. Finally, they tried poisoning him again, this time deciding to poison everyone at his party to make sure he got a dose of the toxins too, and several people at the party were killed by the poison, but Amin survived. He did lose consciousness from ingesting it, but the carbonation in the Coca-Cola he was drinking had helped to break up the toxic agent in the poison, saving his life, and constituting probably the only time in history that a soft drink thwarted a KGB assassination attempt. Nero probably didn't "fiddle while Rome burned" One of the most famous stories about the Roman Emperor Nero is that he "fiddled while Rome burned" during the Great Fire of Rome in 64 *AD*, with this phrase and his name becoming synonymous with a leader who is indifferent or even complicit in the face of disaster. But the truth behind this story is debated. First of all, the fiddle, as we know it today, didn't exist in ancient Rome, and wouldn't for many centuries. If Nero played any instrument during the fire, it would have been the lyre, a stringed instrument similar to a small harp. But more importantly, historical accounts suggest that Nero wasn't even in Rome when the fire started—he was at his villa in *Antium*, about 35 miles away. Some sources say that he rushed home to aid with relief efforts, while others say he was quick to begin drawing up new architectural plans for the affected areas, but whichever is the case, neither involves him maniacally sitting on his balcony playing a fiddle above the flames. This story likely emerged well after the event as part of negative propaganda against him, especially as he was not well liked, especially by Christians, who he blamed for the fire. Mexico was a safe haven for escaped slaves Stories of American slaves escaping southern plantations almost always feature the northern US as their destination of freedom, with at least 30,000 people fleeing into the North between 1830 and 1850 through the famous "underground railroad". But what's less well-known is that Mexico was also the destination for an underground railroad, one that safely evacuated up to 5,000 slaves in the 1830s. Mexico became a destination after the nation itself abolished slavery, about 20 years before the United States would. Families along the borders of both countries worked together to safely transport and hide the wanted individuals as they made their way to freedom. One man later commented that it was even easier than getting to the north, as you simply had to walk south and cross the Rio Grande, and nobody would chase you across the border. Another way people got into Mexico was through the ports, where enslaved sailors and stowaways would jump ship and disappear into the cities where their captors would never find them again. In 1858, hundreds of people were poisoned by candy In 1858, the town of Bradford in England was the site of a horrific mass poisoning that affected more than 200 people, and the culprit was a batch of peppermint candies. The accidental poisoning occurred when a local confectioner, Joseph Neal, sent his apprentice to purchase powdered gypsum, which while normally used in building materials, was being used by Neal to bulk up his candy without having to purchase more expensive sugar. However, the shop that his apprentice frequented made a mistake that day, and instead of the usual powdered gypsum, accidentally sold him arsenic trioxide, which was then mixed in the candy batch and sold to customers around the city. Arsenic, of course, is a deadly poison, and the tainted sweets soon began claiming victims, with people falling gravely ill around the city with severe symptoms, including vomiting, severe stomach cramps, and even convulsions. In the end, 21 people died, and more than 200 suffered symptoms. Authorities quickly deduced that Neal's shop and candies were the common denominator, and the remaining candies were confiscated. An analytical chemist found that some of the candies contained 580mg of arsenic, more than double a fatal dose for an average human. Neal ran from the police and was chased before being apprehended at his home. He was arrested, along with his apprentice and the chemist who had sold him the arsenic, but all three were acquitted on the grounds that it had been an accident. Britain once used cemetery guns to deter grave robbers Grave robbing was a huge problem in 18th and 19th century Britain. With the rise of medical schools and the growing need for cadavers to study human anatomy, along with other, more nefarious reasons, body snatching became a lucrative trade. Freshly buried corpses were frequently dug up and sold to surgeons for dissection, leading to widespread fear and outrage among the public. To combat this, some cemeteries in Britain began using a rather ingenious deterrent: cemetery guns. These firearms were spring loaded and set up near graves with a small network of tripwires. If a grave robber tripped the wire, the gun would discharge, either hitting the robber directly or hopefully scaring them off for the night with a loud bang. Though creative to be sure, cemetery guns didn't put an end to the grave-robbing problem, which was finally solved in 1832 with the passing of the Anatomy Act which provided a legal means for medical schools to obtain cadavers, largely putting an end to the body-snatching industry. Key Takeaways The Russian Baltic Fleet's 18,000-mile voyage in 1905 was plagued by mishaps, including mistakenly firing on British fishing vessels. Spain once threw platinum into the ocean, believing it to be an inferior form of silver. Alexander the Great held a drinking contest in 324 BC where 42 contestants died from alcohol poisoning. The 1927 Liberian election had a voter turnout of nearly 1600%, with Charles King receiving 230,000 votes. The lunar module's autopilot was overridden by Neil Armstrong to avoid a dangerous landing zone on the moon. Frequently Asked Questions What was the fate of the Russian Baltic Fleet in 1905?The Russian Baltic Fleet had a disastrous voyage in 1905 during the Russo-Japanese War. The fleet set sail from St. Petersburg and faced numerous issues, including mistakenly opening fire on British fishing vessels, logistical nightmares, and accidents. By the time they reached Japan, the fleet was exhausted and was defeated in a naval battle, forcing Russia to sue for peace. What did Spain do with confiscated platinum?Spain used to throw platinum into the ocean. When the Spanish first encountered platinum, they believed it to be an inferior version of silver and used it to create fake silver coins. Eventually, the Spanish Crown issued a decree in 1735 ordering all confiscated platinum to be thrown into the sea. What happened at Alexander the Great's drinking contest?Alexander the Great held a drinking contest in 324 BC where the winner, Promachus, drank an estimated 13 liters of unmixed wine. Unfortunately, Promachus and 41 other contestants died of alcohol poisoning within three days. What was the outcome of Liberia's 1927 election?Liberia's 1927 general election is considered the most fraudulent in history. Charles King received 230,000 votes while Thomas Faulkner got around 9,000, resulting in a voter turnout of nearly 1600%. King's term was filled with controversies, including accusations of slave labor, and he eventually resigned before finishing his presidency. What did Neil Armstrong do during the Apollo 11 moon landing?Neil Armstrong took manual control of the lunar module during the Apollo 11 moon landing after realizing that the autopilot was taking them into an area with many boulders and jagged rocks. He steered the craft over the hazardous terrain to find a safer landing zone. What was the Raising of Chicago?The Raising of Chicago was a massive engineering project in the mid-19th century to lift the entire city center to improve public health. Buildings were raised using jackscrews, and streets and sidewalks were also elevated. This project helped prevent flooding and reduced the spread of diseases. What is the significance of the oldest grape wine found?The oldest grape wine ever found is 8,000 years old. Researchers discovered pottery jars in Georgia that contained wine, indicating organized grape wine production and possibly the breeding of specific grape types for wine-making. How did Hernán Cortés communicate with the Aztecs?Hernán Cortés used a unique method to communicate with the Aztecs by utilizing interpreters who spoke multiple languages. Aguilar and Guerrero, Spanish survivors of a shipwreck, had learned the Maya language. Malinche, a Maya woman who spoke Nahuatl and Yucatec Maya, helped bridge the communication gap. What was the US's strategy to acquire titanium for the SR-71 Blackbird?The US used fake shell corporations in multiple third-world countries to purchase titanium ore from the USSR, securing enough to produce the SR-71 Blackbird. The USSR was unaware that they were contributing to the creation of an aircraft designed to spy on their homeland. What was the outcome of the 1908 New York to Paris car race?The 1908 New York to Paris car race was won by an American team led by George Schuster. The race involved driving westward across the United States, up the western coast of Canada, and across the frozen Bering Strait to the eastern edge of Russia, then through Russia and Europe to France. ## Key Takeaways - The Russian Baltic Fleet's 18,000-mile voyage in 1905 was plagued by mishaps, including mistakenly firing on British fishing vessels. - Spain once threw platinum into the ocean, believing it to be an inferior form of silver. - Alexander the Great held a drinking contest in 324 BC where 42 contestants died from alcohol poisoning. - The 1927 Liberian election had a voter turnout of nearly 1600%, with Charles King receiving 230,000 votes. - The lunar module's autopilot was overridden by Neil Armstrong to avoid a dangerous landing zone on the moon. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### What was the fate of the Russian Baltic Fleet in 1905? The Russian Baltic Fleet had a disastrous voyage in 1905 during the Russo-Japanese War. The fleet set sail from St. Petersburg and faced numerous issues, including mistakenly opening fire on British fishing vessels, logistical nightmares, and accidents. By the time they reached Japan, the fleet was exhausted and was defeated in a naval battle, forcing Russia to sue for peace. ### What did Spain do with confiscated platinum? Spain used to throw platinum into the ocean. When the Spanish first encountered platinum, they believed it to be an inferior version of silver and used it to create fake silver coins. Eventually, the Spanish Crown issued a decree in 1735 ordering all confiscated platinum to be thrown into the sea. ### What happened at Alexander the Great's drinking contest? Alexander the Great held a drinking contest in 324 BC where the winner, Promachus, drank an estimated 13 liters of unmixed wine. Unfortunately, Promachus and 41 other contestants died of alcohol poisoning within three days. ### What was the outcome of Liberia's 1927 election? Liberia's 1927 general election is considered the most fraudulent in history. Charles King received 230,000 votes while Thomas Faulkner got around 9,000, resulting in a voter turnout of nearly 1600%. King's term was filled with controversies, including accusations of slave labor, and he eventually resigned before finishing his presidency. ### What did Neil Armstrong do during the Apollo 11 moon landing? Neil Armstrong took manual control of the lunar module during the Apollo 11 moon landing after realizing that the autopilot was taking them into an area with many boulders and jagged rocks. He steered the craft over the hazardous terrain to find a safer landing zone. ### What was the Raising of Chicago? The Raising of Chicago was a massive engineering project in the mid-19th century to lift the entire city center to improve public health. Buildings were raised using jackscrews, and streets and sidewalks were also elevated. This project helped prevent flooding and reduced the spread of diseases. ### What is the significance of the oldest grape wine found? The oldest grape wine ever found is 8,000 years old. Researchers discovered pottery jars in Georgia that contained wine, indicating organized grape wine production and possibly the breeding of specific grape types for wine-making. ### How did Hernán Cortés communicate with the Aztecs? Hernán Cortés used a unique method to communicate with the Aztecs by utilizing interpreters who spoke multiple languages. Aguilar and Guerrero, Spanish survivors of a shipwreck, had learned the Maya language. Malinche, a Maya woman who spoke Nahuatl and Yucatec Maya, helped bridge the communication gap. ### What was the US's strategy to acquire titanium for the SR-71 Blackbird? The US used fake shell corporations in multiple third-world countries to purchase titanium ore from the USSR, securing enough to produce the SR-71 Blackbird. The USSR was unaware that they were contributing to the creation of an aircraft designed to spy on their homeland. ### What was the outcome of the 1908 New York to Paris car race? The 1908 New York to Paris car race was won by an American team led by George Schuster. The race involved driving westward across the United States, up the western coast of Canada, and across the frozen Bering Strait to the eastern edge of Russia, then through Russia and Europe to France. ## Sources - [Original Side Projects video: 100 History Facts that Will Shock You](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SUG1V3dlCxE) ## Related Coverage Simon Whistler https://sideprojects.pub/article/100-science-facts-that-will-shock-you https://sideprojects.pub/article/100-science-facts-that-will-shock-you Thu, 25 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT If you've ever been intrigued by the mysteries of outer space, or if you've ever felt a sense of wonder looking up at the night sky, then you are in for a treat. Today we're bringing you no less than one hundred facts about the cosmos, and they've been carefully selected to be quite different from the types of basic space facts you would normally find on the internet, ensuring that there is something new to be learned for even the most avid of space enjoyers. As we dive into the secrets of the Solar System, the mysteries of the Milky Way, and the strangest objects that might hypothetically exist, we guarantee that by the end of this article, your mind will be blown. ## Early galaxies were banana shaped. When we look at the universe around us, we see that most galaxies fall into a few categories. Spiral galaxies, like our Milky Way, are incredibly common, and often feature a bar structure across the center. Elliptical galaxies, shaped like large spheres or ovals, are less common, but still plentiful. There are also lenticular galaxies, which are sort of a mix between spiral and elliptical, and then there's irregular galaxies, which don't really have a defined shape. Of course, there are a few other types and some subcategories, but these are the main ones that you're going to see when you peer into a galaxy cluster. Which is why when astronomers think of the first galaxies to arise in the early universe, for a long time they figured that these shapes were just as common then as they are now, but a recent discovery from the James Webb Space Telescope has us questioning this assumption. Analyzing new photos of nearly 4,000 newborn galaxies from around 500 million years after the Big Bang, researchers came to the shocking conclusion that they weren't discs or spheres, but oddly banana shaped, confirming an earlier finding from Hubble which described them as pickle-shaped. We don't yet have an explanation for why they may have formed this way, but further research may give us insight into galaxy formation and some critical clues about the elusive nature of dark matter and how it shapes galaxy structure over time. ## Saturn has a hexagonal storm larger than earth. You may have heard of the storm visible on the surface of Jupiter, the Great Red Spot. Its distinct color and immense size make it an iconic part of our solar system, but what's less well-known is that its neighbor Saturn also sports a massive storm, only Saturn's is far more perplexing since its shaped like an almost perfect hexagon over the planet's north pole. The hexagon is so large that each of its sides is longer than the diameter of the entire earth, giving it enough size that, depending on the planet's location relative to us, the hexagon can even be seen by amateur astronomers with backyard-sized telescopes. Aside from things like crystalline structures, neat polygons like this are not commonly seen in nature, especially on this scale, and so this discovery understandably left astronomers scratching their heads when it was first seen by the Voyager mission in 1981. Things got even stranger in the 2000s, when the Cassini mission watched as the hexagon's color gradually shifted from mostly blue to a more golden-orange. We've also since confirmed that Saturn's south pole does not have a hexagon. There are a number of hypotheses attempting to explain this enigma, all of which involve highly complicated math relating to fluid dynamics, vortex formation, and anticyclonic shielding that we won't pretend to understand, but the takeaway is that we've yet to come to a consensus. As for the color shift, the most likely explanation is a change in Saturn's seasons creating a haze, but this is only one piece of the hexagonal puzzle. ## Earth has the best view of Hoag's object. Hoag's object is the name given to one of the most beautiful and intriguing things we've found in space. It's what's known as a ring galaxy, and Hoag's is one of the most ideal ever found, with a near perfect circle of hot blue stars surrounding an orange nucleus. Its formation is largely a mystery, possibly a result of ancient galactic collisions or a near-miss that resulted in some gravitational meddling. Ring galaxies like this are estimated to make up just 0.1% of all galaxies, and while a few others have been found, nothing comes close to Hoag's in terms of symmetry and perfection. But this is not the strangest part of Hoag's object. If you look into the dark space within the ring near the top middle, you'll notice what appears to be a second ring galaxy, red in color and appearing much smaller because it is far off in the distance behind Hoag's object. So not only is this the most perfect example of what might be the rarest galaxy type, but by some cosmic coincidence, earth is lined up in the perfect position to see a second super rare ring galaxy right through its center. ## Moons can have their own moons. Stars are orbited by planets. Planets are orbited by moons. But what do you call an even smaller object that is orbiting a moon? Well, there are actually few names for these, such as subsatellites, moonmoons, or moonitos, and once you start thinking about it, their existence isn't all that odd. After all, if a moon has enough mass, it's entirely plausible that an even smaller chunk of rock could end up circling it in a stable orbit. It seems even more likely when you realize that some moons in our solar system are actually quite large, such as Jupiter's Ganymede, which is larger than Mercury and almost the size of Mars. Mars has two moons of its own, so Ganymede certainly has the necessary mass to capture some of its own natural satellites, assuming that the gravitational pull of its parent planet doesn't prevent this. There have been a few candidates in our solar system, but none of these have panned out yet, and so, we've yet to officially confirm the existence of a moonmoon. However, based on the sheer number of planets and moons in our galaxy, if their stable existence is possible, there's bound to be some moonitos hiding around somewhere. ## The Milky Way might be bigger than Andromeda. The nearest galaxy to our Milky Way is the spiral galaxy Andromeda. Andromeda is so large and so close to us that if our eyes were sensitive enough to see all of its stars and gases, we would see that it stretches across a third of our night sky. Of course, Andromeda is also famous for the fact that we're on an unstoppable collision course with it, after which the two galaxies will merge and form the Milkdromeda. If you've ever seen a documentary or simulation of this collision, you'll see that nearly all of them have depicted Andromeda as much larger than the Milky Way, because this is exactly what we believed for a very long time, but newer research shows that this might not be the case. Current estimates show that Andromeda contains the mass of around 1 trillion solar masses, and is about 220,000 light years in diameter, roughly double the mass and size that we believed the Milky Way possessed. But as it turns out, it's actually very hard to make accurate measurements about the galaxy we live in, because our view is obstructed by it. To help put this in perspective, imagine you're in a room filled with people, and you're trying to gather information about everyone's appearances. Looking around, you can see the colors of other people's hair and eyes, the shape of their eyebrows, nose, lips, and much more. But, if you've never looked in a mirror, you can't know even half of this about yourself. Sure, you can look at your arms and see the color of your skin, but you can't figure out the color of your eyes or the shape of any facial features without some form of outside help. Likewise, without a cosmic mirror, it's pretty difficult to estimate a lot of things about the Milky Way, however, as our techniques improve, we are getting better at it. The latest estimations using data from the Gaia mission and distant Hubble findings give the Milky Way a maximum mass of 1.54 trillion solar masses, and may be up to 170,000 light years in diameter, possibly making it considerably more massive than Andromeda. But regardless of which of the galaxies is larger, one thing that hasn't changed is that they are by far the biggest in our Local Group, with Andromeda and the Milky Way having more stars than the other 60 or so galaxies in it combined. ## There is an Asteroid worth quintillions of dollars. Cruising around the solar system between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter is an asteroid known as 16 Psyche. Psyche is quite a large asteroid, containing about 1% of all the mass of the asteroid belt, but what makes it of special interest is its composition. As far as we can tell, as much as 60% of the asteroid's mass is metal, mostly iron and nickel. It's commonly cited across the internet that if you were to take this asteroid and sell its metal at current market prices, it would be worth somewhere in the ballpark of 10 quintillion US dollars. Of course, various estimates for its composition would change this value drastically, and obviously if we were to somehow bring it to earth and harvest it, the metals would instantly become so abundant that they'd be next to worthless. But hypothetical price tag aside, 16 Psyche also has scientific potential. Specifically, because of its high metallicity, it's believed that it may resemble the infant stages of the development of rocky planets. Thus, further investigation could give us insight into the interior of our very own planet, the primary reason behind NASA launching a spacecraft to go get a closer look at it. The Psyche discovery mission was launched in October 2023, and the spacecraft is expected to reach orbit around the asteroid of interest in the year 2029. ## Europa has more water than the entire earth. While the earth may be nicknamed the blue planet because much of its surface is covered in water, H20 really only makes up a tiny portion of our planet, which is mostly rock and metal. That's because the vast majority of this water is in the crust, and the crust is but a small percentage of the earth's mass. Jupiter's moon Europa, on the other hand, has water as a significant percentage of its total mass, perhaps nearly all of it aside from its core, and since it's about the size of our own moon, that means that even on lower-end estimates, Europa contains about twice as much water as all of the earth's oceans combined. But this is far from the only peculiar thing about Europa. Deep inside this water world, the pressure is immense, so immense, in fact, that it might be strong enough to compress water molecules into ice while they're still above freezing temperature. There are currently 17 known types of ice, and the one that could potentially be created from highly compressed water on the ocean floor of Europa is known as ice 7. ## Neutron stars can spin so fast that they tear themselves apart. Neutron stars are one of the most extreme objects we've discovered so far in the universe. When a massive star runs out of fuel at the end of its life, its core collapses, squishing all that matter into a region roughly the size of a city containing an unbelievable amount of mass. It's commonly shared across the internet that a teaspoon of neutron star material would weigh hundreds of millions of tons, or that a matchbox of the stuff would weigh over a billion tons, but even this ridiculous density is far from the only interesting thing about neutron stars. What's more insane is just how fast they spin. The reason neutron stars spin very quickly is due to the conservation of angular momentum. If you've ever seen a spinning figure skater pull in their arms, you'll see that they start spinning much faster, slowing down again when they extend their arms. Similarly, as all the mass we just described in a neutron star goes from being spread out and spinning slowly into being condensed into a tiny region, the conservation of angular momentum results in a very high speed of rotation. So fast, in fact, that the fastest rotating one we've confirmed so far spins 716 times per second. If you could somehow survive standing on its surface, you would have the ridiculous tangential speed of 24% the speed of light, which, for reference, is almost 5 times faster than the fastest man-made object in history, the NASA Parker Space Probe, which, as of 2024, is racing toward the sun at about 5% the speed of light. But these dense monsters don't begin their lives at such high rotational speeds. Newly formed neutron stars generally spin in the ballpark of 10 to 50 times per second, after which this speed can go up or down. In a phenomenon known as spin down, older neutron stars will slow over time, with elderly ones only making a full rotation every few seconds. But, on the flip side, there is also spin up, where neutron stars continue to absorb nearby mass, such as gas from a nearby star, reshaping themselves in the process and increasing their rotational speed. Theoretically, a neutron star could continue to pull in mass and increase its rotational speed until it overcomes its own gravity and tears itself apart, a limit known as the Keplerian break-up frequency. There isn't an exact breakup limit that is agreed upon by everyone, as it depends on various estimates for the structure and behavior of matter in the interior of the neutron star. For example, one paper from 2018 calculates this limit to be around 1100 rotations per second, but even this is challenged by a potential signal from the constellation Ophiuchus indicating that a neutron star there may be spinning at the shocking rate of 1122 times per second, so the real figure could be much higher. ## Saturn now has the most moons in the Solar System. For many years, it was believed that Jupiter was the planet with the most moons in our solar system, currently boasting 95. But as technology and our observation techniques have improved, Jupiter has actually fallen to second place. In May 2023, the International Astronomical Union officially added 62 newly discovered moons to Saturn's family, bringing the gas giant's total to 145. But make no mistake, these moons are nothing like the giant we see in our own night sky. Most of the moons orbiting our Solar System's gas giants are known as irregular satellites. Their orbits vary wildly and are often eccentric in shape or have high inclination, meaning they don't match up with the flat plane that holds most regular satellites. It's believed that many of these irregular moons are a result of collisions and breakups of previously larger moons that existed many millions of years ago, or perhaps come from asteroids that were captured by Saturn's gravity as they passed through the solar system. However, it must be said that determining the exact number of moons orbiting Saturn is a bit of a controversial task, as there are millions and millions of rocks making up the planet's iconic rings, some of which are hundreds of meters in diameter. There isn't really an agreement on the boundary between what defines a smaller, nameless rock making up one of these rings and a rock large enough to be considered an irregular moon, which is why each new addition to the planet's list must be approved by the International Astronomical Union. And currently, there are still more than 80 of these moons that have yet to even be named. ## There are 96 bags of poop on the moon. Between 1969 and 1972, NASA landed 12 people on the surface of the moon through 6 successful missions. During these missions, it took three or four days to reach the moon, and once on the surface, the time spent there ranged from one to three days. All in all, we're talking between 4 and 6 days for the approach and time spent on the lunar surface, which adds up to quite a few bowel movements. Instead of keeping all of this on board the spacecraft, the astronauts took as much as possible down to the moon, and now, in total, there are 96 bags of human feces still sitting there. But as of late, this is actually of scientific interest. Human waste contains a ton of bacteria, and now some researchers are wondering if some of that bacteria may still be alive in the sealed plastic bags. It's unlikely, given the wild temperature swings and harmful radiation on the moon's surface, but it is a possibility, and it could give us insight into the survival of microbes in extreme environments. If we find out that anything is still alive in those bags, we're going to need to be extra careful in the future to not contaminate worlds that we visit. ## The sun rotates faster at its equator. We all know that it takes the earth 24 hours to complete one rotation, giving us our time unit of one day, but have you ever wondered how long a day would be on the surfaces of other places in our solar neighborhood? A day on Mars is eerily similar to one on earth, clocking in at 24 hours and 37 minutes. Venus, despite being our sister planet, rotates incredibly slowly, and a day there is equivalent to 243 days on earth. Funny enough, it takes Venus just 225 earth days to complete one full revolution around the sun, meaning that on Venus, a year is shorter than a day. As for our sun, if you were able to hypothetically vacation on its surface, calculating how many sun days you spent there would be a difficult task. The biggest problem here is that the sun is not rigid and solid, so it doesn't rotate uniformly like rocky planets and moons. Instead, the rotational speed of the sun varies depending on latitude. Around the equator, it takes about 24 earth days to complete one rotation, while closer to the poles it can take up to 38 earth days. As for the specific mechanisms behind why different parts of the sun's surface spin at different speeds, we aren't exactly sure, and it's an area of ongoing astronomical research. ## Suns are like onions, they have layers. Much like how the earth is comprised of layers of different materials and densities, so is our sun. Current models predict that our home star is made of seven distinct layers, though there are three of them that we cannot see. First is the Corona. This is the sun's outer atmosphere, stretching far into space, but it usually isn't visible because its light is drowned out by the sun's surface. However, it can be easily viewed even with the naked eye during a solar eclipse when the moon obscures most of the sun's other light, which is why there are even paintings of the corona from hundreds of years ago. Oddly enough, the sun's corona is actually 200 times hotter than its surface. Below the Corona is the chromosphere, a rather thin layer with a deep red color that only makes up about 1% of the sun's total radius. Several interesting phenomena have been observed in this layer, such as spicules, which are hair-like plasma streams that shoot straight up before collapsing back down and fading away with a total lifespan of about 10 minutes. There are about three million active spicules on the sun at any given time. Below the chromosphere is the photosphere. This is the visible surface of the sun that we're all familiar with. It emits the majority of a star's light, but it's also very thin, only about 400 kilometers thick. And now we begin the dive into the sun's interior. Directly underneath the surface is the convection zone, a massive region nearly 200,000 kilometers thick filled with plasma. As this plasma heats up, it rises, and then as it cools, it descends back down, creating enormous, continuous plasma currents that often manifest as various phenomena on the surface. Below this is the radiative zone. In this region, the plasma begins to reach very high densities and temperatures. In fact, it's so dense, that when a photon is emitted from the core, such as a gamma ray, it cannot travel far before it is absorbed or scattered by the plasma in this region. Each time this happens, it loses a little bit of its energy, its wavelength gradually increasing as it bounces and scatters its way up through the suns interior until it is finally released on the surface. This is why despite light only taking 8 minutes to reach the earth from the surface of the sun, depending on density it can take that same light more than 100,000 years just to go from the sun's core to its surface. Just one gamma ray created in the core will eventually be released as several million photons of visible light. Speaking of the core, we have finally reached the center of our star. Despite taking up only a small fraction of the sun's total volume, the core contains a third of its total mass. Not surprisingly, it's also the hottest part of the sun, reaching 15 million degrees Celsius or 27 million degrees Fahrenheit. The core is the sun's engine, the location where it fuses hydrogen into helium, releasing unbelievable amounts of energy in the process, powering the sun and ultimately making life on earth possible. ## Anything can become a black hole if you squeeze it hard enough. Black holes are created when huge amounts of matter are forced into a region so small that it collapses under its weight and forms a singularity. As far as we know, the black holes we see around the universe were all created by the deaths of immensely large stars as they ran out of stellar fuel and their cores collapsed. It's also been suggested that some of the oldest black holes may have formed before stars were even around, simply collapsing from massive, ultra-dense gas clouds not long after the big bang. Black holes themselves are highly complex and full of mysteries and mathematical puzzles, but the basics of how one forms is actually quite simple. If you take any given amount of mass, there is a corresponding volume that you could compress it into that would be sufficient to form a black hole. This is called the Schwarzschild Radius, and it yields some surprising results. For instance, the earth's Schwarzschild radius is just under one centimeter, meaning to create a black hole out of our planet, you'd have to take all of its mass, including its gargantuan metallic core, its quintillions of kilograms of magma, and everything in the crust, including the ground, all of the world's oceans, and everything on the surface, and crush it all down into a space so small that you could fit it in your belly button. As you get to smaller objects though, you might find the task becoming impossible. If you were performing the same experiment with, say, the average mass of a human being, the required size would be much smaller than the nucleus of an atom. This puts into perspective just how extreme the dense environment of black hole formation truly is, and explains why only the most massive of stars are able to transform into them. ## Quasars are the brightest objects in the universe. Quasars are a fascinating discovery of the distant cosmos that we've really only come to understand in the last 70 years or so. As astronomers began finding these mysterious, distant, and incredibly bright objects, many explanations were put forth to explain their existence, but they all seemed to fall short except for one. In 1964, two astrophysicists put forward the idea that quasars might be galaxies, and are luminous due to an accretion disk of gas lighting up as it falls into the supermassive black hole at the center. It sounds strange to us in the 21st century, but back then, black holes were not widely accepted science and still largely theoretical, so this proposition was met with a lot of skepticism and several counterproposals. However, in the years since, the more we study quasars the more we find that this idea was spot on. If a large enough amount of gas surrounds the supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy in a thick disk, the gravitational stress and friction gets so extreme that the orbiting matter begins to give off light, transforming the matter into energy. This process is highly efficient, with the quasar able to transform between 5 and 10 percent of an object's mass into energy, many times more efficient than the nuclear fusion going on inside of stars. High efficiency and a huge amount of matter means a ton of light is released as all those stars and gases are burned up. These get so bright that not only does the accretion disk outshine the rest of its own galaxy and stars, it becomes significantly brighter than many other galaxies combined. The brightest quasar that we've found so far is J0529-4351, which is so bright that it is also the most luminous known object in the entire universe. At the center of this quasar is a supermassive black hole with a mass 18 billion times larger than our sun, and powers its extreme light by consuming the equivalent of 370 solar masses every year. This makes it so unbelievably luminous, that if you were to place it in the center of our solar system, it would be 500 TRILLION times brighter than our sun. If you were to detonate a hydrogen bomb in front of your face, it wouldn't even reach a millionth of this brightness. The average quasar would easily outshine a thousand galaxies, and will continue to shine as long as its black hole is continually fueled. ## The Milky Way might have been a quasar. Now that we've covered a bit about quasars, it's time to let you know that you might be living in one. Well, at least, maybe a retired one. This theory is based on a couple of ideas. First, there is the logic that eventually, a quasar will burn through the majority of this fuel, and there will come a time when the accretion disk doesn't have enough matter to continue shining so brightly. It's very likely that after losing its active nucleus, the galaxy would appear rather normal. The second part is that every quasar we've found so far is very, very far away from us. We're talking tens of billions of lightyears away. The light that is reaching us from these quasars, as bright as it might be, began its journey at a time when the universe was much younger, around a billion years after the Big Bang. Putting these two ideas together, some have suggested that quasars might simply be the infant stages of large modern galaxies, and the reason we don't see any in our local neighborhood is because they burned off all this extra gas and dust billions of years ago and have since settled down into the calmer galaxies that we're familiar with today. If this is true, it would likely include the Milky Way, as we also have a supermassive black hole at our center more than capable of shredding a disk of gas should the opportunity arise. And it's only logical that a quasar could then be ignited, or reignited, for a period of time if the center of the galaxy were to suddenly encounter enough matter again. A possible cause of this could be the collision of two large galaxies, so it's very possible that our impending merge with the Andromeda galaxy could briefly ignite a new quasar after the black holes combine at the center. ## The collision with Andromeda isn't going to be as bad as you think. The Milky Way-Andromeda collision is expected to happen in about 4.5 billion years, and on the surface, it sounds like the end of all life as we know it as the galaxies are ripped apart and reshaped and as the black holes at the center merge to reign over their new domain. But assuming our distant descendants will still be around for this distant future, there isn't actually all that much danger to life on earth in a galaxy merge. The chances of stars colliding with each other are actually negligible, and this is due to the vast distances between them, because while the galaxy may look densely populated with stars, there is a surprising amount of empty space. To put it in perspective, if the sun were a walnut in the center of Paris, the next nearest star to us, Proxima Centauri, would be a raisin in Berlin. There might be some gravitational effects on a solar system if the stars pass near each other, and some new binary pairs may join up, but actual collisions are not expected to be common. The real foreseeable danger would be if the sun ended up too close to the center of the new galaxy and near to the merging black holes, or if we lost the cosmic lottery and our solar system was ejected. But hey, at least future humans won't have to worry about stellar collisions. ## The future of the sun is going to be just as bad as you think. So, you've just crossed Andromeda off your list of existential cosmic fears, but there will be a bigger problem to face while that galactic collision is underway, and that's the elderly years of our very own sun. As the sun nears the end of its lifespan, it's going to heat up and begin swelling into a red giant, likely getting big enough to completely swallow the earth. Our problems would start long before this though, as the heating up sun would have long evaporated our oceans and deleted our atmosphere before we even came close to being eaten. But all of these problems will be starting hundreds of millions of years from now. If humans are still kicking it, they'll probably have some ways to avoid this fate, and indeed, some overthinkers in our day and age have already come up with some ideas for them. First, we can pick a new place to call home. As the sun expands and heats up, humans can slowly move outward to match the goldilocks' zone, or the habitable zone. First mars, then eventually some moons of the gas giants, and potentially even moons of Uranus, basically following the good weather and where our technology would permit us to live. An even better option might be to just move the earth itself along this habitable zone, using large asteroids as a way to gradually raise the earth's orbit over millions of years. This would be better because we could use a similar technique to approach the sun again after it shrinks into a white dwarf, the stage that the sun will likely stay at for hundreds of billions of years. But on a good note, there is no indication that our sun is of the required mass to go supernova upon its death, otherwise we'd have to vacate the solar system entirely. ## The solar system has some wild terrain. Here on earth, we think we have some cool geography. Lots of huge mountains to conquer, deep oceans to explore, and well, let's just say that pictures really don't do justice to how big the Grand Canyon really is. But the solar system really has us beat when it comes to this topic. We already covered that Jupiter's moon Europa has a lot more water than the earth, and so, naturally, it also has the solar system's deepest oceans. Some estimates have placed the maximum depth of the ocean on Europa at about 150 kilometers. That's about 15 times deeper than the deepest part of the Mariana Trench, making our ocean look like a shallow pool in comparison. This is a bit frustrating too, as many talks of potential life on Europa are centered on geothermal vents in the deep ocean, which means we'd have to conquer these depths to find out. Cruising on over to Mars, we find two more solar system records. The first is for the largest mountain, which goes to the absolutely gargantuan Olympus Mons, a dormant shield volcano whose peak is nearly 3 times taller than earth's heavyweight champion Mt. Everest. It's so big that it's very visible from space, almost looking like a giant planet pimple. Near its equator, Mars also features the largest canyon around, Valles Marineris, which is around 4000 kilometers long, and up to 7 kilometers deep, several times deeper than the Grand Canyon. This thing is so large that it extends across nearly a quarter of the planet's circumference, and if you were to transplant it onto the earth, it would stretch across almost the entire continental United States. Lastly, we'll take a look at the solar system's tallest cliff. For this, we're heading to Miranda, a small moon orbiting Uranus that appears to have been smacked around in its history, creating some wild terrain. Photographed by Voyager 2, the cliff known as Verona Rupes is 20 kilometers from top to bottom. It's kind of hard to imagine that height vertically, so for comparison take the tallest cliff on earth: Mount Thor in Canada. This tall, sheer cliff juts out from the surrounding landscape, and is intimidating on its own, but to reach the heigh of Verona Rupes, you'd have to stack 17 Mount Thors on top of each other. Also, given Miranda's lower gravity, if you jumped from the top, it would take you a whole 12 minutes to reach the ground, but don't expect this to be a soft landing, as you'll still reach a terminal velocity that would be undeniably lethal. ## Supervoids are absolutely terrifying. We often describe space as largely empty, and, compared to our environment on earth, it is pretty empty. But with that said, galaxies are still loosely gravitationally attracted to each other, forming huge groups known as superclusters, which stretch in large filaments across the visible universe, so even though some local regions might appear empty, overall, when you zoom out and take a look at the bigger picture, the majority of galaxies live in quite populated areas. But the same can't be said for those that reside in voids. In the late 20th century, astronomers began identifying regions of space that had an eerie lack of matter, and called them voids. The largest of these are called supervoids, and their scale is nothing short of horrifying. The Boötes Void, for example, is a roughly spherical region of space with a diameter of more than 300 million light-years, that's more than 100 times the distance from the Milky Way to Andromeda. An area of this size is expected to contain around 2,000 galaxies, but, instead, so far only 60 have been detected, loosely spread throughout the void. These galaxies are so small and isolated from each other and the rest of the visible universe, that astronomer Greg Aldering once said that if the Milky Way were in the center of such a void, we wouldn't have even known about the existence of other galaxies until the 1960s. ## Jupiter crossed the asteroid belt twice. For billions of years, Jupiter has steadily remained the 5th planet from the sun, sitting at a distance of about 5.2 astronomical units, but this wasn't always the case. The early solar system was a hectic place to be, and much of that was thanks to Jupiter. According to the Grand Tack Hypothesis, Jupiter, and possibly Saturn as well, crossed the asteroid belt and entered the realm of the rocky inner planets not once, but twice before stabilizing its orbit where it currently lies. This had a few lasting effects that are now explainable today, such as why Jupiter's moons have such varying atmospheres, and also why Mars is so much smaller than earth and Venus, because Jupiter screwed up a lot of the rocky debris that would have otherwise helped to build the planet. ## Uranus and Neptune switched places long ago. It wasn't just Jupiter who went on a bit of a ride though. Recent computer models show that, very likely, for the first 650 million years of the solar system, Neptune was actually closer to the sun than Uranus, before slowly moving outward to its current position. As far as we can tell, this wasn't a violent move, more like a gentle ride that happened ever so slowly through subtle gravitational nudges over the eons as the solar system settled into place. This planetary swap might help to explain a few oddities, such as why Uranus is the only planet to orbit on its side. It also may have featured the occasional interaction between the planets or their moons, which could be why Uranus's Miranda looks like it's been mashed around, and why one of Neptune's moons is the only one in the solar system to orbit in the direction opposite its planet's rotation. ## Astronomers use supernovas to measure distance. It might seem strange that astronomers are able to measure distances to celestial objects with such confidence. After all, there's no frame of reference in space to compare yourself to like we're used to on earth. To get around this, astronomers have made their own frames of reference with a few creative ideas. One of these is a standard candle, an object that has a predictable luminosity, so then by judging how bright or dim it is compared to this standard, scientists can determine how far away it is. The most widely used standard candle is the type 1a supernova, the explosion that happens when a white dwarf is absorbing extra matter, reaches 1.4 solar masses, and explodes. Because this specific type of explosion always happens at this exact mass, its luminosity is similar each time, and thus becomes a good frame of reference for judging distances between star systems. ## Ancient astronomers were much smarter than you realize. While the majority of what we know about the universe has come about in the last couple centuries, it was curious minds hundreds and even thousands of years ago who set the foundations for modern astronomy. For instance, the Maya were so knowledgeable that they constructed buildings that would light up certain illustrations during equinoxes, and could accurately predict solar eclipses. Even further back in history, Archimedes mentions that in the 4th century BC Aristarchus of Samos proposed what we now know as the first heliocentric model of the solar system. And several hundred years before this, the Babylonians were accurately tracking Venus, as they noted that its motion was peculiar compared the rest of the lights in the night sky. ## The Soviets photographed the surface of Venus. While talk of the space race is often centered around the Soviets being the first to put people in orbit and the United States first putting a man on the moon, there were many more accomplishments that have since been overshadowed. One of these is the Venera missions, the Soviet's attempts to land on Venus. There were 16 total Venera missions, many of which failed either in earth's orbit or en route to the destination, but each was still a step forward in the scientific realm, and a couple stand out from the rest. In 1966, Venera 3 passed through the Venusian atmosphere, losing radio contact in the process, but becoming the first man-made object to crash land on another planet. Nearly a decade later, Venera 9 would make a successful soft landing, and although the environment was so extreme that the spacecraft only remained operable for 53 minutes, it still had time to transmit a single photograph. In the black-and-white scene of rocks and boulders it sent back, it would present to humanity its first ever photograph taken from the surface of another planet. ## Black holes have a theoretical opposite. We've all heard of black holes, the regions of space where gravity is so strong that once you pass beyond the event horizon, not even light can escape. These were theorized long before they were actually observed, as their extreme nature arose from the mathematics of Einstein's general theory of relativity. A few decades after these were first theorized, an opposite solution was found, aptly named a white hole. A white hole is the opposite of a black hole in every sense. For instance, as you approach a black hole, you need more and more energy to escape its grasp, up until the amount of energy required becomes infinite and it is no longer possible to leave. With a white hole, all of this is reversed, as you approach it, you need more and more energy to get closer, until you reach a point where would need an infinite amount of energy to reach the center, rendering it out of reach. Instead of pulling matter in, they are constantly pushing matter out. Outside of the mathematical solutions, however, there isn't much evidence to support their existence. Some have speculated that the Big Bang was the result of a white hole eruption, or that paradoxes involving black holes would be solved if they were merely the entrance to a spacetime bridge which exits at a worm hole. We haven't seen any though, and until we can come up with an astrophysical method for their creation, they'll probably going to stay purely hypothetical. That said, though, this was the exact rhetoric around black holes for a long time, so you really never know. ## White holes might not be real, but grey holes probably are. So, while white holes will probably be left as numbers on the chalkboard, grey holes have a very good chance of being a real thing. Essentially, a grey hole is ALMOST a black hole, where some light can escape but not all. From our current observations, neutron stars cannot exceed roughly 2.4 solar masses before they collapse into a black hole, so if the conditions were just right for a neutron star to get really close to this limit without passing it, it could become so dense that it traps almost everything, but still lets out a teeny bit of light, becoming a grey hole until it overcomes the mass threshold to collapse into a true singularity. Given the size of the universe, it's pretty likely that this situation pops up here and there, and because we would need such highly sensitive instruments to detect the trace amounts of light that actually escape from them, even if we saw a grey hole we might just mistake it for a run-of-the-mill stellar mass black hole. The other issue is that even if they do exist, it might only be for such a brief period that we would never hope to catch one in the act. ## Some planets don't have a home star. It's easy to look at the earth and the rest of our planetary neighbors and think that our solar system is rather ordinary, but we actually have it pretty good, as there are some planets that don't orbit a star at all. These are called rogue planets, cruising around the vastness of interstellar space after being ejected from their own solar system. Estimates for how many of these lonely worlds exist vary wildly, with some researchers even suggesting that in the Milky Way, free floating planets outnumber stars 100,000 to 1, while others posit the far more conservative ratio of 2 to 1. ## Some of these rogue planets travel with a buddy. Recently, the James Webb Space Telescope spotted a huge number of these rogue planets, more than 500 of them, in fact, in the Orion Nebula. However, what shocked the researchers as they analyzed the data was the finding that nearly 10% of them had actually formed binary systems with other rogue planets. The name for these rogue pairs are Jupiter-mass binary objects, or Jumbos for short. ## Planets can orbit more than one star. To make rogue planets even more jealous, some planets orbit not just one, but two stars. These are called circumbinary planets, and at the center of their orbit is a binary star system, giving them a double sunrise and sunset. The first confirmed observation of a circumbinary planet came in 1993, when astronomers located a planet two and a half times the size of Jupiter circling around a binary pair comprised of a white dwarf and a rapidly spinning neutron star. But two does not appear to be the limit. In 2021, the discovery was announced of what might be the first ever circumtriple planet, about the size of Jupiter and orbiting triplet suns. ## Stars can go rogue too. Just as a planet can get kicked out of its solar system, so too can a star get evicted from its home, only the home it's leaving behind is the galaxy in which it was formed. These rogue stars, also called intergalactic stars, are often ejected into the unimaginably large voids between galaxies due to galactic level collisions. If you thought rogue planets were lonely, at least they are still roaming around in their galaxy, these stars don't even have that luxury. Imagine being literally billions of light years from the nearest object. It's also technically possible for these stars to retain some of their planets as they're being ejected. If earth would have been born around one of these lonesome stars far away from any galaxies, our night sky would be very, very dark. ## The hunt for exomoons is underway. Exoplanets are a big deal in modern astronomy, and as technology advances, we're not only finding more and more of them, but also getting better at narrowing down which ones are earthlike and possibly habitable. The main way we locate these alien worlds is by measuring the ever-so-slight, yet predictable dimming, of their star as the exoplanet passes between it and the earth. But one growing area of interest as of late is the search for moons around these exoplanets, and as you probably could've guessed, these are called exomoons. Locating them is an incredibly complex task due to their tiny mass and large distances, but it's been suggested recently by astrophysicist Dr. Kipping that we may be able to detect the presence of exomoons by analyzing repeated transits of exoplanets and "folding them" on top of each other, in a sense, to flesh out the ever-more-precise data betraying the presence of a moon. Published in a 2021 paper, he's named this novel method transit origami. As a fun sidenote, if you remember moonmoons from earlier, it's probably only a matter of time until someone decides to start a search for exomoonmoons. ## Kilonovas aren't quite as bright as supernovas. When a very large star reaches the end of its life, it can explode in a supernova, a violent but spectacular cosmic scene. However, supernovas are not the only types of stellar explosions. Another type are kilonovas, which are the result of two neutron stars merging. Given how extreme neutron stars are in every other sense, you'd expect this to be an extraordinarily powerful event, but they really aren't all that impressive. Generally, they're about 10 times dimmer than your average supernova, and they're usually so dim we don't even see them in the visible light spectrum, only detecting the collision from the gamma rays emitted during the merge. ## Micronovas are even smaller. But it gets even smaller. In 2022 the discovery of a new type of nova was confirmed, this one even dimmer than a kilonova, and thus earning the name micronova. A micronova occurs on the surface of a white dwarf star, as its strong magnetic fields pull material toward the star's poles, it causes sudden bursts of fusion to occur, and as the hydrogen is fused into helium, a large thermonuclear explosion can be seen. Essentially, micronova are the equivalent of big groups of nuclear bombs going off, and while they are quite difficult to spot, the team behind the announcement has so far confirmed three sightings. ## Asteroids are no match for our technology. If you've ever had the existential fear that an asteroid could come along and annihilate life as we know it, you're not alone. NASA shares those same fears, and hoping to not share the same fate as the dinosaurs, they've come up with some pretty good technology for defending our planet. The currently preferred method to neutralize an asteroid is to push it off course by slamming a spacecraft into it. NASA tested this in 2022 when the DART Impactor crashed into the asteroid Dimorphos. The idea here is that even a small change in the asteroid's trajectory will add up to a significant difference over the vast distance it has to cover before it reaches earth, and will therefore miss our planet. If we determine that the impact alone isn't enough to create the change, there are also ideas of a soft landing, after which a spacecraft can anchor itself into the asteroid's surface and activate thrusters to further push it off course. There are a couple flashier ideas though. One of these is, of course, a delivery filled with mankind's best hydrogen bombs to eliminate the asteroid in a historically gargantuan explosion. But while this atomic option is taken seriously by many, it's currently seen more as a last resort as there seems to be a decent chance of simply breaking the asteroid up into lots of smaller pieces that remain on a collision course with earth. Then, instead of dealing with one larger impact, we'd have potentially hundreds of city-killers raining down from the sky. ## But our technology is no match for solar storms. While the sun is quite docile most of the time, there are occasions when its surface erupts in an event known as a coronal mass ejection, sending huge amounts of highly magnetized plasma into space. If a large enough piece of this ejection hits the earth, its interaction with our atmosphere and magnetic field can result in geomagnetic storms, giving off bright auroras in the atmosphere. For millions of years, this was the only real consequence of such events, and was really nothing more than a very peculiar weather phenomenon. But that's only because we didn't have any electronic technology, which can be seriously affected by these storms. Today, our reliance on electronics has given us a serious vulnerability, and if a strong enough storm comes by, we could see some widespread damage. In 1859, such a storm hit the earth, called the Carrington Event, and it was so intense that telegraph systems all over Europe and North America sparked and failed. In some instances, the machines delivered an electric shock to their operators, and in other very bizarre instances, the storm allowing the telegraph to continue working even it had been disconnected from its power source, as was the case seen in a conversation between a station in Massachusetts and one in Maine featuring this line, "Mine is disconnected, and we are working with the auroral current. How do you receive my writing?" To which the other responded: "Better than with our batteries on." The two carried on the conversation for two full hours without connecting their power source. It was a peculiar week for telegraph operators to be sure, but this was the only real damage as there weren't very many electronics back then. In the modern era, these could pose a serious threat to power grids, but more so a lethal threat to satellites, which are outside of the earth's protective shield. And this isn't just speculation, in 1989, two coronal mass ejections struck the earth a couple days apart, damaging several satellites and causing a 9-hour blackout in Quebec. If a much larger one were to occur today, we'd have to be prepared for global damage. ## There is no such thing as a green star. Depending on a star's temperature, size, and what fuel they're fusing, they appear to us in varying colors. There's yellow and white dwarfs, red giants, and even blue giants. However, nowhere in the universe are you going to encounter a star that is green. The reason is that stars don't just emit one color, but many simultaneously, and if it's the right temperature to emit green light, the star is also emitting lots of blue and red. If you putting the three of these colors together, our eyes see only white, hiding the green. A great way to understand this is to imagine a star's light like a seesaw. When one end goes up, you see red, and when the other goes up, you see blue, but green is in the middle, so no matter what you do, you can't get the center to be above both ends and stand out on its own. The closest you can get is to have the seesaw sitting flatly, leaving all colors equal, and thus, creating white as a result. We have found a few objects that appear to be green, but this is not because a star itself is emitting purely green light, but because they are surrounded by something else that affects these light waves before they reach us. For example, the planetary nebula NGC 6826 looks as green as can be, but that's because it's surrounded by a large cloud of ionized oxygen. What this means is that if we do find a green star, we are either missing something very important in the physics and light department, or its colors have been intentionally altered. ## The Milky Way blocks our view of the Great Attractor. In the 1980s, astronomical surveys revealed that our galaxy, every galaxy near us, and as many as 100,000 others are all being gently pulled in the same direction, gravitationally tugged by a mysterious source. This source was given the name the Great Attractor, and must be of immense mass to have such a strong gravitational influence on so many galaxies. It's probably a dense cluster of galaxies but, to be honest, it's very hard to get much information on this. That's because of all the places in the universe for such a structure to exist, it just happens to be in the Zone of Avoidance, the area of our sky that is blocked by the Milky Way. This mean that unfortunately we can't observe the Great Attractor directly, and instead have to settle for analyzing a few wavelengths, such as X-rays, that allow us a glimpse through the Zone of Avoidance. ## Galaxies also have a habitable zone. The habitable zone, also known as the goldilocks' zone, is the distance from a star that is deemed to be within the right temperature range for life to form. For hotter stars this is further out, and for cooler stars it is closer. Generally, this is the distance at which liquid water can remain stable on the surface. But on a larger scale, galaxies themselves also have habitable zones. For starters, you need to be in a part of the galaxy that's has enough materials for life to form. This includes needing enough metallicity to form rocky planets. Generally, these elements are more common the closer you get to a galaxy's center, but you can't get too close, or your solar system will be in constant danger. Centers of galaxies have many more stars on average, which would subject your planet to regular nearby supernovae. Not to mention, if the galactic nucleus is active, such as in a quasar, you'll want to be nowhere near it. But go too far out into the spiral arms, and the high concentrations of gas clouds and dust could also be harmful. This leaves a habitable distance from the center of the galaxy that is more ideal for life. In the case of the Milky Way, the best distance for a solar system seems to begin at around 10,000 light years from the center and stretch to about 33,000 light years. For reference, our solar system is about 27,000 light years from the center, putting us near the outer edge of this zone. ## Some of the first stars had black holes in their cores. The first stars to ignite in the early universe were massive, formed from dense clouds of hydrogen. These stars burned through their fuel much quicker than stars today, but, in some cases, because the star was so huge, when its core inevitably collapsed, its surface could have remained intact, withstanding the collapse and blast within. The result would have been an active star with a black hole at its core, an object known as a quasi-star. After the core has collapsed into a black hole, it wouldn't immediately pull in the rest of the star. That's because as matter continued to group up and fall into the event horizon, the black hole would release large amounts of radiation, which would push outward and counteract the force of gravity that would otherwise pull the star in, creating equilibrium and allowing the surface of the star to remain stable. This delicate balance would only hold up for around 7 million years, but until its final crumbling, a Quasi-star would have potentially been as luminous as a small galaxy. ## Some stars today may have neutron stars at their cores. While the conditions of the universe today no longer allow for stars large enough to hide black holes in their belly, we still have stars big enough to eat and hide the next best thing. This so-called Thorne-Zytkow object is the result of a red giant or red supergiant colliding with a neutron star. Due to the immense size difference though, the neutron star is simply engulfed by the red supergiant and disappears beneath the surface. For the next few hundred years, the neutron star slowly spirals in toward the core, and when it collides, the resulting combination of mass would likely create a black hole. This leaves us with a period of just a few hundred years at best to spot one of these, the equivalent of the blink of an eye on the cosmic timescale, so while we have a few candidates for current or even future Thorne Zytkov objects, they're likely to be quite a rare find across the universe. ## The moon's crust is thicker on its dark side. Analysis of our moon's surface shows that long ago, liquid rock flowed on its surface. This comes as no surprise, as our current models show that the moon was born from a violent collision between the earth and a second, smaller planet, and it likely took millions or even billions of years for the resulting natural satellite to completely cool down into the gray rock we see today. But this cooling process wasn't uniform across the whole surface. Because the moon is tidally locked, one of its sides is always facing the earth. Heat from the also hot and lava-covered earth reached this side of the moon, making it take longer slightly to cool down than the dark side, which only faced cold, empty space. The result is an ever-so slightly thinner crust on the side facing the earth, as well as significantly more signs of volcanism. It doesn't actually have more volcanic activity than the far side, but because the crust was warmer and taking longer to cool, these volcanoes had much more of an impact on the landscape than they did on the far side. Likewise, impact craters are much more prominent on the far side, because that side didn't have soft, flowing rock to cover up many of the craters over the eons. ## There is more gold in the sun than water in the earth's oceans. The Sun is 98% hydrogen and helium, and this remaining 2% is split up between many other trace elements. One of them is gold, whose abundance in the sun is about 3 parts per trillion. In everyday sense, 3 parts per trillion might as well be rounded down to zero, but because the sun's mass is so large, this actually works out to be quite a bit of gold. In fact, doing out the math, it turns out to be nearly 2 sextillion kilograms of gold, or a 2 followed by 21 zeros. In comparison, if you took all of the water out of the world's oceans, it would weigh just over 1 sextillion kilograms, somewhere in the ballpark of half of the weight of all the gold in the sun. ## Chinese astronomers were the first to notice sunspots. A sunspot is a dark and slightly cooler region on the surface of the sun that arises from fluctuations of the magnetic field of plasma below. Please do not try this at home, but it's actually possible to see sunspots with the naked eye if some of the sun's light is obscured by fog or haze, dimming the overall scene and allowing you to see the small black shape moving across the sun's surface. It's thanks to this method that the first sunspots were observed and recorded, dating all the way back to 364 BC, by ancient Chinese astronomer Gan De, with the Greeks following not long after. ## Jupiter's storm is at least hundreds of years old. It isn't quite on the same scale as a sunspot, but Jupiter's great red spot is a huge blemish on the surface of the gas giant. Slightly larger than the entire earth, this immense storm has been raging for hundreds of years. We know it's been around for hundreds of years because paintings and sketches of the planet from the 17th century show the distinct red spot, and astronomers wrote about a permanent stain that could be visible at all times of the year. But for all we know, it could be much older than this, we only started recording its existence after inventing the telescope, and there's still much we don't know about it. Perhaps it's on its way to fizzling out, or maybe these types of cyclones on gas giants last for thousands of years. ## Venus may be the best place to look for life. While Mars gets all the fanfare about searching for extraterrestrial life in the solar system, it's starting to look like Venus has the better prospects. Not the surface, mind you, that place is about as toxic as it gets to life. Where we're looking is the clouds of the planet's thick atmosphere. The clue here is the 2020 detection of phosphine in the atmosphere, a compound made from phosphorous and hydrogen that, as far as we know, is only created by biological processes. This has sparked imaginations of microbes that may have adapted to live in the temperate layers of Venus' clouds, producing phosphine as a byproduct. However, the debate rages on, as multiple independent studies came out a year later showing there was no evidence for phosphine on Venus. Then, in 2023, more studies came out shutting down the critics by confirming its presence. The most tantalizing part of this is that the microbes on earth that produce phosphine live in oxygen-free environments, making them sound like the ideal organism to live on Venus. But on the flip side, there are several critics who point out that believing phosphine can only be made from living organisms is quite short-sighted, after all, it may just be that conditions on earth aren't quite right for its natural occurrence, and it may actually be quite common in other places. Guess we'll just have to book a trip to find out for sure. ## Dyson spheres aren't really feasible, but a Dyson swarm is. A Dyson sphere is a megastructure that an advanced civilization could build around its host star in order to fully control its power output, allowing them the energy necessary for futuristic projects like interstellar travel. This sounds cool in science fiction, but there's just no way it's remotely possible. The amount of material you would need to create something that fully encloses a star would be so colossal that you'd have to entirely dismantle more than a hundred earth sized planets. Instead, a more realistic proposal for a future megaproject is the downgraded version, a Dyson swarm. A Dyson swarm would instead be thousands or even millions of small satellites orbiting the sun, little drone like spacecraft that redirect its light toward power stations from which it can then be distributed. Swarms like this could easily be scaled over time, providing more than enough energy for all of humanity for as long as the sun lives. Perhaps the easiest way to acquire the materials for a Dyson swarm would be from Mercury, whose surface we could transform into one big production site. ## Time machines also need to be space machines As far as we can tell, time travel to the past isn't possible. Even if it were, however, there's one big thing that many science-fiction shows miss when discussing their time machine, and that's the fact that you also need to account for the spatial difference between your current time and your destination. Travel back 1 month without accounting for this difference, and instead of exiting the time machine in your garage where you built it, you'll be floating in space, because the earth hasn't reached your location yet in its yearly trip around the sun. But it's even more complicated than this. Not only would you need to account for the earth's motion around the sun, but also its rotation. Even this wouldn't be enough though, as the sun is also moving, slowly circling the center of our galaxy, which itself also hurtling through space at breakneck speed, oh, and space is also expanding. At this point, you start to run out of frames of reference to even judge your location at all. ## We might never find alien life, not because of space, but because of time. The essence of the Fermi Paradox is that the ingredients and conditions for life are seemingly in high abundance both in our galaxy and in the universe, yet we continually come up empty handed in our search for extraterrestrial intelligence. One solution to this paradox is that we are simply too early. We may indeed be correct in the notion that alien life is abundant in the galaxy, it's just still in its infant stages and we just happen to be among the first instances of it. If this is true, it isn't thousands of lightyears of interstellar space that we'd have to conquer to find intelligent life, instead its millions of years. In fact, this solution to the paradox could mean that if intelligence don't survive long enough for another one to arise, the history and future of our galaxy could be filled with hundreds or even thousands of civilizations that just never happened to be around at the same time, and therefore all assumed that they were alone in the universe. ## There are approximately 2 trillion galaxies in the observable universe. It's difficult to estimate figures like this about the observable universe as a whole, and new discoveries always mix things up, but at our current knowledge of superclusters and the size of the universe, 2 trillion is the number mostly agreed upon. It might not sound impressive when you realize that this doesn't even come close to the number of atoms in a single red blood cell, but it's still astronomically large. If you went on a warp-drive road trip and spent just one hour in every galaxy, it would take you 228 million years to visit them all. And remember, each of these galaxies has upwards of 100 billion stars, a scale truly mind-boggling. ## Kelt 9b is a planet hotter than some stars. Orbiting a hot blue star almost 700 light years from earth, the planet Kelt 9b is a hellish world. It's what's known as a hot Jupiter, a type of gas giant exoplanet that orbits very close to its host star. But Kelt 9b stands out even amongst these already extreme planets. It's more than twice the size of Jupiter, yet it orbits its star at a distance of just .03 astronomical units, that's 10 times closer than mercury is to our sun. Zipping around its star, a year on this planet is equivalent to just 36 hours. It's also tidally locked, so one side of it is constantly cooking, and reaches temperatures of 4327 °C, or 7,820 °F, making it a planet hotter than several types of small stars. Another peculiar note about Kelt 9b is that it orbits its star perpendicular to the spin axis of its sun, meaning as it completes a full revolution, it passes over the star's north and south poles. All of this combined means that each year, it experiences its equivalent of two winters and two summers, with a seasonal change every 9 or so hours. ## Oumuamua might have been a new type of astronomical object. In 2017, astronomers in Hawaii made history when they became the first people to ever detect an interstellar visitor to our solar system. This was Oumuamua, roughly translating to "first distant messenger" in Hawaiian. Oumuamua was odd. Cigar shaped, rapidly spinning, and somewhat red in color, but the strangest part came when it passed the sun, and as it departed, began to accelerate. This acceleration stumped everybody, as there seemed to be no apparent mechanism to explain it, such as a comet's trail. Of course, this immediately led to speculation that it was an alien space probe with solar panels on the back, but later, a more grounded solution was proposed, that Oumuamua was a hydrogen iceberg, born eons ago in the frozen core of a star that failed to ignite. Frozen hydrogen will turn into a gas when it reaches -267 degrees Celsius, just 3 degrees above the general ambient temperature of space. As Oumuamua passed the sun, its heat helped the hydrogen reach this temperature, turning some of it into a gas and giving it that slight acceleration. ## We live in just the right time to view a total solar eclipse. A total solar eclipse is the result of an extraordinary cosmic coincidence. The diameter of the moon is about 400 times smaller than the sun, and the moon is also about 400 times closer to us than the sun. The result is that they are the exact same size in the sky, allowing for total solar eclipses, but it won't always be this way. The moon is slowly receding away from the earth, and the sun will eventually begin to grow, meaning in about 600 million years or so, the moon's silhouette will be too small to entirely cover the sun in the sky, and total eclipses will become a thing of the past. ## Pluto can be considered a binary planet. When one object orbits another, it doesn't just spin around it in a perfect circle. This is an oversimplification, because no matter how small the orbiting object is, it still has mass, and therefore also exerts a gravitational pull on whatever larger object it is orbiting. This means that technically, there is a point between the two around which both of them share an orbit. This point is called a barycenter, and it's easy to understand when looking at binary star systems with similar masses, as you can see that instead of one orbiting the other, they do a sort of spinning dance in space around a shared middle point. However, for most planets and their moons, the barycenter falls well within the radius of the planet itself, which is why there isn't much of an observable effect and it's easy enough to simplify as the moon simply circling around the center of earth. This isn't the case for Pluto though. One of its moons, Charon, is relatively large, with a diameter just over half of Pluto's. Because the difference in mass is so much narrower, their barycenter lies outside of Pluto, in the space between the two. This led to the International Astronomical Union proposing in 2006 that Pluto and Charon be considered a binary planet system, but, sadly, not only was this idea rejected, it was also the same year that Pluto got demoted to dwarf planet. As a side note, the barycenter between our Sun and Jupiter is also just outside the radius of the sun, that's how big Jupiter really is. ## The man who discovered Pluto flew right past it. While it may not be considered a binary planet, or even a planet at all, Pluto is still of great interest due to its unique, eccentric orbit and mysterious origins. Pluto was discovered in 1930 by self-taught American astronomer Clyde Tombaugh, who was offered a job at the Lowell Observatory after spending years building his own telescopes on his family farm. It was at Lowell Observatory that Tombaugh discovered Pluto, cementing his name in astronomy's history. In 2005, the New Horizons spacecraft was launched to get a closer look at this distant world. On board New Horizons were Tombaugh's ashes, which flew right past Pluto in 2015. His remains will be the first to escape the solar system. ## The solar system is much larger than you think. Though it's normally depicted this way, the solar system doesn't end at the orbit of Pluto. What we generally consider to be the outermost region of the solar system is the Oort cloud, a ring of trillions of icy objects that is thought to be the source of most comets. It's believed that the inner edge of this cloud begins at about 2,000 astronomical units, but then stretches as far out as 100,000, which, if true, would more than 3,000 times further from the sun than the orbit of Neptune. This is so incredibly far, that despite Voyager 1 traveling about a million miles per hour, it will still take about 300 years to reach the inner edge of the Oort Cloud, and then another 30,000 years to exit from the other side. ## There is a category of black hole larger than supermassive. In the middle of the Phoenix Cluster is a huge elliptical galaxy called Phoenix A. With an estimated diameter of almost 700,000 light years, Phoenix A is nearly 7 times larger than the Milky Way, making it one of the largest galaxies ever found. It also has one of the highest rates of star birth ever witnessed, currently producing around 740 solar masses worth of new stars every year. But forget all of that, we're here for the galactic monster at its core. According to a paper from 2016, the black hole at the center of Phoenix A is of such unbelievable size that you really can't wrap your brain around it. If the estimates are correct, this black hole has a mass of more than 100 billion solar masses. That would make it 24,000 times heavier than the black hole at the center of our galaxy. Its event horizon would be a ridiculous 3,900 astronomical units, more than 100 times the distance from the sun to Pluto's average orbit. This is so large that another paper in 2020 proposed that it, and a few other candidates such as TON 618, which has a confirmed mass of over 60 billion solar masses, are too heavy to be grouped in with the other supermassive black holes, and should instead form a new class of objects called Stupendously Large Black Holes, or SLABs for short. ## Given enough time, black holes will evaporate. But even stupendously large black holes are not immune to the sands of time. Hawking Radiation is far too complicated to explain in detail in a quick fact list like this, but suffice to say that as a result of quantum fluctuations, a black hole loses energy over time if it is not consuming more matter. The popular explanation involves a virtual pair of particle and antiparticle forming in the vacuum, with the antiparticle falling past the event horizon and the regular particle escaping, thus eliminating a small amount of matter inside, but this is a gross oversimplification and reallynot that accurate, because it isn't a particle that is radiated away from the black hole, it is a highly redshifted photon. But technical details aside, if a black hole has no more matter to consume, it will begin to radiate away its energy, photon by photon. This is what is meant when we say evaporate, because eventually all energy within the black hole will be exhausted, and nothing will remain. This is a process so slow there aren't even metaphors remotely close. For the largest black holes, it's estimated that it would take up to 2 googol years, that's a 2 followed by 100 zeros. Above and below the Milky Way are strange bubbles. In 2010, a new analysis of gamma rays revealed structures in our galaxy that we were previously unaware of. Nicknamed Fermi bubbles, they are located above and below the center of our galaxy, and span about 50,000 light years in diameter. These areas emit higher-energy gamma rays than the rest of the galaxy, despite there being no object in the vicinity that can emit such energy. Because of this, it's currently believed that it's due to some interaction with the supermassive black hole at the Milky Way's center, either odd collections of gas and dust, or perhaps a relic from a time when our galactic nucleus was more active. Jupiter is not a failed star. It's commonly repeated that Jupiter is a failed star due to the fact that it made of many of the same elements as stars yet lacks the mass required to begin nuclear fusion and light up. But this makes it sound like Jupiter was just on the verge of becoming a star when its career stagnated and it stayed a planet forever, when in reality, it is very, very far from the threshold. To achieve nuclear fusion in its core, Jupiter would need to have more than 80 times its current mass, and that would barely put it on the very small end of stars, a red dwarf. So yes, you could call it a failed star, but it's so far from ever becoming one that it would probably be more accurate to call our moon a failed planet. Mars shows evidence of a gigantic tsunami It's been known for quite some time now that Mars used to have liquid oceans on its surface. Water was probably deposited there from comets during the same period that brought it to earth, and likely Venus, and though it's now only confined to the frozen ice caps of the red planet, we can still see the story that water left behind on the Martian surface. By analyzing deposits and shapes of landforms, scientists have found clear evidence of large tsunamis, one of which was traced to have originated from the Lomonosov crater, a huge asteroid impact site. Back when this impact happened, around 3 billion years ago, this was right smack in the middle of a Martian ocean, meaning the blast from the asteroid would have resulted in a megatsunami of epic proportions that radiated out in every direction. Enceladus is the most reflective body in the solar system. Saturn's moon Enceladus is entirely covered in smooth ice. This ice reflects nearly all the light that reaches it, making it the most reflective body in our solar system. Reflecting all this light comes with the side effect of reflecting most of the heat as well, and as a result the surface of Enceladus is incredibly cold, reaching negative 330 degrees Fahrenheit or negative 201 degrees Celsius. Despite this, the interior is warm enough to hold an ocean of liquid water. And this isn't just speculation like it is with many other icy worlds. During a flyby, NASA's Cassini spacecraft watched as icy geysers erupted from its surface, spewing water and ice into space from deep reservoirs below. Some of this falls down toward Saturn and joins its rings, while the rest rains back down onto the moon's surface as snow. Io is the most volcanic body in the solar system. Only slightly larger than earth's moon, Jupiter's Io has around 400 active volcanoes covering its surface, with some of them spewing clouds of rock and gas dozens of miles into the atmosphere. If it contains enough molten lava, these fountains can be so tall and bright that sometimes they can even be seen from telescopes on earth. But Io is a world of extreme contrast. With one step, you can touch molten iron, that's recently been brought up from the scorching depths, but with the next, you can touch its otherwise frozen surface. Having essentially no atmosphere and being so far from the sun, anything that isn't getting blasted by a volcanic eruption is as cold as it can get. Haumea is the fastest spinning object in the solar system. Located in the far reaches of the solar system, Haumea is a rocky dwarf planet about one-third the mass of Pluto. Its discovery was fraught with controversy as two separate teams both claimed credit, with one group allegedly accessing the data logs of the other without permission, but drama aside, Haumea is a fascinating discovery. First of all, despite its small size, it not only has two moons, but its own thin ring system made of ice and dust. It's also not spherical like most other planets and dwarf planets, but rather a stretched out ellipsoid, which also happens to be the fastest rotating major body in the solar system, making a complete spin around its axis every 4 hours. The universe is missing nearly all of its antimatter. The universe loves balance. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction, momentum and charge are always conserved, energy can't be created or destroyed, and much more. But the one place where the universe seems to break this rule is with the observed lack of antimatter. All accepted models and intricacies of the big bang seem to indicate that it should have created an equal amount of matter and antimatter. But we don't see equal parts across the universe today, so either the big bang did not create as much antimatter as expected, or something happened just after that changed the matter to antimatter ratio. There is no consensus on what could have caused this, and it is considered one of the great mysteries of modern physics. One rotation of the Milky Way takes more than 200 million years. Since we're inside of it, it's no simple task to measure how quickly our galaxy is spinning, but astronomers are able to deduce this using something called the Tangent Point Method, which compares the doppler shift of objects at varying distances and some good old math. The most accurate figure we've settled on is that it takes the sun about 225 million years to complete one full circle around the Milky Way. This means that in just one galactic year, earth went from early dinosaurs roaming the supercontinent of Pangaea to you in the 21st century watching this video. Most stars exist thanks to quantum tunneling Earlier, we brought up how some consider Jupiter to be a failed star, but if it weren't for quantum tunneling, even our own sun would be a failure. That's because stars run on nuclear fusion, the combining of hydrogen into helium in their centers. The idea is that when the star has enough mass, all this matter creates enough temperature and pressure in its core to force the hydrogen nuclei to overcome their mutual electromagnetic repulsion and fuse into each other. However, it turns out that according to classical physics, our sun, and, in fact, almost every other star out there, don't actually possess enough mass to create the necessary pressure. Thankfully, quantum tunneling makes it possible. The basic run-down of quantum tunneling is that matter can act like both a particle and a wave. Due to the wave characteristics, a particle's location is not exact, and is better described as sort of fuzzy ball. The particle can be anywhere in this fuzz, it's just a matter of probability. If you push this fuzzball up against a net, it won't go through as a whole, but part of the fuzz pokes through the little holes in the barrier. Given enough time, due to probability, there is a chance that the particle's location will be in the tiny fuzzy region that is poking through net, and it would suddenly appear to our eyes as if the whole thing has just teleported through a solid object. Another way to understand it would be to imagine if you had the ability to teleport as far as your arms could reach. If you were outside or in a big room, this wouldn't get you anywhere that you wouldn't have been able to just walk to, but it would allow you to reach through a partially opened car window and teleport inside. Now imagine two hydrogen nuclei. Electromagnetic repulsion pushes them apart when they get close, you can think of this repulsion as the wall or barrier that needs to be crossed. If the two are far from this barrier, there's essentially zero chance that one of them will tunnel across it because the probability is far too low. However, get them close enough to each other for long enough, push them up against that wall, and the chances of one suddenly appearing on the other side become much higher. Once the barrier has been crossed, the strong nuclear force overpowers electromagnetism, and the nuclei essentially fall into each other. This is exactly what is happening in our sun and most other stars. Unfathomable numbers of nuclei are shoved and squeezed into each other deep in the core. In this environment, there is enough pressure to get them close to that barrier, close enough that quantum tunneling becomes a possibility, and boom, the star lights up. If it weren't for this bizarre phenomenon, only the most massive of stars would be able to achieve fusion, and the universe would be a much darker place. It takes only a day for a star's core to turn to iron Iron is the final element that can be created via this fusion process in the core of a star. Anything heavier than this requires far more energy, and is made during events like supernovas or neutron star collisions. And many of the elements leading up to iron can only be created in larger stars. Our sun, for example, is only massive enough to fuse up to about Oxygen. But in larger stars with many times more mass than our sun, they will inevitably reach a stage where they have fused their entire core into iron. At this point, they no longer have sustainable fuel for nuclear fusion, and will explode in a violent supernova. This timeline involves a few distinct stages that get shorter as they go, and is as follows: Stage 1: hydrogen burning, which lasts for up to 10 million years Stage 2: helium burning, which lasts about a million years Stage 3: carbon burning, 600 years Stage 4: neon burning, 1 year Stage 5: oxygen burning, just 6 months And finally, Stage 6: silicon burning, which converts the entire star's core into iron in just one single day. In trillions of years, stars will be frozen In the early universe, stars were almost pure hydrogen, allowing them to burn hotter and brighter than stars today, which have higher levels of heavier elements. You can think of these heavier elements as impurities that over time lower the overall maximum temperature of stars. Follow this trend forward, and trillions upon trillions of years from now, the metallicity and impurities of stars will theoretically be much, much higher, and the average temperature of stars will be far lower, as their cores struggle to fuse, slowly churning along over the eons. It's believed that some of these stars could be burning at such a low temperature that their surfaces could reach temperatures of around 273 degrees Kelvin. In regular units, that's 0 degrees Celsius, or 32 Fahrenheit. Since these stars would remain in this condition for a very, very long time, it's very likely that their surface will be slowly met with debris from outer space containing ice, which will be able to remain frozen on its surface, or even liquid in some slightly warmer spots. So, while stars today are so hot that even getting within millions of miles of them would cook anything resembling life, their surfaces very well might be temperate and even habitable in the far future. Long after this, they will become pure iron. As we said earlier, iron is the final element to be created via fusion in the core of a star, however, given enough time, it's possible that the entirety of the star will eventually become solid iron. This is once again due to quantum tunneling, which, given an agonizingly long time, will allow for cold fusion as the remnants of lighter elements tunnel into each other and fuse into iron, atom by atom, until there is nothing left to fuse. Suffice to say, this takes a long time, in the ballpark of 10 to the power of 1500 years. This number is so stupidly large that it's hard to even understand. Don't even bother coming up with any analogy, you could individually examine every grain of sand on earth for a decade each, you could spend a millennium with every single subatomic particle in the universe one by one, none of this comes even remotely close to such a high number, that's how ridiculously far into the future it would be. Scientists used to think the universe had no beginning. Nowadays, it's common knowledge that the universe is expanding, and the Big Bang theory is pretty well accepted. Of course, there are alternative theories and unanswered questions, but this is usually down to things like what caused the big bang or what potentially came before it. But a hundred years ago this was not the case, and the prevailing belief about the age of the universe was the Steady-State Theory. At the core of this theory is that the universe as we know it does not have a defined beginning, but is essentially eternal, and despite expanding, maintains the same energy density by constantly creating new matter. According to this theory, the Milky Way Galaxy has been around for untold eons, which, funny enough, would mean that even iron stars might be found within it, which is why one of them is visited by a spaceship in the Soviet science fiction novel Andromeda Nebula. It was only during the 40s and 50s that this view began to be challenged, creating a rift in the world of cosmology between the supporters of Steady State and the supporters of the Big Bang, until continued advances eventually pushed Steady State out the contest. We have direct photos of exoplanets. When we talk about finding exoplanets and how it's almost always done by observing their effect on their host star, it can come off as a bit disappointing that you don't get to see them directly. But this reality is changing with the work of the Spectro-Polarimetric High-Contrast Exoplanet Research, or SPHERE, located at the Very Large Telescope in Chile. In 2020, they achieved the first ever direct photograph of planets orbiting another sun-like star, TYC 8998-760-1. In the photo, you can clearly see two bright lights near the star, these are both gas giants, one with a mass 20 times that of Jupiter and the other with 7 times its mass. It truly is spectacular to be able to see exoplanets on a real photograph, especially considering that this system is 310 light years away. Gravity lets you see behind things. Predicted by Einstein long before it was observed, gravitational lensing is an odd by-product of the laws governing our universe. Take for instance, a star. This is a region of space with a lot of mass, and thus, warps spacetime to a high degree. A smaller star far off in the distance behind this one would normally be invisible to us, since our view is blocked, but because spacetime is curved, some of the light from this second star can end up travelling in a trajectory AROUND the star in the middle, and can still reach us on the other side. This can manifest in a few ways. The first is what appears to be a smear of light in a sort of circle. This is often called an Einstein ring, and is commonly seen when the source of light, the object acting as a lens, and the observer are all in perfect alignment. If the three aren't in perfect alignment, you don't end up with a clear ring, but rather distorted and stretched objects, or, in very weird cases, duplicate images of the same object. The first double image was discovered in 1979, when what was initially thought to be a pair of quasars turned out to be the same quasar presenting to us in two locations. Since then, we've found even crazier ones, such as Einstein's Cross, a single quasar presenting to us as four duplicate images. Because of the way the light gets bent in different directions, there's actually a chance that one of the duplicate images of an object takes a shorter path through space than the other, so even though we would be looking at, for instance, the same star, one of the images may show it 10 million years ago, while the other shows it just 5 million years ago. Gravitational lensing could allow us to make a really, really big telescope. Aside from being a cool tidbit about the universe, gravitational lensing may actually have some real practicality. In 1936, Albert Einstein predicted that light being gravitationally lensed around the sun would converge on a specific focal point, which he calculated to be about 542 astronomical units from the sun. Building on this finding, it's been suggested over the years that a probe orbiting at this exact distance could use the sun as a giant lens to peer at distant objects behind it, essentially turning our star into one huge telescope. Hypothetically, this would be able to provide us with incredibly detailed, up-close photos of exoplanets, with a 2020 study suggesting that we would even be able to see surface features such as mountains or canyons. And while most people agree that the idea is, in theory, promising, it simply isn't a feasible mission at the moment. 542 astronomical units is really far away, in fact, it's about 18 times the distance that Neptune orbits the sun. This is so far that according to NASA's live mission status, Voyager 1 has not even covered a third of this distance, and it was launched in 1977. Phobos is going to crash into Mars. Both of the moons of Mars are a bit odd, and that's probably because they were once asteroids that were captured by the planet's gravity. But the larger of the two, Phobos, is especially weird. It has a strange, irregular shape, and orbits very close to Mars, so close, that it's actually hard to see sometimes. However, the most interesting thing about Phobos is that it is on a predictable collision course, spiraling inward with a crash date of about 50 million years from now. When the time comes, it will either smash into the surface of the red planet, or be ripped apart by tidal forces, with a high likelihood that it forms a ring. Gravitational waves let us watch black holes collide. As with an amusing number of topics in modern cosmology, the existence of gravitational waves was predicted in Einstein's theory of relativity, which described them as ripples in spacetime. However, they were predicted to be so small that even Einstein was skeptical they could ever be observed. However, in 2015, a team announced the first direct observation of them, only able to do so because of an event that was immensely powerful, and thus released higher energy gravitational waves than your everyday occurrences. The event in question was a stellar black hole merger, one with 29 solar masses and the other with 36, which used to be in a binary pair until they began spiraling in toward each other, eventually colliding. As you can imagine, this is a cataclysmic event, and the resulting gravitational waves briefly changed the length of one of the team's measurement tools, allowing them to directly see the ripple of spacetime flowing through it. Still, the effects were so small that calling them microscopic or subatomic doesn't do it justice. The measuring arm in question was 4 kilometers long, and uses a pair of lasers to check if their travel time has been altered before they meet at the end of the tunnel. Following the black hole merge, the paths of these lasers were changed, confirming the discovery. What's insane here though is that the change was on a scale a thousandth the diameter of a proton. To put that in perspective, it's equivalent to having this same tunnel reach all the way to Proxima Centauri, and measuring that the ripple changed the laser's length by the width of a piece of paper. Earth is not the best place to live. As astronomers search for earth-like planets around the galaxy, the exoplanets they encounter are given a habitability score based on metrics such as temperature, presence of water, and distance to the star. This is called the planetary habitability index, and, surprisingly, earth may not be at the top of the list, as the parameters earned our home planet a score of 0.829, while the planet Kepler 442b scored a tad better at 0.836. This planet is rocky, about twice as large as earth, is believed to have liquid water, and is just beyond the distance that would tidally lock it with its star, likely allowing it to develop a strong magnetic field, which is considered crucial to life as it blocks harmful radiation from space. Its star is much smaller than the sun, and so Kepler 442b orbits much closer, which is considered an advantage because it means that the star is potentially calmer than our sun, meaning fewer solar flares or coronal mass ejections that would threaten the planet. Of course, there's still tons of factors to examine and a lot more research to be done before you start packing your bags, but it is fascinating to see that there are very likely pleasant, earthlike planets in our galactic neighborhood. It snows metal on Venus. So, earth may not be at the top of that habitability index, but we can certainly be grateful for how nice our planet is compared to its twin sister. Venus may have once been similar to earth in the distant past, but today its surface is one of the most hostile environments to life in the solar system, as its surface temperature is hot enough to melt lead. Photos from the Pioneer Venus orbiter showed a shiny, reflective surface occasionally developing on the mountains of Venus. On any other planet, this would be assumed to be snow and ice, but obviously it's far too hot for this to exist here. Instead, these thin layers are likely made of metal, currently believed to be a cocktail of lead and bismuth, but may also contain pyrite, essentially equating to metallic snow. Jupiter is bigger than every other planet combined If you take all the mass in the solar system, all the planets, asteroids, dust, gas, and ice, you'll find that the sun makes up 99.86% of all of it. But of that remaining 0.14%, Jupiter takes up the vast majority. In fact, Jupiter is so big that it's two and a half times more massive than the rest of the planets put together, and that's including Saturn, who often appears to be about the same size in common representations of the planets, but has far less mass in reality. And not only in terms of mass does it dominate, but also in size. With a diameter 11 times larger than earth, you could 1,300 copies of our planet inside. You can fit all of the planets between the earth and the moon, sometimes. One of the more common space facts floating around is that the distance between the earth and the moon is large enough to fit every single other planet between the two, Jupiter included. But this is only true with careful planning. The average distance between the earth and the moon is 382,500 kilometers, and adding up the diameter of every planet, you arrive at 380,010 kilometers. That's a tight fit, just over 2,000 kilometers to spare. But this tiny margin of error means that this fun fact isn't always true. First off, notice how we said the AVERAGE distance between the earth and the moon, because sometimes the moon is quite a bit closer, around 360,000 kilometers, meaning if the moon were in this position, the planet chain would be about 20,000 kilometers too long. Likewise, the diameter measurements that allow the planets to fit are taken by measuring the planet from pole to pole. If we take the measurement across their equator, the planets are a bit wider, especially Saturn, and we end up overshooting the average moon distance by about 10,000 kilometers. So, yes, you can fit all the planets between the earth and the moon, but only if the moon is at a certain place in its orbit and if you orient all the planets correctly. ORCs are a new mystery in astronomy One of the more mysterious space discoveries in recent years are Odd Radio Circles, or ORCs for short. These objects, when viewed at radio wavelength, are seen to be circular, bright, and very, very large. They're so big that they're actually several times larger than the Milky Way galaxy, but their origin is a complete mystery. And the more we look for them, the more we are starting to find. As of January 2024, 11 have been detected, including some near infant galaxies captured by the James Webb Space Telescope. A potential clue came when a team found that one of the ORCs was seen around a galaxy with a large amount of gas near its center that seemed to be moving outward as if from a powerful blast. Their idea is that some galaxies, called starburst galaxies, produce stars at a rate much higher than normal, and sometime producing a lot at once. Since this batch of stars were all born around the same time, they all die together, creating a supernova symphony that leaves a massive, long-lasting blast of radio waves. The magnetic field on Uranus opens up once a day The magnetic field of earth is one of the reasons life has been allowed to thrive. But on Uranus, it seems that the magnetic field is less of a steady shield, and more like a strobe light. About once per rotation, the magnetic field lines up with the solar wind, briefly allowing the planet to be blasted with charged particles from the sun. Earth's magnetosphere is generated by spinning and flowing metal deep underneath our feet, but given the volatility and odd nature of the magnetic field on Uranus, there must be some other explanation. One theory suggests that its magnetic field is generated by the flows of a mantle made of water and ammonia, and another suggests that an ocean of liquid diamond is to blame. Eris is the reason Pluto is no longer a planet. Discovered in 2005, Eris is a dwarf planet orbiting the sun far beyond the realm of Neptune. When it was announced, its size was determined to be larger than that of Pluto, and thus, was initially classified as the solar system's tenth planet. But this didn't last long. The existence of Eris was further evidence that beyond Neptune, objects the size and composition of Pluto were actually quite common, and so, in 2006, the International Astronomical Union officially defined what constituted a planet, and everything else was demoted to dwarf planet. Among those demoted were Pluto, Eris, and a large spherical asteroid named Ceres. Today, there are 5 official dwarf planets, and the number is only expected to grow as we peer deeper. Pluto is sometimes closer to the sun than Neptune. One of the other reasons that Pluto from the rest of the main planets is its abnormal orbit. Not only is offset from the flat plane where the rest of the planets reside, it also orbits in an elliptical shape. As a result, there are short periods when its orbit is closer to the sun than that of Neptune. This happens for a period of 20 years every 248 years. Most recently, this happened between 1979 and 1999. Space junk is getting dangerous. Since the first man-made objects began leaving the atmosphere in the 20th century, we've launched a lot of stuff into space. Actually, the exact number of objects we blasted up is 15,946, and as you can assume, many of these are now outdated, broken, and non-functioning. This results in a lot of space junk floating around the earth, with NASA estimating that there are more than 25,000 objects the size of a grapefruit and 100 million objects even smaller than this. Each of these are cruising around at up to 10 times the speed of an average bullet, making each and every one of them a potential danger to our property in space. But it can even start to pose a problem to people on earth. In March 2024, Alejandro Otero was sitting in his home in Florida when he heard what he described as a tremendous noise. What he found was a chunk of metal about the size of a can of soda that had torn through this roof and slammed into the floor of his house. Mr. Otero claimed that he was in total shock as the object had nearly hit his son. Turns out, this hardware was from the International Space Staton. It was an old battery that had been jettisoned after getting replaced in 2021, and was completely expected to burn up upon reentering the atmosphere. But as we can see, it survived reentry, and very nearly hurt someone. The more object we leave floating around our planet, the more likely events like this will become. But the real threat of space junk is the problems it will start posing to satellites. If the amount of trash up there continues to grow unchecked, it might become an issue for rockets heading up into orbit. The Soviets almost got to the moon first. When John F. Kennedy announced in 1962 that the United States intended to put a man on the moon within the decade, there didn't seem to be a very strong response from the Soviet Union. On the surface, The USSR seemed far more interested in projects like space stations and discovery probes, and not the risky plans of putting an astronaut on the moon. This led many to talk about how the space race wasn't much of a race at all, as it seemed the two now had different goals in mind. But as the Soviet Union began to relax in 1980s, and just before it collapsed, a tour was given to a group of U.S. scientists to show some old relics of the space race. Among them was a lunar landing craft, and, apparently, it was quite advanced. As it turns out, the Soviets actually had a very serious lunar program, and judging by how much effort and funding had been put into the equipment, they very well may have beaten the United States to it given a little more time. The reason they didn't allegedly came down to rockets. Soviet engineers struggled to design the propulsion systems for the rocket to leave the earth, land on the moon, and make a full return trip while having enough power to carry a human crew. Given more time, they certainly would have figured it out, but following the American success on the front, the Soviets scrapped the program in the early 70s. Zambia also tried to get to the moon first. In 1960, Edward Makuka Nkoloso founded the Zambia National Academy of Science, Space Research, and Philosophy. This seems like a great institution to found to educate the next generation of citizens in a country that had just gained its independence, but Nkoloso had much, much higher ambitions than just education. His stated goals were to build a rocket to carry a 17-year-old girl named Matha to the moon, accompanied by two cats. He also spoke of trips to mars, anticipating that he could beat both the USA and the USSR to these achievements. He also wanted to preach Christianity to the Martians he expected to encounter there. He had high hopes that Zambia could rise to fame and power if it took a quick hold of the frontier of space that was rapidly growing in importance. To train his astronauts, who he had, no joke, nicknamed afronauts, Nkoloso rolled trainees down a hill inside of an oil drum and had them spin around on a tire swing. He asked UNESCO and foreign sources for around 2 billion dollars, but never received anything. Turns out, the minister of finance had thrown out the requests without even sending them, because the Zambian government was doing all they could to distance themselves from the alleged space program. Eventually, though, they took a more active stance, and shut down his launch site a few days before their first rocket was ignited. Nkoloso reported that the program had been shut down due to three things: a lack of funds, the unexpected pregnancy of Matha the astronaut, and the sabotage of the rocket by meddling foreign powers. The first man-made object in space wasn't a rocket or satellite. Sputnik 1 was the first man-made object to reach escape velocity and completely exit the earth's atmosphere, after which it orbited the earth for three months. But the United States may have actually launched an object up there first, albeit not so intentionally. Operation Plumbbob was a series of nuclear tests during the summer of 1957, and one of the detonations took place underground, in a borehole that was covered with a steel cap weighing 2,000 pounds, or 900 kilograms. Well, the blast yield turned out to be thousands of times more powerful than anticipated, creating a jet of fire that shot high up into the sky, and, in the process, blew the steel cap off its place and sent it soaring into the air, never to be found again. Some believed it had been vaporized, but upon examining a high-speed camera, which captured one frame per millisecond, the cap was able to be spotted in a single frame, allowing its speed to be estimated as reaching more than six times the escape velocity of the earth. So, if it wasn't torn apart by the blast or by friction as it tried to leave the atmosphere, this metal cover very likely was the first man made object to be exiled from our planet, accidentally beating Sputnik 1 by just 38 days. The asteroid belt is not as dense as you think. Looking at movies and TV shows about space, the asteroid belt appears to be a thick band of rocks that requires a skilled pilot to navigate safely. And indeed, there are there are tons of rocks here, ones considered to be large number in at over a million, while there are hundreds of millions of smaller ones. But it would be very inaccurate to depict this as a dense sea of rocks that must be carefully steered through. That's because while the numbers of asteroids may be large, the space they inhabit is even larger, to the point where the average distance between asteroids is about 600,000 miles, or 960,000 kilometers. Plenty of space for even the worst of spacecraft pilots to peacefully pass through without any worry of collision. UY Scuti puts our sun to shame. Our sun is considered a yellow dwarf star in the middle of its lifespan. This makes it quite a bit larger than many other stars out there, but compared to the largest stars out there, our sun is nothing but a speck of dust. UY Scuti is considered by many to be the largest star ever discovered, a red supergiant that is so bright it was first catalogued all the way back in 1860. It's estimated diameter is more than 1,700 times that of our sun, meaning that if you hollowed it out, you could fill it with 5 billion suns, or 7 trillion jupiters, or, if you're feeling ambitious, around 7 quadrillion earths. If you replaced our sun with UY Scuti, the surface of the star would completely envelop all four of the rocky planets and extend out into the asteroid belt. It's simply enormous. However, despite its intimidating size, its huge size means that the surface of UY Scuti is actually cooler than the surface of our sun. Space takes its toll on the human body. One of the biggest challenges facing the future of space travel is how to maintain astronaut health during long trips. Our bodies have adapted to living on earth, and, crucially, are accustomed to earth's gravity. Living in microgravity has serious detrimental effects on the human body, one of which is the loss of bone density, leading to a higher risk of fractures. Muscles also suffer, as without the need to provide constant tension to stabilize and keep the body upright against gravity, they begin to atrophy, especially in the legs and back. Another problem arises with the eyes, which can suffer minor structural changes known as spaceflight-associated neuro-ocular syndrome, or SANS. Some of these problems can be remedied with regular intense exercise, such as the stationary bikes used on the international space station, but there are likely many more issues that we will run into in the future. For instance, we don't know the effects of space travel on pregnancy, or on a growing child. We also don't have great data on very long-term effects, such as what could happen during the years-long trips to and from Mars, or after spending a decade on a future moon base. All of this will need to be addressed if humanity wants to venture deeper into the final frontier. Pizza has been delivered to space. Forget Neil Armstrong's famous words as he stepped onto the lunar surface, forget Yuri Gagarin's 'until we meet again, dear friends' before departing on his historic mission to become the first human being to leave the earth. Forget these, because the greatest space speech of all time comes from Randy Gier, the chief marketing officer of Pizza Hut. In 2001, he announced, "Having recorded numerous 'firsts' on Earth, we also wanted to make history by becoming the first company in the world to deliver pizza to space. From this day forward, Pizza Hut pizza will go down in history as the world's first pizza to be delivered to and eaten in space." Pizza Hut paid the Russian space agency a million dollars to make the delivery happen, and because extended stays in space have the effect of dulling the tastebuds, extra salt and spices were added. Also, pepperoni didn't seem to survive the preliminary tests, growing moldy, so it was swapped out for salami. After it had been prepared, the pizza was placed in a vacuum sealed bag and stored among the scheduled cargo. A few weeks later, it was eaten by Russian cosmonaut Yuri Usachov, who can be seen flashing a thumbs-up in the promotional video. After the success, Pizza Hut released a statement saying "...we're determined to give customers what they want, when they want it and where they want it, even if they are in space. Wherever there is life, there will be Pizza Hut pizza". It rains methane once every thousand years on Titan. Titan is Saturn's largest moon, and one of the largest in the solar system. Just like earth, it has lakes, rivers, and rain, only instead of water, on Titan this is all happening with methane. This makes it the only object in space other than earth on which stable surface liquid has been found. It's believed that the rain happens when volcanoes or geysers spew methane out from deep stores below the surface, an event which seems to happen every thousand years or so. Despite the thick atmosphere, Titan is too far from the sun to receive much warmth, and thus, the surface is in a perpetual deep freeze. It's accepted that no form of life can exist at this level, but conditions might be different beneath the surface, and the environment could be perfect for hypothetical methane-based life. Of course, finding extraterrestrial life would be one of the most important discoveries of all time, but finding it on Titan would be even more significant than on, say, Venus or Mars. That's because these two planets are not only quite close to earth, but they also have far more similar compositions and histories. If we were to find microbes on Mars, there is no ruling out that its ancestors originated from earth, and made the trip to Mars long ago on a rock that was ejected into space during an impact event. This isn't even all that far-fetched, as we've recovered pieces of Mars that have landed on earth, so it's only logical to assume the reverse could happen. If life was found on Titan, it would be so chemically different from life on earth that no common ancestor explanation would be possible, and we would certainly be looking at a completely separate instance of life in the universe. Only Iapetus can see Saturn's rings. Saturn's rings are a sight to behold, and are so visible that they were first spotted by Galileo himself in the year 1610. But we only have this great view because of our distance and angle relative to Saturn. If you were on one of Saturn's moons, it would be very difficult to spot the rings, as they would be edge-on and so thin that they'd all but disappear. However, if you lived on Iapetus, you would get to see the rings in all their glory. That's because Iapetus orbits Saturn at a high incline, closer to its poles, and thus has a clear view of its parent planet's many rings. The Milky way has a supernova once every 50 years. Based on how many stars are in our galaxy, and the percentage of these that are heavy enough to explode upon death, it's estimated that there is a supernova about once every 50 years in the Milky Way. Most of these will be obscured from our view as they'll be deep within the galaxy, but one close enough to be seen is not unheard of. The first recorded supernova is credited to ancient Chinese astronomers, who recorded in the year 185 AD the sudden appearance of a new, bright star in the sky, which lasted for 8 months before fading from view. They called it a guest star, and wrote of another one in the 393. Over the following 1500 years or so, they recorded around 20 more such events, many of which were corroborated by astronomers in India, Europe, or the Middle East. Some of these were so well documented that we've actually narrowed down which supernova they witnessed. For example, in 1054 AD nearly every civilization on earth wrote about the sudden appearance a new star. It was so noteworthy that it has even been found in the petroglyphs of the ancestral Puebloans, who carved a large, four-pointed star near to a crescent moon, which is precisely where it would have been located in the night sky at the time. Astronomers have traced this event to the Taurus constellation, where the supernova has left behind the mesmerizing and iconic Crab Nebula. Judging from the size of the nebula, the supernova's peak brightness was likely 4 times brighter than Venus in the night sky, and would have even been visible during the day for nearly a month. The US Space Command confirmed the first interstellar visitor to earth. In January 2014, a meteor just a foot in length smacked into the coast of Papua New Guinea. Based on its angle and speed, a 2022 paper claims that the only plausible origin of the meteor is a separate star system. If this is true, it would not only be our first known interstellar object to reach earth, but it would technically predate Oumuamua as the first known interstellar object in the solar system, we just didn't know it at the time. Many astronomers doubted the findings, as the data regarding the asteroid's speed had been recorded by the United States Space Command and thus was not public information. Once the debate had sprung, the office released a statement and some data on the meteor's velocity, concluding that it was "sufficiently accurate to indicate an interstellar trajectory". The final piece of the puzzle was to go out and find some of it. The topic was fascinating and very pubic, so funding wasn't hard to secure, but there was a daunting reality that many of the fragments may be at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. However, in 2023, the two lead researchers reported finding metallic fragments that they believed to be a part of the meteor, and after analyzing their isotope ratios, concluded that they were older than the solar system itself. The axis of evil eludes explanation. One of the core philosophies of astronomy is the Copernican principle, or the assumption that our place in the universe is not special. When something appears to violate the Copernican principle, it is a call for further investigation, as there should be nothing statistically extraordinary about our galaxy or even solar system. Which is why astronomers were shocked to find that many aspects of the cosmic microwave background, or CMB, are suspiciously aligned with the earth's plane of orbit in our solar system, also called the ecliptic plane. One such example is that above the ecliptic plane, or the top half of the CMB from our perspective, appears to be slightly cooler than the bottom half. There is no reason for our insignificant solar system in one of trillions of galaxies to be so perfectly aligned with the central divide of the universe's background radiation. In an article on the subject, theoretical physicist Larence Krauss wrote, "The new results are either telling us that all of science is wrong and we're the center of the universe, or maybe the data is simply incorrect, or maybe it's telling us there's something weird about the microwave background results and that maybe, maybe there's something wrong with our theories on the larger scales." And the problem only seems to be getting worse, as data published from the Planck Telescope in 2013 found even stronger evidence for the anomalies. As for potential explanations, there are many. Some believe the anomaly to be purely psychological with humans finding patterns where there are none to be found. Others believe the cause could be local, that perhaps our motion around the galaxy causes our view of the CMB to be warped from our perspective. The US considered using nuclear bombs for space propulsion. In the 1950s and 60s, Project Orion investigated the feasibility of using nuclear weapons to propel spacecraft at high speeds. And no, we don't mean some highly advanced capsule that captures the energy like a reactor and releases it out the exhaust behind the craft, we mean literal atom bombs being detonated behind the rocket to push it forward. This was taken very seriously at the time, with one of the most prominent supporters being Wernher von Braun. It was believed that with a sufficiently strong shock absorbing blast pad, the power from the nukes could be safely used to quickly gain speed in the vacuum of space. Visions of the project scaled up to extreme heights, with a proposed 'super Orion' ship weighing 8 million tons and using bombs that weighed 3,000 tons each, with a total price tag equal to the yearly GDP of the United States. As ridiculous as it sounds though, it actually is quite an efficient way to gain lots of speed in space, and it was believed that a one-way trip to Alpha Centauri could be achieved in just 133 years, reaching tops speeds above 30 trillion kilometers per hour. But there are some really big issues with this as you can imagine. One of them is slowing down, which would require equally powerful blasts in the opposite direction. The next is danger to earth, because, funny enough, it was even thought for a while that the atomic blasts could begin right on the launchpad to give it a head start, and just continue booming one after another as the rocket left the atmosphere. Project Orion was scrapped upon the signing of the non-nuclear proliferation treaty, which banned atmospheric nuclear tests. And while it is a fun thought experiment, with the knowledge we've gained since, a much more practical spacecraft would instead utilize matter-antimatter annihilation as its propulsion instead of nuclear bombs, as the fuel would weigh far less than the nuclear devices while releasing far more energy in the process. Neutron stars can be used as cosmic clocks. In our discussions of many aspects of neutron stars today, we neglected to include one thing, that many of them, if not all, emit beams of electromagnetic radiation from their magnetic poles. Much like a laser pointer though, we can only really see this if it's pointed right at us. The ones firing these beams right at us are called pulsars. Because neutron stars spin at very predictable rates, you can observe and measure the timing of these electromagnetic waves with incredible accuracy. In fact, 30 years ago, they were reportedly more accurate than the world's best atomic clocks, though the atomic clocks have since come out on top. Part of the reason pulsars cannot compete with the best of timepieces is that they randomly experience glitches. Pulsar glitches are an event in which the spin speed seems to randomly wander, increasing by a small amount, followed by a gradual recovery period to the pre-glitch speed. There are also anti-glitches, where the speed randomly decreases for a bit. The reason for these is unknown, but it may have something to do with a sudden restructuring of the interior of the star. More energy hits the earth than we could ever hope to use. The amount of energy that the sun radiates into space is extreme. At any given moment, the earth is being bombarded with 173,000 terawatts of energy, and if you're wondering, a terawatt is a trillion watts. According to MIT, this is more than 10,000 times all of humanity's energy usage, all essentially for free, just constantly hitting our planet. Figures like this make you wonder why we haven't yet covered the world's deserts with solar panels to power the whole world for cheap, but it's a lot more complicated than that. You'd still have to store and transport the energy, maintain, repair, and clean the solar panels, and worry about the potential environmental effects of building megastructures of that level. But whenever we get around to it, these hundreds of thousands of trillions of watts are just waiting to be used. But as crazy as that amount of energy sounds, it is but a mere fraction of the sun's output, since it radiates its photons in every direction and we are a relatively small target. As an analogy, you could take the whole population of earth and have each person represent an equal fraction of the sun's energy output. If they all left the sun at the same time, only four of them would reach the earth. The voyager crafts carry our first greeting to aliens Since they will likely be the first of our spacecraft to exit the solar system and enter interstellar space, the voyager spacecraft have both been equipped with what is called the golden record, intended to make a good first impression in case anyone else happens to stumble upon it. It includes unique greetings from native speakers of 55 languages, including 5 extinct languages, as well as various sounds from earth, such as music, the sounds of crickets, frogs, a train's horn, a jet, and human laughter. Accompanying the audio are a collection of 116 images. These detail life on earth, the spacecraft, and much more, such as diagrams of the human body and a map of which pulsars are pointed toward earth to help an intelligent civilization deduce our location. There are photos of DNA, the pyramids, autumn leaves, gymnasts, and the Golden Gate bridge. They were selected to represent a wide variety of human activity and accomplishments, and to do so in a way that describes all of us as one human family, regardless of national origin, including a Somali woman holding a microscope, and an Indonesian woman performing a traditional dance. In fact, despite the spacecraft being launched at the height of the Cold War, photos were included of Soviet sprinters taking the lead in a race. It's both awe-inspiring and humbling to see so much of human history and culture wrapped up in such a small package, with a note from the then president of the US ending with the sentence, "This record represents our hope and our determination and our goodwill in a vast and awesome universe." Key Takeaways Early galaxies were banana-shaped, not spherical or disc-like. Saturn has a hexagonal storm larger than Earth, with unknown origins. Earth has the best view of Hoag's object, a rare ring galaxy. Moons can have their own moons, called moonmoons or moonitos. The Milky Way might be bigger than Andromeda, contrary to prior beliefs. Frequently Asked Questions What shape were the first galaxies?Early galaxies were banana shaped. What is the largest storm in our solar system?Saturn has a hexagonal storm larger than earth. What is the best view of Hoag’s object?Earth has the best view of Hoag’s object. Can moons have their own moons?Moons can have their own moons. Is the Milky Way bigger than Andromeda?The Milky Way might be bigger than Andromeda. Is there an asteroid worth quintillions of dollars?There is an Asteroid worth quintillions of dollars. Does Europa have more water than Earth?Europa has more water than the entire earth. Can neutron stars spin so fast that they tear themselves apart?Neutron stars can spin so fast that they tear themselves apart. Which planet has the most moons in the Solar System?Saturn now has the most moons in the Solar System. How many bags of poop are on the moon?There are 96 bags of poop on the moon. ## Key Takeaways - Early galaxies were banana-shaped, not spherical or disc-like. - Saturn has a hexagonal storm larger than Earth, with unknown origins. - Earth has the best view of Hoag's object, a rare ring galaxy. - Moons can have their own moons, called moonmoons or moonitos. - The Milky Way might be bigger than Andromeda, contrary to prior beliefs. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### What shape were the first galaxies? Early galaxies were banana shaped. ### What is the largest storm in our solar system? Saturn has a hexagonal storm larger than earth. ### What is the best view of Hoag’s object? Earth has the best view of Hoag’s object. ### Can moons have their own moons? Moons can have their own moons. ### Is the Milky Way bigger than Andromeda? The Milky Way might be bigger than Andromeda. ### Is there an asteroid worth quintillions of dollars? There is an Asteroid worth quintillions of dollars. ### Does Europa have more water than Earth? Europa has more water than the entire earth. ### Can neutron stars spin so fast that they tear themselves apart? Neutron stars can spin so fast that they tear themselves apart. ### Which planet has the most moons in the Solar System? Saturn now has the most moons in the Solar System. ### How many bags of poop are on the moon? There are 96 bags of poop on the moon. ## Sources - [Original Side Projects video: 100 Science Facts that Will Shock You](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eF1_qj5cKj8) ## Related Coverage Simon Whistler https://sideprojects.pub/article/3-mindblowing-scientific-paradoxes https://sideprojects.pub/article/3-mindblowing-scientific-paradoxes Thu, 25 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT By Kevin Jennings We often think of paradoxes as being thought experiments. These are logical conundrums, often involving unproven bits of science like time travel, that act as fun puzzles and ways to test our ability to reason through impossible situations. One thing they often tend to lack, however, is practical application. Sure, it may be fun to contemplate what would happen if you traveled back in time and killed your father before you were born, or whether the statement "this is a lie" can ever be considered either true or false. But as fascinating as they may be, those sorts of paradoxes rarely lead to major innovations. So today, instead of thought experiments, we'll be looking at three paradoxical outcomes of empirical research. These are paradoxes rooted in modern science, some of which could lead to incredible advancements in modern medicine if we're able to find a solution. ## Peto's Paradox Cancer has plagued humanity for as long as we've existed, and scientists have spent centuries studying how it works and how we might combat it. The first environmental carcinogens were even identified 250 years ago, and there has been extensive research since then. However, there was one paradox related to cancer that nobody really seemed to notice until Richard Peto noticed it in 1977. Over the course of any animal's lifetime, cells are constantly replicating. We all begin as a single cell in utero, and that cell continues to divide to form the entire organism. An adult human has about 37 trillion cells, and those cells are constantly dividing to replace themselves. The rate at which they divide varies depending on what type of cell it is, but it all averages out to about once every 24 hours for human cells. Each time a cell replicates, there's the chance of genetic mutations. These happen all the time, and most of them are harmless. Some, however, will result in a cell that continues to replicate uncontrollably, causing cancer. But our bodies have a number of built in defenses for this. There is a tumor suppressing gene called p53 that will trigger other mechanisms within the cell to repair damaged DNA. If the cell is too far damaged, p53 will force it to self destruct. The immune system can also recognize and kill cancer cells. In fact, people develop cancer cells on a pretty regular basis, but our body is usually able to eliminate them before it becomes a problem. In order to for a tumor to form, the cancerous cell needs to have several very specific mutations simultaneously. It needs a mutation to cause uncontrolled reproduction, one to disable the p53 gene, and one to hide its presence from the immune system. The odds of all of the necessary mutations happening in a single cell are low, but over the course of a person's life their body will have produced somewhere between 10 quadrillion and 100 quadrillion different cells. Even though the odds for any individual cell forming a dangerous tumor are low, the sheer volume of cells results in about 20% of people developing cancer at some point in their lifetime. However, what Peto noticed in 1977 was that humans didn't seem to be getting nearly as much cancer as we should. Across the entire animal kingdom, all cells are roughly the same size. Larger animals don't have meaningfully larger cells, they just have more cells. What Peto observed was that even though humans have 1,000 times as much mass as mice and live 30 times as long, meaning we have 1,000 times more cells dividing for a much longer period of time, both species developed cancer at the same rate. Logically, this didn't make any sense. In 1998, a study even confirmed the idea that more cells should mean more cancer, as the data showed that humans who were either taller or heavier than average were more likely to get cancer. The rate of cancer has increased significantly as human life expectancy has increased as well. The same is also true for within mice populations, meaning that number of cells and longevity are both risk factors for cancer within the same species, even though humans weren't getting cancer at thousands of times the rate mice do, as would have been expected. Later research examined dozens of different mammalian species, and it found that there was no correlation between number of cells or lifespan of a species and the rates of cancer relative to other species. For example, elephants have about 70 times more cells than humans and blue whales have over 2,000 times as many cells as humans, but they aren't developing cancer at higher rates than humans. In fact, cancer is extraordinarily rare in both species. This observation is Peto's Paradox: if all cells are equally likely to become cancerous, then mammals with more cells should have more cancer. So why don't they? Why do giant mammals with many times more cells than humans or mice seem to get cancer at dramatically lower rates than smaller mammals? For the most part, we don't know. If we did, this probably wouldn't still be called a paradox. But there are some theories why this might happen. To start, a lot of larger animals have slower metabolic rates, so as a result their cells don't divide as often. While that does introduce a variable that wasn't originally accounted for, human cells don't divide anywhere remotely close to 2,000 times more often than blue whale cells, so there has to be something else going on. Another theory is that these large animals do get cancer, we just don't notice. The larger an animal is, the larger a tumor would need to be for it to become deadly. It's possible that giant animals like blue whales are full of small tumors that would be deadly to a mouse or even human, but they aren't large enough to affect the whale in any way. Related to how large the tumors need to become to be dangerous is another theory called hypertumors. The idea is that, as cancerous cells reproduce, they continue to mutate. Some of these cells mutate to form a separate tumor that competes for resources with the original tumor so aggressively that it winds up cutting the main tumor off from the vascular system, killing both of them in the process. Essentially, the tumor gets a tumor, and the name hypertumor comes from hyperparasites, which are parasites of parasites. It's possible that humans die of cancer before hypertumors have the ability to form, whereas larger mammals like whales need more cancer cells for a tumor to become deadly and thus they have more time for hypertumors to form and kill the original tumor. Note that while there is some indirect evidence that such a thing might be possible, there is no direct evidence of hypertumors anywhere in the animal kingdom. While there have been observations of one tumor outcompeting another nearby tumor in the same person, causing one of the tumors to die, there aren't any documented cases of a hypertumor existing, let of one alone resulting in the mutual destruction or the tumor and hypertumor. This theory is largely based off of a single paper from 2007 that used computer simulations to prove the theoretical possibility of hypertumors. While this is considered a paradox, the answer is an important area of research, as discovering how giant mammals avoid cancer could help humans in our own fight against it. And when it comes to elephants, we've even discovered an answer. We mentioned the p53 tumor suppression gene earlier, and how it helps prevent cancerous cells from multiplying, requiring that the cell not only mutate to become cancerous but also to disable that gene. Nearly all animals have a single p53 gene, but researchers have discovered that elephants have 20 copies of the gene. Having so many copies gives their cells incredible redundancy in the ability to prevent cancer from spreading, but this particular adaptation seems to be limited exclusively to elephants. Other large mammals like whales, hippos, rhinoceroses, and so on each only have a single p53 gene, yet they seem to be equally resistant to cancer. It's possible that there may be other genetic adaptations present in these animals that we just haven't discovered yet. Alternatively, it may not be the other large animals that are the outliers. It's possible that humans might just have an abnormally high rate of cancer stemming from environmental factors and our diets. ## The Exercise Paradox Exercise is good for you. There is a mountain of research showing all of the ways in which regular exercise is beneficial for humans. We want to make that as clear as possible at the start, as this point often gets lost or confused when it comes to discussions about the exercise paradox and its implications. That said, exercise may not be as useful as previously thought when it comes to losing weight. People eat food every day, and we use the calories from that food to power our bodies. If you consume more calories in a day than you use, the excess gets stored as fat for later use. Since physical activity burns calories, conventional wisdom has always been that the two keys to losing weight were to exercise more and to eat less. However, new research has shown that this may not actually be the case. The study that really kicked off discussions about the Exercise Paradox was a 2012 study involving the Hazda tribe of Tanzania. But the results weren't an outlier, and a number of previous studies had already supported what the researchers found, even if the previous research didn't fully look into the paradox. The 2012 study followed a number of members of the Hazda tribe, a group of hunter-gatherers who routinely walk up to 9 km each day while hunting and foraging. Members of the tribe were given special water containing rare isotopes of hydrogen and oxygen. By examining the amount of these isotopes in their urine, researchers could calculate the amount of carbon dioxide their bodies were producing in a day, and thus the number of calories they were burning each day. This is called the doubly labeled water method, and it has been the standard method for measuring energy expenditure ever since it was discovered. The numbers from the Hazda tribe were then compared against sedentary office workers in industrialized nations, and the results were rather shocking. Hazda men burned around 2,600 calories each day on average, and the women burned around 1,900 calories each day. This energy expenditure was nearly identical to people who were mostly sedentary, despite the Hazda tribe being far more physically active. The assumption was always that energy expenditure would be additive. It takes a certain amount of energy to keep your body functioning, with the human brain using up about 20% of your body's total daily energy. So if your body needed 2,000 calories just to function, then doing 300 calories worth of exercise should logically burn a total of 2,300 calories for the day. Or so we always thought. However, this research suggests that energy is actually constrained, and that there is essentially a predetermined amount of energy that the body will use each day. If the body isn't using that energy for physical movement, it may instead use it on other processes within the body. For example, inflammation is an immune system response to a variety of different stimuli. In people who exercise regularly and are using up their daily calorie allotment, the immune system has to be as efficient as possible with things like inflammation, as it requires energy. But in a sedentary person whose body needs to use all that excess energy somehow, they may experience greater levels of inflammation or even chronic inflammation. Chronic inflammation can have some severe negative consequences, so the paradox ironically revealed yet another reason why exercise is good for you, as its best not to have our bodies use excess energy on things like inflammation. It's important to note that while there is a lot of evidence supporting the exercise paradox on sample populations as a whole, each person is different. While total energy expenditure for humans seems to be constrained on average rather than additive, there are clear examples where we know this isn't the case. High performance athletes like endurance athletes or those competing in strongman competitions tend to need several thousand calories of food each day just to maintain their weight, especially during particularly strenuous training cycles. Even for people who are just exercising for health rather than attempting to push their body to its limits, there is a lot of individual variation with the extent to which this theory holds true, even if the aggregate data supports the idea. When a person who was previously sedentary begins daily moderate exercise, it also seems to provide an initial shock to the system. Even if they don't change what they eat, individuals who take up exercising may see weight loss early on until their body adapts to the new levels of activity, reducing energy spent on other internal functions to compensate for the extra energy expenditure from the exercise. Even before the exercise paradox was identified, this idea of early weight loss followed by a frustrating plateau was something that millions of people had already witnessed for themselves. Because the exercise paradox is contradicting centuries of conventional wisdom, it's still a new area of research with questions yet to be answered. It's quite possible that energy is neither fully additive nor constrained, but that the reality lies somewhere in the middle. Regardless, based on the best data that is currently available, it seems that regulating calorie intake is far more important than exercise when it comes to weight loss. But again, exercise is still good for you and is very important for human health, even if it doesn't appear to directly cause weight loss in the way that it was always believed to. ## The Paradox of Enrichment Wouldn't it be great if there were more resources? It certainly sounds like that would be great, but it turns out it could actually be disastrous. The term "Paradox of Enrichment" was coined in 1971 by ecologist Michael Rozenzweig, as it relates to population ecology. We generally see two types of predator-prey relationships. Some are cyclical in nature, where increases in the prey population result in increases in the predator population. The predators then begin to run out of food and their population decreases, allowing for the prey population to expand again and the cycle repeats. While these cyclical relationships do exist in nature, they tend to be pretty rare. It's what we might expect from a theoretical predator-prey model, but in the real world where things like disease and competition over territory exist, we usually see predator and prey populations reach an equilibrium. So what if the environment was enriched such that the prey population was able to grow? More importantly, what if resources became so abundant that the prey population was able to grow completely unbounded? That may sound like heaven for the predators, and yet the results of laboratory experiments showed very different results. One of the most common examples of the Paradox of Enrichment involves two single celled organisms: Didinium nasutum as the predator and Paramecium aurelia as the prey. When the two were put into an environment together, the Didinium would eat all the Paramecium and both would go extinct, as expected. When a source of food was added for the Paramecium, there was typically some amount of oscillation between the populations, but they would eventually reach equilibrium. However, when an effectively infinite supply of food was added to the environment for the Paramecium, the species were unable to coexist and it was the predator who went extinct, rather than the prey. Essentially what was happening was that the increased number of prey would cause the predator population to balloon to unsustainable levels. This eventually resulted in the predators all dying off, as prey were able to hide from and evade the competing predators long enough. Rozenzweig described this relationship as a paradox because of the irony that attempting to enrich an ecosystem could instead lead to its instability and even to species extinction. Fortunately, infinite resources aren't a thing that exist in the real world. While the Paradox of Enrichment has been demonstrated in labs many times, we don't tend to see this actually occur in nature. There are also a number of factors in nature that can prevent predator populations from growing to unstable levels as well, such as how difficult the prey in question is to catch and eat, or potential toxicity of the prey that makes eating them less desirable. Real world factors like these help prevent throwing an ecosystem into upheaval even in the presence of an explosion in the prey's population. Of course, it's also quite possible that we could see this paradox destroy a natural ecosystem rather than being limited to laboratory settings, we just haven't seen it happen with the right predator-prey combination yet. ## Key Takeaways - Peto's Paradox questions why larger animals with more cells don't have higher cancer rates. - The Exercise Paradox suggests that physical activity may not burn as many calories as previously thought. - The Paradox of Enrichment shows that abundant resources can lead to predator extinction in ecosystems. - Elephants have multiple copies of the p53 gene, which helps prevent cancer. - Exercise reduces inflammation, highlighting another health benefit beyond calorie burning. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### What is Peto’s Paradox? Peto’s Paradox is the observation that larger animals with more cells and longer lifespans do not have higher cancer rates than smaller animals, which contradicts the expectation that more cell divisions would lead to more cancer. ### Why is Peto’s Paradox important? Understanding Peto’s Paradox could lead to significant advancements in cancer research and treatment for humans, as it may reveal mechanisms by which large animals avoid high cancer rates. ### What is the Exercise Paradox? The Exercise Paradox is the observation that physical activity does not increase daily calorie burn as much as previously thought, suggesting that the body has a constrained energy expenditure. ### How does the Exercise Paradox affect weight loss? The Exercise Paradox suggests that regulating calorie intake is more important than exercise for weight loss, although exercise remains crucial for overall health. ### What is the Paradox of Enrichment? The Paradox of Enrichment is the observation that an abundance of resources can lead to the extinction of predator species due to unsustainable population growth, as demonstrated in laboratory settings. ### Why is the Paradox of Enrichment considered ironic? The Paradox of Enrichment is ironic because enriching an ecosystem with more resources can lead to its instability and the extinction of predator species, rather than supporting their growth. ### What are some theories explaining Peto’s Paradox? Theories explaining Peto’s Paradox include slower metabolic rates in larger animals, the presence of small, non-lethal tumors, and the concept of hypertumors, which are tumors that compete with and potentially destroy each other. ### How do elephants avoid high cancer rates? Elephants have 20 copies of the p53 tumor suppression gene, which provides redundancy in preventing cancerous cells from multiplying. ### What did the 2012 study on the Hazda tribe reveal? The 2012 study on the Hazda tribe revealed that physically active individuals did not burn significantly more calories than sedentary individuals, supporting the idea of constrained energy expenditure. ### What is the doubly labeled water method? The doubly labeled water method is a technique used to measure energy expenditure by tracking the production of carbon dioxide in the body using rare isotopes of hydrogen and oxygen. ## Sources - [Original Side Projects video: 3 Mindblowing Scientific Paradoxes...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDtaKFKPBIA) ## Related Coverage Simon Whistler https://sideprojects.pub/article/3-thought-experiments-to-boggle-the-mind https://sideprojects.pub/article/3-thought-experiments-to-boggle-the-mind Thu, 25 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT Today, we're exploring three lesser-known, yet utterly fascinating thought experiments that will twist your brain in knots. First, we'll tackle The Quantum Suicide, a mind-bending scenario that challenges the very foundations of reality and our understanding of life and death. Next, we delve into Newcomb's Paradox, where free will clashes with a predictive entity. And finally, The Sleeping Beauty Problem, a philosophical puzzle that will make you question how probability and belief intersect. ## The Quantum Suicide You've probably heard of the Schrodinger's Cat thought experiment before, but we'll give you a quick refresher. A cat is placed into a box with a vial of poison, an atom of radioactive material, and a Geiger counter. After one half-life of the atom, there is a 50% chance that the atom will decay, triggering the Geiger counter which will then release the poison. At this point, the cat now has a 50% chance of being alive. But thanks to quantum superposition, the entire system can remain in both states until observed. Under the Copenhagen interpretation, this is precisely what happens. The cat is simultaneously both alive and dead, and the system doesn't collapse to a singular outcome until the evil scientist performing the experiment opens the box to observe the result. At that point, the cat will only be either alive or dead. One of the numerous potential issues with this view is that, because the cat was both dead and alive, it should have a memory of being dead. While this has never been tested experimentally, and with good reason, we have no reason to believe that a cat in this scenario would have memories of its time being dead before the box was opened. There are also other questions regarding whether it's even possible for such a macroscopic system to exist in a quantum superposition, all of which challenges the Copenhagen interpretation. The more popular solution is the many worlds interpretation. Under this framework, the system results in two parallel universes: one where the cat is dead and one where the cat is alive. Opening the box doesn't collapse the possible outcomes, it merely reveals which timeline the observer is a part of. There should be two alternate realities with two copies of the same scientist each observing a different result. But those two scientists have no ability to communicate with each other, meaning that the end result observed is no different than the Copenhagen interpretation: there is a single cat that is either dead or alive. So if these wildly different interpretations of quantum superposition both would have the same experimental results, how can we possibly design a test to support one theory over the other? That's where the ideas of quantum suicide and quantum immortality come into play. Though several others presented similar ideas in the preceding years, this thought experiment is usually attributed to the Swedish-American physicist Max Tegmark and his 1998 paper. This experiment is a hypothetical means to test the many worlds interpretation, and for once it doesn't involve the senseless murdering of cats. Instead, it is the scientist himself that gets into Schrodinger's box. Rather than a vial of poison, the box will have some sort of murder machine that instantly kills the scientist before they can even feel anything. Once a radioactive atom decays, their death will also happen faster than they can read the Geiger counter or any other measurement tools. These modifications are designed to remove the argument that the scientist would count as an observer of the system, as they would have died before any observation could occur. More importantly, however, instead of a single radioactive atom, the box will contain hundreds. Each atom has a 50% chance of decaying over the course of one half-life, so according to the many worlds interpretation each of these will result in the creation of parallel universes, one where the scientist dies and one where they don't. But because there are hundreds of atoms, the overall odds of survival for the scientists are the same as flipping heads on a coin hundreds of times in a row; it's essentially zero. From the scientist's point of view, however, the odds of survival under the many worlds interpretation would be 100%. So how can that be possible? The first atom has a chance to decay, at which point it creates two parallel universes. If we ignore the possibility of an afterlife, the scientist's consciousness will never exist in the universe where they die, only continuing in the other universe where they survived. That's where the paradoxical nature of this experiment comes into play. Winning all of these coin flips in a row may be a near statistical impossibility, but under the many worlds interpretation it is a necessity that all outcomes exist. As such, the scientist's consciousness will only travel along the singular path of potential outcomes in which they survive the entire ordeal. Despite their death under the conditions of the experiment being all but certain, quantum physics would demand that they survive, making the person functionally immortal. At least immortal in regards to this particular experiment; they will absolutely still die eventually. While quantum immortality seems like an elegant way to prove the many worlds interpretation is true, there are still a couple problems. First, it would require creating an absolutely mind blowing number of alternate universes in which the scientist died, and the theory would only be proven true in the one where they survived. And because the odds of survival are effectively zero, their claims of success are likely to be dismissed and chalked up to the death machine not working properly anyway. As frustrating as it would be to prove the many worlds interpretation and have nobody believe you, fortunately that should never happen. No scientist would actually be stupid enough to turn this thought experiment into an actual experiment. ## Newcomb's Paradox Would you like some free money? Then American physicist William Newcomb has the thought experiment for you. Newcomb devised his thought experiment around 1960, and he discussed it frequently with fellow physicists and philosophers. It was first published by American philosopher Robert Nozick in 1969, and people were already extremely divided. Nozick noted in a follow up paper in 1969, "To almost everyone, it is perfectly clear and obvious what should be done. The difficulty is that these people seem to divide almost evenly on the problem, with large numbers thinking that the opposing half is just being silly." So what exactly is this confounding problem? Newcomb's Paradox is a very simple game. You are presented with two boxes, labeled A and B. Box A is clear and you can see that it contains $1,000. Box B is opaque and it will contain either $0 or $1,000,000. You must choose whether you want to only take the mystery box, or if you would rather take both boxes. The twist is that a "reliable predictor" has determined beforehand which you would choose. There are variations on this where the prediction is 100% perfect, but those get into arguments about freewill and reverse causality and a bunch of other stuff that is really meant to be beside the point. For our purposes, we'll assume that the predictions are correct 90% of the time; they are usually correct, but the predictor is fallible. Anyway, if it predicted you would only take box B, then that box will have $1,000,000 inside. If it predicted you will take both boxes, then box B will be empty. The prediction was made before you were presented with the boxes, and the contents of box B have already been finalized. So is the correct answer to only take box B, or is it to take both boxes? When presented with this question, most people immediately assume that there is one answer that is very obviously correct. You're probably already sure what the optimal strategy is right now, because the setup for this question is so simple. But as Nozick alluded to back in 1969, half of you reading this right now think the correct answer is obviously to only take box B, and the other half think the obvious answer is to take both boxes. By the time you get to choose the box, the contents of box B are already fixed. If the predictor chose you would only take the mystery box and you take both, you will get $1,001,000 instead of just a million. If it predicted you would take both boxes, then by taking both you would get $1,000 instead of nothing. In game theory this is called the strategic dominance principle, because one course of action always has a better result than the other, regardless of what the other player chose. So it's settled then and you should always take both boxes, right? Not necessarily, because that decision would have been predicted with 90% accuracy. This means that 10% of the time the prediction will have been wrong and you will get $1,001,000, but the other 90% of the time you will only get $1,000. That means that the average value of taking both boxes is only $101,000. However, if you only take box B, 90% of the time you will get the million dollars while only 10% of the time will you get nothing. That makes the average value of choosing only box B $900,000. In game theory this is called the expected utility principle, and it is just as valid as strategic dominance. That is the source of the paradox, as two equally flawless forms of analysis result in contradictory answers. And while one of these answers may have initially seemed more obvious to you, neither is particularly more obvious than the other as a general rule. Decades of countless surveys have shown that people are consistently split nearly 50/50 on this question, with the decision to take both boxes usually being a couple percentage points more popular. These numbers remain consistent even when the survey only includes professional philosophers, mathematicians, and game theorists, so it's not like there's some really complicated yet definitive decision matrix that can solve this problem. In 2011, a well received paper by physicists David Wolpert and Gregory Benford claimed to unequivocally resolve Newcomb's paradox, and stated that there was only one correct solution. So which answer did Wolpert and Benford choose, do you ask? Rather frustratingly, both. According to their paper, the nature of how the prediction is made is a bit vague, and as such there are two completely different games being played depending on how you assume the probabilistic nature of the predictor's decision works. The two possible choices are each correct in one version of the game but not the other, and everybody just chooses whichever option is correct for the version of the game they believe is being played. Unfortunately, Wolpert and Benford did not weigh in on what they believed was the correct interpretation, leaving us no closer to a definitive answer. However, they did make some interesting word choices that you are free to interpret however you like. They defined taking both boxes as the realist position and taking only box B as the fearful position, arguing that the latter position was seemingly based on the participant believing that they lacked free will in this scenario. ## Sleeping Beauty Problem The Sleeping Beauty Problem was first published in 2000 by philosopher Adam Elga, expanding on ideas first introduced in 1990 by philosopher Arnold Zuboff. The setup for this thought experiment is very simple, but agreeing on a solution has proven to be much harder. Our test subject for this experiment is Sleeping Beauty, who has been made fully aware of the details of the experiment beforehand. On Sunday, Sleeping Beauty will be put to sleep. While she is asleep, one of the researchers will flip a fair coin. If the coin lands on tails, she will be woken up on Monday and asked a single question as laid out by Elga: "What is your credence now for the proposition that the coin landed heads?" In this context, "credence" means what does she believe is the probability that the coin landed heads. After answering the question, Sleeping Beauty will be given a drug that will make her fall back asleep and forget that the interview ever happened. She will then be woken up again on Tuesday, asked the same question, and put back to sleep. If the coin landed on heads, she will only be interviewed on Monday and will sleep through all of Tuesday. So how should Sleeping Beauty answer the question when she is interviewed? There are two conflicted schools of thought, both of which have proofs that are accepted as being mathematically valid. The first answer is the thirder position, which states that Sleeping Beauty should believe that there is a 1/3 chance that the coin landed on heads. This seems counterintuitive since, by definition, a fair coin has a 50% chance of landing on head, but the math behind this argument is sound. First, let's assume that today is Monday. When Sleeping Beauty is woken up, the probability of it being Monday and tails is equal to the probability of it being Monday and heads. Next, let's instead assume that the coin landed tails. Since a tails result always results in her being woken up twice, when she is woken up the probability of it being Monday and tails is equal to the probability of it being Tuesday and tails. Since the probability of Monday tails is equal to both Monday heads and Tuesday tails, all three outcomes have the same probability. Some of you may be screaming at your screens that this sounds like some sort of trick, but we promise you that these two equalities can be combined like this even though they were derived from different assumptions. You can even test it yourself by flipping a coin 100 times and keeping track of when Sleeping Beauty will be woken up. Assuming fair coin flips, you will find that she is woken up at each of the three possible timings about 50 times each. Because all three of these events have an equal probability of happening, thirders argue that Sleeping Beauty should say she believes there is a 1/3 probability that the coin landed heads. After all, 2/3 of the time that she is interviewed it is because the coin landed tails. This was the position that Elga took, and while there is no general consensus it is definitely the more popular of the two answers among philosophers. However, it happens to be the rather vehement opinion of the writer of this episode that the thirder position is an utter abomination, and all those who support it should be ashamed of themselves. The halfer position argued that Sleeping Beauty should believe that there was a 1/2 chance that the coin landed heads, because there was. By the very definition of it being a fair coin flip, the odds were 50%. Sleeping Beauty went to sleep knowing this, and when the researcher wakes her up she has no new information. She has no idea what day of the week it is or if she has already been interviewed. Since she knew that it was a fair coin flip, why should she suddenly believe that there is anything other than a 50% chance of the coin landing on heads? Instead of flipping the coin while Sleeping Beauty was asleep, the researchers could flip it on Sunday while she was still awake and ask her what she believed the probability was that the coin landed on heads. And of course she would say it was 1/2. Likewise, when the experiment ended on Wednesday, if she was asked the question again, now knowing that the experiment had ended, she would always answer that it was a 1/2 probability that the coin landed on tails at the beginning of the experiment. Thirders try to make the answer seem more persuasive by extending the length of the experiment to better illustrate their point, such as making tails result in Sleeping Beauty being woken up and mind-wiped 999 times. By extending the equalities we did earlier, this could prove there is only a 1 in 1,000 chance that the fair coin landed on heads. However, these events aren't independent of each other. Either all 999 tails events happen or 0 of them do, and that is a 50% chance. Of course, the real issue may be that the question itself is ambiguous and that thirders are answering a question that wasn't asked. The question posed by Elga in the original paper, and the question that is always asked of Sleeping Beauty, is "what do you believe is the probability that the coin landed on heads." She knew it was 1/2 when she went to sleep and had no new information when she woke up, so of course the answer to that question should remain unchanged. However, if the question being asked was "what do you believe is the probability that I woke you up because the coin landed on heads", well that is a completely different situation. If the coin landed heads she will be woken up once and if it landed tails then she would be woken up twice, so of course tails is the more likely option under this phrasing. If the experiment was repeatedly performed and Sleeping Beauty was going to be given $100 every time she correctly guessed whether the coin landed on heads or tails, she would make twice as much money by always guessing tails. Not because tails was a more likely result, just because she was asked more times when it was the correct answer. To many people that may sound like an endorsement of the thirder position, as this sort of wager argument is often used to illustrate their point. However, here's one final variation on this thought experiment that may help show the difference between the question being asked and the question that thirders seem to be answering. Let's stop injecting Sleeping Beauty with drugs, and instead we'll use a simple ball pit. Whenever a fair coin lands on heads one green ball will be put in the pit, and whenever it lands on tails two red balls will be put in the pit. We could flip the coin a million times and ask you what the probability is that a green ball was put in the pit, and every time you would correctly say that it was 1/2. However, if we were to then pull one ball at random out of the pit and ask you what the probability is that a green ball was removed? The answer may now be 1/3, but it is a very different question. ## Key Takeaways - The Quantum Suicide thought experiment explores the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. - Newcomb's Paradox presents a scenario where strategic dominance and expected utility principles conflict. - The Sleeping Beauty Problem challenges understanding of probability and belief through a coin flip experiment. - The Copenhagen interpretation suggests a cat in a box is both alive and dead until observed. - The thirder and halfer positions offer differing solutions to the Sleeping Beauty Problem. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### What is the Quantum Suicide thought experiment? The Quantum Suicide thought experiment is a hypothetical scenario where a scientist enters a box with a murder machine triggered by radioactive decay to test the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. ### What is the many-worlds interpretation in the context of the Quantum Suicide experiment? The many-worlds interpretation suggests that each possible outcome of a quantum event occurs in a separate, parallel universe. In the Quantum Suicide experiment, this means the scientist's consciousness would only exist in the universe where they survive. ### What is Newcomb's Paradox? Newcomb's Paradox is a thought experiment where you choose between taking one opaque box or two boxes, one of which is clear and contains $1,000. The opaque box contains either $0 or $1,000,000, determined by a reliable predictor. ### What are the two main strategies in Newcomb's Paradox? The two main strategies are taking both boxes, which follows the strategic dominance principle, and taking only the opaque box, which follows the expected utility principle. ### What is the Sleeping Beauty Problem? The Sleeping Beauty Problem is a thought experiment where Sleeping Beauty is put to sleep and woken up depending on the outcome of a coin flip. She is asked to determine the probability that the coin landed heads. ### What are the two main positions in the Sleeping Beauty Problem? The two main positions are the thirder position, which argues that Sleeping Beauty should believe there is a 1/3 chance the coin landed heads, and the halfer position, which argues that she should believe there is a 1/2 chance. ### What is the thirder position in the Sleeping Beauty Problem? The thirder position argues that Sleeping Beauty should believe there is a 1/3 chance the coin landed heads because, out of the three possible waking scenarios (Monday heads, Monday tails, Tuesday tails), two involve the coin landing tails. ### What is the halfer position in the Sleeping Beauty Problem? The halfer position argues that Sleeping Beauty should believe there is a 1/2 chance the coin landed heads because the coin flip is fair, and she has no new information upon waking. ### What is the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics? The Copenhagen interpretation suggests that a quantum system exists in all possible states simultaneously until it is observed, at which point it collapses into one definite state. ### What is the strategic dominance principle in game theory? The strategic dominance principle in game theory states that one course of action always has a better result than the other, regardless of what the other player chose. ## Sources - [Original Side Projects video: 3 Thought Experiments to Boggle the Mind](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=894vqDKd5RM) ## Related Coverage Simon Whistler https://sideprojects.pub/article/3-unsolved-ancient-engineering-mysteries https://sideprojects.pub/article/3-unsolved-ancient-engineering-mysteries Thu, 25 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT Engineering is an old profession. From the dawn of history, people have been using numbers to perform feats that otherwise might seem impossible – Aristotle is said to have lifted an entire ship out of a harbor by himself, using only pulleys and ropes. We've put people on the moon, and the bottom of the ocean, and we even have tiny balls of electricity running through wires to put this video on your screen. At the end of the day, it's all just a math problem, isn't it? Today, we'd like to delve a bit into the history of engineering – specifically, the murky history of it. The past is full of moments with gaps in the historical record, and engineering is no exception. We have buildings, contraptions, and even, as you'll see, sounds that defy easy explanation. These are some unsolved ancient engineering mysteries. ## The Baghdad Battery Starting our list off, we have the Baghdad Battery. In 1936, an Austrian archaeologist named Wilhelm Konig was excavating a site in Khujut Rabu, a village just outside of Baghdad in Iraq. There, in an old grave covered by a stone slab, he discovered a set of three artifacts: a clay pot, six inches tall; a hollow copper cylinder; and a single iron rod. These artifacts fit together, with the rod going into the copper cylinder, and the cylinder going into the jar. Konig was intrigued by this, and speculated that the object was an ancient prototype of a battery, a so-called galvanic cell, capable of holding an electric charge when all put together, along with an acidic agent like wine or vinegar. The fact that the iron appeared to be corroded, indicating such a liquid was present, seemed to support that claim. Konig hypothesized that the purpose of such a battery was for electroplating gold onto silver objects. Now, this hypothesis is near-universally rejected, for a number of reasons. Firstly, Konig made a number of claims that didn't line up, such as saying the artifacts were from the Parthian Empire, even though the style of the pottery was from the later Sassanid Persian Empire. Second, when the pieces are all together, there's no way to connect them to complete the electrical circuit, making it pretty useless as a battery. And third, even if it was possible to use them to electroplate gold and silver together, there are no known electroplated objects that have been found from the same time to support the hypothesis. So, why do we include it? What was it actually used for? Currently, the tentative explanation is that the objects were used to store scrolls, which were then buried with someone who died, perhaps a priest. Considering the jars were found in an old grave, along with several hundred beads and other artifacts, this seems plausible. Nevertheless, there's still a bit of intrigue here. The TV show *MythBusters* did an episode testing the Baghdad Battery, making recreations of it to see if it could actually produce an electric charge. And, it turns out, it could. It's still almost certain that whoever created it didn't know this, and couldn't use it for anything practical, meaning that whoever created the Baghdad Battery discovered batteries by accident. Massive coincidence or not, that's something you don't see very often. ## The Antikythera Mechanism In 1900, a Roman-era shipwreck was discovered by sponge divers off the coast of the Greek island of Antikythera. The Greek navy proceeded to explore the wreck, recovering various artifacts such as coins, statues, and more, dating back over two thousand years. One of those artifacts was a worn down hunk of corroded bronze, considerably ravaged by the passage of time. At first, the artifact was ignored in favor of the statues and coins, which were easier to decipher, and so it was placed in storage for over a year. But when they got around to examining it, it was revealed that there was more to this lump of waterlogged rust than met the eye. The Antikythera Mechanism is an ancient clockwork device, i.e. one powered by gears. Specifically, it's an orrery, a mechanical model of the Solar System that helps to predict the positions of the planets and the moons, decades in advance. It could tell you the phases of the moon and even predict when eclipses would happen. You put in a date, and it spits out the result. In short, it's a computer. A two-thousand year old analogue computer. Isn't that something? The original artifact is rather degraded, making it hard to decipher just by looking at it. It doesn't help that it's in several pieces from sitting on the bottom of the ocean for two millennia. But, just like the person who created this device, we have technology. Using various advanced methods, including x-ray imaging, researchers have managed to recreate what the device probably would've looked like, and how it worked. The device is currently believed to have consisted of 37 bronze gears, precisely measured to follow the movements of both the Sun and the Moon, even through the moon's irregular orbits. There's some speculation that the device also had an additional segment, for decoding the movements of the planets, as well – Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. The others weren't known about yet. The mechanism itself was quite complex. There was a dial for setting the date, and the whole machine was powered by a hand crank, which would turn a gear linked to the front dial. To set the year, one used two scales – one with 365 days and 12 months, and the other with 360 days and 12 zodiac signs. It had 360 because the old calendar used in the mechanism had 12 months of 30 days each, with 5 days left over. If you needed to clarify a date or a year, the device also included a handy built-in calendar on the back side. There's even separate dials to account for leap years; not automatically, amazing as that would've been. But they are there. So now to the big question: what's the story? Who made it, and where, and why, and how? All good questions, some with tentative answers. There's no definitive answer as to the creators, except that they were probably Greek scientists who were well-versed in astronomy. The device was found off an island in southern Greece, but its place of origin could variously be Rhodes, Corinth, northwestern Greece, or even a Greek colony in Sicily. Aside from that, the rest of the story is a bit shrouded in mystery. The research, however, is far from complete, and it's possible more of the puzzle will come together over time; experts are continuing to dive in the underwater spot where the device was originally found, hoping to discover more clues as to its origins. Soon, perhaps, we'll have more answers. ## Chichen Itza The last entry we have for this list is a bit unusual. Bear with us as we go to Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula, the home of the Mayan civilization. The Maya were a sophisticated culture, having comprehensive understandings of astronomy, architecture, and many other mathematical concepts. One of the greatest Mayan cities was Chichen Itza; it was one of the largest pre-Columbian cities in Mesoamerica and is today the site of many old Mayan monuments. One of those monuments is the Temple of Kukulcán, variously known as El Castillo, La Pirámide, or just Kukulcán. It's a step pyramid, built between the 8th and 12th century – not particularly ancient, mind you, but old all the same. The pyramid was a temple dedicated to the Mayan deity of, take a guess, Kukulcán, who bears a close resemblance to the Aztec god of Quetzalcoatl. But it's not so much the construction of the pyramid that intrigues. Rather, there's some ancillary things that pique one's interest. To start with, during the spring and autumn equinoxes, the sun flares off one side of the pyramid, casting shadows that appear to resemble snakes crawling down the side of the temple. Is that on purpose? The Mayans were known to construct temples, or parts of them, deliberately aligned or oriented based on celestial events. So it's possible, although it again could just be coincidence. However, there is another aspect of this pyramid that catches people's eyes. Or ears, in this case. You see, if you're standing in front of the pyramid, and then you clap your hands, the sound travels back to you sounding rather like the chirping of a bird; a quetzal, to be specific. The technical explanation is that the sound waves travel up the side of the pyramid, each one returning to the listener at a later time than before as it bounces off the limestone steps. Because the waves travel at an angle, and because of math, the later echoes decline in frequency, creating a chirping sound. An interesting effect, to be sure, but some researchers have argued that this characteristic is not accidental, and that the temple was built specifically to scatter and reflect sound waves in such a way to mimic the sound of a native bird. Such a claim is naturally difficult to prove, but if the Mayans worked out astronomy, it's possible they could work out sound waves in architecture, too, and they certainly had attention to detail when it came to buildings. Again, it could just be a massive coincidence, but who's to say? ## Key Takeaways - The Baghdad Battery, discovered in 1936, is an ancient artifact that may have been used to store scrolls. - The Antikythera Mechanism, found in 1900, is an ancient analogue computer that predicted celestial movements. - The Temple of Kukulcán in Chichen Itza produces a bird-like sound when clapped, possibly by design. - The Antikythera Mechanism's creators were likely Greek scientists with advanced knowledge of astronomy. - The Baghdad Battery could generate an electric charge, but its creators likely did not know its purpose. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### What is the Baghdad Battery? The Baghdad Battery is a set of three artifacts discovered in 1936 in Khujut Rabu, Iraq, consisting of a clay pot, a hollow copper cylinder, and an iron rod. It was hypothesized to be an ancient battery, but this theory is widely rejected. ### Who discovered the Baghdad Battery? The Baghdad Battery was discovered by an Austrian archaeologist named Wilhelm Konig in 1936. ### What was the original purpose of the Baghdad Battery? The original purpose of the Baghdad Battery is uncertain, but it is tentatively believed to have been used to store scrolls, which were then buried with someone who died, perhaps a priest. ### What is the Antikythera Mechanism? The Antikythera Mechanism is an ancient Greek analogue computer used to predict astronomical positions and eclipses. It was discovered in a Roman-era shipwreck off the coast of the Greek island of Antikythera in 1900. ### How does the Antikythera Mechanism work? The Antikythera Mechanism consists of 37 bronze gears that follow the movements of the Sun and the Moon. It includes dials for setting the date and a hand crank to power the device, with scales for 365 days and 12 months, and 360 days and 12 zodiac signs. ### Who created the Antikythera Mechanism? The creators of the Antikythera Mechanism are unknown, but they were likely Greek scientists well-versed in astronomy. The device's origin could be Rhodes, Corinth, northwestern Greece, or a Greek colony in Sicily. ### What is the Temple of Kukulcán? The Temple of Kukulcán, also known as El Castillo or La Pirámide, is a step pyramid located in Chichen Itza, Mexico. It was built between the 8th and 12th centuries and is dedicated to the Mayan deity Kukulcán. ### What is the significance of the sound effect at the Temple of Kukulcán? When you clap your hands in front of the Temple of Kukulcán, the sound echoes back as a chirping sound, resembling the call of a quetzal bird. Some researchers believe this effect was intentionally designed by the Mayans. ### What happens during the equinoxes at the Temple of Kukulcán? During the spring and autumn equinoxes, the sun casts shadows on the Temple of Kukulcán that appear to resemble snakes crawling down the side of the temple. This could be a deliberate design by the Mayans. ## Sources - [Original Side Projects video: 3 Unsolved Ancient Engineering Mysteries](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHJL60t1QPo) ## Related Coverage Simon Whistler https://sideprojects.pub/article/5-amazing-technologies-way-ahead-of-their-time https://sideprojects.pub/article/5-amazing-technologies-way-ahead-of-their-time Thu, 25 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT Previously on this channel we looked at ancient innovations that were well ahead of their time. From automatic doors to flushing toilets, the creativity and ingenuity of ancient peoples knew no bounds. Today we're going to be stepping a bit forward in time past the ancient world to look at even more inventions that were still well ahead of their time. ## Parachutes Anyone who has walked outside with an unzipped jacket on a particularly windy day can tell you that the idea of a parachute seems pretty simple and intuitive. Indeed, the first evidence of someone attempting to use a parachute dates back to 852 in Spain, but the attempt was extremely unsuccessful. It wasn't until Leonardo Da Vinci circa 1485 that we find the first sketch of the modern day parachute. There was at least one other drawing of a similar style parachute from the 1470s, but that design was flawed to the point of meaning certain death, so we'll give Da Vinci the credit on this one. The first modern parachute wouldn't be used until 300 years later in France. What made this invention so ahead of its time, other than the 300 year gap between Da Vinci's sketch and the parachute's actual invention, is that it was solving a problem that didn't even exist yet. There were no airplanes or helicopters. The first hot air balloon wouldn't even be invented until 300 years later, probably not so coincidentally the same year as the parachute. Even if Da Vinci built his parachute successfully, what purpose would it even serve as there was no means of air travel? Humans have always dreamed of flying, but this was not an aircraft or glider. It was a device with the sole purpose of allowing someone to fall straight down without injury. Theoretically it could be used to quickly travel from the top of the cliff to the bottom, but presumably the jumper would need to return home so they would now have to carry the massive parachute all the way back up. Of course, Da Vinci also drew designs for a helicopter, so perhaps he was solving a problem he thought was going to exist soon. While his helicopter design was far too heavy and would not have worked, the same cannot be said for his parachute. Despite skepticism from experts, a phrase you never want to hear when testing a parachute, daredevil Adrian Nicholas constructed Da Vinci's parachute and tested it in 2000. Not only did it work, be he claimed it was a smoother ride than traditional parachutes. ## Contact Lenses While Leonardo Da Vinci's work inspired this idea, French scientist Rene Descartes is the one to first create a pair of at least slightly functional contact lenses. Da Vinci had speculated that submerging a person's head in a bowl of water would alter their vision. This isn't exactly incorrect, but it's not very helpful, either. Rather than focusing on creating a wearable fish tank for the vision impaired, Da Vinci scaled down his idea to just a glass tube with a funnel to insert water, but this was still impractical and unwieldy. In 1636, inspired by Da Vinci's ideas, Descartes took the idea one step further. He proposed a small glass lens filled with water placed in direct contact with the cornea. This direct contact makes them the first official contact lenses, over 250 years before the invention of modern contact lenses. So did Descartes lenses work? Well, sort of. The glass used wasn't designed to improve vision, so the only thing altering the wearer's vision was the water itself. They helped a little bit, but they also created a problem: the glass was too thick for the wearer of these lenses to blink. Despite Descartes brilliant idea of lenses applied directly to the cornea to improve vision, the technology he needed just wasn't there yet. In order to efficiently cut and mold glass thin enough to make functional contact lenses Descartes would have needed to wait until advances in the glass industry that didn't take place until the 1880s. Even then, while glass contact lenses were effective, they were too uncomfortable to gain widespread popularity. It wasn't until the invention of synthetic plastics that contact lenses became comfortable enough for people to actually wear. In 1936, exactly 300 years after Descartes shoved lenses so big the wearer couldn't blink into someone's eyes, the first plastic contact lenses were manufactured. Within a year, thousands of people would have adopted the technology to replace their glasses. ## MP3 Players While the previous entries were ahead of their time by centuries, with the rate technology advances it's important to remember the difference that just a few years can make. Such is the case with Audio Highway's portable digital music player, the Listen Up. The idea came from CEO Nathan Schulhof who wanted the MP3 player to replace the popular Walkman and Discman portable devices. The device was first announced in 1996. It won the Innovation Award at the 1997 Consumer Electronics Show and the People's Choice Award at the 1998 Internet Showcase Conference. If you haven't noticed yet, there was one obvious problem with the Listen Up. If you told someone in 1996 that you had a brand new portable MP3 player, they would have stared at you blankly and asked "What's an MP3?" While the MP3 coding format was created in December of 1991, no one actually knew what it was yet. Napster wasn't created until 1999. Even for the OGs of music piracy, Scour Media Agent didn't exist until December of 1997. Schulhof had just invented a device that everyone would want, they just didn't know it yet. Just how good was the world's first MP3 player, you ask? Well, we'll never really know. It is estimated that, at most, only 25 total units of the Listen Up were ever produced. In addition to MP3s not being familiar technology yet, there were a few other problems that held the product back from success, despite critical acclaim. The Listen Up could only hold 60 minutes of music. That's not great, but at the same time it was about the length of a CD or cassette anyway so that shouldn't have been a dealbreaker. The retail price was also $299. Again not great, but while cheap portable CD players were only $100 in 1996, top of the line players were upwards of $250 so it's only a little bit of a stretch, and it would avoid skipping! So far things aren't looking incredible, but not enough to justify only 25 units ever being made. The key factors came from how the music was put onto the MP3 player. Obviously it would have to be connected to a computer, but the music was to be downloaded from the Audiowiz store, created by Audio Highway to facilitate use of the player. It was essentially iTunes before iTunes. That's incredibly forward thinking, but the store didn't have any music people wanted. Oh, and your enjoyment of the track list you curated would also be interrupted with 30 second advertisements. The iPod would launch only five years later, and of course be a massive commercial success, as was the iTunes store. With the exception of using the device the consumer paid for to interrupt the music they also paid for with advertisements, it really seems like Schulhof's ideas were almost entirely right. It's amazing what a few years difference makes. Had he only waited a few more years, larger harddrives would have been available to store more songs, he could have gotten more licensing deals for the Audiowiz store, and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) would have shutdown Napster. Instead, Schulhof will have to console himself with the fact that he got to sell his company and patents to Sony. ## Computers Charles Babbage, a British mathematician, inventor, engineer, and philosopher had a simple dream. He was sitting in his room at the Analytical Society, a club he and his friends had founded, checking over a table of logarithmic functions produced by the French government. He was annoyed by how riddled with mistakes the table was, and his dream was for the calculations to be done and printed by an infallible machine. Not at all a lofty goal for 1812. Babbage set to work on his design, and by 1821 it was ready for construction. The first computer, named the Difference Engine, was going to require 25,000 individual parts and weigh approximately 8,000 pounds. Eleven years later, Babbage would receive one seventh of the part of the machine that performed calculations. A year later, that would be all that remained of the world's first computer. In 1833, work ceased on the project over a disagreement regarding compensation, and 12,000 of the computer components were melted down for scrap. The entire ordeal was funded by the British government, who were none too happy about the colossal failure. The uncompleted project had cost them as much as 21 brand new steam locomotives. Considering the project was nowhere near completed at the time it ended, it does beg the question of just how many trains a computer would have been worth in the 1830s. With the Difference Engine project stalled out, Babbage set to work designing something new. Something essentially incomprehensible. It was later named the Analytical Engine. While the Differential Engine was designed specifically to calculate polynomials, the Analytical Engine was to be a general purpose, programmable computation machine. Essentially, a giant mechanical calculator that could perform any complex function. Babbage spent years on this design, but he never attempted to build it. The engines were powered by a crank, and the Difference Engine would have been able to be cranked by hand, but the Analytical Engine would have been so large and heavy it could only be cranked by steam powered machines. His newer engine may have been far too ambitious, but he learned a lot from it. From 1847-1849, Babbage set forth designed a new machine, the cleverly named Difference Engine No. 2. This updated design utilized a lot of the techniques he had developed while designing the Analytical Engine. His design was pared down from an unwieldy 25,000 different parts to only 8,000. Despite being able to eliminate much of the complexity and over two thirds of the moving parts, the new design was going to weigh approximately 10,000 pounds, 2,000 pounds greater than the more complex design. For reasons unknown, Babbage never attempted to build this final engine either. Babbage was 100 years ahead of his time with the first programmable computer not being developed until 1938. So why did he fail? Babbage was independently wealthy, had high social standing, had the backing and funding of the British government, and had access to the best engineers available. With so much time and money invested, how could Babbage never see one of his engines built to completion? There are a myriad of small contributing factors, but ultimately the failure all comes down to a single reason: Charles Babbage was kind of a douchebag whose brilliance was matched only by his ability to alienate people. It's a shame too, because his design worked perfectly. In 2002, construction on the Difference Engine No. 2 was completed by a private party who then lent it to the Computer History Museum. The 10,000 pound machine of brass, iron, and steel can be programmed with a polynomial function and will calculate it with total accuracy to 31 places, then both print out a copy of the answer on paper with ink so the user can see the result as well as imprinting the answer into plaster to be used as a printing plate for tables. It's a remarkable feat of mathematics and engineering, and it begs the question of what the world would have looked like had construction completed 153 years prior when it was first designed. ## Virtual Boy For as long as reality has existed, humans have sought a way to escape it. Be it plays, movies, music, or any other form of entertainment, escapism has been a central driving force in our motivation to seek out these activities. As a result, few things have been more appealing since the explosion of digital technology than the dream of leaving reality, even if momentarily, to enter an alternate, virtual reality. Enter the Nintendo Virtual Boy. Except, not really. The virtual reality users were actually being offered was a red, monochromatic nightmare. The wearable headpiece cost $180 at release, roughly the same price as a Super Nintendo system, but the experience fell fall short not only of what was advertised, but of basic expectations of video games at the time. The price would have been a bargain for a better experience, but the system was riddled with problems. One of the first things people noticed in demos was that moving your head didn't do anything while using the Virtual Boy. A wearable piece of technology that covers your vision and is billed as virtual reality has a basic expectation that, should you look around, what you are seeing will change. All the user would see was poor quality graphics, similar to a Tiger handheld electronic game of the time. The gameplay experience offered was nothing different than a normal video game, either. The user still had to use a game controller, meaning that the only change this offered from normal gaming was that the screen was taped to your face for no apparent benefit. Not only was there no apparent benefit, there was very apparent detriment. Reviewers and consumers alike complained that the uncomfortable headset combined with the monochromatic display resulted in dizziness, nausea, and headaches. Several prominent scientists stated that there could be more serious long-term effects, and some industry professionals speculated that extended use could result in permanent brain damage. That is extraordinarily farfetched and really just baseless speculation, but it's still not the sort of publicity a company wants. Flash forward to modern day, and the Oculus Quest 2 has sold over 10 million units, and it's not even the only VR headset on the market. Nintendo has long had a history of innovation and trying new things while other companies stick to a formula, but unfortunately in this instance their ambition had far outpaced the technology available. To their credit, while it was a product ahead of its time, Nintendo has ever tried to spin the Virtual Boy as anything other than what it was: a complete a total failure. ## Key Takeaways - Leonardo Da Vinci's 1485 parachute sketch was centuries ahead of its time. - Rene Descartes created the first contact lenses in 1636, but technology limited their use. - The Listen Up MP3 player in 1996 was ahead of its time, but MP3s were not yet popular. - Charles Babbage's 1821 Difference Engine was a functional computer design 100 years early. - The Nintendo Virtual Boy in 1995 was a failed attempt at virtual reality gaming. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### Who was the first to sketch the modern-day parachute? Leonardo Da Vinci sketched the first modern-day parachute around 1485. ### When was the first modern parachute used? The first modern parachute was used 300 years after Da Vinci's sketch, in France. ### Who created the first functional contact lenses? French scientist Rene Descartes is credited with creating the first functional contact lenses in 1636. ### What was the main issue with Descartes' contact lenses? The glass used was too thick for the wearer to blink, making them impractical despite their innovative design. ### What was the Listen Up and when was it announced? The Listen Up was a portable digital music player announced in 1996 by Audio Highway. ### What were the main issues with the Listen Up MP3 player? The Listen Up could only hold 60 minutes of music, had a high retail price, and the music was downloaded from a store that lacked popular tracks and interrupted playback with advertisements. ### Who designed the first computer and what was it called? Charles Babbage designed the first computer, named the Difference Engine, in 1821. ### Why did the construction of Babbage's Difference Engine fail? The project was halted due to a disagreement over compensation and 12,000 of the computer components were melted down for scrap. ### What was the Nintendo Virtual Boy and why did it fail? The Nintendo Virtual Boy was a wearable headpiece that offered a red, monochromatic gaming experience. It failed due to poor graphics, discomfort, and health concerns. ### What was the main criticism of the Nintendo Virtual Boy? The main criticisms included dizziness, nausea, headaches, and speculation about potential long-term health effects from extended use. ## Sources - [Original Side Projects video: 5 Amazing Technologies That Were WAY Ahead of Their Time](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvdumyYjiw8) ## Related Coverage Simon Whistler https://sideprojects.pub/article/5-awful-disasters-with-good-consequences https://sideprojects.pub/article/5-awful-disasters-with-good-consequences Thu, 25 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT For as long as the earth has been around, there have been natural disasters. However, nowadays, there is a key difference: there are humans who can get caught in the crossfire. But although they are often tragic, these natural disasters sometimes lead to a surprising turn in human events. For example, the flood that created a capital city; earthquakes that triggered not one, but two, theological transformations; a volcanic eruption that led to an iconic literary monster; and a hurricane improved people's lives. All, coincidentally, are included in this article. ## St. Lucia's Flood, 1287 The Netherlands is no stranger to floods; in fact, its name literally translates to "low country" or "low-lying lands." Today, approximately one-fourth of the country is below sea level and two-thirds is vulnerable to flooding. For the Dutch, water getting into places where water shouldn't be is as dependable as death and taxes. Understandably, this means that the Netherlands is also home to some of the most elaborate and well-engineered water management systems. A combination of sand dunes, floodgates, dams, and 22,000 kilometers or 13,670 miles of dykes protects the coastline from the hungry waves of the North Sea. But even in a place this prepared, sometimes, the waters get through. And when they do, the results are deadly. In December 1287, one of the deadliest floods in European history swept through the Netherlands, and in its aftermath, the shape of the country and its future would be forever changed. It was the night of December 13. Earlier that evening, the Dutch had celebrated St. Lucia's Day. This involved dressing up as the early Christian martyr, lighting candles, eating sweets, and generally enjoying the kickoff to the Christmas season. But as the festivities ended and people headed off to bed, disaster brewed in the North Atlantic. A low-pressure system, likely originating as a nor'easter on the American east coast, had worked its way across the Atlantic. Along the journey, the constant spinning of the earth had coaxed it into a spiral pattern. From there it grew larger and faster, creating a cyclone that was headed right for the Dutch coast. The winds themselves were a problem, but the St. Lucia's Day Flood wouldn't be so memorable if not for its impeccable timing: the coastal waters were at high tide. As a result, the energized mass of wind and water smashed past the sea walls and water flooded into the Dutch lowlands at terrifying speed. Areas in the prosperous north country were completely flooded. Entire towns were literally wiped off the map overnight, some never to reappear again. Records from the time period estimated the death toll was between 50,000 and 80,000 people, and the actual number could be higher. It was one of the deadliest floods of Europe's entire Medieval Era. But the floodwaters did more than take people's lives; it reshaped the country. Roughly halfway up the coastline was a small inlet that, in Roman times, had been a lake. Today this is called the Zuiderzee, which means "southern sea." It was originally created during the All Saint's Flood of 1170, but it was nowhere near the size that it would become during the St. Lucia's Flood. Nonetheless, a modest village called Amsterdam quickly became a trade hub when it suddenly became shoreline property after the All Saint's Flood. However, this upstart town could never hope to compete with the more established commercial towns on the coast. That is, until 1287. Not only did large swaths of land suddenly become water that could potentially be used for shipping, but Amsterdam's stiffest competitors were destroyed in the flood. This natural disaster had changed the course of Dutch history. The city of Amsterdam continued to grow, and it became the undisputed world capital of commerce and culture during the Dutch Golden Age. Today, it remains the capital city of the Netherlands and is protected by one of the most elaborate floodwater management systems in the world. The St. Lucia Flood reshaped trade routes and human settlement for centuries after the floodwaters receded. It made its presence known through folklore, public building projects, and, of course, in the city of Amsterdam. Even eight hundred years later, we can still feel its effects on world history. ## Cusco Earthquake, 1650 Around one o'clock in the afternoon on March 31st, 1650, all of the church bells in the city of Cusco, Peru, suddenly began to ring. The city is located high in the Andes Mountains, about 3,400 meters or 11,000 feet above sea level. These dramatic peaks were created when the South American tectonic plate crashed into the Nazca plate approximately ten million years ago. Every year, about seven centimeters of the oceanic Nazca plate is dragged under the continent. This subduction has created some of the most powerful earthquakes in recorded history. Honestly, the city of Cusco had enough problems without adding seismic activity to the list. The area had been occupied since around 900 AD, and each generation had added their own touches. Until recently, the city had been the capital of the Incan Empire and featured a golden temple dedicated to Inti, the sun god. Then, of course, a group of Spanish conquistadors showed up, promptly murdered the Incan Emperor and declared themselves in charge. This meant everyone had to be Catholic now. So, the temple for sun god was torn down and a church was built in its place. However, this conversion-at-gunpoint strategy wasn't as effective as planned. In 1650, the Incan religious beliefs were still alive and well, something that the Spanish colonial government found to be highly annoying. But a natural disaster was about to change everything. On March 31st, 1650, a powerful earthquake ripped through the city of Cusco. Today, it would be considered at least a 7.5 on the Richter scale. As the ground beneath the city rumbled and shook, the church bells began to swing wildly in their towers, as if they were calling the faithful to Mass on a Thursday afternoon. The initial quake lasted only two or three minutes. The devastation, however, was widespread. Almost every building in the city center was damaged or totally destroyed, including the vast majority of its many churches. But the few remaining Incan buildings were largely fine. The Inca, who'd lived in the Andes for centuries, had created sturdy trapezoidal structures that fitted heavy stones together without mortar so the walls would be able to slide around. This made them much more resilient to earthquakes than their Spanish counterparts. Now, the indigenous people might have taken this as a sign that the Spanish didn't know what they were doing. After all, their buildings were still standing and the Catholic churches were in ruins. Perhaps Christianity was not all it was cracked up to be. But surprisingly, that was not what happened. The earthquake, it turned out, was not the end. Hundreds of aftershocks rippled through the city, further damaging the buildings and terrifying the city's population. For many people, it would have felt like the earth would never be still again. A painting made shortly after the event depicted people frantically praying, kissing the ground, and pulling items out of the buildings. As the city was hit with wave after wave of seismic activity, the local religious leaders decided they were overdue for some divine intervention. One of the buildings that was still standing was Cusco Cathedral, the center of Catholic religious life in the city. Within its walls were a number of important religious artifacts, including a painting of the Virgin Mary that would hopefully solve their earthquake problem. The image of Nuestra Señora de los Remedios was brought all the way from Spain and already had a reputation of performing miracles, including a spontaneous healing. Hopefully, it could do it again. The priests dragged the painting to the doors of the Cathedral. Shortly afterward, the tremors stopped. A surprising small number of casualties were accounted for. Spanish colonial officials credited the painting. But the people of Cusco knew better. They were fixated on another religious symbol, one that had also been called upon to stop the aftershocks. It was a life-sized statue of Christ on the cross, which, according to legend, had been processed through the streets in a desperate attempt to stop the endless quaking. But this was no ordinary crucifix. It had been made in Cusco by local artisans, and it has a distinctly indigenous twist. The face and hair texture looked Incan, not European. It was still Jesus, sure, but it was an Incan Jesus. The message was clear: the locals were willing to adopt Catholicism, but only on their own terms. The Spanish painting of the Virgin Mary was out, and Incan Jesus was in. The crucifix became known as El Señor de los Temblores, or Taytacha Temblores in the local Quechua language, which translates to "Lord of the Earthquakes." From that day forward, this crucifix was revered as a holy object that had miraculously stopped the Cusco earthquake. Today, it remains one of the most iconic crucifixes in the world. With so much of the city destroyed, the Spanish decided to rebuild Cusco as an ideal colonial city. This meant building lots of Catholic churches full of Catholic art. However, most of the city's artists were indigenous and wanted to mix their own culture and beliefs into their work. The Spanish didn't like it, but the art was too good to pass up. As a result, the earthquake ushered in a new visual movement called the Andean Baroque that combined Catholic subjects with indigenous imagery and practices. And nowhere was this new combination religion more evident than in the yearly parade of El Señor de los Temblores through the city streets. Originally, this happened on March 31st, the anniversary of the earthquake. Today, it happens on the Monday of Holy Week. The statue is dressed in an elaborate sudario and draped in red ñuk'chu flowers. Songs in both Spanish and Quechua accompany the procession through the city, a sign of the mixed cultural heritage that continues to this day. Without the earthquake, the local indigenous population might never have embraced Catholicism, and the Spanish colonial government wouldn't have had to tolerate the hybrid art that resulted from it. And there definitely wouldn't be a life-sized statue of a dark-skinned Jesus paraded through Cusco every year as part of the lead-up to Easter. ## Lisbon Earthquake, 1755 It started out as a usual holiday in Lisbon. This medieval city was the capital of the Portuguese Empire, which stretched from the Azore Islands to Brazil, Africa, and India. An influx of Brazilian gold meant that some of the city's churches had gotten an upgrade, but Lisbon mostly remained the same confusing jumble of narrow streets and crowded houses familiar in previous centuries. Portugal also remained a devoutly Catholic country. It's estimated that in 1750, the country had around 200,000 priests for a population of less than three million people. The country's prime minister, the Marquis de Pombal, found this incredibly frustrating. He wanted to modernize Portugal and make it competitive on the world stage, but all these old-fashioned priests and aristocrats kept getting in his way. The King, Joseph the First, was absolutely no help. If it wasn't riding, playing cards, or going to the theater, he wasn't interested. The morning of Saturday, November 1st changed everything. It was All Saint's Day, a religious holiday that started with a morning Mass and was followed up with visiting friends and family or paying respects at a local graveyard. At nine o'clock in the morning, the faithful were dutifully sitting in the pews of the many churches. At about nine-thirty, the ground began to rumble. At first, it sounded like nothing more than an approaching horse-drawn carriage. But the noise grew louder and more insistent, and the ground began to shake. At nine-forty, gigantic fissures ripped open the ground in the city center and all of the church bells began to ring. Minutes later, those same bell towers collapsed onto their faithful congregations. Within about six minutes, thirty thousand people were dead. Those who survived the initial quake ran for their lives as the city crumbled around them. Many fled to the open waterfront, where they stared in astonishment as the Atlantic coastline receded before their eyes, revealing a muddy plain dotted with shipwrecks. Some understood that this meant they should run. Most, however, did not. The tsunami hit the city forty minutes after the earthquake. The initial wave is estimated to have been six meters tall, which is almost twenty feet. It was soon followed by two more. Hundreds of people drowned, many of them refugees that had climbed onto ships in an effort to get away. And all across the city, overturned hearths and votive candles lit for the holiday set fire to the wooden buildings, and soon the flames consumed the wreckage. The cumulative disasters destroyed 85% of Portugal's capital. The 1755 Lisbon earthquake is widely considered to be the strongest seismic event ever to hit Europe. It was at least a 7.7 on the Richter scale, potentially as high as a 9. The source of the quake was underwater, along the city's Atlantic coast. Exactly which fault or how many caused this huge earthquake is still up for debate. However, the now highly traumatized survivors didn't know anything about fault lines or Richter scales. The usual explanation for earthquakes was that they were God expressing His wrath. But the disaster had happened on a holy day, as the faithful were dutifully worshiping at Mass. Respectfully, what more could God want? In the vacuum that followed the crisis, the Marquis de Pombal swooped in to take control. He needed Lisbon up and running again as soon as possible, and he had the organizational know-how to make it happen. All able-bodied adults were not allowed to flee the city; instead they had to help put out the fires, dig survivors out of the rubble, and gather the dead to be buried at sea. The Marquis de Pombal also sent out a survey to every Portuguese parish to figure out basic facts like when the earthquake began, how long it lasted, and what were the casualties. There was no mention of God. The Marquis planned to use this disaster to drag the city of Lisbon, and all of Portugal behind it, into the modern era. He wanted wide, modern streets and earthquake-proof buildings. In his opinion, church fearmongering and guilting was only going to get in the way. Around this time, Europe was moving away from explanations of the natural world that were offered by the Catholic Church. Instead, people were making their own observations in a movement widely called the Enlightenment. Prior to 1755, the idea that earthquakes occurred naturally had floated around some geological circles. Now, everyone was, suddenly, very interested. And since it was the era of the printing press, mentioning the earthquake was a surefire way to publish a bestseller. This was still the 1700s, so the theories were not exactly accurate. One posited that it was large bubbles of underground gas suddenly breaking free. Another proposed it was electricity. But however inaccurate, they agreed that this was something natural. It wasn't the wrath of God, and the people of Lisbon had done nothing to deserve this. The Church, obviously, pushed back. A Jesuit priest named Gabriel Malagrida published a pamphlet titled *An Opinion On the True Cause of the Earthquake* that used no uncertain terms: "Learn, O Lisbon, that the destroyers of our houses, palaces, churches, and convents, the cause of the death of so many people and of the flames that devoured such vast treasures, are your abominable sins, and not comets, stars, vapors and exhalations, and similar natural phenomena." This attitude pissed off a lot of people, including the Marquis de Pombal. He had been dying for a chance to get rid of the priests that kept ruining his modernization plans, and finally, it looked like the people were on his side. So, without further ado, he kicked all Jesuit clergymen out of the royal court. It was a move that transparently solidified his own power, but it also sent a message: the age of religious explanations was over. Science, and what it said about the natural world, was here to stay. ## Tambora Eruption, 1815 On April 10th, 1815, a small island in what is now Indonesia changed the course of history. Sumbawa is a medium-sized island on the eastern side of the archipelago. It was conveniently located along trade routes that connected various islands. This prime real estate and excellent natural resources meant that it was constantly getting invaded. In 1815, the latest conqueror was the Dutch East India Company, who discovered that coffee grew surprisingly well along the slopes of the island's largest mountain. In hindsight, this should have been a warning. The high-quality soil was the result of volcanic eruptions. Mount Tambora was, in fact, a ticking time bomb. The volcano was an impressive 4,300 meters or 14,000 feet tall. It was one of the largest peaks in Indonesia, an area that sits along the Ring of Fire. Here, the Pacific Tectonic plate rubs into other, smaller plates, in this case, the Australian and the Sunda plate. All this crashing around makes Indonesia one of the most seismically active places in the world. But despite all the activity, Tambora hadn't erupted in approximately one thousand years. It turned out that she was saving all her energy for a one-in-a-lifetime demonstration of her power. After a small throat-clearing eruption in 1812, the volcano rumbled again. This time, it was on the evening of April 5th, 1815. All across Indonesia, British colonial officials tried to figure out why someone was firing a cannon. Some dispatched soldiers to repel imaginary invaders, while others sent out boats to look for a vessel in distress. Little did they know that the cannon was actually a volcano, and the explosions were only going to get louder. The next morning, ash began to fall on East Java, which was two islands to the west. Over the next few days, the cannon noises continued. Then, around 7pm on April 10th, 1815, it was time for the main event. Observers from around thirty kilometers or eighteen miles away saw three huge plumes of flame explode from the mountain's peak. They merged into an enormous column of fire that rose to a height of 43 kilometers or 26 miles. Minutes later, the whole mountain seemed to glow with liquid fire. Volcanic ash and pumice began pelting down on Sumbawa and nearby islands. Volcanic wind uprooted trees and other objects. Approximately 1,200 meters or 4,000 feet of rock was blasted off the mountain's height in less than three hours. As the enormous eruption column collapsed at around 10pm, pyroclastic flows roared down the sides of the volcano, destroying everything in its path. A village, later called the Pompeii of the East, was completely buried. A massive crater formed in the mountain's summit, six to seven kilometers or about four miles in diameter. Over eight hundred miles away, the British Lieutenant-Governor of Java wasn't initially too concerned. He'd already gotten used to the volcano noises and decided to go to bed as normal. However, when he woke up the next morning, he realized that it was still dark out and he had to light candles just to find his way around. Understandably, the Lieutenant-Governor wanted to know what the heck was going on. So, he started asking around and keeping a record. In the groundbreaking 1830 book *Principles of Geology*, the scientist Charles Lyell wrote, "but for the accidental presence of Sir Stamford Raffles, then governor of Java, we should scarcely have heard in Europe of this tremendous catastrophe." Because of the limited documentation, it's hard to know exactly what happened during the eruption. Some estimate that 10,000 people on Sumbawa died from the pyroclastic flows and poison gases, others think it was 11,000 or 12,000. As for the amount of volcanic ash that was thrown into the air, it could be anywhere from 100 to 150 cubic kilometers or 24 to 36 cubic miles. However, everyone agrees that the Tambora eruption was absolutely massive. It's one of a handful that holds a 7 on the volcanic explosivity index. That's four times bigger than Krakatoa and a hundred times bigger than Mount St. Helens. This is the kind of eruption that has consequences for the entire world. Since the eruption column reached into the stratosphere, much of the volcanic ash was injected directly into the earth's atmosphere. From there, it was carried far and wide across the globe. The ash particles shaded the earth, much like a tree provides a cool respite on a sunny day. However, in this case, the tree can cover an entire continent, and we have all learned far too well what happens when the earth's temperature changes by just a few degrees. The year after the eruption, the ash cloud reached Europe and North America. There, 1816 was known as "The Year Without a Summer." The earth's average temperature dropped by three degrees celsius. Crops died from unseasonably late frosts and a lack of sunlight. Food prices climbed and famines broke out across Europe, Canada, and the United States. In Virginia, the July 4th Independence Day celebrations had to be moved inside. Over ten thousand people chose to leave the chilly state of Vermont and move west, and soon after, Indiana and Illinois officially joined the U.S. In Ireland, it rained for nearly eight weeks straight. In Germany, so many horses died from starvation that an inventor came up with a new form of transportation: the bicycle. But perhaps the most enduring result of this gloomy and cold summer comes from a group of friends attempting to enjoy a holiday on the shores of Lake Geneva in Switzerland. The group was led by the famous British poet Lord Byron. Since the weather wasn't cooperating with their plans of boating and laying in the sun, he suggested that they all sit by the fire and tell ghost stories. When they exhausted the pre-existing supply, Lord Byron suggested they each create their own. The winner of this informal contest was a guest's eighteen-year-old girlfriend. She told the story of a scientist with a desire to create life, only to be horrified when he finally succeeded. It was the perfect scary story for the rainy summer. In the next few years, the couple got married, the author changed her name to Mary Shelley, and the first edition of *Frankenstein* was published in London. At the time, no one knew why the summer of 1816 had been so gloomy. No one yet understood how a volcano on the other side of the world had the power to change the weather. However, we now know that it was all connected: the ash in the atmosphere, the surprisingly cold temperatures, and the challenge Lord Byron gave his creative friends as they were all trapped indoors. It was a chain of events that went from catastrophe to immortal literary creation. ## Hurricane Katrina, 2005 In 2005, a cataclysmic event offered an opportunity for a natural experiment. These are moments that forever change the way a group of people live their lives. They offer a rare opportunity to study a phenomenon that would be too difficult, or too unethical, to carry out in a lab. Famous examples include the Dutch Famine Study in World War II and John Snow's "ghost map" during the London cholera outbreak in 1854. Today, these events are remembered both for their tragedy and the scientific breakthroughs they inspired. In mid-August in 2005, a storm began brewing in the Caribbean, growing in force as it hit the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico. From there, the storm ballooned into a Category 5 hurricane. The screens of American weather services lit up with images of a huge spiraling white cloud with a dark, black eye at its center. Soon, the whole world would know about Hurricane Katrina. Directly in the storm's path was the major U.S. city of New Orleans, which was home to almost half a million people. Many of the poorest residents were living in neighborhoods built on drained swampland that was below sea level. Many did not want to leave their homes; others had nowhere to go. On Saturday, August 27th, the city issued a voluntary evacuation order and residents slowly began making their way out of the city. Approximately 200,000 people did not have access to a car, so the plan was to provide buses. About 100,000 people planned to stay. Nineteen hours before the storm hit, New Orleans issued its first-ever mandatory evacuation order. But there weren't nearly as many buses as the city expected, and many of the licensed bus drivers had evacuated with their families. So instead of fighting through the traffic that was clogging routes out of the city, the limited drivers dropped people at emergency shelters like the local football stadium known as the Superdome. Everyone braced for impact. Hurricane Katrina surged into the coast with wind speeds of 125 miles or 200 meters per hour. In nearby Mississippi, there was a storm surge of 28 feet or 8.5 meters of water. But for a moment, it almost looked like New Orleans would be spared. Electricity, sewage, water, and communication had all been knocked out by the storm, but the city was largely untouched by the wind and rain. However, the worst was yet to come. As the city woke up on Tuesday, August 30th, they realized there was a problem. The storm might be over, but the city's many levees built to hold back frequent floodwaters had been overwhelmed by the storm surge. Areas of the city that were below sea level were slowly and steadily filling with water. By the end of the day, eighty percent of the city was flooded. Those who were able to, climbed onto the roof of their home to avoid the rising water. Those who couldn't, drowned. As the rest of the country slowly realized that New Orleans was in crisis, the survivors desperately searched for food and water. It was clear that everyone just needed to just get out. On September 1st, the city's mayor told a local radio station, "I need 500 buses…get every doggone Greyhound bus line in the country and get their asses moving to New Orleans." Five days after the storm, a mass evacuation effort began moving everyone out of the city. The survivors were sent all across the country until a plan could be made for their return. Overall, the storm displaced over one million people that would have otherwise stayed in the New Orleans area. And this is where the natural experiment begins. See, there had long been a theory that poverty could be alleviated simply by moving poor people to less poor areas. However, telling a bunch of poor people that you are forcibly relocating them in the name of science is not only unethical, it puts the researcher at risk of bodily harm. As a result, no one was able to test it. Before Hurricane Katrina, 1 in 4 residents of New Orleans lived below the poverty line. Now those people were spread out across the country in all kinds of different neighborhoods. It was a perfect chance to see if the theory would work. In 2014, the National Bureau of Economic Research published a paper that analyzed the tax returns of people who had been displaced by the storm. To their surprise, the Katrina victims had higher earnings and were less likely to receive unemployment benefits. Further analysis showed that while higher income (and mostly white) residents quickly returned to the city, lower income (and mostly black) residents hesitated, or did not return at all. Those who chose not to return mostly settled in other parts of Louisiana or the neighboring state of Texas. These areas had a lower poverty rate, greater access to higher education, and better schools. Ten years after the hurricane, approximately forty percent of evacuees were living somewhere else. For some people, they had no other choice. But for many, life outside New Orleans was too nice to pass up. In a study on how the storm affected the lives of low income young adults, interviewers asked their subjects about the most significant negative event of their lives. A few said the hurricane, but most listed things from the day-to-day trauma of living in poverty. When asked about positive events, seven people said that "the most important good thing" to ever happen to them was Hurricane Katrina. Without the hurricane, it would have been impossible to study whether or not moving to opportunity can affect generational poverty. Through all the devastation, there was now a glimmer of hope for a better future. ## Conclusion Disasters are often remembered for the devastation they cause, whether it's taking human lives or the costly damages. But sometimes, natural disasters can have surprising consequences. They can change the course of human events in a way that no one saw coming. In fact, scientists are still analyzing past disasters to better understand how they have affected us today. It turns out the earth itself has quite the role to play, and for that reason, we are constantly trying to understand its next move. ## Key Takeaways - The St. Lucia's Flood of 1287 reshaped the Netherlands, turning Amsterdam into a major trade hub. - The 1650 Cusco earthquake led to a blend of Incan and Catholic beliefs, creating the iconic crucifix El Señor de los Temblores. - The 1755 Lisbon earthquake accelerated the shift from religious to scientific explanations of natural events. - The 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora caused global climate changes, inspiring Mary Shelley's 'Frankenstein'. - Hurricane Katrina in 2005 provided a natural experiment, showing that relocating from poverty-stricken areas can improve economic outcomes. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### What was the impact of the St. Lucia’s Flood on Amsterdam? The St. Lucia’s Flood in 1287 reshaped the Netherlands and transformed Amsterdam into a major trade hub. The flood destroyed competing commercial towns and created new waterways, allowing Amsterdam to become the capital city of the Netherlands and a world capital of commerce and culture during the Dutch Golden Age. ### How did the Cusco Earthquake of 1650 affect religious practices in the region? The Cusco Earthquake led to a theological transformation where the indigenous population embraced Catholicism but on their own terms. A life-sized statue of Christ with Incan features, known as El Señor de los Temblores, became revered as a holy object that stopped the earthquake. This event also led to the development of the Andean Baroque art movement, which combined Catholic subjects with indigenous imagery and practices. ### What were the long-term effects of the Lisbon Earthquake of 1755? The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 led to a shift away from religious explanations for natural disasters towards scientific understanding. It also marked the beginning of the Enlightenment in Portugal, with the Marquis de Pombal using the disaster to modernize Lisbon and reduce the influence of the Catholic Church. ### How did the Tambora Eruption in 1815 influence literature? The Tambora Eruption caused a global climate anomaly known as the "Year Without a Summer" in 1816. This led to a group of friends, including Lord Byron, gathering in Switzerland and telling ghost stories, which inspired Mary Shelley to write the novel "Frankenstein." ### What was the impact of Hurricane Katrina on poverty in New Orleans? Hurricane Katrina displaced over one million people from New Orleans, providing a natural experiment to test the theory of moving poor people to less poor areas. Studies showed that displaced residents had higher earnings and were less likely to receive unemployment benefits, suggesting that relocation can alleviate generational poverty. ### How did the St. Lucia’s Flood change the landscape of the Netherlands? The St. Lucia’s Flood in 1287 reshaped the Netherlands by transforming a small inlet into the Zuiderzee, a large body of water. This flood also destroyed many towns and created new waterways, significantly altering the country's geography and trade routes. ### What architectural changes occurred in Cusco after the 1650 earthquake? After the 1650 earthquake, the Spanish decided to rebuild Cusco as an ideal colonial city with many Catholic churches. This led to the development of the Andean Baroque art movement, which blended Catholic subjects with indigenous imagery and practices, reflecting the hybrid cultural heritage of the region. ### How did the Lisbon Earthquake affect the power dynamics in Portugal? The Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 provided the Marquis de Pombal with an opportunity to reduce the influence of the Catholic Church and modernize Portugal. He used the disaster to implement wide, modern streets and earthquake-proof buildings, marking a shift towards Enlightenment ideals and away from religious explanations for natural events. ### What were the global consequences of the Tambora Eruption in 1815? The Tambora Eruption in 1815 caused global climate changes, leading to the "Year Without a Summer" in 1816. This resulted in widespread crop failures, famines, and unusual weather patterns across Europe, North America, and other regions, significantly impacting agriculture and human activities. ### How did Hurricane Katrina provide an opportunity for scientific research? Hurricane Katrina displaced over one million people from New Orleans, allowing researchers to study the effects of relocating poor individuals to less impoverished areas. This natural experiment provided valuable insights into how moving to opportunity can affect generational poverty and improve economic outcomes. ## Sources - [Original Side Projects video: Natural Disasters With the Most Unexpected Consequences](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZHYvm_X3dU) ## Related Coverage Simon Whistler https://sideprojects.pub/article/5-countries-that-might-soon-exist https://sideprojects.pub/article/5-countries-that-might-soon-exist Thu, 25 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT Following the end of the Cold War, there were dozens of newly recognized countries across the world, mostly in the former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. Since then, however, things have slowed down quite a bit. In the 21st century, only a few new countries have been largely recognized, with the most recent being South Sudan in 2011. However, there are still many areas across the world where the people seek to gain independence and recognition as a sovereign state. Today we'll be looking at five such areas that might soon become new countries. ## Bougainville Of all the areas we'll be looking at today, Bougainville is the one most likely to become a new country in the immediate future. Theoretically it's a done deal, though it is still pending parliamentary approval. Although Bougainville has been populated for nearly 30,000 years, its quest for independent recognition begins with its colonization by the Germans in the 1880s. After all, before the island was colonized, they had nobody to declare independence from. The German Empire had laid claim to New Guinea, and both they and the British Empire had their eyes on the neighbouring Solomon Islands. An agreement was reached between the nations by which they divided the Solomon Islands amongst themselves, with Bougainville becoming part of German New Guinea. After the conclusion of World War I, German New Guinea became occupied by the Australians, and a League of Nations mandate officially placed the Territory of New Guinea under Australian control. Bougainville had mainly been important because of its strategic location, but in 1969 it was discovered to hold one of the largest deposits of copper ore in the world. Bougainville's ore deposits contain roughly 1 billion tons of copper and 12 million ounces of gold. Bougainville Copper Limited was created to mine the ore, and the island was flooded with workers from offshore who worked in the mines. But throughout this period and the previous decades, Australia had slowly been preparing Papua New Guinea for self governance and independence, a rather peaceful process that ended in 1975 when Papua New Guinea officially gained its independence. However, Bougainville shared little in common with the Papua New Guinea mainland. They were also resentful of the copper mine, which they essentially saw as the exploitation of their home. Bougainville Copper Ltd made up nearly 50% of the nation's export revenue, with much of the money going directly to the government of Papua New Guinea, who owned 20% of the company. The indigenous population of Bougainville received only about 1% of the total profit from the mine. Between the destruction to the environment, refusal to share financial benefits of the mine, and what were perceived as negative societal changes from all the mainland miners coming to work on their island, the people of Bougainville began to seek secession from Papua New Guinea. Government forces kept suppressing activity from activists who sought independence, finally resulting in a decade long civil war from 1988 through 1998. Over the course of the conflict it's estimated that between 15,000 and 20,000 Bougainvilleans were killed, which was nearly 10% of the island's total population. Only 300 members of the Papua New Guinea Defense Force were killed, though thousands were injured. New Zealand helped to broker peace between the Bougainville and the mainland. The formal peace agreement called for the creation of an Autonomous Bougainville Government, which was fully established in 2000. Another provision of the peace agreement was that, within 20 years of the autonomous government being created, they would be allowed to hold a non-binding referendum for independence from Papua New Guinea. That vote finally took place in December of 2019, and the results were overwhelming. An astonishing 98% of Bougainvilleans voted for independence, with 87% voter turnout. Although this was a nonbinding referendum, the governments have been in talks on how to make Bougainville's independence a reality. Bougainville's president set a deadline of 2027 for the transition to be complete, though the independence vote is still awaiting ratification from the Papua New Guinea parliament. Although the Papua New Guinea government does seem to be willing to grant independence, their prime minister has stated wanting a slower timeline. But barring a surprising decision from parliament, it seems like Bougainville will become its own country in the next few years. ## Rojava While Bougainville is the most likely to become a new country, Rojava is probably the least likely one we'll talk about today. Rojava is located in northeastern Syria, and it is officially known as the Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, though it is not an official autonomous region. Rojava is populated predominantly by Kurds, and the name comes from the Kurdish name for Syrian Kurdistan, but we'll come back to Kurdistan in a moment. Rojava as a de facto autonomous zone was born out of the ongoing Syrian Civil War that began in 2011. The Kurdish forces seized control of a number of cities with a Kurdish majority, and they wrote their own constitution for self governance. Throughout the conflict, Rojava has battled not only the Syrian Armed Forces, but ISIS as well. To date, Rojava is credited as being the only ones to successfully and comprehensively defeat ISIS in a ground conflict, largely driving them out of the region. As for the government of Rojava, it is often regarded as the closest thing to an anarchist state the world has ever seen, though it is more a libertarian socialist government. They have a communal government that lacks the typical hierarchical systems people expect of governments, and there is no official police force. Although their military does enforce laws and protect government buildings, what we would consider local law enforcement is handled by the Civil Defense Forces. These are decentralized programs that basically act as a neighbourhood watch, patrolling their own neighbourhoods for any signs of criminal activity or possible attacks by ISIS. They are typically armed, and some carry radios with which they can contact the military in the event that they do witness invasions by ISIS or other forces. Rojava's system of government has been seen by many as a radical experiment, and the Kurds are determined to keep Rojava's autonomy from Syria. However, one thing they have explicitly stated they do not want is full independence. So why would Rojava be on this list if they said they don't even want to be their own country? Well, the situation for the Kurds is more complicated than just the region of Rojava. As we said before, the name Rojava comes from the Kurdish name for Syrian Kurdistan, and it is part of the larger Kurdistan region that comprises parts of Turkey, Iraq, and Iran as well. There are estimated to be between 30 and 45 million Kurds, making them the largest stateless ethnic group in the world. Many of them would like to change this, and they seek for Kurdistan to become its own nation. Calling Kurdistan a long shot would be an understatement, as it would require taking land from all four of the aforementioned nations. Iraq has an official autonomous zone for the Kurds and Syria has a de facto one, but Iran has refused to recognize any Kurdish autonomy and Turkey has militantly opposed it. In fact, one of the main reasons Rojava isn't seeking independence is because of the almost certainty that it would result in their immediate invasion by Turkey. However, the situation has become even more volatile recently. In December of 2024, the regime of Syria's Bashar al-Assad, who was seen as a totalitarian dictator, was overthrown. This has created considerable upheaval, meaning that the future of Rojava remains uncertain. It is possible that the future political climate that emerges from the current chaos makes full independence for Rojava a more attractive possibility to its residents. ## Azawad Similar to the Kurds, the Tuaregs are a stateless ethnic group in Africa who inhabit an area spanning multiple national borders, particularly northern Mali. During the scramble for Africa of the late 19th and early 20th century, about 90% of the continent was colonized by European powers. One of the areas claimed by France was French Sudan, which, after several name changes, became the Autonomous State of Mali in 1958. Two years later, Mali became independent from France and became recognized as its own country. Once Mali was independent, the Tuareg, Berber, and Arab people in the region expected that they would get to form their own independent state as well, which they called Azawad. When this didn't happen, it resulted in a Tuareg rebellion against the Malian government beginning in 1962. But the rebellion was unorganized, lacking any unified leadership or plan, and it was ultimately unsuccessful. There were two more unsuccessful rebellions in the 1990s and 2000s, but another rebellion in 2012 showed signs of progress. The National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad took control of northern Mali and the major cities of Timbuktu, Kidal, and Gao. They then made a unilateral declaration of independence, though this independence was not recognized by the rest of the world. Unfortunately for the Tuaregs, this declared independence was short lived. In their war against the Malian government, the Tuaregs had aligned themselves with the Islamist group Ansar Dine, which had ties to Al-Qaeda. Although this alliance helped them in the short term to gain control of the region, the Tuaregs were quickly pushed out by Al-Qaeda who co-opted the movement and tried to turn Azawad into an extremist Islamic state. They then tried to take control of all of Mali, but the Malian army, with support from France and Chad, were able to recapture northern Mali and end the rebellion. A peace deal was reached in 2013 that granted the Tuaregs greater autonomy. There was supposed to be a referendum in 2017 that would have granted even greater autonomy as well as officially renaming the northern region of Mali to Azawad, but this never happened. Although there hasn't been another large scale rebellion since 2012, there has been continued insurgency and calls for independence. The region has also become increasingly unstable, as the Malian government experienced coups in 2020 and 2021. French soldiers were kicked out of Mali, and instead Russian soldiers from the Wagner Group were invited in. Amidst all the chaos, the Tuaregs regained control of most of northern Mali. Should their territory extend all the way to Timbuktu and Gao again, they may once again attempt to declare Azawad as an independent nation. If that happens, we'll have to see whether foreign nations again provide support to put down the rebellion or if they will instead recognize Azawad as its own country this time. ## New Caledonia The group of islands known as New Caledonia, located off the eastern coast of Australia, was first made known to Europeans after they were spotted by British explorer James Cook in 1774. The northeast of the largest island reminded him of Scotland, so he named it New Caledonia after the name given to Scotland by the Roman Empire, thus creating a sort of Ouroboros of colonization. New Caledonia was of little interest to Europeans for the next few decades, until they began taking people from islands in the South Pacific and selling them into slavery. There are also reports that a crew of British missionaries and another crew of Americans were both murdered and cannibalized by the natives. Finally, in 1853, Napoleon III decided that New Caledonia was going to belong to France. There were 50-60,000 indigenous people known as Kanaks living on the island, but Napoleon sent a couple dozen French settlers, so as far as Europe was concerned New Caledonia was part of France now. A decade later it became a French penal colony, with roughly 10,000 convicts sent to the island over the next 20 years. The same year it became a penal colony, they also discovered large deposits of nickel on the island. Much like with Bougainville, the natural resources began being heavily mined, and the indigenous population did not receive any of the financial benefits. But they did receive plenty of smallpox and measles, which wiped out over half of the Kanak population. The Kanaks were eventually confined to reservations, leading to multiple unsuccessful rebellions. After World War II the French government extended citizenship to all residents of New Caledonia, and the island began focusing more on trade with nearby Australia. The indigenous population also finally returned to its pre-colonization levels, making them the largest ethnic group on the island again. Throughout all this, New Caledonia wanted its independence from France. There were multiple armed conflicts between 1976 and 1988, culminating in a hostage crisis in Ouvéa cave just days before the 1988 French presidential election. Kanak militants killed four French police officers and took 27 more hostage, until the military assaulted the cave, killing 19 of the hostage takers. This ultimately resulted in the Matignon Agreement, a ten year deal that would improve conditions on the islands, as well as granting amnesty to those on both sides of the hostage crisis. The basic idea was that the Kanaks promised not to talk about independence for the next ten years, and the French would make New Caledonia as nice a place to live as possible so that they wouldn't even want independence anymore. After the ten years were up, the Nouméa Accord was signed. This set up a 20 year transition period during which New Caledonia would have increased political power and autonomy, and they would be allowed to hold three referendum votes on whether or not they wanted their independence. The first vote was held in 2018, and 56.7% of voters chose to stay with France. The second vote was held in October of 2020, and this time only 53.4% of voters chose to stay with France. Momentum seemed to be on the side of independence for the third vote, which was scheduled for December of 2021. However, Covid deaths had disproportionately affected the Kanak population, who were largely in favour of independence. The deaths resulted in a traditional period of mourning that would have affected voter turnout, so pro-independence groups lobbied for the vote to be delayed until after the pandemic. The French government refused to move the vote, so the pro-independence groups instead organized to boycott the vote. The vote to stay with France passed with 96.5% of the vote, however voter turnout was only 43.9%, down from 85.7% the previous year. That suggests that the vote was still going to be extremely close, but independence may have won. Regardless, French president Emmanuel Macron declared that the will of the people of New Caledonia had been made clear, and they would be staying under French rule. Of course, the story doesn't end there. Pro-independence groups have been trying to have the 2021 vote thrown out, and they even petitioned the International Court of Justice to weigh in on the matter, though the court still has yet to say whether or not they'll hear the case. Though the situation isn't as violent as it was before 1988 and the Matignon Agreements, there have been protests and riots in New Caledonia since the third referendum. At this point it seems like an independent nation of New Caledonia is only a matter of time, it's just unclear whether France agreeing to another referendum vote will be a matter of years or decades. ## South Yemen Our last entry today is a country that already existed once, and it potentially will again. The region of Yemen has a complex history, with it often being fragmented and contested by different tribes. Things were no less complicated following colonization by the Ottomans and the British. None of the Ottomans actually wanted to be assigned to Yemen, so only the worst and most corrupt officials wound up there. They were also constantly at odds with the local tribes. While British rule of the Aden Protectorate, centered around the port city of Aden, was a bit more orderly, they still faced heavy opposition from Arab nationals. After the First World War and the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, North Yemen became the Mutawakkilite Kingdom of Yemen. A civil war in the 1960s overthrew the government and the area became the Yemen Arab Republic, commonly referred to as North Yemen. The British were trying to decolonize South Yemen at this point, as they realized they would not be able to manage the region effectively. They attempted to create a federation of the different Arab tribes, but influences from the Eastern bloc took hold and in 1967 South Yemen officially became the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen, the only communist state in the Middle East. Unlike other regions that were split by communism like East and West Germany, North and South Korea, and North and South Vietnam, North and South Yemen generally experienced peaceful coexistence with one another. There were a couple Yemeni civil wars in the 1970s, but these were short lived and both ended with talks of unification of the two countries. In 1990 that unification became a reality, and North and South Yemen became the single nation of Yemen. However, in 2014, Iranian backed Houthi rebels seized control of Yemen's capital city of Sana'a, leading to the still ongoing Yemeni Civil War. There are several factions fighting in the civil war, though there are three that are considerable larger than the others. There are the Iranian backed Houthis who claim to be the legitimate, official government of Yemen, and the Saudi backed Republic of Yemen, who are the official government recognized by the United Nations. Both of these factions seek to gain control of the entire region of Yemen. However, the third large faction is the Southern Transitional Council, backed by the United Arab Emirates. This is a separatist faction who seeks to secede and recreate the nation of South Yemen. While peace talks appeared to be making progress in 2022 and 2023, the violence has only escalated since then. It's impossible to say what the end result of the Yemeni Civil War will be at this point, but history seems to suggest that the cultural and political differences throughout the region make a single, unified state of Yemen difficult to maintain. ## Key Takeaways - Bougainville is the most likely to become a new country, with a 2019 referendum showing 98% support for independence. - Rojava, a Kurdish-controlled region in Syria, seeks autonomy but not full independence due to regional tensions. - The Tuareg people of northern Mali have repeatedly rebelled for independence as Azawad, facing instability and external influences. - New Caledonia has held referendums on independence from France, with the latest vote boycotted by pro-independence groups. - South Yemen, previously an independent state, is a potential future country due to ongoing civil war and separatist movements. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### What is the most likely area to become a new country in the near future? Bougainville is the area most likely to become a new country in the immediate future. A referendum in December 2019 showed that 98% of Bougainvilleans voted for independence, and while the process is still pending parliamentary approval, it seems likely to move forward. ### What is the current status of Bougainville's independence? Bougainville's independence is still awaiting ratification from the Papua New Guinea parliament. The referendum results showed overwhelming support for independence, and the Bougainville president set a deadline of 2027 for the transition to be complete. ### Why did the people of Bougainville seek independence? The people of Bougainville sought independence due to environmental destruction, refusal to share financial benefits from the copper mine, and perceived negative societal changes from mainland miners working on the island. ### What is the situation in Rojava? Rojava, located in northeastern Syria, is a de facto autonomous zone populated predominantly by Kurds. It has a libertarian socialist government and has successfully defeated ISIS in the region. However, it does not seek full independence due to the risk of invasion by Turkey. ### What is the history of the Tuareg rebellion in Azawad? The Tuareg have had multiple rebellions against the Malian government since 1962, with the most recent significant rebellion in 2012. They declared independence but were quickly pushed out by Al-Qaeda. A peace deal in 2013 granted them greater autonomy, but the region remains unstable. ### What is the current status of New Caledonia's independence? New Caledonia held three referendums on independence, with the third vote in 2021 showing a low turnout due to a boycott by pro-independence groups. The French government declared that New Caledonia would remain under French rule, but pro-independence groups are challenging the vote. ### What is the Southern Transitional Council in Yemen? The Southern Transitional Council is a separatist faction in Yemen backed by the United Arab Emirates. They seek to secede and recreate the nation of South Yemen, which existed from 1967 to 1990. ### What is the history of South Yemen? South Yemen was a communist state that existed from 1967 to 1990. It was created after the British decolonized the region and was the only communist state in the Middle East. It unified with North Yemen in 1990 but has since seen separatist movements. ### What are the main factions in the Yemeni Civil War? The main factions in the Yemeni Civil War are the Iranian-backed Houthis, the Saudi-backed Republic of Yemen, and the Southern Transitional Council, which seeks to recreate South Yemen. ### What is the significance of the 2019 referendum in Bougainville? The 2019 referendum in Bougainville was significant because it showed overwhelming support for independence, with 98% of voters in favor. This non-binding referendum has set the stage for potential negotiations and parliamentary approval for Bougainville's independence. ## Sources - [Original Side Projects video: 5 Countries that Might Soon Exist...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lfij9CK5KRs) ## Related Coverage Simon Whistler https://sideprojects.pub/article/5-french-tanks-that-prove-they-just-do-things-differently https://sideprojects.pub/article/5-french-tanks-that-prove-they-just-do-things-differently Thu, 25 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT When you think of the great tank producing nations, France isn't likely the first one that springs to mind. And this is a dire shame, because the nation actually has an exceptionally rich history of tank and armoured vehicle production; with them being among the initial pioneers back in WWI, when they produced revolutionary vehicles such as the Renault FT Light Tank, and continuing to produce top of the line stuff to this very day, such as the Leclerc Main Battle Tank. Hidden within that history, however, is a whole other, and frankly far more interesting story; one in which France produces and uses not just great tanks, but also, well… weird ones – and today, we're going to be having a look at five of them… so let's begin! ## Char 2C Bis We're willing to bet that many of you have already heard of the Char 2C, since, as both the largest tank, period, and indeed, the only super heavy tank ever put into full production, it is just a bit famous. For those of you who haven't, however, it was developed at the tail end of WWI, being conceived as the ultimate breakthrough tank that would be able to push through muddy terrain and German fortifications as if they weren't even there. A brief such as that was naturally quite a demanding one, and so it ended up being a simply vast machine when all was said and done; with it coming in at a whopping 76 tons, being over 10 metres long, having a VERY decent maximum armour thickness – by WWI standards anyway – of 45mm, and a dizzying array of weaponry that included a 75mm Model 1897 cannon in its main turret, and four Hotchkiss Model 1914 machine guns spread all over the tank. That, in and of itself, would be more than enough for the 2C to earn itself a place on this list, but alas, no, it isn't actually the tank we are interested in; at least in its standard form – for you see, it actually had a far more bizarre, and all the more obscure variant, and that would be the Char 2C Bis. This variant, in a nutshell, took the 75mm gun that adorned the 'normal' 2C, chucked it, and replaced it with a stubby barrelled howitzer that was more than DOUBLE its calibre – 155mm to be precise. To make it weirder still, we don't actually even know which 155mm gun was used, although most tank historians speculate that it was likely a highly modified Model 1917 Schneider Howitzer. But while what gun it carried may be a mystery, we do at least know why the 2C Bis came about; and that was because the French Military wanted to experiment with a 'bunker deleter' of sorts, one that could trundle out onto the battlefield, and not just put enemy fortifications out of action, but totally wipe them from the battlefield. As for when and how it came about, that would be in December 1922, when one the 2Cs, specifically Champagne – there being so few of them that they were all individually named – was selected as the tank that was to be retrofitted, and so got shipped off to the French Army's proving ground at La Seyne to see the work done. This ended up taking until 1926, and saw Champagne get retrofitted with its posh new gun, obviously, as well as an all-new rounded cast steel turret to house it. All of that added a fair bit of weight to the already rather beefy tank, so it was given some juiced up engines, and also had three of its four machine guns removed; saving the weight of both the gun, and the bloke who had to shoot it. This proved to be a good idea too, as the deletions actually made Champagne lighter than a 'normal' 2C by a whole two tons, which, coupled with the new engines, meant that it could now push 10mph rather than 9mph on flat ground… a modest increase to be sure, but in just the same way that a newly passed teenage driver is chuffed to bits when a new air filter squeezes an extra horsepower out of his three pot econo-box, so too was the French Army happy as a pig in muck with the increased speed. They were less pleased when they came to actually test out their new 2C Bis, however, as it turned out to be an absolute heap of junk; with the new cannon, whatever it was, barely being able to produce a muzzle velocity greater than 200 metres per second thanks to its absolutely tiny barrel; for reference, the Model 1897 that it had replaced had over double that. This meant that its range was absolutely atrocious. Further still, while the 2C Bis might have been lighter overall, the turret itself was still WAY heavier, and all of that weight bore down on the front suspension, which REALLY was not happy about it, and often broke as a result. They fettled with it for a few years to try and get it working right, but they eventually gave it up as a bad job, with Champagne being returned to its original configuration no later than 1934, and the experimental turret eventually just being stuck on one of the Mareth Line bunkers in Tunisia so that it could be of 'some' use. ## M4A4 FL10 For those of you who already know about the Sherman, America's go-to medium tank of WWII, you are likely aware that MANY attempts were made over the years to replace the 75mm M3 gun that it usually sported, which many believed lacked top end punch, with something a bit heavier hitting; with notable examples coming from the Americans themselves, who started fitting the 76mm M1 gun into some of their Shermans from January 1944, the British, who started producing their own 76mm 17-Pounder armed 'Sherman Fireflies' in the same month, and the Israelis, who crammed a monstrous 105mm CN105F1 into the M-51 'Super Shermans' from 1961. The French, having seen just how much more effective the Sherman became when given a bigger shooty bit, naturally wanted in on the action themselves, but their attempt would be all the more peculiar, as they produced THIS, the oh so snappily named M4A4 FL-10. And if you are wondering what made it so weird, have a closer look at its turret; looks a bit off, doesn't it? And that is because it is what you call an 'oscillating turret,' which is where the gun and upper turret are mounted on a pivoting section, separate from the lower turret, allowing the upper portion to tilt for elevation while the entire unit rotates for aiming. While being VERY different to a conventional turret, which really just is a rotating armoured box with a hole for the gun, nothing complicated at all, there is actually some method to the madness when it comes to oscillating turrets, with them offering several advantages such as: simplified gun elevation mechanisms, reduced weight, a lower overall profile for better concealment, improved compatibility with autoloaders for faster reloading, and cost-effectiveness due to their simpler design and maintenance requirements – although they would eventually fall out of vogue since they couldn't be sealed and thus made CBRN safe. As for how such a turret came to be incorporated, it actually wasn't done for France's own benefit, but rather, as a cheap and cheerful way of upgrading some of the upwards of 2,000 units that they had received from the Americans both during and after WWII, with a view to then flogging them to developing nations for a tidy profit. The 'cheap and cheerful' bit came from the fact that the turret was actually just from the AMX-13; with it turning out that just producing more of those, with their usual 75mm SA50 guns, and plonking them onto Shermans, was a WAY cheaper way of upgrading them than trying to mess about with the turrets they already had. Only one country ended up buying them however, and that, ironically, would be Egypt, who purchased 50 of them in 1955; and if you're wondering why that's ironic, that would be due to the fact that France would actually invade Egypt in 1956 following its seizure and nationalisation of the Suez Canal – meaning that not even a year after their delivery, France was blowing up the very tanks they had sold. It also turns out that France may have slightly ripped Egypt off, as while the FL10 did indeed have a meatier gun than a 'normal' Sherman, the AMX-13 was actually a light tank, meaning that its turret, when stuck on a Sherman, ended up having WAY thinner armour than the rest of the tank, potentially exposing it to great risk in combat situations. Additionally, the autoloader system, while innovative, didn't exactly seem to take to the Egyptian heat, with it reportedly breaking VERY regularly; and what are we meant to say about that - other than 'c'est la vie?' ## AMX-13 For our next weird French tank, let's stick with the AMX-13 that we met in the last chapter, as there is WAY more that we can say about it. In doing so, however, let us cast the 'standard' AMX-13-75 variant from our minds, as, with its 75mm SA50 cannon, it was but a peashooter by French standards; mere diet coke, when we are interested in the BIG full sugar stuff, like the AMX-13-105 variant. No prizes for guessing what sized gun it had, because, sure enough, as the name gives away, it came packing a 105mm cannon, specifically a CN-105-57. Given that its contemporaries, like the Soviet PT-76 and American M41, both only came with 76mm guns, it was a simply monstrous thing; a weapon that could, in the right circumstances, genuinely threaten main battle tanks, and the light tank it was fitted to didn't even weigh 14 tons. As for the specifics of just how threatening it could be, put it this way; its go-to High Explosive Anti-Tank, or 'HEAT' round, the OCC-105-F1, could penetrate up to 350-400mm of steel plate, and the Soviet T-55, for reference, had a little over 200mm at its thickest point. Further still, because it was a HEAT round, which gets its oomph from a shaped explosive charge creating a high-velocity jet of metal that penetrates armour by focusing energy on a small area, rather than kinetic energy, it could do that at ANY distance. Then there was its 'Armour-Piercing Fin-Stabilized Discarding Sabot' round, the OFL-105-G1, which, while less impressive, could still penetrate just shy of 200mm of steel plate in optimum circumstances. Despite that, however, it should be noted that that AMX-13-105 was NOT a tank hunter by trade, and rather, France used it as a 'normal' light tank, just one that also had the capability to tangle with the bigger stuff as and when the tactical situation forced it to have to do so, with its regular bread and butter being things like providing air-transportable fire support, where it would deploy from the air alongside paratroopers, assisting them in their initial assault, and subsequent holding the fort down till the big stuff could arrive, as well as reconnaissance missions, and infantry support against fortified positions and light armoured targets. Bizarrely, while we know that the AMX-13 generally was first introduced in 1952, we have no idea when the AMX-13-105 specifically was. We really did look hard for that information too, and it just doesn't seem to be out there. We tried Janes, a BIG name in open-source military intelligence, for example, and they just had it down as the "late 1950s" so we'll just gesture vaguely at that time period and say, "yeah, about then probably." But at least we do know when France pulled it from service, and that'd be in 1987. By that point, its gun, despite its vast size relative to the tank it was bolted to, simply wasn't top of the line anymore, being unable to take on the latest and greatest generation of Soviet main battle tanks such as the T-72 and T-80, both of which came festooned with composite armour that the CN-105-57 just had not been designed to deal with. For what it's worth though, while France has now basically abandoned the idea of light tanks occasionally taking on main battle tanks in its doctrine, the spirit of the AMX-13-105 does live on in a whole new generation of differently tasked vehicles with WEIRDLY large guns, with examples being the Panhard ERC, an armoured car that packs a 90 mm CN90 cannon, and the AMX-10 RC, an armoured reconnaissance vehicle that packs a 105mm L/47 cannon. ## ARL-44 A question, folks. What would you do if you had to rebuild a tank force following an absolute spanking at the hands of a certain Austrian Armband Enthusiast? Would you, A), accept the situation for what it was, take your time, and come out with an absolute banger of a tank down the line, or would you, B), cobble any old sh*t together because, "I'm totally still a great power, trust me bro!" Well, if you were France's military leadership contending with that question after WWII, you would have ended up picking option B), with the any old sh*t in question being THIS, the ARL-44. So enthusiastic were the French to get their tank force rebuilt in fact, that initial design work on it began before the German occupation had even ended, with the work being carried out hidden in plain sight disguised as other things; a supposed trolley bus, a purported tracked snow blower, things like that. Although, it should be noted that we really stress the word INITIAL there, as at that early stage, they were entertaining a VERY different tank to the one that would eventually be built, with the brief then being for a 30-ton medium tank armed with a 75mm gun of some kind. By comparison, the ARL-44 ended up weighing 53 tons, and carrying 90mm gun, specifically a SA45. Following the liberation of Paris in August 1944, however, progress sped up exponentially, what with the threat of death no longer looming over them if they were caught, and the Provisional French Government throwing actual tons of cash at them in order to see a tank, literally any tank, completed ASAP. And with speed being the name of the game, there was no time at all for innovation or optimisation; they simply took what they had lying around, designed an armoured box to encase it all, and called it a day. The result was a tank that, despite being seemingly quite high tech by mid-1940s standards, was weirdly antiquated and awkward looking when seen in the flesh. The tracks and suspension, for example, they were taken straight from the Char B1, an interwar tank that had first left the factory back in 1934, and had been in design since 1921, and the engine was a Maybach HL-230, a German design that used to power things like the Panther and Tiger II during the war. Even that SA45 gun, which sounds like it could be a bit of beast on paper thanks to its size, was a bodge, as it could trace its lineage back to the 90mm Model 1939 anti-aircraft gun; with it basically just being one of those, but with a hastily modified mounting system, a muzzle brake tacked on the end, and a lengthened barrel. Oh, and the turret that housed that gun, it was made from steel salvaged from the scuttled battlecruiser Dunkerque… it really was bodge, after bodge, after bodge with the ARL-44. But wait, it gets worse, because would you believe it, it turns out that tanks which are hastily thrown together tend to be absolute heaps of junk, and the ARL-44 is no exception, with notable problems being gearboxes that often decided to spit out their innards, brakes that liked to cook themselves and stop working, and a suspension that was prone to falling apart. As a result of all this, the ARL-44's time in service was… lacklustre, and that's putting it mildly. A mere 60 of them were built, and they didn't even get to enter service until 1949, because while they had hulls ready to go from 1946, it took them a whole three years to find that scrap steel for the turrets. From there, they did… well, pretty much nothing, making a single public appearance in 1951's Bastille Day Parade, and that's about it. They were eventually phased out in 1953, with France just having to swallow its pride and turn to the American M47 Patton, of which they bought 856 units, to keep things ticking along until its domestic industry was capable of producing a truly modern medium or heavy tank. ## Panther The most peculiar French tank of all however would have to be the Panther, and no, that isn't a tank that co-incidentally just so happens to have the same name as the iconic German WWII medium tank, it's the EXACT same tank, as France just cracked on and used it for themselves after Hitler ever so kindly redecorated the Führerbunker with his grey matter in 1945. It all began following the destruction and encirclement of the Falaise Pocket in August 1944, because there, a LOT of German vehicles just so happened to have been left behind; either abandoned in fully working nick, or put out of action with only minimal damage. For the French, who needed every tank they could get their hands on as they continued to push the Nazis out of their country, this presented quite the tantalising opportunity, and so, from January 1945, they started hauling them out, patching them up, and using them to equip the French forces that were then encircling Saint-Nazaire; a small coastal town on the West Coast of France where a not insignificant number of German troops were holding out – largely thanks to a VERY heavily fortified U-Boat base. 17 vehicles were sent in total, among which was a single panther which was dubbed Dauphiné by its crew, and given the WEIRDLY large amount of photos we have of this tank as compared to the others, which included otherwise much more shiny and impressive things like Tiger Is, and more exotic things like a Panzerwerfer 42 rocket-launching half-track, it is clear that this Panther made a VERY good impression indeed on the French. Further to just this, as the rest of the French Forces pressed East as part of the Allied Army, more and more Panthers kept getting captured, meaning that come the war's end, France actually had quite the reasonable stock of them on hand, 59 of them to be precise, and with them needing every half decent tank they could get their hands on, those that were still in at least half decent condition were dragged into the workshop, juiced up, and pushed into service. 49 in total emerged from said juicing, and they were given to the 6th Cuirassiers Regiment and the Combat Tanks Regiment, and then, for several years, with those regiments, they acted as THE heavy hitters of the French Tank Force, producing, in the process, utterly bizarre photos such as this one, where Panther tanks can be seen in convoy with American M3 halftracks. This arrangement had been intended to be a VERY short one, with the ARL-44 being slated as the Panther's replacement when it was finished, but yeaaaaaaaaaah… we know how that turned out. As a result, the Panthers remained in service till 1950, at which point, because they were then held together mostly by duct tape and a can-do attitude, they were pulled from service and replaced with American M47s. And sure, we know that the Panther isn't exactly a tank that France 'made,' per say, but hey, it's an interesting story, so we thought we'd include it anyway. ## Key Takeaways - France has a rich history of tank production, from WWI's Renault FT to modern Leclerc tanks. - The Char 2C Bis was a modified super-heavy tank with a 155mm howitzer, but it proved impractical. - The M4A4 FL10 Sherman used an oscillating turret from the AMX-13, sold to Egypt but later fought in Suez. - The AMX-13-105 light tank had a 105mm gun, capable of threatening main battle tanks. - The ARL-44 was hastily built post-WWII using old components, resulting in a unreliable and short-lived tank. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### What is the Char 2C Bis and why was it created? The Char 2C Bis was a variant of the Char 2C, the largest and only super heavy tank ever put into full production. It was created by replacing the 75mm gun with a 155mm howitzer to experiment with a 'bunker deleter' that could destroy enemy fortifications. ### What were the issues with the Char 2C Bis? The Char 2C Bis had several issues, including a very low muzzle velocity for its 155mm gun, which resulted in poor range. The heavy turret also caused frequent suspensions failures. Despite attempts to fix these problems, it was eventually returned to its original configuration. ### What is the M4A4 FL10 and what made it unique? The M4A4 FL10 was a modified M4 Sherman tank with an oscillating turret from the AMX-13 light tank. This turret design allowed for simplified gun elevation mechanisms, reduced weight, and a lower profile, but it was not sealed for CBRN safety. ### What was the AMX-13-105 and how was it used? The AMX-13-105 was a variant of the AMX-13 light tank equipped with a 105mm cannon. Despite its light weight, it could threaten main battle tanks with its HEAT rounds. France used it for air-transportable fire support, reconnaissance, and infantry support against fortified positions. ### What was the ARL-44 and why was it created? The ARL-44 was a hastily constructed French tank created post-WWII to quickly rebuild the French tank force. It used components from older tanks and vehicles, including tracks from the Char B1 and an engine from the German Panther and Tiger II. It was designed to be a stopgap until more modern tanks could be developed. ### What problems did the ARL-44 face in service? The ARL-44 had numerous issues, including unreliable gearboxes, brakes that often failed, and a suspension prone to breaking down. Its service life was short and uneventful, with only 60 units built and phased out by 1953. ### Why did France use the German Panther tank? France used the German Panther tank after capturing them from the Germans following the Battle of the Falaise Pocket in 1944. They repaired and used these tanks to equip their forces, particularly around Saint-Nazaire, and later in other regiments until 1950. ### How many Panther tanks did France have in service? France had 59 Panther tanks after the war, of which 49 were repaired and put into service. These tanks were used by the 6th Cuirassiers Regiment and the Combat Tanks Regiment until they were replaced by American M47s in 1950. ## Sources - [Original Side Projects video: 5 French Tanks That Prove They Just Do Things Differently](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2UDNiFuQn4) ## Related Coverage Simon Whistler https://sideprojects.pub/article/5-human-species-who-lived-alongside-us https://sideprojects.pub/article/5-human-species-who-lived-alongside-us Thu, 25 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT We tend to think of humans as being a unique species. Humans are part of the Great Ape family, with humans and chimpanzees having evolved from a shared ancestor. While it's easy to think that this evolution into modern humans was a linear progression, it was actually anything but. It's been over 6 million years since the first primitive hominins were born, representing the first human species to walk the Earth. Since then, there have been at least 20 different species of humans that existed. The exact number is difficult to pin down, both because of scientific disagreement on how much variety is necessary for something to be considered a different species and because newly discovered fossils are continually showing new, unidentified species of humans. But while there is some debate on the total number, there are 21 different species of humans on whom scientists almost universally agree. While some of these died off millions of years ago, there were actually 8 different species of humans that shared the Earth with modern *Homo sapiens*. Although these other human species lived alongside modern humans, we can't say that they coexisted with one another. After all, we're the only species left, and it's believed that the expansion of modern humans out of Africa and into other parts of the world is what resulted in the extinction of many other species of human life on the planet. Today we'll be looking at five species of humans who once lived alongside us, some of whose DNA has continued to be passed down to present day. ## Homo erectus Though a dozen or so species of humans predate *Homo erectus*, it is one of the most well known early species from the genus *Homo*. Though the first *Homo* species, *Homo habilis*, evolved in Africa, it is unclear where *Homo erectus* originally developed. The oldest known fossils of *Homo erectus* date back just over 2 million years, with similarly aged remains having been found in both Africa and Eurasia. This was an important species in the evolutionary chain for humans, as their brains doubled in size compared to *Homo habilis*, something that happened in a relatively short period of time. They were also the first human species to have a flat face with a prominent nose, and they may have been the first to see a dramatic reduction in body hair compared to other members of the Great Apes family. Many of the details surrounding *Homo erectus* remain matters of debate, thanks to limited evidence from millions of years ago. For example, although it is almost universally accepted that *Homo erectus* was the first species of humans to use fire, the extent to which fire was utilized and the effects it had on human development are much more contested. Some experts credit the use of fire to cook meat with the increased brain size, as well as using it to explain how the species could have survived in Eurasia during the ice age. While this is a plausible explanation, cooking doesn't seem to have become more common until around 400,000 years ago. Before that, it is possible that *Homo erectus* had designated "fire keepers", people who kept naturally occurring fires burning as long as possible. Even the earliest *Homo erectus* sites that have been claimed to show fire usage only date back about 1.5 million years, 500,000 years after this large brained species was spread across Africa and Eurasia, so it's hard to say if fire was the cause. Admittedly, it is notoriously unlikely for something like a fire pit to actually remain identifiable for millions of years, which is why there's so much debate. However, something that is not debated is that *Homo erectus* were not just hunters, but apex predators. Though they engaged in both hunting and gathering, there is abundant evidence showing that they hunted the largest animals available for food. It's possible that they even hunted animals to extinction, as the exodus of *Homo erectus* from the Eastern Mediterranean Region lines up with the extinction of the straight-tusked elephant. As for how these humans functioned socially, we aren't really sure. They lived in groups, and evidence suggests they may have had a division of labour based on sex, with hunting parties being entirely male. This is despite the fact that there was minimal sexual dimorphism between the sexes, with males and females being the same size. There's no way to know from fossil records alone, but the fact that they were the same size implies that *Homo erectus* may have been monogamous. After all, it's a lot harder for males to keep a harem under control if they aren't bigger than the females. But while *Homo erectus* may have first appeared millions of years ago, they stood the test of time far better than any other human species. The most recent remains of these early humans appeared on the island of Java, dating back only a little over 100,000 years ago. Java was also the location of the first *Homo erectus* fossils ever discovered, back in the late 1800s. Their presence on islands suggests that these may actually have been a seafaring people as well, and those living on Java may have outlasted the rest of the species thanks to their isolation from other humans. But for a good 200,000 years or so, *Homo erectus* and modern humans walked the same Earth. ## Homo naledi *Homo naledi* is the most recently discovered human species, and the discovery has raised a lot of questions. Despite existing at the same time as modern humans, *Homo naledi* and *Homo sapiens* couldn't possibly be more different, to the point that some have even called into question whether this species should be part of the *Homo* genus. The discovery was made in 2013, at the bottom of a 40 foot vertical drop in the Rising Star Cave system in South Africa. Despite the species having never been known before, there were a total of 1,550 bones from at least 15 different people, containing all manner of bones from complete skulls and feet to inner ear bones. These specimens ranged from infants to adults, both male and female, making it the most comprehensive fossil record of any hominin species ever found. Because the discovery is so new, and there was only the one large cache of bones found in a single location, not much is yet known about the *Homo naledi*. But perhaps the most interesting elements about these remains is how much they resembled more primitive human species, like *Australopithecus africanus*, rather than other members of the *Homo* genus. It's unclear exactly where their evolution diverged, with them possibly being a sister species to either *Homo habilis* or *Homo erectus*. Either way, there are two key physiological differences that set them apart from other, more modern human species. One is that their brains are comparatively very small. While *Homo erectus* saw a sudden doubling in the size of the human brain, *Homo naledi's* brain was only about a third the size of modern humans. Despite this, their skeletal structure shows that their hands were adapted for making and using tools, indicating a level of human intelligence. There is also a rather controversial belief that the abundance of bones in a singular location is because the cave was used as part of ritual burials. Such a theory would have massive implications with regards to the mental capacity of these humans, but it is essentially just speculation at this point. The other interesting difference is that their anatomy suggests this was a species of tree-dwelling humans. Humans are unique, as we are the only mammals that are primarily bipedal, with the only other bipedal animals being birds. Bipedalism, while having its disadvantages, is extremely energy efficient and makes humans exceptionally suited for long-distance running and traveling. Though *Homo naledi* was capable of humanlike walking, their anatomical structure is better designed for climbing and hanging from tree limbs rather than walking long distances. Of course, while that's all fascinating, it just makes them sound like a very early ancestor of modern humans, more ape than man. However, the fossils discovered were dated as being only 200,000-300,000 years old. This doesn't give us any indication as to when the species first evolved, but *Homo naledi* was living in Africa at the same time that modern humans evolved there. This potentially means that they may have survived even longer than *Homo erectus* did, and if not it raises a lot of questions about the evolutionary paths taken by various human species. Until we discover more examples of *Homo naledi* fossils, there are going to be a lot of unanswered questions that have the potential to reshape our understanding of human evolution. ## Flores Man, aka The Hobbits We generally think of humans in the past as being shorter on average. If you're six feet tall you may have difficulty trying to walk through a house built in the 1600s, and we assume that would extend throughout all human species. This wasn't universally true, as *Homo erectus* was comparable in height to modern humans, but many species of early humans were indeed smaller, with the average *Homo naledi* being just under 5 feet. But when it comes to diminutive humans, none of the other species can compare to *Homo floresiensis*. With adults averaging a mere 3.5 feet tall, barely over a meter, this species was quickly nicknamed the Hobbits. Just make sure to never use that word when advertising lectures or exhibits featuring *Homo floresiensis*, or the ghost of J.R.R. Tolkien will sue you from beyond the grave, as others have already experienced. This species, also known as Flores Man, was discovered in Liang Bua Cave on the island of Flores, Indonesia. Some speculated that the specimens discovered were actually just a group of *Homo erectus* who suffered from insular dwarfism, a condition where a species rapidly decreases in size over generations. This is most common on small islands such as Flores, and the island is currently home to pygmies for this exact reason. However, while insular dwarfism is likely the cause of Flores Man's small stature, it is widely believed to be a separate species from *Homo erectus*. Aside from their height, the other most notable feature about this species of human is their small brain size, even smaller than that of *Homo naledi*. This supports the theory of insular dwarfism, as research into animals such as pygmy hippos has shown that the brain size decreases faster than the rest of the body under these conditions. But that doesn't mean these humans were stupid. The prefrontal cortex, the area of the brain associated with cognition, was the same size as in modern humans. This is further evidenced by their use of tools. All the known specimens of Flores Man were discovered in Liang Bua Cave, and the bones discovered thus far have been identified as coming from 13 different individuals. While thirteen specimens may seem like a great start, it pales in comparison to the over 10,000 stone tools that were found in the cave with their bodies. Most of these tools were lithic flakes, which are shards of rock broken off of a larger rock to use as tools. That may sound simple, but it required precise knowledge and control over the angle and amount of force being used to break the flakes off from the stone core. As far as Stone Age tools go, these were relatively advanced. Based on the type of tools found, it is believed that Flores Man may have hunted large animals and been skilled at butchering, cooking their meat with fire. As with *Homo naledi*, it is difficult to know when this species first evolved, as the entire fossil record is from a single location. However, the fossils found on Flores Island are dated as being only 50,000-60,000 years old. Not so coincidentally, the apparent date of Flores Man's extinction happens to line up with when modern humans first arrived in the area. ## Neanderthals Neanderthals, or *Homo neanderthalensis*, are perhaps the most well known species of humans who lived alongside us, and one with whom we do seem to have coexisted. This is most clearly evidenced by the Neanderthal DNA that the majority of modern day humans possess. Those descended from Europeans and West Asians average about 1-2% Neanderthal DNA, while those descended from East Asia average about 2.5%. People whose ancestors remained in Africa typically have 0% Neanderthal DNA, as Neanderthals evolved in Eurasia and never traveled to Africa. However, we aren't sure exactly when Neanderthals first came onto the scene. Various studies produce estimates ranging from just over 300,000 years ago to almost 800,000 years ago, but the oldest definitively Neanderthal fossils thus far discovered are only about 430,000 years old. This suggests that the majority of the time Neanderthals were around they were sharing the Earth with modern humans, though for much of that time the two species didn't interact. It wasn't until around 120,000 years ago when the first wave of *Homo sapiens* migrated out of Africa that the two would have crossed paths. And once they did cross paths, they wasted no time in breeding with one another, hence the Neanderthal DNA in most of us. That modern humans would have had both the ability and the desire to interbreed with Neanderthals suggests that they weren't that different from us, something that all evidence seems to support. For a long time, the largest perceived difference was that modern humans were vastly more intelligent than Neanderthals, though recent research has called this into question as Neanderthals actually had larger brains than we do. There's nothing that suggests we were any smarter than they were, and culturally we appear to have been very similar. The main differences between modern humans and Neanderthals were physical. Neanderthals were about 4 inches shorter on average, 5.5 feet for men and 5 feet for women, and they were stockier and more massive. This is believed to be because of the colder climate of Eurasia during the ice age. They had wider hips, larger, barrel shaped ribbed cages, and shorter arms and legs. This would have allowed them to conserve body heat better, something that was absolutely necessary in the colder climate. DNA analysis also shows that Neanderthals had much more fast-twitch muscle fiber than modern humans, making them better sprinters. As we previously mentioned, modern humans excel at long-distance running and endurance. By having more slender bodies built for longevity rather than speed, the *Homo sapiens* in Africa could hunt prey by chasing them to the point of exhaustion, or even hyperthermia. This was not going to be an option in the colder climate, so Neanderthals had to be built for speed in order to survive. But again, culturally the two species were very similar. Neanderthals lived in small groups of hunter-gatherers, used tools, cared for their sick, buried the dead, and engaged in music and art. There's even some evidence that Neanderthals may have created abstract art, though the markings identified as such could also have been haphazardly made by a bear's claws. In terms of their societies, the big difference between Neanderthals and modern humans was size. Neanderthals lived in isolated groups of only about 10-30, while modern humans traveled in larger groups that were more interconnected with one another. This allowed modern humans to divide labour by sex, with men hunting and women and children foraging, while Neanderthals likely all took part in hunting, even their young. Neanderthals shared Eurasia with modern humans until going extinct about 40,000 years ago, and the size difference of their groups may have played a big part in that. Since interbreeding was common, the isolated bands of Neanderthals may have simply been assimilated into the larger groups, with their DNA becoming diluted over time. Not only did modern humans travel in larger groups, but they were more numerous in general. Once assimilated into a uniform society, the physical traits of Neanderthals that made them better adapted to the cold may have become less appealing in the warming climate following the end of the ice age. While aggression and competition from modern humans is believed to have caused the extinction of multiple human species, it's quite possible that Neanderthals were just bred into extinction after the species united as one. ## Denisovans The existence of the Denisovans was only discovered recently, in 2010, and there are very few samples. In fact, there is so little to work off of that they haven't even been given a proper taxonomic name yet. This species of humans is simply known as Denisovans, named after the Denisova Cave in Siberia where the first bones were discovered. However, while very little is known about this species, the discovery was still incredibly important for understanding the evolution of human species. Modern day Melanesians, aboriginal Australians, and Filipino Negritos all possess roughly 5% Denisovan DNA. Most of what is known about Denisovans comes from their DNA, as samples were able to be extracted from a finger bone and analyzed. In simple terms, if we share 99% of our DNA with Neanderthals, then we only shared 98% with Denisovans. Those two species were more closely related to each other than to modern humans, and the genetic variation indicates that our evolutionary path diverged from the Denisovans over a million years ago. More interestingly, research indicates that the Denisovans were descended from an as of yet unidentified species of ancient humans. The presence of such a high amount of Denisovan DNA in many modern humans suggests that there was a great deal of interbreeding between this species and modern humans. However, we also know that they interbred with Neanderthals as well. This brings us to perhaps the most interesting discovery from Denisova Cave thus far. Despite knowing that interbreeding among human species was common, for the first time ever researchers found a first generation hybrid. The specimen, nicknamed "Denny", was a teenage girl with a Neanderthal mother and Denisovan father. With the current samples found dating to as recently as 50,000 years ago, it's quite possible that the Denisovans may also have been bred into extinction with modern humans. There's so little information to go on right now that it's hard to definitively say a lot about this species. But since the few bones we've found so far have revealed the discovery of a recent human species, the existence of an unknown archaic human species, and a first generation human hybrid, this is definitely a topic worth keeping an eye on for big new discoveries. ## Key Takeaways - Humans evolved from a shared ancestor with chimpanzees, with at least 21 species identified. - Eight human species coexisted with modern Homo sapiens, but all others went extinct. - Neanderthals and Denisovans interbred with modern humans, contributing to our genetic makeup. - Homo erectus was an early human species with a significant brain size increase and tool use. - Flores Man, or Homo floresiensis, was a small-statured human species with advanced tool use. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### How many different species of humans have existed? There have been at least 20 different species of humans that existed, with 21 different species of humans on whom scientists almost universally agree. ### Which human species is known for its small stature? Homo floresiensis, also known as Flores Man or the Hobbits, is known for its small stature, with adults averaging about 3.5 feet tall. ### What is the significance of the Homo naledi discovery? The discovery of Homo naledi raised many questions due to its unique characteristics, such as a small brain size and anatomical adaptations for tree-dwelling, despite living around the same time as modern humans. ### How did Neanderthals adapt to the colder climate of Eurasia? Neanderthals had wider hips, larger barrel-shaped rib cages, and shorter arms and legs, which helped them conserve body heat. They also had more fast-twitch muscle fiber, making them better sprinters. ### What is known about the Denisovans? The Denisovans were discovered in 2010 and are known primarily through DNA analysis. They interbred with both modern humans and Neanderthals, and their DNA is present in modern-day Melanesians, aboriginal Australians, and Filipino Negritos. ### What evidence suggests that Homo erectus used fire? While it is almost universally accepted that Homo erectus was the first species of humans to use fire, the extent to which fire was utilized and the effects it had on human development are much more contested. Some experts credit the use of fire to cook meat with the increased brain size. ### How did Homo erectus function socially? Homo erectus lived in groups and evidence suggests they may have had a division of labor based on sex, with hunting parties being entirely male. Despite minimal sexual dimorphism, the fact that males and females were the same size implies they may have been monogamous. ### What is the significance of the Denisova Cave discovery? The Denisova Cave discovery revealed the existence of a recent human species, the presence of an unknown archaic human species, and a first-generation human hybrid, making it a significant find for understanding human evolution. ### How did modern humans contribute to the extinction of other human species? The expansion of modern humans out of Africa and into other parts of the world is believed to have resulted in the extinction of many other species of human life on the planet, possibly through aggression, competition, and interbreeding. ### What tools did Flores Man use? Flores Man used lithic flakes, which are shards of rock broken off of a larger rock to use as tools. These tools required precise knowledge and control over the angle and amount of force being used to break the flakes off from the stone core. ## Sources - [Original Side Projects video: 5 Human Species Who Lived Alongside Us](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D8aiaj5Ygew) ## Related Coverage Simon Whistler https://sideprojects.pub/article/5-incredible-cities-built-from-scratch https://sideprojects.pub/article/5-incredible-cities-built-from-scratch Thu, 25 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT Under ordinary circumstances, it can take decades (and even centuries) for a cluster of villages to develop into a sprawling and dynamic metropolis. City-building is no easy task, and most cities grow and expand through a natural process of increasing urbanization and improving transportation networks. It is not a process that can be completed overnight. Or can it? Beginning in the 20th century, some countries have managed to devise and implement a radical alternative to the traditional model of urban development. They have built brand new, fully-functional cities from scratch. These planned cities did not begin life as small, rural settlements. Rather, they came into being as modern, bustling metropolises from the day they opened for business. In this article, we will take a closer look at five of these incredible urban centers that were built from scratch. ## Astana The capital city of Kazakhstan, recently renamed Nur-Sultan, is a planned city built in the 1990s and designed by Japanese architect Kisho Kurokawa. Home to numerous skyscrapers and a range of futuristic buildings, Astana has often been described by the international media as "a space station in the steppes". Former Kazakh president Nursultan Nazarbayev, in whose honor Astana was renamed last year, decided in 1997 that he didn't quite like where his country's capital was sitting. The former capital, Almaty, home to more than 1.7 million inhabitants, apparently sat too close to the Chinese border for the president's liking. So, Nazarbayev moved the seat of his government nearly 1,000 kilometers further north, towards the Russian border. Billions of dollars were poured, over the next two decades, to build a new, state-of-the-art capital city for the people of Kazakhstan. Today, Astana is home to slightly over a million residents, making it the country's second-largest city, after Almaty. Amsterdam-based photographer, Ryan Koopmans, once described Astana as "a very remote little metropolis in the middle of nowhere". Situated in the isolated Kazakh steppes – a vast region of open grassland that covers the northern part of the country (and some adjacent provinces of Russia) – Astana is Kazakhstan's political and commercial hub, a glistening city of metal and glass rising implausibly out of the isolated grasslands that surround it in all directions. There are no neighboring metropolises within 1,000 kilometers of the city. It is home to the country's Senate, Parliament House, Presidential Palace, Supreme Court, and numerous large, state-owned corporations. The spectacular cityscape of ultramodern buildings that constitutes Astana gave rise to a total construction bill of more than $15 billion. Some of the best-known landmarks of the city include a 77 meter glass pyramid known as the Palace of Peace and Reconciliation; the unique and awe-inspiring Baiterek Tower featuring a 22-meter golden egg sitting atop a metallic poplar tree; and the Khan Shatyr Entertainment Centre, the world's largest (and most expensive) tent, which houses a shopping center and an indoor beach, complete with imported sand and palm trees. Apart from these, Astana is littered with many gorgeous and outlandish pieces of architecture, including a circus building that resembles a flying saucer; a velodrome (or track cycling arena) shaped like a cycling helmet; a concert hall designed to look like flower petals; and two conical, golden towers nicknamed the 'Beer Can Buildings'. Architects from around the world came together to design the futuristic skyline of this international city, which was built to symbolize Kazakhstan's ambition of establishing its own cultural identity, distinct from that of the former Soviet Union. ## Abuja The capital of Nigeria was moved from Lagos to Abuja in 1976. Located at the center of the country – on land formerly occupied by various ethnic groups such as the Koro, Gbagyi, Bassa, Gade, and Gwandara – Abuja is one of the most expensive cities ever built in Africa. The military government of General Murtala R. Mohammed initiated the process of moving the capital to the yet-to-be-completed city of Abuja. Lagos, the former capital, was polluted, congested, and lacking in sufficient infrastructural facilities. Being a coastal city, it was also hot, humid, and most importantly, open to attack by foreign powers. Therefore, the leaders of Nigeria decided to relocate the seat of the government to a place that was better developed, more fortified, in close proximity to all the states or provinces, and deemed neutral to the numerous ethnic groups of the country. Nigeria, being the largest oil and gas producer in Africa, accumulated substantial wealth during the 1970s Energy Crisis, due to the elevated price of petroleum in the global market. This provided the funds for the construction of a new capital city. Consequently, in 1979, the Federal Capital Development Authority of Nigeria held a competition, where participants were to design a master plan for the new capital city. The contest was won by the International Planning Associates (IPA), a consortium of urban planning and architecture firms led by Wallace, McHarg, Roberts & Todd of Philadelphia. The designers took advantage of the natural contours of the terrain, envisioning individualized, arching streets and neighborhoods, unlike the rectilinear ones found in other planned cities such as Brasilia and Islamabad. They demarcated two distinct zones within the city – a residential and shopping zone in the peripheries and a central zone for government buildings and cultural institutions. Construction began in 1980, when amenities such as water supply, healthcare centers, schools, and public transport quickly followed the construction of government facilities. As government officials from Lagos began moving into the new capital city along with their families, telephone and water systems capable of accommodating a million residents were speedily put in place. Representing the two major religions of Nigeria, the skyline of Abuja is dominated by the golden dome of the National Mosque and the intricate spires of the National Christian Center, the two buildings facing each other across a busy highway at the center of the city. The 170 meter Millennium Tower, designed by Italian architect Manfredi Nicoletti, is another striking landmark, which is also the tallest artificial structure in Abuja. ## Destiny City Unlike the other cities on this list, Destiny City is still under-construction and has yet to become a fully functioning urban center. The 65-square-mile city was originally proposed as America's first planned environmental development, supported and recognized by the Clinton Climate Initiative. The designers of Destiny City essentially envisioned it as the Silicon Valley of green technology, which will one day attract environmental research groups and eco-friendly companies from various parts of the world to Florida. Once completed, Destiny City will offer sustainable infrastructure, ample open spaces, thoughtful preservation of natural resources, and a pollution-free environment for residents. Located at the center of Florida's Clean Tech Corridor, the city's economy will revolve around the development of cutting-edge green technology, R&D, education, and innovation. An area of 41,300 acres has been set aside for eventual development under this project, which will include about 100,000 residential units (housing 250,000 people), and more than 160 acres earmarked for business or commercial use. This large-scale, environmentally conscious community will be powered entirely by sustainable bioenergy. Some of the major sources of energy in Destiny City will include a massive waste-management system for extracting methane, an energy farm designed to generate biofuel, and a 30MW solar array. From an urban planning perspective, Destiny City is expected to provide a blueprint for the integration of biofuel production into a mixed-use community. A major cornerstone of the city's economic proposition is the use of sustainable agriculture as a primary source of all the food and fuel used by the community. Farms in Destiny City are currently planting sweet sorghum, jatropha, and other sustainable energy crops, in a bid to replace the fertilizer-intensive farming practices required for the production of corn ethanol. At an estimated cost of $1000 per acre, the farms in Destiny City will utilize a gravity flow system and a 1V solar-powered irrigation system to improve water distribution within the community. The energy crops that this system produces will provide power, cash, and fuel for the residents. In terms of infrastructure, Destiny City will be home to an International Clean Technology Center, which will serve as a hub for organizations and businesses focused on the development of clean technologies and renewable energy sources meant to reduce the reliance on fossil fuels. The city will also feature Florida's first dedicated electric automobile charging station, a 400-acre energy research park, a "green-mart" convenience store powered by solar and geo-thermal energy, and a mixed-use airport complex. Solar panel manufacturers and composting companies have been some of the first businesses to set up shop in Destiny City. ## Rawabi If ever a place was in dire need of new cities, it would be the West Bank, near the Mediterranean coast of Western Asia. For almost half a century, the Israelis and the Palestinians have struggled to find common ground (in more ways than one), and the resultant conflicts have blighted the economy of Palestine, as well as its citizens' standards of living. The new city of Rawabi, the first planned city ever to be built by and for the Palestinians, is intended to change all that and kick-start a renaissance in the West Bank. Bashar Masri, the lead developer behind Rawabi, wanted to create a self-sustaining community that would provide residents with employment opportunities as well as safe, healthful living conditions – neither of which are abundant in the West Bank. The city has been designed to provide an anchor for the region's economy and act as a destination for long-term investment. It has also been seen by many as an unambiguous political statement from the Palestinian people, a way to assert their rights over the land and claim it as their own. The word Rawabi means 'hills' in Arabic, and a bustling, cutting-edge metropolis of sandy-golden stone on the mountain is exactly what the city is shaping up to be. As of now, Rawabi can accommodate about 40,000 residents in its 6,000 housing units spread across six neighborhoods. The city center, which includes offices, banks, petrol stations, shops, mosques, walking trails, and eight schools, is surrounded by the residential neighborhoods. Other amenities that Rawabi offers include a seven-screen cinema, a hospital, a fiber-optic telecommunications system, several galleries, and a piazza lined with cafes and shopping centers. The construction of Rawabi has resulted in more than 10,000 jobs for Palestinians, including engineers and architects. One-third of these workers are women, an unprecedented female labor participation rate in the Arab world. On average, these workers are paid 30 percent above the Palestinian minimum wage. An elaborate recycling infrastructure is one of the distinctive features of Rawabi. Buildings in the city do not have water towers, with a computerized system being used to recycle the drinking water. Any excess is redirected immediately to water the city's many public parks. The public transport system (once completed) will run exclusively on electricity and provide free transit to all residents, with only visitors being required to pay. A Roman-style amphitheater with 15,000 seats, girded by honey-colored columns, was completed in 2018, and is the largest of its kind in the Middle East. Rawabi will also be home to the largest mosque in Palestine, a church overlooking the open-air amphitheater, and a tech hub that is expected to facilitate the growth of the Palestinian ICT sector. ## Canberra Founded in 1913, the city of Canberra in Australia was built to resolve the longstanding dispute about whether Melbourne or Sydney (the two biggest Australian cities) should be declared the national capital. A compromise was reached, and it was decided that a brand new capital city would be constructed from scratch in the Yass-Canberra region of New South Wales. The Department of Home Affairs launched an international design competition in 1911, with the husband-and-wife-team of Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin eventually emerging victorious. They designed a master plan for the new capital city, which consisted largely of geometric shapes and patterns adjusted to the natural landscape. The inner-city area, therefore, consists of several concentric hexagonal and octagonal streets emerging from various radii, but the outer areas of Canberra, which were built later, are not laid out geometrically. Large stretches of open, grassy parkland dot Canberra, which was originally envisioned as a quiet, leafy city situated in the lap of nature. Even today, the city is home to 37 nature reserves in and around the urban center, all of them collectively known as the Canberra Nature Park. It is not hard to see that the Griffins' master plan was influenced largely by the garden city movement, a method of urban planning that incorporates the use of 'greenbelts' surrounding self-contained urban communities. A hierarchy of districts, local suburbs, industrial zones, and town centers constitute the urban areas of Canberra. The seven residential districts are subdivided into smaller suburbs, which have their own town centers, where most commercial and social activities take place. The Royal Australian Mint, the National Library of Australia, the Australian High Court, and the Australian War Memorial are some of the many buildings of historical importance that have made Canberra a thriving tourist destination as well as being the seat of the national government. The New Parliament House, comprising no less than 4,700 rooms, is also popular among tourists. Other attractions include the Australian National Botanical Garden and the National Zoo and Aquarium. Canberra may not be counted among the most influential or well-known global cities, but this carefully planned metropolis provides world-class infrastructure, healthful living conditions, and an enviable standard of urban living to its inhabitants. It is, without doubt, one of the most sustainable and livable urban centers in the world. ## Conclusion Many cities are built from scratch around the world, for a plethora of practical and political reasons. Planned cities can often facilitate better (and more sustainable) living outcomes for their inhabitants. Good urban design has the potential to make a city more functional, livable, and aesthetically appealing. However, to be truly successful, these new cities need to be designed with a view to long-term sustainability, and have built-in economic drivers that provide an organic impetus for growth and development. ## Key Takeaways - Traditional city development takes decades, but some countries have built new cities from scratch. - Astana, now Nur-Sultan, was built in the 1990s as Kazakhstan's new capital, featuring futuristic architecture. - Abuja replaced Lagos as Nigeria's capital, designed with distinct residential and government zones. - Destiny City, still under construction, aims to be a sustainable, green technology hub in Florida. - Rawabi, the first planned Palestinian city, focuses on self-sustainability and economic growth. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### Which cities were built from scratch? Astana (Nur-Sultan), Abuja, Destiny City, Rawabi, and Canberra. ### Why was Astana built? Astana was built because the former Kazakh president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, decided to move the capital from Almaty, which he felt was too close to the Chinese border. ### What is the significance of Abuja's location? Abuja was built at the center of Nigeria to be better developed, more fortified, in close proximity to all the states or provinces, and deemed neutral to the numerous ethnic groups of the country. ### What is the primary focus of Destiny City? Destiny City is envisioned as the Silicon Valley of green technology, focusing on sustainable infrastructure, environmental research, and eco-friendly companies. ### What is the purpose of Rawabi? Rawabi aims to provide a self-sustaining community with employment opportunities and safe living conditions in the West Bank, serving as an economic anchor and a political statement for the Palestinian people. ### Why was Canberra built? Canberra was built to resolve the dispute between Melbourne and Sydney over which should be the national capital of Australia. ### What is the design philosophy behind Canberra? Canberra's design is based on geometric shapes and patterns adjusted to the natural landscape, influenced by the garden city movement, which incorporates greenbelts surrounding self-contained urban communities. ### What are some notable landmarks in Astana? Notable landmarks in Astana include the Palace of Peace and Reconciliation, the Baiterek Tower, the Khan Shatyr Entertainment Centre, a circus building resembling a flying saucer, a velodrome shaped like a cycling helmet, and the 'Beer Can Buildings'. ### What are some key features of Rawabi's infrastructure? Rawabi features an elaborate recycling infrastructure, a computerized water recycling system, an electric public transport system, and a Roman-style amphitheater with 15,000 seats. ### What is the economic focus of Destiny City? Destiny City's economy will revolve around the development of cutting-edge green technology, research and development, education, and innovation. ## Sources - [Original Side Projects video: 5 Incredible Cities that Were Built from Scratch](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXFcby2Ut9w) ## Related Coverage Simon Whistler https://sideprojects.pub/article/5-incredible-places-to-look-for-alien-life https://sideprojects.pub/article/5-incredible-places-to-look-for-alien-life Thu, 25 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT When pondering the prospects of alien life in the universe, the mind quickly jumps to the highly-advanced civilizations of sci-fi, creatures with big grey heads and dark eyes, able to traverse the cosmos in ways humanity can only dream of. Unfortunately, the chances of such a species existing and visiting us seem to be little more than a fantasy, and while it would be pretty cool to receive highly advanced technology beyond our wildest imagination, reality is a lot more mundane. In the search for extraterrestrial life, the likes of NASA and the European Space Agency are far more interested in looking for microorganisms, specs of life that may have independently evolved from that on earth and are perhaps still around today. And we don't need interstellar travel to look for signs of such life, as our very own solar system is ripe with several places that could potentially harbor alien life. Today we're going to cover five of these places, ranked in order of how likely we think they are to be the place we finally discover life outside of our own planet. ## 5. Ceres In fifth place we have Ceres. Named after the Roman goddess of the harvest, it's the largest object in the asteroid belt. In fact, Ceres is so large that it's actually classified as a dwarf planet, and contains about 25% of all the mass present in the entire asteroid belt. It's often referred to as an embryonic planet, because it seems to have begun the process of planet formation but got interrupted at some point, probably by the immense mass of nearby Jupiter. Ceres has an incredibly thin atmosphere, its surface is rocky and cold with large salt deposits, and the temperature can drop to a chilly -225 degrees Fahrenheit, or -143 Celsius. If your instincts are telling you that this isn't a great place to look for life, you're probably right, its surface seems to be outright inhospitable. But the reason Ceres makes this list is the fairly recent discovery of what lies beneath this frozen hellscape. In 2015, NASA's space probe Dawn entered orbit around Ceres, where it would hang out for the next three years. During its time there, the probe came incredibly close to the surface, and gathered crucial data that scientists worked around the clock to interpret. What they found was that there's a high likelihood that Ceres contains a subsurface ocean. And not only that, but the ocean almost certainly consists of salt water. The salinity is the crucial finding here, because it means that even on a frozen world like Ceres, salt lowers water's freezing temperature, allowing it to stay in liquid form, and thus providing a potential habitat for subsurface life. And because many of the salt deposits on the surface are relatively young, having formed within the last million years or so, it's likely that whatever process brought them to the surface is still active, which could mean some form of thermal activity. It's also important to note that if this ocean does exist, it is really, really big. Current estimates place the total amount of water at nearly 25% of Ceres' mass, meaning that it would actually have more water than all of earth's oceans combined. All of this points to the possibility that microscopic life could flourish in this watery mantle, or, that it may have at some point in the past. But it doesn't seem like we'll know for quite some time. There are no currently planned missions to land on Ceres in the near future, and even if there were, it would be quite the technological feat to drill through the surface. So don't expect life on Ceres to be confirmed or denied anytime soon, just know that it's certainly a great candidate for potential life in the solar system. ## 4. Mars In fourth place we have Mars, the fourth planet from the sun and arguably the one we know the most about aside from earth. It's long been the subject of speculation for alien life, going as far back as the 19th century, when astronomers believed the surface was covered in straight canals, supposedly constructed by extraterrestrials, along with large oceans. This was all debunked a few years later, but the idea that Mars may be home to life is a sentiment that has yet to leave. To date, there have been six different rovers landed on the red planet, 5 from NASA and one from the China National Space Administration, all of which have gathered and analyzed soil and rock samples, atmospheric conditions, and more. Two of the rovers, Opportunity and Curiosity, were reported to be searching for signs of extraterrestrial life, specifically looking for organic compounds, microscopic fossils, and traces of ancient water. What we've learned from all this exploration, and the many probes that have circled and photographed the planet, is that Mars was once a very different place from the barren, red landscape we see today. Long ago, the planet was home to plenty of liquid water, which altered the landscape in ways we can still detect today. The only remains of this water are found in the frozen ice caps, as the atmospheric conditions no longer allow liquid water to remain on the surface, but the idea that it was once there raises some tantalizing questions. Was Mars once earthlike? Was it home to a variety of organisms that went extinct billions of years ago? If life did exist, even microscopic life, we may be able to find its fossils if any remain on the surface, or other traces of life that once was. In fact, according to some scientists, we may have already come across such traces. In 1984 a meteorite was picked up in Antarctica, and it was found to be of Martian origin. Specifically, it broke off from Mars around 4 billion years ago, during the time when the planet was home to water. To avoid earthly contamination, samples were taken from the interior of the meteorite, where the team found small, orange, carbonate globules, or droplets. After analyzing these droplets, the team found three pieces of evidence to suggest the presence of ancient microscopic life. First, they found polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAH, a type of complex organic compound. Second, trace amounts of magnetite and iron sulfide, which apparently are rarely found together in the presence of carbonates unless influenced by bacterial processes. And third, when examined under a microscope, the rock contained numerous worm-like tubes that resembled fossilized bacteria. The team admits that any one of these findings could be explained in a way that doesn't invoke extraterrestrial life, but they argue that the presence of all three is too coincidental to ignore. Obviously this proposal was met with a lot of controversy, and is by no means definitive proof, but it is possible evidence that there's much more to the red planet than meets the eye. It's highly unlikely that anything remains living on the surface of Mars, the conditions are simply too brutal, but there is recent evidence of small lakes beneath its surface, just a couple kilometers down. We've found bacteria on earth living in similar conditions, so who's to say they wouldn't be able to do the same in our neighboring world. So stay tuned, because as American and Chinese rovers continue to scour Mars, there are certainly more than a few surprises waiting for us, and one of them may be evidence of alien life. ## 3. Titan In third place we have Titan, one of the most complex and interesting worlds in the solar system. Titan is Saturn's largest moon, and boasts a fully developed atmosphere of nitrogen, methane, and hydrogen. Titan is also the only place in the solar system aside from earth that is known to have liquid lakes, rivers, and seas on its surface. Only these lakes and rivers aren't made of water, they're actually composed of methane and ethane, as the surface of Titan is so cold that water only exists as ice. However, beneath its icy shell, it is speculated to be home to a layer of liquid water. It is also geologically active, keeping the interior warm. Overall it ranks very high in habitability, just not for organisms like humans or fish. It's hypothesized that if life exists on Titan, it could be very different from the water-based organisms we are accustomed to on earth, and may instead consume hydrogen, react the hydrogen with acetylene, and produce methane as a result. Organisms that produce methane are known as methanogens, and they do exist on earth, only on our planet they react hydrogen with carbon dioxide. If these proposed methanogens are present on the surface of Titan, there are a few ways we could detect traces of them. The easiest of these would be to measure the levels of hydrogen and acetylene, which would be lower than expected due to their consumption. Interestingly, evidence consistent with this was reported in 2010, when researchers from John Hopkin's University found that hydrogen levels drop off sharply near the surface as opposed to the high atmosphere, and that the surface has very low levels of acetylene. There are alternative explanations for these findings, though, such as a currently unknown mineral process that allows hydrogen and acetylene to react chemically, without the need for life. Researchers have noted that finding such a new process would be extraordinary, though obviously less extraordinary than alien life. Whether or not any of this is plausible should be answered in the coming years, as the NASA mission Dragonfly is planned to launch in 2027 and arrive on Titan in 2034. Dragonfly will not simply be a rover like we've seen before, but actually a rotorcraft with the ability to vertically take off and land in suitable places on the surface, giving it the ability to sample many different locations across Titan. However, one astrobiologist has pointed out that even if we do find life on Titan, it may still be of earthly origin. Just as scientists speculated that microscopic fossils were blasted off the surface of mars and ended up on earth, so too may chunks of microbe-rich rocks have been knocked off the surface of our planet long ago, potentially landing on Titan and managing to survive and adapt. It would still be an incredible find, but may not necessarily mean that other life independently originated outside earth. Regardless, the complex chemistry of Titan makes it a compelling place to potentially house life, and hopefully Dragonfly can shed some more light on this by the mid-2030s. ## 2. Venus In second place we have Venus, the second planet from the sun and one that is remarkably similar to earth in terms of size and mass. Venus has an incredibly thick atmosphere, which obscures the planet's surface and left it the subject of speculation for many years. Some believed that beneath the clouds were rather earthlike conditions, maybe a massive desert, or perhaps a world made entirely of water, with no land at all. One popular theory was that the surface was covered in thick jungles, a result of immense rainfall from the thick cloud cover. Such a climate was envisioned by authors HP Lovecraft, Ray Bradbury, and many more. Unfortunately, none of this is even close to true, and we've since learned that the surface of Venus is rocky and blazing hot. There is extensive volcanism, and the average surface temperature is around 850 degrees Fahrenheit, or about 450 degrees Celsius, which, by the way, is hot enough to melt lead. The atmosphere is made of 95% carbon dioxide, and the pressure it exerts on the surface is simply crushing, nearly 100 times that found on earth. Suffice to say, no life as we know it would survive for very long on the Venusian surface, and hopes that it contained extraterrestrial life largely died out following these revelations in the 60s and 70s. However, soon after, the focus shifted away from the absolute hell of a surface, and toward the upper layers of the atmosphere, where conditions are surprisingly pleasant. For decades, scientists have speculated that extremophile microorganisms may live in the upper, cooler layers of the atmosphere, where water and sunlight can be found, allowing for potential photosynthesis. This was originally suggested by astronomer Carl Sagan, but more recently in 2019 when researchers reported peculiar bands of UV absorbance in the atmosphere, caused by what they dubbed an 'unknown absorber'. They stated that this unknown absorber may be a chemical reaction that we'll understand one day with more information about the atmospheric conditions, or it may be the result of large colonies of microbial life taking energy from the sun's rays. Further speculation suggests that volcanic activity could blast vital nutrients up into the atmosphere, sustaining whatever life may be thriving amongst the dense clouds. But the real reason Venus is such a hot topic right now is because of the 2020 report that phosphine had been detected in the atmosphere. Phosphine is a gas, and while it can form inorganically, the conditions required to create a substantial amount of it are not present in Venus's atmosphere, or on any rocky planet for that matter, leading the researchers to conclude that it may be of organic origin, and thus a biosignature for life above Venus. Since then, several more analyses have spotted said phosphine in the atmosphere, albeit generally a bit less than in the original report, but still in significant quantities. In wake of these findings, NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine publicly called on researchers to dig deeper into the data, referring to the discovery of phosphine as "the most significant development yet in building the case for life off Earth". Confirmation of these findings may come within the next decade, as NASA is currently planning an exploratory mission to Venus, the VERITAS spacecraft, with 2029 as the earliest expected launch date. However, budget shortfalls have taken a hit on the project, and there's a chance it may get canceled altogether. ## 1. Europa Coming in at first place, arguably the best place to search for life in the solar system, we have Europa, one of Jupiter's 95 known moons and the sixth largest in the solar system. Europa's surface is a smooth sheet of ice, and the current scientific consensus is that beneath this ice lies a vast subsurface ocean of liquid water. And not just any subsurface ocean, because Europa's tidal forces are thought to create an internal circulation, creating currents that keep the water constantly moving. This interaction and constant motion have led astronomers to hypothesize that the water below may be in a constant cycle that eventually brings it to the surface, meaning that when we eventually land on Europa, we may not need to dig through the ice to look for signs of life, as it may be waiting on the icy surface. It's also been hypothesized that radiation striking the ice could create oxygen that makes its way down into the ocean, and scientists have spotted clay-like deposits that supposedly contain organic compounds, meaning Europa as a whole has conditions seemingly more than suitable for life. As promising as it sounds, other scientists are more skeptical. Some have proposed that the subsurface ocean almost never interacts with the surface, and that the ice sheet is far thicker than previously thought, perhaps containing a thick layer of slightly warmer ice and only containing liquid water more than a hundred miles down. If this is true, we would have a very difficult time reaching potential life on the icy moon. More information on Europa and its potential habitability is expected in the coming years, as the European Space Agency recently launched the Jupiter Icy Moon Explorer, or JUICE probe. JUICE plans to orbit and study three of Jupiter's moons, Ganymede, Callisto, and Europa. This mission will likely overlap with a planned NASA mission, the Europa Clipper, which is set to launch in October 2024. With all these launches searching for life in the solar system, the future holds some interesting developments, and perhaps in 10 years this video will look hilariously outdated. ## Key Takeaways - NASA and ESA focus on finding microorganisms, not advanced civilizations, in the solar system. - Ceres, Mars, Titan, Venus, and Europa are top candidates for potential extraterrestrial life. - Ceres may harbor a subsurface saltwater ocean, potentially supporting microscopic life. - Mars shows signs of past liquid water and possible ancient microbial life. - Europa is considered the best place to search for life due to its subsurface ocean. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### What is the largest object in the asteroid belt? Ceres is the largest object in the asteroid belt and is classified as a dwarf planet. ### What makes Ceres a potential candidate for harboring alien life? Ceres is believed to contain a subsurface ocean of salt water, which could provide a potential habitat for subsurface life. ### What evidence suggests that Mars once had liquid water? Exploration of Mars has revealed that the planet was once home to plenty of liquid water, which altered the landscape in detectable ways. ### What was significant about the 1984 meteorite found in Antarctica? The meteorite, of Martian origin, contained small, orange, carbonate globules with evidence suggesting the presence of ancient microscopic life. ### What are the unique features of Titan that make it a candidate for alien life? Titan has a fully developed atmosphere of nitrogen, methane, and hydrogen, and is the only place in the solar system aside from Earth to have liquid lakes, rivers, and seas on its surface, though they are composed of methane and ethane. ### What is the proposed method for detecting life on Titan? One method is to measure the levels of hydrogen and acetylene, which would be lower than expected due to their consumption by potential methanogens. ### What are the conditions like on the surface of Venus? The surface of Venus is rocky and blazing hot, with extensive volcanism and an average surface temperature around 850 degrees Fahrenheit, or about 450 degrees Celsius. ### What recent discovery on Venus has sparked interest in the search for alien life? The detection of phosphine in Venus's atmosphere, which may be of organic origin, has sparked interest in the search for alien life. ### What makes Europa a top candidate for harboring alien life? Europa is believed to have a vast subsurface ocean of liquid water, with conditions seemingly suitable for life, including potential oxygen and organic compounds. ### What upcoming missions are planned to study Europa? The European Space Agency's Jupiter Icy Moon Explorer (JUICE) and NASA's Europa Clipper are planned missions to study Europa and its potential habitability. ## Sources - [Original Side Projects video: 5 Incredible Places to Look for Alien Life](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CU94oRXqF4o) ## Related Coverage Simon Whistler https://sideprojects.pub/article/5-mind-bending-paradoxes-explained https://sideprojects.pub/article/5-mind-bending-paradoxes-explained Thu, 25 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT When a statement seems contradictory, a situation impossible, or a scene so puzzling we just can't wrap our minds around it, we call it a paradox. There are all sorts of paradoxes, including unsolved problems in biology, confusing concepts in relativity, mathematics, logic, and much more. Today we're going to go over some of the most popular paradoxes out there, and break down exactly what makes them so perplexing. ## The Bootstrap Paradox The first one we'll dive into is called the bootstrap paradox, and it is one of the many mind-boggling issues that arise when we think about time travel to the past. Long story short, an item can travel backward in time and become its own cause for existence in the future. Sounds confusing, so let's break it down. Imagine you walk into your local library, looking for an interesting story to read. After scanning the shelves for a bit, you pull out *The Lord of the Rings* by J.R.R. Tolkien. Lost in his fantasy world, you decide that this is the best book you've ever read, and you now have a burning desire to personally thank Tolkien for his works. Unfortunately, Tolkien died in 1973, so you head home and do what any determined fan would: you build a time machine in your garage and travel back to the 1920s, where you find Tolkien in his 30s. You spend several hours gushing about your favorite characters, moments, and battles from his book, and ask him to autograph it. But Tolkien is flustered, and has no clue what you're talking about, because he won't publish the book for another 15 years and hasn't even started writing it yet. Finally, you decide it's time to go home. But as you're stepping into your time machine and warping back to the future, you realize that you accidentally left your book in Tolkien's house, leaving it in possession of its author. What happens here is that Tolkien is inspired by your words of praise, and finding the copy of the book you left behind, decides to claim it as his own and publishes it as *The Lord of the Rings*. It becomes a historic novel, eventually ending up in your local library, where you pick it up, fall in love with it, and head back in time to give it to Tolkien. On the surface, this might seem fine, but it begs the question: Where did the book come from in the first place? It can't have originally come from Tolkien, because he got the idea from you when you traveled back and gave it to him, and it didn't come from you, because you got the idea from Tolkien when you found his book in the library. And this is the paradox: the book exists in a time loop, with no beginning. Cause-and-effect has been broken because time travel has allowed the effect to become its own cause. If it still doesn't make sense to you, here's a couple more examples. An episode of *Doctor Who* describes a situation in which a man goes back in time with some of Beethoven's music, but upon finding that Beethoven doesn't exist, decides to become Beethoven and publishes the music himself. Not only does this leave the origin of the music up in the air, but even the name Beethoven seemingly has no origin. And finally, in the 1980 movie *Somewhere in Time*, the character played by Christopher Reeve is given a pocket watch by an elderly lady. Later in the movie, he travels back in time and meets this lady in her youth, where he gifts her the pocket watch. So according to the woman, the man traveled back in time and gave her the watch, which is why she gave it back to him later in life. But according to the man, the woman gave him the watch first, which is why he went back in time to give it to her. Following the trail of the watch's origin, you end up stuck in a loop with no beginning. ## Hilbert's Hotel Our next paradox comes from the world of mathematics, and highlights the inability of the human mind to easily comprehend infinity. Hilbert's Experiment of the Grand Hotel is a thought experiment that imagines a gargantuan hotel. It's so big that it has not just a few thousand rooms, not even a few million, but an infinite number of rooms. Stranger still, every room is occupied by a single person, meaning if you randomly select any number, that room is taken, all the way from room number 7, to room 400,000, to room number six octillion. No matter how high you go, they are all occupied. But you really want to stay in this hotel, so you come up with an idea to make some space for yourself. Every occupant simply needs to move up one room, meaning the person in room 1 moves into room 2, the person in room 2 moves into room 3, and so on, all the way up the chain. This leaves room 1 vacant, and you can now take it for yourself. This method works for any number of finite guests. Bringing in 10 new guests simply means that everyone needs to move up 10 rooms; bring in 50, and everyone needs to move up 50 rooms. No matter the number, you can always find room. It's a strange idea that because infinity does not behave like the numbers we encounter in our daily lives, even when it's full, you can still make space in it. But it gets even weirder. Not only can you fit any number of finite guests into the hotel, but even an infinite amount. If an infinite amount of people shows up looking for a room, all the manager has to do is move the guest from room 1 into room 2, room 2 to room 4, room 3 to room 6, 4 to 8, 5 to 10, and so on. Doubling each room number always ends in an even number, leaving every single odd-numbered room vacant, and the infinite number of guests can settle in for the night in rooms 1, 3, 5, 7, etcetera. But this is where we're going to stop with the math behind Hilbert's Grand Hotel, because mathematicians have gone wild from here, coming up with solutions to housing an infinite number of cars each carrying an infinite number of people. Now imagine the hotel is on the beach, and an infinite number of ferries arrive each carrying an infinite number of cars each carrying an infinite number of people. The math gets pretty crazy, but you don't need to understand the math to get what this paradox is about. The reason Hilbert's Hotel is a paradox is because it leads to a result that is counter-intuitive, yet certainly and provably true. Our instinct tells us that when a hotel is full, it's full, and that's the end of the story, but when working with infinity, things are never quite so simple. ## The Ship of Theseus Our next paradox is a classic, first recorded by Greek historian Plutarch nearly 2000 years ago in his biography *Life of Theseus*. The story goes as follows. A ship carrying the legendary hero Theseus sailed from Athens to Crete, and because Theseus was such an important figure, the ship was preserved for many generations. And over the years, as old planks began to crack and rot, they were replaced with new ones. Likewise, the aging sails were eventually replaced with newer fabric, as well as the oars, the rudders, and everything else. After all these years of renovations, it was realized that not a single piece remained from the original ship—every last bit had been replaced with something newer. So then here's the question: Is this still the ship of Theseus, or is it an entirely new ship? If you take the side that it is an entirely new ship, it only leads to more questions. It's unclear when this transition happened, because presumably at some point in the renovations it was still the original ship, and only after a certain number of parts had been replaced did it become something completely new. But how many parts? Surely not just one, but where do you draw the line? Maybe once you pass 50%, maybe 75%—there's no definitive answer. But here's where it gets even trickier. What if someone had secretly been saving all the discarded parts from the original ship, all the old planks, decaying sails, and splitting masts, and once they had every single piece, reconstructed the old ship with the original parts. Sitting side by side with the one that had been renovated over the years, they both lay claim to being the actual Ship of Theseus. One ship claims this through continuity, and the other through originality. This is the paradox—a paradox of identity. Whichever ship you believe to be the actual Ship of Theseus largely comes down to your own opinion. And several so-called solutions have been thought up over the years, but none of them can quite nail it down. You might have already been familiar with this paradox not just through the ship example, but from others around the world. Old tales from several European nations speak of knives who have had their blades and handles replaced, and an ancient Buddhist text describes a man whose body parts were removed by demons and replaced with those from a corpse, leaving him questioning his true identity. These concepts might sound abstract and a bit detached from reality, so let's make it personal. Throughout your life, your cells are dividing and dying off; in fact, every day, more than 50 billion cells die in your body, constantly replaced in a fine-tuned biological process. Because some cells live longer than others, it's estimated that ALL of our body's cells are replaced every 7-10 years. So at what point do you consider your body one that's entirely new? ## The Lottery Paradox Imagine there's a big lottery in town, with a single guaranteed winner, and you just can't resist buying a ticket. Not because you're addicted to gambling—you can quit whenever you'd like—but because you can't stop thinking about becoming that sole winner and buying that super yacht you've always wanted. After heading home, you turn on the TV to see the devastating news that exactly one million lottery tickets have been sold. You stare at the one in your hand, and realizing that you essentially have no chance of winning, you throw it away. After all, there's a million other tickets; it is very reasonable to assume that yours is losing, hence why gambling is a losing game in the first place. After talking to your friend, you explain your logic to him, and he also throws his ticket out, realizing that he too has no real chance of winning, and the ticket was nothing more than a waste of money. This is perfectly logical thought, as 999,999 out of a million is well beyond the threshold to consider something a certainty. Therefore, it's reasonable to assume that ticket number 1 is losing, and it's also reasonable to assume that ticket number 2 is losing. This logic follows all the way through to the one millionth ticket, and applying the same logic across the board, it has now become reasonable to assume that not a single ticket will win. But this can't be, because you know that one of them will win. And this is where the paradox arises, in these contradictory yet seemingly true statements. You have one rational line of thought telling you that you are completely justified by your natural intuition in saying that every single ticket will lose, while another rational line of thought tells you that one of them must be winning. To some, this doesn't seem like a paradox; after all, it's just a matter of probability. But to philosophers, this isn't a purely mathematical paradox like Hilbert's Hotel was—this is a paradox of rational human thought. At what point do we draw the line between being justified in something being a certainty, while it is still technically possible? And how can this rational logic lead to two completely true, yet contradictory statements? This puzzle was first put forward in the 1960s, and its underlying logic has been grappled with ever since, with many solutions having been put forward, such as restricting the logic to find the difference between something being highly probable and something being absolutely certain. To cognitive scientists, it seems to be a problem of information aggregation, or how we combine results from different lines of thought. Regardless, much like the other paradoxes, this is a level of logic that doesn't affect one's day-to-day life, and even figuring out solutions to it does not influence anyone's decision making when it comes to gambling. And this is considered by some to be the secondary Lottery Paradox: what compels people to engage in an event when the odds are so astronomically stacked against them that they know they have next to no chance of winning? ## The Grandfather Paradox For our last paradox, we'll dive into one that you've most certainly heard of before. The grandfather paradox—perhaps the most popular time travel problem ever thought up. Let's start with the basics. You build a time machine and travel back many decades, encountering your own grandfather while he was still in his youth. For whatever reason, you end up taking his life, meaning that he doesn't ever meet your grandmother, and never has kids with her, leading to you never being born. If you are never born, then nobody goes back in time to eliminate your grandfather, meaning he continues his life as normal, meets your grandmother, and the two raise a girl who ends up giving birth to you. Now that you exist, you can go back in time and kill your grandfather, starting the whole cycle over again. It's an utterly confusing mess, and has left everyone scratching their heads for years. Its relative simplicity yet far-reaching consequences are part of why it has become so popular, and there is quite a bit to unpack here. One solution to the paradox arises from quantum mechanics, specifically the many-worlds interpretation. This theory suggests that when an event can happen one of two ways—say, you either kill your grandfather or you don't—both options actually happen, branching off into multiple universes or timelines. This solves the issue of you not being born, because the universe in which you kill your grandfather is not the one in which you were eventually created. By the way, this theory also seems to fix the Bootstrap paradox mentioned at the beginning of the video, because it means that the object's time loop actually begins in a separate universe. But this idea leaves so much to be explained with these alleged alternate universes that there's really just more questions than answers. Another solution comes from what is known as the Novikov self-consistency principle, a conjecture put forward by a Russian physicist proposing that the universe outright prevents any actions that would create contradictions or paradoxes. If this is true, it could mean that the laws of the universe do not allow time travel to the past in any form, or it may mean that all we can do is observe the past without interfering. The most concerning implication of this, though, is that it may indeed allow us to travel to the past, but anything we do only serves to preserve the timeline as it was, meaning that, all along, our past actions only contributed to the current state of the world. Put simply, you can indeed travel backwards, but nothing you do matters as you cannot change the future. If this is true, it brings into question the notion of free will, because it appears that our actions are already predetermined to preserve the timeline. And so, perhaps the simplest explanation is the most boring one: that time travel to the past simply isn't possible, and we'll never need to deal with the potential consequences of such an invention. ## Key Takeaways - The bootstrap paradox involves an item traveling back in time to become its own cause. - Hilbert's Hotel paradox illustrates the counterintuitive nature of infinity in mathematics. - The Ship of Theseus paradox questions identity when all parts of an object are replaced. - The Lottery Paradox highlights the contradiction between rational thought and probability. - The Grandfather Paradox explores the logical inconsistencies of time travel to the past. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### What is the bootstrap paradox? The bootstrap paradox is a time travel paradox where an item travels backward in time and becomes its own cause for existence in the future, creating a time loop with no clear origin. ### Can you explain the Hilbert’s Hotel paradox? Hilbert’s Hotel is a thought experiment involving an infinite hotel where every room is occupied. Despite being full, it's possible to accommodate more guests by shifting existing guests to higher-numbered rooms, highlighting the counter-intuitive nature of infinity. ### What is the Ship of Theseus paradox? The Ship of Theseus paradox questions the identity of an object that has had all its parts replaced over time. If every part of a ship is replaced, is it still the same ship? ### How does the Lottery Paradox work? The Lottery Paradox presents a scenario where each lottery ticket seems unlikely to win, leading to the conclusion that no ticket will win, which contradicts the fact that one ticket must win. ### What is the grandfather paradox? The grandfather paradox is a time travel paradox where traveling back in time to kill your grandfather prevents your own existence, creating a logical contradiction. ### What are some solutions to the grandfather paradox? Some solutions include the many-worlds interpretation, which suggests that both outcomes happen in different universes, and the Novikov self-consistency principle, which proposes that the universe prevents actions that create contradictions. ### What is the many-worlds interpretation? The many-worlds interpretation is a theory from quantum mechanics suggesting that every possible outcome of a quantum event actually occurs in a separate, branching universe. ### What is the Novikov self-consistency principle? The Novikov self-consistency principle is a conjecture that the universe prevents actions that would create contradictions or paradoxes, ensuring that time travel to the past does not alter the timeline. ### What is the secondary Lottery Paradox? The secondary Lottery Paradox questions why people engage in gambling when the odds are overwhelmingly against them, despite knowing they have almost no chance of winning. ## Sources - [Original Side Projects video: 5 Mind-Bending Paradoxes Explained](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uGQm8YykPIs) ## Related Coverage Simon Whistler https://sideprojects.pub/article/5-most-idiotic-warships-ever-made https://sideprojects.pub/article/5-most-idiotic-warships-ever-made Thu, 25 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT When done right, a warship, be it a dinky destroyer or a beastly battleship, is a truly terrifying thing, as it brims with the latest, greatest, and most deadly technology, and is crewed by hundreds, if not thousands of masterfully trained men and women, each of whom are masters of their individual maritime crafts, and who come together to make a fearsome sum far greater than their individual parts. And yet, despite all of that, 'great' warships have a problem… you all find them boring! We've seen the analytics; we know what you are all about – you cheeky scamps! Well, we here on Sideprojects aim to please, so for the next 20 or so minutes, let's boot the notion of quality far off over the horizon and pay it no heed, and instead focus our minds firmly on the terrible, the incompetent, and the bewildering; the truly God-awful stuff that never should have graced, or should we say disgraced, the waves. This is five idiotic warships… let's begin. ## 1. Vasa Although known for its peace-loving ways nowadays, back in the 17th century Sweden was a VERY different beast; a muscular unit of a nation that liked nothing more than flexing its guns, both literally and figuratively, and waging expansionist wars of conquest against its neighbours… as was the European way at the time. Enter Gustavus Adolphus, the then wearer of Sweden's shiny hat. The year was 1628, and he was then engaged in one such war of expansion, specifically the Thirty Years War of 1618-1648. The war was going quite well for him all things considered, and to keep that momentum going he was on a ship building bonanza; eager to make sure that Sweden emerges from the war not only victorious, but as the undisputed master of the Baltic Sea for many years to come. The *pièce de résistance* of this effort was the **Vasa**, an enormous 64-gun warship that was to be the flagship not just of Adolphus' navy, but of Sweden itself; a no expense spared testimony to the might of Swedish civilisation as beautiful as she was deadly. Truly she was a thing to behold, and no doubt Adolphus couldn't help but feel a sense of smug satisfaction as her mighty hull crashed into the waves for the first time. You can't blame him really, because he had invested **5% of his entire nation's GDP** into her construction. Said smugness would have been fleeting however, because not even twenty minutes later, the top of Vasa's masts slipped beneath the waves as the drink claimed her for its own. So, what the hell happened? In a nutshell, it was all about the ballast, or rather a lack thereof. Ballast stabilizes a ship, ensuring that it has a low centre of gravity and can remain upright and steady at sea, and Vasa's ballast was insufficient for her size and the weight of her armaments. This critical miscalculation made her dangerously top-heavy, with way too much weight placed high above the waterline. This made her terrifying array of 64 guns little but multi-ton pendulums as she swayed from side to side in the Baltic waves. This was bad enough within the sheltered confines of Stockholm Harbour, with surviving testimony describing her as wallowing from side to side so severely that her crew would almost certainly be breaking out the precautionary brown underpants. But for whatever reason, the captain ordered full sails ahead, and when they broke out of the harbour, the full might of the Baltic's winds hit her, and it was game over; her pendulous guns sent her into an extreme list from which she could not right, and she fell over onto her side. From there she began filling with water, and soon enough sank beneath the waves – barely more than a kilometre away from her home port. But while her lack of ballast was the straw that broke the camel's back, there is a larger story. For example, there was a lack of oversight and clear guidelines from the king during her construction, who was more concerned with her firepower and imposing appearance than her seaworthiness. The shipbuilders, under immense pressure to meet the king's demands, kept quiet, fully aware of the disaster they were nailing together. Additionally, there were significant changes to her specifications during construction, including a last-minute decision to add a second gundeck, which only exacerbated the existing stability problems, and further compromised her design. The aftermath of the sinking led to an inquest by the Swedish Council of the State. Much finger pointing ensued, as everyone involved with the Vasa debacle tried to make sure the blame landed at someone else's feet, and ultimately, no canings, either literal nor proverbial, were handed out – Adolphus was well aware it was his fault, and well aware that everyone thought that, and so saw little to be gained from trying to pin the blame on a scapegoat. Incredibly, that isn't where the Vasa's story ends however, because she was hauled up from the seabed in **1961** after it was found that thanks to the peculiar specifics of where she sank, she was still in near as damn it perfect condition. She was then housed in a purpose built 'Vasa Museum' in Stockholm, where she remains to this day. We FIRMLY recommend a visit if you happen to be in the area – few ships from this period survive PERIOD, so the fact that one survives in near perfect condition is genuinely crazy. ## 2. Novgorod When a boffin has a brainwave, it means one of two things. Either A), sliced bread has just been invented, and the world's other boffins are about to slap their head in unison before shouting "Damn, why didn't we think of that!" Or B), there was a VERY good reason no one else was doing it, and our hypothetical boffin is about to have fate smear egg thickly over his face, and generally leave him looking a bit of a nob. For **Rear-Admiral Andrei Alexandrovich Popov** of the Imperial Russian Navy, it was B), because back in the black and white days of the late 19th century, he took a look at the THOUSANDS of years of ship-design orthodoxy that preceded him which dictated that ships should be vaguely rectangular shaped from the top down, and proceeded to say: "Sod that for a game of soldiers, what if they were circular." Yes, you heard us right, **CIRCULAR ships**. From those musings spawned the **Novgorod** in 1874. She was an ironclad river monitor, a river monitor being a classification of ship which boasts neither speed nor armour, but REALLY big guns relative to its size, and river, well, would it shock you to discover that that refers to where she was meant to operate? In this case specifically 'river' refers to the Dnieper–Bug Estuary, a vital waterway in modern day Ukraine, where Novgorod and her sister ship the Vice Admiral Popov were planned to be stationed, so that they could duly obliterate any pesky foreigners who threatened the Tsar's waterways. Like every terrible idea however, there was method in the madness, and for Popov he believed that shortening a ship's hull while broadening its beam would reduce the area of the ship which needed armouring and greatly enhance mobility thanks to the weight saved. The circular hull was just the logical end point of this idea; there is no less short nor broad a shape can be before it starts to take on the form of a rectangle once again – or so his thinking went anyway. Initially, the Russian Navy was so impressed that it wanted an entire fleet of these circular ironclads. Once constructed however, it quickly became apparent that those lofty ambitions were to go unrealised, as fate didn't so much throw just a bit of egg into Popov's face, as it did pin him down and smear a whole coop's worth right on in there. That great manoeuvrability that Popov yearned for so desperately. Well, it was non-existent, and we mean that quite literally. The ship's circular design and flat bottom resulted in a vessel that was not far off impossible to steer and control, especially in strong currents – she was basically a skimming stone with some whopping great cannons bolted on. So bad was this, that she could take **45 MINUTES** to do a full 360° turn in the water. But wait, there's more! Her flat bottom also meant she was dangerously unstable and prone to rolling, which left her confined to port during all but the calmest of water, and our personal favourite fact about her: **her cannons could send her spinning uncontrollably** – imagine a teacup ride propelled by 82lbs of gunpowder and you have the idea. Perhaps unsurprisingly then, that planned fleet of circular ironclads soon had the plug pulled on it, and the idea was written off as a bugger up from which the Imperial Russian Navy would like to quickly move on. Popov however, eager to scrape SOME of egg off his face, did later revisit the idea for the imperial yacht *Livadia*, but she was, to put it simply, a 'normal' ship that had her hull balloon out into an oval shape at the waterline – a FAR cry from Popov's original vision. But it did at least, you know, work and all that, so good for you Popov! ## 3. Hoche If there's one thing France excels at, it's architecture. A statement which becomes self-evident when one gazes upon the Arc de Triomphe, the Palace of Versailles, and Notre-Dame Cathedral; all truly magnificent structures to behold. This isn't ALWAYS a good thing, however. If it's a beautiful yet cliched proposal spot you want, say no more, keep that beautiful architecture coming. But if you are trying to make a top-of-the-line warship, old school architectural cues probably shouldn't really be high up on your list of must haves. And that brings us to the **Hoche**, because she WAS designed with such features in mind, and as a result featured **multi-pane glass windows and doors** more befitting of the Basilica of Saint-Denis than the Port of Brest – smart shout that, big windows in something designed to be shot at… WHAT COULD GO WRONG. It gets worse too, because while her bizarre windows are certainly the easiest thing to point and laugh at, the low hanging fruit that they are acts as a scapegoat for a much broader picture… one in which the Hoche was simply a heap of junk from top to bottom. Another glaring issue was her stability, which was heavily compromised by an overly heavy and tall superstructure. This had been intended to give her plenty of space for additional facilities and crew accommodations, so was certainly a commendable idea, but in reality, all it served to do was make her VERY top-heavy… much like the Vasa. Oh, and just to make the stability even worse, they then plonked two VERY thick and therefore heavy military masts on top of all of that. But wait, there's more, because they also gave her a fearsome complement of guns, specifically, **two 340mms, two 274mms, and 18 138mms**, all of the Modèle 1881 type, which weighed 52, 28, and eight tons respectively BEFORE they were put into a turret. This would have been happy days in a better designed ship, but in the already unstable Hoche, it was just too much, and as a result of all of this, she was about as stable as a baby deer having its first go at ice skating. And it's a shame really, because Hoche could have been a belting ship, as she actually had quite a lot of highly innovative and top of the line features. For example, she was the first French capital ship to use armoured turrets and compound armour, alloyed armour that offers much greater protection than just pure steel, and she also had that mighty armament we just discussed – and yet, it all meant naught in the face of her highly compromised core design. At least it didn't end in disaster, because the French Navy immediately recognised the hot steaming turd they had on their hands when Hoche first hit the water in **1886**, and almost immediately took some steps to fix her, such as giving her some lighter guns, chopping away some of her upper superstructure, and swapping in some lighter masts. This didn't suddenly make her a wonder ship mind, and she was still deeply flawed as a fighting warship, but at least she didn't drag all of her sailors down to the bottom of the ocean… so that's something at least. ## 4. HMS Captain Our next idiotic warship, **HMS Captain** from 1870 is a ship that is difficult to categorise, as she was a child of the transitional period between sail and steam power. As a result of this, the form of then modern warships was still being figured out, and thus Captain escapes an easy 'type' we can point to her as being. She was reasonably big for her time, displacing just under **8,000 tons**, which, to put it in perspective, is just over 1,000 tons lighter than HMS Warrior and double the displacement of CSS Virginia – both of which are more famous ships of the same period we can use as a reference. And like both Warrior and Virginia, she too was both steam powered and ironclad in her design. Her firepower came from a pure muzzle-loading arrangement of four RML 12-Inchers, and two RML 7-Inchers. These would have made for quite the formidable armament even if they were just pointing out of the side 'age of sail' style, but she had a little trick up her sleeve – her 12-Inchers were mounted in armoured turrets buried in the middle of her hull, which gave them unparalleled versatility for the time. This was part of a wider cutting edge design trend of the time of so called 'turret ships,' which were exactly what they sound like, although note, due to the WIDE variation in turret type, shape, and the sort of ship they were mounted to, this moniker doesn't tell you much about the ship beside the fact it had at least 'a' turret, and thus it isn't typically used to describe a ship 'type,' but rather a feature. But we digress; if Captain had all of this good stuff going for her on paper, being a big, well-armed, and armoured girl, where did it all start to go belly up? Well, in what is becoming something of a trend in this video, she was FAR too top heavy. Really, she was a victim of her own success in many ways – she had all of these whiz-bang new features… that were SO cutting edge that they were implemented terribly, as the designers of the day simply hadn't had the opportunity to think them through thoroughly. For example, while she may have been steam powered, steam propulsion was still new and scary in those days. Ship designers the world over recognised the merits make no mistake, and were well aware that being able to sail independently of the wind at speeds hitherto thought impossible was a BIG deal, but they were reluctant to depend upon it, because what if it broke? You'd be stranded at sea with no way of making it back home and no way of communicating your situation, and so, it was reasoned, some sails should still be chucked on just as an emergency backup. And that is what led to Captain's bizarre looking design with the turrets buried in the centre of the ship. The designers couldn't think of a way of getting both her turrets AND her masts onto the same deck… and so they just put a deck over the turrets. This was just far too much weight up high; between the weight of her turrets, the weight of her masts, and the weight of her armour, it was a recipe for disaster. Oh, and that's not all, the 'turrets in the middle' set up also led to her having a dangerously low freeboard, the distance between the waterline and the deck, of **six and a half feet**… and there's A LOT of waves taller than that out on the waves of the deep blue sea. All of these defects came home to roost in **September 1870**, barely five months after her commissioning. She was hit by a storm off the coast of Spain, one that threw **50-foot-tall waves** in her direction, and because of her low freeboard, A LOT of this water settled on her deck, then, when she entered a list while crossing a wave, all of that weight sloshed to the side, and made sure she didn't recover, and she was below the waves in mere minutes. Out of a crew of over 500, **only 18 survived**. ## 5. Tomozuru For our final idiotic warship, let's take a look at the Japanese torpedo boat **Tomozuru**. She was a modest little thing, displacing a little over 800 tons fully laden, and more or less dead on 600 tons normally. Her small size was quite intentional however, because as a torpedo boat her whole schtick was being small and nippy while packing a mighty right hook that could leave much larger ships trembling before her. To this end, she could top out at **30 knots**, carried a 127mm Type 3 Naval gun as normally seen on destroyers, which was later upgraded to three 120mm Type 11s, and packed a complement of eight Type 95 torpedoes, each of which packed a 550kg warhead, and was the fastest of ANY torpedo in common use at the time. So then, just how did Tomozuru earn her place on this list most contemptable, because she sounds like a bit of a unit doesn't she? Well, the problem, in a nutshell, was that her teeth were TOO sharp – much like a bro-lifter who always finds an excuse to skip leg day, and as a result finds themselves sporting a fetching pair of chicken legs, Tomozuru's strength came at the expense of her stability. You see, she was a child of the **Washington Naval Treaty**, which was signed by the US, the UK, Japan, France, and Italy in 1922. The treaty aimed at preventing a naval arms race by limiting the size and armament of warships, as the construction of big muscular warships before WWI was seen as a major contributing factor to both the outbreak of hostilities and the destructiveness of the conflict when it did break out… it also proved CRIPPLINGLY expensive to boot. We'll spare you the specific legalese, lest this video get JUST A BIT dull, but just know that this treaty, and the various limits it and its later revisions imposed saw Japan want to get the maximum bang for its buck out of its warships, quite literally, and it began to cram ever bigger guns onto hulls which they never would never have been paired up with before the treaty. From this logic, the Tomozuru was born in 1934, with the teeth of a destroyer, but the hull of a torpedo boat. There is a small problem with that kind of ship building formula however, one that was missed by Japanese planners as they hyper-fixated on firepower relative to tonnage… that being that there was a damned good reason why in the before times guns were fixed to the hulls they were… and ignoring that wisdom made ships 'rather' top heavy. So, knowing that, guess what happened when Tomozuru was put into the water? Yep, she capsized. She was unstable from the offset, and before her sea trials were even complete, she was noted to wallow from side to side in a manner akin to a drunkard after their 10th can of Special Brew. The Japanese Admiralty cared not however, as it is easy to gloss over glaring problems and say 'be reet' when it isn't you who is personally serving on the ship in question. But alas, time is the great vindicator and humiliator, and so all was proved to not in fact 'be reet' on the **12th of March 1934**, not even a month after her completion. She was on nighttime exercises with the 12th Torpedo Flotilla, and as a storm rolled in, her lights disappeared from view and all radio communications stopped… she had capsized! It took 10 hours to find her, and a further 17 hours to drag her back into port, by which point **over 100 of her crew perished**. She was then refitted with the new guns we mentioned earlier to make her less top heavy, and pushed back into service, where she then managed to stay out of the drink until March 1945, when American bombs sent her to the bottom of the sea. ## Key Takeaways - The Vasa sank shortly after launch due to insufficient ballast, making it dangerously top-heavy. - The Novgorod's circular design made it nearly impossible to steer and prone to rolling. - The Hoche's stability was compromised by a heavy superstructure and large guns, making it unstable. - The HMS Captain's design flaws, including excessive top weight and low freeboard, led to its sinking in a storm. - The Tomozuru capsized due to its top-heavy design, resulting in over 100 crew members perishing. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### What was the primary issue with the Vasa warship? The primary issue with the Vasa warship was insufficient ballast, making her dangerously top-heavy and prone to capsizing. ### Why did the Novgorod warship have maneuverability issues? The Novgorod warship had maneuverability issues due to its circular design and flat bottom, which made it difficult to steer and control, especially in strong currents. ### What architectural features made the Hoche warship problematic? The Hoche warship featured multi-pane glass windows and doors, a heavy and tall superstructure, and thick military masts, all of which contributed to its instability. ### What caused the HMS Captain to capsize? The HMS Captain capsized due to its top-heavy design, which included turrets, masts, and armor, combined with a low freeboard that allowed waves to flood the deck. ### What was the main flaw of the Tomozuru warship? The main flaw of the Tomozuru warship was its instability due to having the armament of a destroyer on the hull of a torpedo boat, making it top-heavy. ### What was the intended role of the Novgorod warship? The Novgorod warship was intended to operate in the Dnieper–Bug Estuary, a vital waterway in modern-day Ukraine, to protect the Tsar's waterways. ### What innovative features did the Hoche warship have despite its flaws? The Hoche warship was the first French capital ship to use armored turrets and compound armor, and it had a powerful armament. ### What was the significance of the Vasa warship to Sweden? The Vasa warship was intended to be the flagship of Sweden's navy and a testament to the nation's might, with 5% of Sweden's GDP invested in its construction. ### What was the Washington Naval Treaty and how did it affect the Tomozuru? The Washington Naval Treaty limited the size and armament of warships to prevent a naval arms race. The Tomozuru was built to maximize firepower within these limits, resulting in an unstable design. ### How did the Vasa warship end up being preserved? The Vasa warship was salvaged from the seabed in 1961 and is now housed in the Vasa Museum in Stockholm, where it remains in near-perfect condition. ## Sources - [Original Side Projects video: 5 of the Most Idiotic Warships Ever Made](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXdAm4bzrZY) ## Related Coverage Simon Whistler https://sideprojects.pub/article/5-new-scientific-discoveries-2024 https://sideprojects.pub/article/5-new-scientific-discoveries-2024 Thu, 25 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT In the ever-evolving landscape of scientific research and exploration, humanity's brightest minds continue to push the boundaries of knowledge at a rate faster than ever before. So far, 2024 has been no exception, and while we're only a few months into the year, there have already been several fascinating discoveries from a wide variety of fields. Today we're going to bring you 5 of these recent findings, from what might be the oldest black hole ever found, to a new innovation that might be the key to the future of the world's batteries, and much more. ## The Big Ring Sifting through data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, PhD student Alexia Lopez was studying the distant universe when she spotted something incredible. 9.2 billion light-years away from us is a massive circle of galactic clusters so large that it defies all possible reasoning. It's been nicknamed the Big Ring, and with a diameter of 1.3 billion light-years and a circumference of 4 billion, it might just be the largest structure in the observable universe. But there's a problem with the Big Ring, and that's the fact that its mere existence casts doubt on some well-established cosmological principles. To understand how the ring is forming cracks in the foundation of astrophysics, we need to rewind time, all the way back to the Big Bang. During the first few hundred thousand years after the big bang, the universe was filled with an ocean of dense plasma. As waves rippled through this plasma, it created peaks and valleys. This is known as Baryonic Acoustic Oscillation, or BAO, and it's believed that the places where matter bunched up on these primordial waves is what led to the distribution of matter we see throughout the universe today, as well as the patterns of the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation. The problem here is that analysis of the Big Bang and current models of BAO indicate that the upper limit for cosmic structures should be somewhere in the ballpark of 1.2 billion light years in length, which sounded great until we started discovering things larger than this upper limit, such as the Big Ring. But the oddities don't end there. What makes the Big Ring even stranger is that it is adjacent to another limit breaker that was discovered in 2021, the Giant Arc in the Sky, which, by the way, was also discovered by the same PhD student Alexia Lopez. The Giant Arc is considered by some to be larger than the Big Ring, as it spans 3.3 billion light-years, only it doesn't form a complete circle like its recently-discovered neighbor. To put into perspective just how immensely large these structures are, the cluster of galaxies that our Milky Way resides in, the Laniakea Supercluster, is only about 520 million light-years in diameter, meaning that despite containing an estimated 100,000 galaxies, it is absolutely dwarfed by the Big Ring. And the Giant Arc is so large that if it were visible to human eyes in the night sky, it would take up the space of 20 full moons lined up side-by-side, and, overall, takes up about 1/15th the radius of the entire visible universe. So, with the addition of 2024's Big Ring, we now have two supermassive structures whose origins defy explanation, and whose surprising proximity raises further questions. As Lopez herself put it: > "The Big Ring and the Giant Arc, both individually and together, gives us a big cosmological mystery… And their ultra-large sizes, distinctive shapes and cosmological proximity must surely be telling us something important — but what exactly?" ## Batteries of the Future Batteries are crucial to the functioning of our society. They're in our phones, computers, cars, and nearly every other piece of critical infrastructure that makes modern life possible. But while they afford us the luxury of storing and transporting electrical energy, they have brought about their own set of problems, namely, the extraction of the resources needed to make them. One of the most concerning of these resources is lithium, a crucial component for the type of battery used in electric vehicles. Lithium mining is no easy task, and requires the use of chemicals like sulfuric acid and sodium hydroxide, which can poison the local ecosystem, the diversion of huge quantities of local fresh water, deforestation, etcetera. In fact, while electric cars themselves drastically reduce emissions compared to traditional combustion engines, their production is actually more polluting. On top of this, lithium sources aren't endless, and, like with any other resource, eventually the cost of lithium extraction is going to climb as newer methods are needed to reach deeper or more challenging reserves. Alongside lithium-ion batteries are several other types with various uses around the world, such as alkaline, lead-acid, and nickel-cadmium, all of which come with their own advantages and disadvantages. All of this is why finding a more sustainable or cheaper resource for batteries would have far-reaching benefits for the world, and alter the future of things like mobile devices, transportation, and the efficiency of solar panels. Which is exactly what two teams have accomplished this year, one in Australia and the other from China. The team from Australia, led by researchers from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, have developed what they call "recyclable water batteries". In every battery, you need a positive end, called the cathode, a negative end, called the anode, and an electrolyte that connects the two and turns chemical energy into electrical energy. Usually, this electrolyte is a hazardous, such as sulfuric acid in the case of lead-acid batteries. And this why you're not supposed to throw most types of batteries in the trash with the rest of your household waste, as it can pose problems to its disposal location down the line. The Australian team's breakthrough is that their prototype battery's electrolyte is none other than water, with a little bit of salt. They're calling their invention an aqueous metal ion battery, and the advantage here is that once the water-based electrolyte has run out of charge, it can easily be removed and replaced, potentially prolonging the battery's lifespan indefinitely. Water-based electrolytes don't pose the risk of chemical pollution that lead-acid batteries do, and they don't carry the risk of intense fires that lithium-ion batteries do. Not only that, but they're also much cheaper. So far, the team has created prototypes of several small-scale batteries, such double A and the small cell-type batteries found in watches. Each battery contains the potential to be recharged at least 500 times, and have shown to retain 80 percent of their capacity after more than 700 charging cycles. One of the keys to maintaining its capacity is the team's innovative use of rust. Normally, over the lifespan of a battery, tiny metal spurs called dendrites will form on the anode, which can eventually reduce the battery's effectiveness and ability to hold a charge. The team stopped their formation by coating their anode in a thin layer of bismuth, after which they allowed it to oxidize, or rust, preventing these spurs from forming in the first place. Meanwhile, a team in China has come up with a different solution: calcium. Scientists from Fudan University announced in February 2024 that they'd created a calcium-based battery that could handle 700 recharging cycles. Calcium is far more abundant than lithium is, about 2500 times more abundant, on its own making up about 4% of the earth's crust and is the third most common metal. If the number of recharging cycles can be improved, as well as their size and overall power, this on its own promises a much cheaper alternative to lithium-ion batteries, but there's another aspect of calcium that makes it even more attractive. It turns out that calcium batteries are highly flexible, and its creators demonstrated that small-scale models could be built into thin fabrics, potentially giving us a glimpse of next-generation wearable devices disguised as everyday clothing. On top of this, there is some hope for one specific variant, the calcium-oxygen battery, which theoretically would have the highest total capacity and energy density. These batteries would take oxygen out of the air to use as power, which would be an incredible technological leap, but unfortunately, these systems aren't stable at room temperature, so they require far more energy to maintain than they can currently deliver. Regardless, with 2024's announcements of water and calcium batteries, the future of energy is looking pretty optimistic. ## A Puzzling Black Hole In 2016, data from the Hubble Space Telescope was examined by a team working on the CANDELS, one Hubble's most ambitious data projects, peering at the far-reaches of the cosmos. The team announced that further analysis of the galaxy Gn-z11 had revealed that it existed an estimated 13.4 billion years ago, just 400 million years after the big bang. At the time, this was the oldest known galaxy in the universe, as well as one of the most-distant. Since then, teams working with the James Webb Space Telescope, or JWST, have identified a few candidates that are likely further way, causing some of the hype from Gn-z11 to die down over the years. However, the JWST isn't just remarkable because it can see further and find things that Hubble couldn't, it's also useful for reexamining the findings of Hubble to give us a clearer picture and sharper data. And this is exactly what a team of astronomers did in January 2024. The James Webb Space Telescope took a better look at Gn-z11, but this time, what caught the researcher's attention was the black hole at the center of the galaxy, which is now believed to be the oldest in the observable universe. But, as the researchers noted, it isn't JUST the exact age of the black hole that's all that surprising, after all, much of this that had already been covered a few years earlier. What was shocking was its newly realized immense size, which doesn't seem to line up with its age whatsoever. The size of the black hole was noticed due to the galaxy's higher-than expected brightness. Originally, it was assumed that the galaxy's luminosity arose from the sheer quantity of stars, but further investigation revealed that much of the light is actually coming from hot gasses swirling around the black hole, radiating their heat before they fall past the event horizon. What's intriguing here is that this scale of stellar consumption isn't what should have been happening so relatively soon after the big bang. According to current models of black hole formation, if the one in Gn-z11 grew at what is believed to be the standard rate, it would have taken about a billion years to reach its current size, not the 400 million years that we see. It's like seeing a young boy that you're certain was only born 10 years ago, but already looks like a grown man with a full beard, it just doesn't make sense, something we think we know must be wrong. This can mean a few things. Perhaps black holes in the early universe grew at a faster rate than those today, or maybe they simply started out larger, as it's been suggested that some of them may have formed from the collapse of giant gas clouds. It also could mean that our estimates of time overall are incorrect, either for the age of the galaxy in question, or for the universe as a whole. Whatever the answer may be, these new findings only add to the puzzling existence of black holes, a mystery that continues to deepen. ## A Cloning Breakthrough In 1996, the first ever animal was successfully cloned. This was Dolly the sheep, and her existence was a sign that genetic engineering had the potential to go beyond anyone's wildest dreams. In the three decades since then, more than 20 other species have successfully been cloned, including dogs, cats, and even cattle. What all of these clones had in common was that they were created using the same technique, somatic cell nuclear transfer, or SCNT. This process involves removing the nucleus of an egg cell and replacing it with a nucleus taken from a somatic cell, which can be taken from any other part of the body. Under the right conditions, and after stimulating the newly forged cell with a shock, it will start to divide. If taken care of properly, these cells can eventually grow into a fully functioning, living creature, and an exact clone of its parent because it only contains one set of genetic material. Like we said, this technique has been used on many, many animals, but it always proved to be difficult with primates. It wasn't until 2018 that the first monkeys were finally cloned using this method, a pair of macaques named Zhong Zhong and Hua Hua. However, while the cloning of macaques was certainly considered progress, the real goal was a rhesus monkey, due to their genetic similarities to humans. It wasn't until 2024 that the first rhesus monkey was cloned using SCNT, named ReTro. The researchers at the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences finally made the breakthrough when they realized that the reason so many previous attempts had failed due to defective placentas. For some reason, rhesus monkeys created from SCNT couldn't properly use their placenta and umbilical cord to intake enough nutrients, a problem which was solved by taking healthy cells from a non-cloned monkey and growing the placenta from those, which ultimately resulted in the clone ReTro, the first of his kind. According to the researchers, genetically identical monkeys are a necessity for the future of the medical field, as their similarity to each other means more certainty in testing results. Overall, they claim that this would result in fewer monkeys being used for testing, but this all still comes off as quite concerning to many people. First of all, this only stokes fears that one day, human cloning will be possible, because, despite the fact that every ethics board, and most geneticists, are against this, progress in the field of genetics continues to take steps toward this outcome. The other concerns are from animal rights' activists who don't believe monkeys should be experimented on in the first place, much less have a special genetic line of them created specifically for disease and drug testing. Either way, despite the recent success, we're still a long way off from being able to consistently clone rhesus monkeys. After all, ReTro was just one viable baby from 113 total embryo attempts, a success rate of less than 1%. Still, what the researchers have done is show that it is possible, opening up many doors for geneticists around the world. ## World's Smallest Robots With all these other advances in science and technology, it should come as no surprises that the field of robotics moves forward just as quickly. In January 2024, Washington State University announced that their School of Mechanical and Materials Engineering had successfully created two insect-like robots, the smallest of their kind in the world. The smaller of the two, called mini-bug, weighs in at just 8 milligrams, while the other, modeled after a water strider, weighs about 55 milligrams. What's most impressive is their movement speed, with each of them moving about six millimeters per second, definitely a lot slower than biological insects, but much faster than any of their micro-robotic peers. The secret to their speed is their tiny actuators, which, using a new technique, were shrunk down until they weighed less than a single milligram. The way that these operate is by using shape memory alloys, a metal that can change shape when heated but return to its original shape after cooling back down. Each actuator contains two wires made from this shape memory alloy, and the wires are able to be heated up and cooled down rapidly using a small electric current, allowing the mechanical parts of the robots to move incredibly quickly. In the case of the water strider, it can flap its fins more than 40 times per second. And the researchers aren't done there. They've spent time studying the insects they've used as models, and identified things that make them quicker, which they hope to implement in future iterations. Also, on the to-do list is to create a super tiny battery to allow these mini machines to function without being tethered to a power source. The uses for robots of this size are endless, such as robot-assisted surgery, environmental monitoring, and materials manufacturing. There's also hope that one day swarms of mini-robots like these could be used for artificial pollination in places or with plants that are naturally hard to pollinate. ## Key Takeaways - The Big Ring, a massive circle of galactic clusters, challenges established cosmological principles. - Australian researchers developed recyclable water batteries, offering a safer and more sustainable alternative. - The oldest known black hole in the observable universe defies current models of black hole formation. - Chinese scientists successfully cloned a rhesus monkey, overcoming previous challenges with placenta development. - Washington State University created the world's smallest robots, modeled after insects, with potential applications in various fields. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### What is the Big Ring and why is it significant? The Big Ring is a massive circle of galactic clusters located 9.2 billion light-years away, with a diameter of 1.3 billion light-years and a circumference of 4 billion light-years. It is significant because its size challenges established cosmological principles and the upper limit for cosmic structures. ### What are the environmental concerns associated with lithium-ion batteries? Lithium mining involves the use of chemicals like sulfuric acid and sodium hydroxide, which can poison local ecosystems, divert huge quantities of fresh water, and cause deforestation. Additionally, lithium sources are finite, and extraction costs are expected to rise as deeper or more challenging reserves are accessed. ### What is the significance of the water-based batteries developed by the Australian team? The water-based batteries, or aqueous metal ion batteries, use water with a bit of salt as the electrolyte, making them recyclable and non-hazardous. They are also cheaper and safer, with prototypes showing the ability to be recharged at least 500 times while retaining 80% of their capacity after more than 700 charging cycles. ### What makes calcium-based batteries a promising alternative to lithium-ion batteries? Calcium is about 2500 times more abundant than lithium, making it a cheaper alternative. Calcium-based batteries are also highly flexible and can be integrated into thin fabrics, potentially leading to next-generation wearable devices. Additionally, calcium-oxygen batteries theoretically have the highest total capacity and energy density. ### What is unusual about the black hole in the galaxy Gn-z11? The black hole in Gn-z11 is believed to be the oldest in the observable universe, existing just 400 million years after the Big Bang. Its size is unusually large for its age, suggesting that black holes in the early universe may have grown faster or started out larger than current models predict. ### What was the breakthrough that allowed for the successful cloning of a rhesus monkey in 2024? The breakthrough involved solving the issue of defective placentas in previous attempts. Researchers used healthy cells from a non-cloned monkey to grow the placenta, ensuring proper nutrient intake for the clone, named ReTro. ### What are the potential applications of the world's smallest robots developed by Washington State University? The tiny robots, weighing between 8 and 55 milligrams, have potential applications in robot-assisted surgery, environmental monitoring, materials manufacturing, and artificial pollination. Future iterations aim to include a super tiny battery for untethered operation. ### How do the tiny actuators in the insect-like robots work? The actuators use shape memory alloys, which change shape when heated and return to their original shape when cooled. They are heated and cooled rapidly using a small electric current, allowing the robots to move quickly. ### What is the Giant Arc in the Sky and how does it relate to the Big Ring? The Giant Arc is another supermassive structure discovered in 2021, spanning 3.3 billion light-years. It is considered by some to be larger than the Big Ring and is adjacent to it, raising further cosmological questions due to their proximity and immense sizes. ### What is the significance of the James Webb Space Telescope's observations of the galaxy Gn-z11? The JWST provided clearer data on Gn-z11, revealing that the galaxy's brightness is largely due to hot gases swirling around a massive black hole at its center. This observation challenges current models of black hole formation and growth in the early universe. ## Sources - [Original Side Projects video: 5 New Scientific Discoveries in 2024](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkQNMYQ8EqY) ## Related Coverage Simon Whistler https://sideprojects.pub/article/5-obscure-wwi-weapons https://sideprojects.pub/article/5-obscure-wwi-weapons Thu, 25 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT Having had a little peek down our analytics it appears that you all, the folks of *fine* taste that you are, just might have a little penchant for firearms content, and seeing as how we here on Sideprojects always aim to please—pun intended—here's another such video for your enjoyment; this is Five Obscure WWI Weapons. Let's begin! ## The Mondragón M1908 Our first entry today is the first semi-automatic rifle to both be adopted by a military, and to see combat: the Mondragón M1908. Designed by Mexican General Manuel Mondragón, hence the name, and manufactured by SIG in Neuhausen, Switzerland, it was initially chambered in 7×57mm Mauser, then the standard rifle round of the Mexican Army—although efforts to both tinker with the design and market it to more countries would also see models made that were chambered in everything from 7.5×55mm Swiss to .30-30 Winchester. Really niche cartridges even in their day, never mind now. It was also quite the overengineered thing, as early examples of technologies often do tend to be, featuring a *very* robust action that employed a long-stroke gas piston system underneath the barrel—that is, a type of action that actuates the bolt via a whopping great operating rod that gets pushed by high pressure gases released during a cartridge's combustion. Aware that semi-automatic rifles of his day could be a touch finicky, however, Mondragón also included a gas cutoff that would physically lock up the gas piston and prevent it from cycling—allowing it to be used as a straight pull bolt action should quality ammunition that could reliably cycle it prove hard to come by. The bolt design is pretty tarty too, particularly for an early semi-auto rifle, and it uses dual sets of rotating locking lugs both at the front *and* the rear of the bolt—locking lugs being "arms," for want of a better term, that firmly hold the bolt in place and keep it sealed tight, which is handy for making sure the gas goes down the barrel to push the round with maximum whack, and not straight back into the operator's face. As is also the case with many early semi-auto rifles, it uses an internal magazine, specifically a 10-round one, fed through either stripper clips of five rounds or individually by hand, although larger magazines with capacities of 20 and 30 rounds were also made. As for its sights, they were the same as basically *every* military rifle of the era in that they were graduated sights that went out to a *very* optimistic distance—specifically 2,000 metres. All in all, then, it was a pretty high-tech bit of kit for its time, but this didn't stop it from suffering from some real issues. For starters, it worked an absolute treat in the clinical conditions of a gun range, but out in the real world it turned out to be a tad mysophobic—as it really, *really* didn't like dirt. And remember what we said about it including a gas cutoff to use with bad ammo? Well, that turned out to be nothing if not prophetic, because the Mexican Army's ammo back then was utter garbage, and would fail to cycle the action more often than not. As a result of both of these issues, the Mexican Army cancelled its contract after only 1,000 units had been delivered. This put SIG in quite the pickle, because they had already manufactured a further 3,000 of the things, and now they needed someone to flog them to. Luckily for them, however, WWI broke out but a moment later, which left them with no shortage of opportunities to be rid of them. It would ultimately be the Germans who took them off of SIG's hands, but they very quickly learned exactly what the Mexicans had before them, and so using them in the trenches was quickly abandoned as an idea. The Air Force, however—yes; for there was nowhere less dirty than the sky! Thus, the extra 3,000 Mondragóns found their way to the back seats of various airplanes, where they would be used as self-defence weapons. They worked an absolute treat there too, far away from ever so scary dirt, and fed by high quality German ammunition as they were. Soon though, with aviation technology progressing *very* quickly, they would find themselves obsolete following the adoption of synchronised forward-facing machine guns. Then, they were given to the Navy, because why not at that point—no one else had a use for them—and that's where they remained till the end of the war. ## The Webley Self-Loading Pistol Next, we have another first, specifically the first ever semi-automatic pistol adopted by the British Military: the Webley Self-Loading Pistol. Oh, and if you happen to be wondering, "self-loading" is just an old-timey term for semi-automatic. Webley, in this instance, refers to Webley & Scott, a *very* famous British manufacturer of handguns, particularly revolvers, with a more notable model of theirs being the Webley Self-Extracting Revolver, which, in one form or another, was in service with the British Military for a whopping 103 years between 1887 and 1970. As for the Self-Loader, it was designed by William Whiting, and is descended from a long line of early 20th century semi-automatic pistols made by Webley in an attempt to break into that then-nascent market. The first in its lineage was the Webley Model of 1904; a simply huge and hulking thing that went down about as well as a cup of cold sick on the commercial market. From there it was scaled down into a few models of "pocket pistols." These had some modest success, but still left Whiting dissatisfied, for he knew that the *big* money was in landing a military contract. This led to him putting together a prototype of what would become the Self-Loader, and then trying to flog it to the British Military. After *really* taking his time to perfect the design, his ego still bruised from the abject failure of the Model 1904, he submitted it for testing in 1909. These initial trials went well. They liked the basic design of the thing, finding it to be reliable and handy enough, but they suggested a few additions to make it more to their liking, most notable of which was a magazine cut-off—literally a big slice of steel that physically blocks the magazine from feeding to the chamber. This *very* archaic idea was actually very much in vogue with the British Military at the time, and was also featured on early No.1 Mk.3 SMLEs, with the general premise being that it allowed a weapon to be loaded and discharged one round at a time to make a soldier *really* think about where he was putting his rounds, rather than blating away everything he had and costing the Military untold pennies in wasted rounds. Further testing was then undertaken later in 1909, chief among which was a "torture test" of sorts where 1,254 rounds were put through the pistol in a range of failure-inducing conditions such as water immersion, sustained firing, and induced corrosion. This test went well, but unfortunately for Whiting, he couldn't do anything right at this point, as every different branch of the Military was giving him conflicting messaging as to what they wanted; the Navy, for example, *really* liked the grip safety, which prevented the pistol from discharging unless held in a proper firing grip, and the Army—they *hated* the grip safety, fearing it to be inherently unsafe—ironically. Whiting pushed on, however, and in 1910, a new set of trials saw it pitted against a Colt Model 1905 and a "normal" Webley Self-Extractor. It did *very* well here, blowing the Colt out of the water by proving itself to be more reliable and accurate. This finally saw the Navy put their money where their mouth was, and they put in an order for 1,000, which was then followed by them formally adopting it in February 1912. That order was fully delivered by September 1913, and the Navy, thoroughly chuffed with it by that point, had intended to go all in on it and make it their service handgun with a *big* order of them—but a little something happened the following year that scuppered those plans: WWI. This changed everything, and suddenly, big and grand plans about completely shaking up the service's main handgun just were not on the table, and so their dream of fully adopting the Self-Loader was never realised. Production continued at a trickle, with a total of 8,050 of them being made by the time production finally ceased in 1919. Most of these ended up going to the Navy, who, despite now being reluctant to go all in on it, did find the spare cash to treat themselves to a crate or two of them from time to time. As for the rest, they found their way to the Royal Horse Artillery and Royal Flying Corps, both of whom put in some modest-sized orders as the war rolled ever on. Oh, and if you're wondering how it worked, don't worry, we haven't forgotten. It worked using a short recoil action—that is, a mechanism where, upon firing, the barrel and bolt initially move backward together for a short distance before the barrel stops and the bolt continues to the rear to eject the spent cartridge and load a new one. As this is a *rather* common action, being seen on everything from Glocks to M1911s, it really isn't that exotic, despite its peculiar appearance—at least on a basic level. ## The FN M1900 For our third entry we have another semi-automatic pistol: the FN M1900. It was actually one of *the* earliest semi-automatic pistols ever designed, having been designed all the way back in 1896 by none other than John Browning, who also created the M1911 and Hi-Power pistols, as well as the M1919 and M2 machine guns. As for how it worked, it was a simple little thing, operating on a straight blowback mechanism—that is, by using the recoil energy of a fired cartridge to directly move the slide backward, with the slide's mass and recoil spring delaying the opening of the breech until the bullet exits the barrel. It also, quite peculiarly even by the standards of the day, and *especially* by modern standards, has its recoil spring positioned above the barrel, rather than below it—a choice that Browning thought would help manage recoil more effectively. Beyond that, however, it was actually quite a surprisingly modern thing, especially when one considers that its contemporaries included the stripper clip-fed Mauser C96, and the toggle-action-operated Borchardt C-93, which rather than a slide used an articulated "arm" of sorts that was pushed back under pressure to chamber another round after discharge. Particularly "normal" on the M1900 was its seven-round magazine that was inserted into the grips, and contained seven rounds of .32 ACP—which, unlike say the weird .455 Webley Auto round fired by the Webley Self-Loader, you can still happily find on the shelf today. Its first, and main, user was the Belgian Military, which adopted it the moment the first unit left the factory in 1899. It began to be marketed commercially the following year, hence its name, and this led to it finding its way *everywhere*, as it proved just a tad popular. A substantial number found their way to the German Army, for example, having been privately purchased by many officers prior to the outbreak of WWI. But that is just the tip of the iceberg, as it is also known to have found its way to the Austro-Hungarian and Russian Militaries the same way—although seemingly in lesser numbers. We'd also bet money on the fact that some found their way to the British Military too, given how common privately purchased sidearms were in its officer corps, but we didn't find anything explicitly that stated this, and nor did we find any photos—so we aren't stating it as fact. We *do* know that the French were quite partial to it, however, with it being well documented that it was used not just by their officers, many of whom were lucky enough to snag one on the commercial market, but by their enlisted trench raiders too, who were issued basically any pistol that the army could get its hands on. And all in all, it seems to have been very well appreciated by those who used it. It was compact, so didn't prove too intrusive to carry on one's person, and it proved reasonably reliable even in the muddy conditions of the trenches of the Western Front, where its slide, which kept much of its operating mechanism covered, led to it being far better suited than something like, say, the P08 Luger, which, courtesy of using a toggle action like the C-93, had its operating bits right up on top, out in the open, nice and vulnerable to picking up the assorted flotsam that built up in those horrific conditions. ## The Frommer Stop Next, we have *another* pistol, but this time from the Austro-Hungarians, specifically the Frommer Stop, which was designed by the Budapestian arms designer Rudolf Frommer in 1912. It was adopted by the Austro-Hungarian Army that same year, who dubbed it the "Pisztoly 12M." It was distinctive for using a long recoil action, a mechanism where both the barrel and bolt move back for the entire length of the cartridge, rather than just for a short distance before separating, as in a short recoil action. This isn't one that you come across much, either then or now, and *especially* not in a pistol, with it typically being the preserve of rifles such as the Remington Model 8 and shotguns like the Browning Auto-5. It's also debatable how good it actually was—it was still a functional semi-automatic pistol in WWI, so it inherently had some utility and advantages just from that, but it was so overcomplicated that the troops reportedly hated having to strip and clean it, which often led to its maintenance being neglected, and thus its reliability suffering. It also didn't have a hold-open, meaning that when its magazine was emptied, the bolt would have to be fully re-cocked, costing the operator precious time that his enemy would be using to try and shoot him. As for its use, it was always a niche thing, and was never *the* Austro-Hungarian service pistol, with it serving alongside an absolute mishmash of other designs such as the Steyr M1912 and Roth-Steyr M1907, but it did become more common as the war went on, due to it initially being in service just with the Honvéd, the Hungarian part of the Austro-Hungarian Army, but later being rolled out to the rest of the military as Central Command got desperate and began buying bucket loads of *any* pistol that it could get its hands on—with a grand total of 130,000 of them having been procured come the war's end. A peculiar twist in its tale came in 1916, when an attempt was made to convert it into a machine gun in the style of the Italian Villar Perosa. This saw two of them mounted side by side on a common mount, and then fitted with extended barrels and extended 25-round magazines. Although novel, this idea proved to be something of a dead end, and a small, but unclear, number of them were made before the company turned its attention back to just pumping out the tried and tested "normal" pistol. ## The Huot Automatic Rifle And to finish us off, we come full circle with another rifle, specifically the Huot Automatic Rifle, developed in Canada by Joseph Alphonse Huot. It was an attempt to alleviate the crippling machine gun shortage that was then plaguing Canadian Forces by converting surplus Ross Rifles, which were originally straight pull bolt actions, into fully fledged machine guns. Initial design work began in 1916, the same year that the Ross Rifle was withdrawn from frontline service, and thus became available in *big* numbers. Eventually, after much fettling, Huot finalised on a design that saw 33 of the Ross' original parts retained, around which was added a gas piston system which would actuate the bolt, a new receiver to house it all, and the cooling shroud from a Lewis Machine Gun, which was meant to work by using the muzzle blast to suck air in through the back of the jacket and across the barrel. Further to that, Huot also added a 25-round drum magazine, and kept the original .303 calibre of the Ross Rifle. Initial testing began in late 1916. Through that Huot secured the support of the Canadian military and started refining his design under the supervision of the Government Small Arms Experimental Department. From there, with his idea polished up a bit, more serious testing began, with a 650-round test being carried out in February 1917, which, thanks to it going well, led into an intense endurance test the following month that saw 11,000 rounds put through the weapon. This went so well that Huot was summoned to England in January 1918, as a bigwig Canadian general had recommended that the Huot be adopted by the entirety of the Imperial British Military, and so they wanted to put it through its paces themselves at the Royal Small Arms Factory in Enfield. This saw the Huot tested alongside the Lewis, Hotchkiss, and Farquhar-Hill light machine guns. The Huot performed impressively in several aspects, such as snapshooting from trenches and quick deployment. Fouling did prove to be a "bit" of an issue in these tests, however, as after 4,000 rounds had been fired, it needed to be cleaned and oiled to keep going, and was starting to show notable barrel wear after 10,000 rounds; but this was still better than the Lewis Gun managed—so the job was a goodun' as far as Huot was concerned. One *major* thing it had going for it was cost, as converting a Ross Rifle, of which Canada specifically and the British Empire more generally had a metric shitload, cost a mere 50 Canadian dollars as compared to around one thousand Canadian dollars for manufacturing a whole new Lewis Gun, and if you know anything about British Military procurement—they love a bargain, they do. Unfortunately, however, while the poshos of British Military Command might have been so tight you could hear them walk, they were still creatures of reason ultimately, and so, when confronted with the Huot Automatic Rifle, cheap though it was, they looked at the 25-round magazine, which seemed awfully small compared to the 47-round pan that was plonked on top of the Lewis, they looked at its lack of a pistol grip, which made it a bit awkward to handle and manoeuvre, and they ended up passing on it, opting instead to just beef up production of the tried and tested Lewis Gun. Many, both then and now, say that this was quite the foolish move purely because of the cost difference; 50 dollars for an "alright" machine gun instead of 1,000 dollars for a banger of a machine gun is quite the tantalising prospect after all, but none were more annoyed about this than Huot himself, as he had sunk 30,000 dollars of his own money into the project, and with it being rejected, he received *nothing* in return. For years after the war he fought to get reimbursed, as it wasn't exactly like he submitted a joke proposal just to try to screw the War Office for a few quid, and eventually, in 1936, after 18 long years of fighting, he was compensated with 25,000 dollars—not even enough to cover the costs he incurred just trying to do his country a solid during wartime. ## Key Takeaways - The Mondragón M1908 was the first semi-automatic rifle adopted by a military, but it struggled with dirt and poor ammunition. - The Webley Self-Loading Pistol was the first semi-automatic pistol adopted by the British Military, but its full adoption was halted by WWI. - The FN M1900, designed by John Browning, was one of the earliest semi-automatic pistols and was widely used by various militaries. - The Frommer Stop, used by the Austro-Hungarian Army, had a complex long recoil action and was not favored by troops due to maintenance issues. - The Huot Automatic Rifle, developed in Canada, was cost-effective but rejected by the British Military due to its smaller magazine and lack of a pistol grip. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### What was the first semi-automatic rifle to see combat? The Mondragón M1908 was the first semi-automatic rifle to both be adopted by a military and to see combat. ### What was the first semi-automatic pistol adopted by the British Military? The Webley Self-Loading Pistol was the first semi-automatic pistol adopted by the British Military. ### Who designed the FN M1900? The FN M1900 was designed by John Browning. ### What was distinctive about the Frommer Stop's action? The Frommer Stop used a long recoil action, where both the barrel and bolt move back for the entire length of the cartridge. ### What was the Huot Automatic Rifle designed to address? The Huot Automatic Rifle was designed to alleviate the crippling machine gun shortage that was plaguing Canadian Forces by converting surplus Ross Rifles into fully fledged machine guns. ### What was the primary issue with the Mondragón M1908 in combat? The Mondragón M1908 suffered from issues with dirt and poor-quality ammunition, which prevented it from cycling reliably. ### How did the Webley Self-Loading Pistol perform in trials? The Webley Self-Loading Pistol performed very well in trials, proving to be more reliable and accurate than the Colt Model 1905. ### What was the main advantage of the FN M1900 in trench conditions? The FN M1900's slide, which kept much of its operating mechanism covered, made it better suited for the muddy conditions of the trenches compared to pistols like the P08 Luger. ### Why was the Frommer Stop not widely popular among troops? The Frommer Stop was overcomplicated, leading to difficulties in maintenance and reliability issues, which made it unpopular among troops. ### What was the cost advantage of the Huot Automatic Rifle? Converting a Ross Rifle into a Huot Automatic Rifle cost only 50 Canadian Dollars, compared to around 1,000 Canadian Dollars for manufacturing a new Lewis Gun. ## Sources - [Original Side Projects video: 5 Obscure WWI Weapons](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lSAp36pm60) ## Related Coverage Simon Whistler https://sideprojects.pub/article/5-of-historys-greatest-warships https://sideprojects.pub/article/5-of-historys-greatest-warships Thu, 25 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT "The history of Sea Power is largely, though by no means solely, a narrative of contests between nations, of mutual rivalries, of violence frequently culminating in war." So writes the American author Alfred Thayer Mahan in the first line of his book, *The Influence of Sea Power upon History* in 1890. Today, the success of his book is credited with being a contributing factor to the United States becoming a global superpower. It did this by creating a global navy, dedicated not only to the protection of its coastlines, but also of its interests. This is the thesis of Mahan's book – a navy existing not only to defend a country, but to project its power abroad. It's not hard to see why he would come to this conclusion, as the influence of the sea on history truly cannot be understated. Trade flows over it, valuable resources lie underneath it, and wars have been decided by it. As a consequence of this importance, the oceans of the world have seen countless battles between states for naval supremacy, and navies have been the focus of feverish innovations as countries sought – and still seek – to gain an edge over their rivals. This can take the form of new weapons, technologies, or tactics, but in this article, we'll be discussing innovations in the form of entirely new ships, dedicated to solve specific problems or to fill specialized roles in the fleet, as well as some of their most famous examples and crews. Without further delay, here are 5 of History's Greatest Warships. ## The Carrier We'll start off with perhaps the most well-known warship of the modern day, the aircraft carrier. We've all seen America's Nimitz-class supercarriers. But America's tradition with carriers goes back all the way to their invention. Carriers are the youngest class of ship in the modern navy, in part due to the fact that aeronautics is such a relatively new concept. Think about it – the first airplane only flew in 1903, which is not that long ago. Despite this, the concept of naval aviation was so promising that resources were thrown at this idea. By the 1920s, countries were constructing ships specifically designed as carriers. Prior to that, the carriers of these navies were converted ships: battleships, battlecruisers, or ocean liners that had their decks flattened into runways for aircraft, either during construction or after they had become obsolete. Devoting entire ship classes to the idea was a huge vote of confidence. In the interwar years, there was a fiery debate between naval theorists over what a modern navy should focus on – battleships, as posited by people like Mahan, or carriers, which were as of yet unproven. This debate would be settled once and for all with the outbreak of World War 2. In the matchups between carriers and battleships, the carriers won every time. It was a British carrier, the HMS *Ark Royal*, that played a decisive role in sinking the German battleship *Bismarck*. It was Japanese carriers that made the surprise attack against the American navy at Pearl Harbor, sinking four battleships and severely damaging four more. And it was American carriers that helped win the battle for the Pacific theater, sending countless Japanese battleships, including the IJN *Yamato*, to the bottom of the ocean. One of these American carriers is still spoken of fondly today, the USS *Enterprise*, a *Yorktown*-class carrier launched in 1936. The *Enterprise* participated in every major naval battle in the Pacific campaign, including Pearl Harbor, where planes launched from her runway to engage Japanese bombers. She was the first American ship to sink a Japanese vessel in the war, when her aircraft sank a Japanese submarine three days after the attack on Pearl Harbor. The Japanese media mistakenly announced three times that she had been sunk in battle, which led to her being nicknamed "The Grey Ghost". She survived to the end of the war with 20 Battle Stars, more than any other American ship, and by the end of her service she and her aircraft had sunk 71 ships, damaged or destroyed 192 others, and had shot down 911 planes. She was even the inspiration for the name of a certain Star-Trekking vessel – a fitting legacy for a ship that pushed the frontiers of naval theory. ## The Battleship Next, we will talk about the great rival of the aircraft carrier, the Battleship. Though the carrier would eventually prevail as the superior warship, at the turn of the 20th century battleships were still considered the apex of naval warfare. The class we refer to as a "battleship" really begins with the launch of a single vessel – the British HMS *Dreadnought* in 1906. It was said that the moment this ship was launched, all other battleships in the ocean became obsolete, so much so that the entire ship class was divided into "Dreadnoughts" and "Pre-Dreadnoughts". The *Dreadnought* was the immediate precursor to what we think of today as modern battleships, with massive gun batteries and armor plating capable of withstanding direct hits from other battleships. Prior to the *Dreadnought*, battleships tended to have a mix of large and small caliber guns; the *Dreadnought* was designed to have big guns only, and by removing the smaller armaments, it could fit more big ones on its hull. Whereas other battleships at the time would have around four heavy guns, the *Dreadnought* had ten. This meant that, at long range, the *Dreadnought* could decisively outgun any enemy battleships it faced. But that wasn't all; the *Dreadnought* also incorporated steam turbines for propulsion, which gave it a top speed of 21 knots, faster than the 18 that was typical for pre-Dreadnoughts. So, you have a battleship that can not only outgun your own battleships, but outrun them if they try to get close. All in all, it's easy to see why this ship gave such a decisive advantage to the British navy. But the legacy of the *Dreadnought*, like most battleships, is a complicated one. For one, despite being designed to engage enemy battleships, the *Dreadnought* never did that. In fact, the only significant combat action it ever took was to ram and sink a German U-boat, becoming the only battleship in history to sink a submarine. Other than that, it never saw action, was eventually relegated to coastal defense, and was scrapped in 1921. Similar legacies can be found in other famous battleships of the 20th century, including the IJN *Yamato* and the German *Bismarck*. The *Bismarck* was sunk by the Royal Navy after only a single mission, and the *Yamato* was powerless to stop the American carrier fleets. You might ask, then: what was it that made these ships so great, if their effectiveness was so questionable? Here's the answer: though battleships became less effective as the 20th century rolled on, it cannot be doubted that they changed the course of history. Let's again go back to Mahan. He was an enthusiastic proponent of battleships because of the so-called "decisive battle" doctrine, whereby a naval war between two powers would be decided through the fighting of a single, well, decisive battle. Every major navy in the world followed this doctrine in one form or another before World War 1; until aircraft carriers and submarines proved the superior choice, the navies of the world were built around the battleship. Their very existence influenced how adversaries behaved. When the *Dreadnought* was launched by the British, it started an arms race between the British Empire and the German Empire, where the tensions would eventually lead to World War 1. Though the British and the Germans were roughly even in terms of fleet power, the decisive battle never came because they were both afraid of losing their expensive battleships to the other fleet. One might argue that this proves them ineffective, but the fact that both countries were so paranoid of the other's capabilities actually serves to highlight the extent to which these navies were obsessed with the battleship. And in the occasional situation where battleships were pitted against traditional surface vessels, they performed quite admirably, such as when the *Bismarck* famously sank the HMS *Hood*. In conclusion, even though the battleship's legacy as a fighter can be debated, its influence on history certainly can't. ## The Turtle Ship Next up on the list is a ship not from the era of iron and steel-plated ships, but with wooden frames and cannons. Let's set the stage: we're in the Korean peninsula in the year 1592. Just across the Tsushima strait, in the islands of Japan, the long civil war known as the Sengoku Jidai has just ended, and the new leader of Japan, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, found himself with a lot of experienced samurai, armed to the teeth, who now didn't really have jobs since the civil war was over. Worried about the possibility of civil disorder, Hideyoshi decided to give them something to do, and launched an invasion of Korea, with the intention of conquering China as well. Korea was not prepared for an invasion of this scale. Though they would receive assistance from the Ming dynasty, much of the Korean peninsula was occupied by the Japanese. But fortunately for the Koreans, they had a man who would single-handedly turn the tide of the war. Admiral Yi Sun-sin, despite having no prior training in seamanship, is widely considered to have been one of the world's greatest naval commanders. Over the course of the six-year war with Japan, Yi would fight twenty-three battles, and he would win all twenty-three of them, often outnumbered at some truly ridiculous odds; in the Battle of Myeongnyang, Yi defeated a fleet of 133 warships with just 13 of his own – without losing a single one. Admiral Yi managed to do this not only because he was a truly brilliant commander, but because he also designed one of the most iconic ships in naval history: the *Geobukseon* (go-boog-sun), known in the West as the Turtle Ship. Now, it's generally accepted that Admiral Yi didn't "invent" the Turtle Ship. Rather, he took a design from the early 1400s and improved upon it to make it more effective. Nevertheless, the power of this ship was evident of Yi's understanding of naval warfare. The Turtle Ship gets its name from the armored shell on its hull, fitted with spikes to ward off boarding parties. As the Japanese ships were primarily built around close combat boarding actions, the Turtle Ship was a hard counter to this tactic. On top of this, the Turtle Ship was fitted with powerful naval cannons facing every direction, meaning it couldn't be flanked. Lastly there is its famous dragon head ornament, which is said to have been used for billowing out smoke or fire. Though this ship fell out of favor after the Japanese invasion ended and Yi fell in battle, its track record speaks for itself. Throughout his naval career, Admiral Yi sunk hundreds of Japanese ships, while losing none. To this day, Yi is admired in naval circles throughout the world, and the ship that he helped design is as famous in Korea as the man himself. ## The Ironclad Continuing on, we have another armored ship for you, but we're returning to the industrial era for this ship type. It's difficult to articulate just how quickly the industrial revolution changed the world at large, and naval warfare was no exception. In 1820, ships were still using sail power and wooden frames. By 1900, most ships were built from iron and steel, and ran on steam engines instead of wind. The in-between of these two periods is something that can only be described as chaos. Ship designs, technologies, and tactics were changing so quickly that many ships commissioned by countries were obsolete before they were even finished. Nevertheless, in the transition from wooden "clipper" ships to iron and steel "steamer" ships, engineers came up with one design that became the truly iconic ship of the industrial revolution: the Ironclad. Ironclads, simply put, are warships protected with iron or steel plating. It goes somewhat further than that, however; ironclads were built with the express purpose of destroying traditional wooden ships. They were equipped with more advanced guns which used explosive shells to smash through wooden hulls. This, combined with their thicker armor making smaller cannons ineffective, meant that purely wooden ships were well and truly obsolete in the face of the first true iron ships. Because of their armor, ramming tactics were also popular with ironclad ships, and although the effectiveness of the tactic was questionable, ironclads tended to be equipped with ramming bows just in case. When we think of Ironclad warships, we tend to think of a famous painting from the American Civil War, depicting the CSS *Virginia* doing battle against the USS *Monitor*, both of them unable to break through their enemy's armor, a perfect illustration of the power of industrial warfare. But this was a time of experimentation, and ironclads came in many types, shapes, and sizes. There was the *Monitor*-class ships, named after – well, the USS *Monitor*, entirely encased in iron armor and strictly a coastal defense ship, yet one could also find some real amalgamations like the French *Gloire*, which had both a wooden and iron hull while running on both steam and sail power. It's kind of beautiful, in a way; a fusion of traditional sailing ships with the latest industrial technology. Though ironclads were largely experimental rather than long-lasting, they were the first step to getting us to the truly incredible warships we have today. ## The Submarine Last, but certainly by no means least, we have the submarine. It is often undersold just how much of an engineering marvel these ships are, with modern versions larger than commercial aircraft and powered by nuclear reactors, able to launch torpedoes and even ballistic missiles while underwater, and capable of withstanding the crushing pressure of an entire ocean above them. Though carriers get a lot of the spotlight when it comes to modern naval history, it can be argued that the submarine was an even greater advancement than the carrier, both on a technical and tactical level. The history of submarine experiments goes back to the 1600s, but the history of "successful" submarining starts, once again, with the American Civil War, when an inventor by the name of Horace Lawson Hunley began experimenting with submarine prototypes to help the Confederates break the Union blockade. After a couple false starts, he came up with the H.L. *Hunley*. Perhaps not surprisingly, a prototype version of a boat that's designed to sink on purpose ended up being a bit of a deathtrap. The H.L. *Hunley* sank no less than three times, killing a total of 21 people, including Horace Hunley himself. Despite this, the ship became a proof of concept, as on February 17, 1864, she attacked and successfully sank a Union warship, the USS *Housatonic*, which became the first ship in history to be sunk by a submarine. The engineering challenges presented by submarines were gradually improved upon over the decades. Famously, submarines were used by the German navy during both World Wars, and it was during World War 2 that America started experimenting with them, having a great deal of success against the Japanese navy. It was during the cold war that submarines went from being a luxury for navies to a staple. Nuclear power was implemented, allowing submarines to remain submerged basically indefinitely, and changes in the structural design allowed them to descend into even greater depths. The Soviet Union's (now Russia's) *Oscar*-class submarine is capable of submerging 830m, or 2723 feet. That is an entire Burj Khalifa, the tallest building on earth, underwater. Make no mistake – these are extreme vessels, built for extreme environments. By their stealthy nature, we don't know much about most submarine operations. Take a look at the USS *Parche*. It is one of the most decorated ships in American naval history, receiving nine Presidential Unit Citations and ten Navy Unit Commendations. For context, the USS *Enterprise* received only one of each. What did this submarine and its crew do to earn those rewards? Well, we don't really know. The vast majority of its missions remain classified, and the ship was decommissioned in 2004. So, what this submarine did during most of its career is unknown to us, and probably will remain so for the foreseeable future. But one thing is certain: submarines are not going anywhere anytime soon. ## The Future of the Sea The history of war on the seas is interesting to see not just because of the stories that have come out of it, but because of what it means for our own future. Though the structure of navies have changed dramatically in the last hundred years, this fact has not – even with all our modern technology and infrastructure, 90% of world trade is still done by ship. Mahan identified trade over the seas as a concept of prime importance to the existence of a navy; as such, we can expect the ocean to remain a theater of importance in the future, and we can expect new technologies and tactics as countries continue to search for an edge. The more things change, the more they stay the same. ## Key Takeaways - Aircraft carriers eclipsed battleships in WWII, with the USS Enterprise earning 20 Battle Stars and sinking 71 ships in the Pacific theater. - HMS Dreadnought's 1906 launch made all prior battleships obsolete and triggered an Anglo-German arms race that contributed to WWI's outbreak. - Admiral Yi Sun-sin's Turtle Ship countered Japanese boarding tactics with spiked armor and omnidirectional cannons, helping him win 23 naval battles without loss. - Ironclads like USS Monitor and CSS Virginia rendered wooden warships obsolete during the American Civil War, bridging sail and steam eras. - The H.L. Hunley became the first submarine to sink a ship in 1864, while modern nuclear submarines like USS Parche remain highly classified strategic assets. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### What was Alfred Thayer Mahan's main thesis in The Influence of Sea Power upon History? Mahan's thesis was that a navy should exist not only to defend a country, but to project its power abroad. He identified trade over the seas as a concept of prime importance to the existence of a navy. ### How did the aircraft carrier prove its superiority over the battleship during World War 2? In matchups between carriers and battleships during World War 2, the carriers won every time. Examples include the British carrier HMS Ark Royal playing a decisive role in sinking the German battleship Bismarck, Japanese carriers making the surprise attack at Pearl Harbor that sank four battleships and severely damaged four more, and American carriers helping win the Pacific theater by sending countless Japanese battleships, including the IJN Yamato, to the bottom of the ocean. ### What was the USS Enterprise's record during World War 2? The USS Enterprise participated in every major naval battle in the Pacific campaign, including Pearl Harbor. She was the first American ship to sink a Japanese vessel in the war. The Japanese media mistakenly announced three times that she had been sunk, leading to her nickname 'The Grey Ghost.' She survived to the end of the war with 20 Battle Stars, more than any other American ship. By the end of her service, she and her aircraft had sunk 71 ships, damaged or destroyed 192 others, and had shot down 911 planes. ### What made the HMS Dreadnought so revolutionary when it launched in 1906? The HMS Dreadnought was revolutionary because it was designed to have big guns only—ten heavy guns compared to the roughly four on other battleships—allowing it to decisively outgun any enemy battleship at long range. It also incorporated steam turbines for propulsion, giving it a top speed of 21 knots, faster than the typical 18 knots for pre-Dreadnoughts. The launch was so significant that the entire ship class was divided into 'Dreadnoughts' and 'Pre-Dreadnoughts.' ### What was the only significant combat action the HMS Dreadnought ever took? The only significant combat action the HMS Dreadnought ever took was to ram and sink a German U-boat, making it the only battleship in history to sink a submarine. Other than that, it never saw action against enemy battleships, was eventually relegated to coastal defense, and was scrapped in 1921. ### How did Admiral Yi Sun-sin use the Turtle Ship to defeat the Japanese during the 1592 invasion of Korea? Admiral Yi Sun-sin designed the Turtle Ship (Geobukseon) as a hard counter to Japanese naval tactics. The ship featured an armored shell with spikes to ward off boarding parties, powerful naval cannons facing every direction so it couldn't be flanked, and a famous dragon head ornament used for billowing out smoke or fire. Over the course of the six-year war, Yi fought twenty-three battles and won all twenty-three, including the Battle of Myeongnyang where he defeated 133 Japanese warships with just 13 of his own without losing a single ship. Throughout his naval career, he sunk hundreds of Japanese ships while losing none. ### What was the significance of the ironclad warship in naval history? Ironclads were warships protected with iron or steel plating, built with the express purpose of destroying traditional wooden ships. They were equipped with more advanced guns using explosive shells to smash through wooden hulls, and their thicker armor made smaller cannons ineffective, rendering purely wooden ships obsolete. Though largely experimental rather than long-lasting, they represented the first step toward modern warships and were the iconic ship of the industrial revolution. ### What was the H.L. Hunley and what did it accomplish? The H.L. Hunley was a Confederate submarine prototype developed by Horace Lawson Hunley during the American Civil War to break the Union blockade. It sank three times during testing, killing 21 people including Hunley himself. However, on February 17, 1864, it successfully attacked and sank the Union warship USS Housatonic, becoming the first ship in history to be sunk by a submarine. ### How do modern nuclear submarines compare to other warships in terms of capabilities? Modern nuclear submarines can remain submerged basically indefinitely due to nuclear power, can descend to extreme depths—the Soviet Union's Oscar-class submarine can submerge 830m (2,723 feet)—and can launch torpedoes and even ballistic missiles while underwater. The USS Parche, one of the most decorated ships in American naval history, received nine Presidential Unit Citations and ten Navy Unit Commendations (compared to the USS Enterprise's one of each), though most of its missions remain classified. ### Why did battleships influence international relations even if they rarely saw decisive combat? Battleships influenced international relations because of the 'decisive battle' doctrine, where naval wars were expected to be decided through a single decisive battle. Their very existence influenced how adversaries behaved. When the Dreadnought was launched, it started an arms race between the British and German Empires that contributed to tensions leading to World War 1. Though the British and Germans were roughly even in fleet power, the decisive battle never came because both were afraid of losing their expensive battleships. This paranoia actually highlighted the extent to which navies were obsessed with battleships. ## Sources - [Original Side Projects video: 5 of History's Greatest Warships](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hO3SktCPDQ) ## Related Coverage Simon Whistler https://sideprojects.pub/article/5-shocking-things-about-knights https://sideprojects.pub/article/5-shocking-things-about-knights Thu, 25 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT Ask the average person what a knight was, and chances are you'll get a response with all the clichés; armour, chivalry, serving a lord, and perhaps some mention of tournaments. But what if we told you that knights were also brutal soldiers trained from childhood to kill, and that some spent as much time violently feuding one another as they did actually serving a kingdom? Well, all of the above is true, at least to some extent. As always, the reality of history is far more complicated than has been taught by popular media, and what a knight was and how that knight behaved varied greatly depending on the era of the medieval period we're talking about. So what was a real knight? Were they all really bound by codes of chivalry? Were they truly committed to fighting for truth and justice in an age of violence and barbarism? Let's take a look at a few rather shocking truths about knights, and paint a much clearer picture of reality versus romanticised fantasy. ## Knights Were Trained To Kill Before Puberty Once the class of knight had been well established, around the end of the 9th and beginning of the 10th century, it became customary for the son of a knight to train, be anointed a knight himself, and eventually enter into a term of service with a lord, otherwise known as becoming that lord's vassal. A newly anointed knight, a particularly skilful one, also had a chance of being given a fief by a lord looking to secure service, a fief being plot of land a knight was allowed to work and earn money from. But, what tends to get overlooked is that a knight's value originally came from being an elite military unit. Knights were simply heavy cavalrymen, with the term knight itself being nothing more than a military denotation. This denotation would change as the medieval period progressed, but we'll get more into that later. For now keep in mind that it was the most professional, fiercest knights that were sought out by lords, meaning that relentless training was a necessity. The son of a knight was expected to train from the age of 7 through to the age of 21, and you can bet that elite medieval military standards were ruthless. At age 7 the boy was sent off to the lord of the lands household, given the title of page, and immediately thrust into a heavy fitness regime. It wasn't all physical though, with the page also expected to excel in basic academic studies, including the Code of Chivalry. Between academics and fitness, a page was also sent off to participate in extended hunting outings with falconers and huntsmen. After the introductory period, a page was then assigned to an established knight as a servant, taking over duties such as cleaning armour, caring for horses and handling baggage. It wasn't uncommon for a page to even be taken on knightly expeditions, meaning that the boy, not yet having hit puberty, was likely to come face to face with violence, and even death. Older pages would start receiving training with weapons, get general tutelage on combat and warfare, and eventually graduate from page to squire at the age of 14. A new squire was, first and foremost, given his own sword and armour in a religious ceremony, after which the real training could start; namely the notoriously difficult seven points of agilities. The seven agilities were a physical training regime designed to truly chisel a boy into a versatile athlete, involving the mastering of activities like fencing, wrestling, long jumping, bow shooting, climbing, swimming, riding, and even dancing. If this doesn't sound overwhelming enough, keep in mind that all of the above had to be done while wearing full armour. At some point during all of this, a squire would also have to be desensitised to violence in accordance with his future job. As such, squires, still just teenagers, were sometimes required to systematically slaughter livestock with a sword, most commonly pigs. The gruesome task familiarised the boy with the sounds of screaming, the sight of gore, and the smell of freshly spilled blood. When a squire turned 21, he was then eligible to be knighted and could, depending on his performance, enter into the service of a lord. The goal always was to be awarded a fief, but only a few of squires ever caught the attention of particularly wealthy lords. Knighting usually happened on Easter or Christmas, and in an elaborate ceremony the squire swore an oath to a lord who would in turn touch a sword to each of the squire's shoulders. ## Chivalry Was A Very Flexible Concept Now, all this talk of brutal training regimes and children being chiselled into fighters may be a bit surprising. Wasn't there an Age of Chivalry? Weren't knights brave, courteous men that defended the weak, stood for justice and treated ladies with respect? As it turns out, how knights behaved, and whether a true Age of Chivalry ever really existed is a highly speculative topic. Our modern perception of knights comes predominantly from Renaissance era books like *Le Mort d'Arthur*, *The Death of Arthur*, which worshipped the dignified King Arthur and his valorous Knights of the Round Table. But the content of such books was drawn from chivalric romances rather than historical records, so it's perhaps best to say that *Le Morte d'Arthur* was as accurate in depicting knights as dime store westerns were in depicting cowboys. This isn't to say there wasn't a Code of Chivalry, because there certainly was. In that regard, however, it's important to understand the intention of the code, and appreciate that it changed dramatically throughout the medieval period. Going way back, the words "chivalry" and "cavalry" have a very close relationship. Chivalry comes from the Old French term *chevalerie*, which roughly translates to "horse soldier." The earliest true knights, anointed under the Frankish King Charlemagne between 768 and 774, were nothing more than elite cavalrymen. Charlemagne rewarded his fiercest cavalrymen with land as a means to secure their loyalty, and in doing so a new warrior class was created destined to become wealthy and influential in their own right. The key here is that the elite cavalrymen were given a code of conduct to aspire to, which in the early days simply involved following orders and performing professionally. But as the reverence and prestige heaped on cavalrymen grew, so the code of cavalry also evolved, soon including additions such as how to behave towards lower ranking soldiers. Time passed and the warrior class of knights grew ever wealthier and more influential, so it wasn't long before the sons of knights, the pages and squires we were just talking about, were taught also how to act in the presence of a lord and other nobles, as well as how to treat noble ladies, and lower social classes. Historian Léon Gautier in his 1884 book *La Chevalerie* summed up the chivalric code, with his key points including: > "Thou shalt defend the Church and believe all that it teaches... > > Thou shalt respect the weak, and defend them… > > Thou shalt not recoil before thine enemy… > > Thou shalt never lie and always be true to thine word… > > Thou shalt be generous... > > Thou shalt be the champion of the Right and the Good..." To be clear; no such list ever existed in the medieval period. Gautier took information from multiple medieval and renaissance texts and boiled them down into what he felt were the key chivalric aspirations. More to the point, and much more controversially, it's also very debatable as to whether knights paid any attention to these teachings at all. Or at least, as to whether they observed the code of chivalry when not in the presence of nobles that could hold them accountable for their behaviour. The idea that there was ever an Age of Chivalry at all, generally said to be the 11th and 12th centuries, has also been called into question, notably by late 1700s Swiss historian and economist Jean Charles Léonard de Sismondi. Sismondi argued that the Age of Chivalry exists only due to the romanticised writings of the renaissance era, saying: > "The more closely we look into history, the more clearly shall we perceive that the system of chivalry is an invention almost entirely poetical. It is impossible to distinguish the countries in which it is said to have prevailed. It is always represented as distant from us both in time and place, and whilst the contemporary historians give us a clear, detailed, and complete account of the vices of the court and the great, of the ferocity or corruption of the nobles, and of the servility of the people, we are astonished to find the poets, after a long lapse of time, adorning the very same ages with the most splendid fictions of grace, virtue, and loyalty." ## Knights Probably Caused More Violence Than They Resolved You're probably familiar with the legendary tourneys, or tournaments that were regularly held throughout much of the medieval period. Tourneys were, as is often depicted in movies, highly popular, potentially very lucrative spectator sports that pitted knight against knight. The events included free-for-all battles where the last knight standing won, or most famously the jousting duels that saw men flung from their horses. Losing knights were required to give up their horse to the winner, and adding insult to injury, also had to pay a 'ransom' to the winner for sparing their life. As you can imagine, violent feuds were a common highlight of these events, and getting killed by a rival, either over the course of the tourney or as an act of revenge, was fairly common. The petty violence that characterised later tourneys wasn't, of course, the original intent. The sports had originally been introduced in the mid-1100s as a way for knights to demonstrate their skills to prospective lords, and to keep fighting wits sharp for the ongoing crusades. But the social role of knights was already changing, and as the knight and nobility classes became increasingly intertwined, trivial in-fighting became ever more frequent. Most distressing is that feuds sometimes spilled over from the tourneys into the outside world, resulting in knights clashing in fatal duels, and sometimes entire regions being provoked into riots. In extreme cases a feud could even escalate into a full-scale conflict, erupting in knights and nobles raiding one another's fiefs and burning one another's property. Not surprisingly, the church quickly took a firm stance against tourneys, calling the events "inventions of the devil" that served only to lure young men into fighting one another, as opposed to the common foreign enemy of the Muslims. The clergy went so far as to forbid those who were killed at tourneys from being buried on holy ground, which was a pretty extreme punishment at that time. King Henry II, ruling between 1154 and 1189, was finally pressured into banning the events. Though his decision didn't last long, with his son Richard the Lionheart soon lifting the ban in 1194. From that point on tourneys were strictly regulated, though remained popular through the crusades until being halted for good in the 1620s. Speaking of the crusades, it's often suggested that Pope Urban II launched the campaigns partially as a way to distract nobles and knights from fighting one another. In-fighting had been rampant even before the tourneys, and the church intended that knights and nobles put aside petty feuds and join forces against the Muslims. Urban II said: > "Hence it is that you murder one another, that you wage war, and that frequently you perish by mutual wounds. Let therefore hatred depart from among you, let your quarrels end, let wars cease, and let all dissensions and controversies slumber. Enter upon the road to the Holy Sepulcher; wrest that land from the wicked race, and subject it to yourselves." As the lengthily age of the crusades arrived, taking place between 1099 and 1291, the clergy took the opportunity to try and bring order to the class of knights, attempt to reform it into something closely tied to religion. This gave us the now popular cliché of a holy knight; a knight that saw himself as acting in accordance with the word of God. Various chivalric orders were born, all directly under the church, and the Code of Chivalry become strongly associated with Christian ideals. Some of the first chivalric orders include the Knights Hospitallers, the Teutonic Knights, and the now iconic Knights Templar. ## Knights Only Worked 40 Days A Year With all this talk of rigorous training and fighting in the crusades, it may surprise you to learn that knights were only required to work 40 days a year. Add to this that a knight was also often a landowner, and that a knight's lord was expected to provide essentials to that knight when the time called for it, including lodging, food, training, equipment and horses. This seems like a pretty ridiculous arrangement, but it happens to be absolutely true. Does this mean, however, that knights were some of the most overvalued, over compensated military units in history? Leading up to the crusades, it's true that knights only owed 40 days of service to a lord annually, though the arrangement only applied during times of peace. A knight could also be called to extended periods of service as needed, keeping in mind that serious injury and death was a very real possibility. Also keep in mind that some vassal knights were land owners and therefore taxable by their lord, so it wasn't as if they were sitting around simply being a drain on the economy. More to the point, it was even acceptable for a knight to pay a *scutage*, or a tax that excused them from service for that year. The 40 days arrangement was seen as mostly agreeable until around the middle of the 13th century, with knights that did meet their 40 day obligation patrolling the kingdom, acting as a bodyguard in a lord's castle, or serving in some other appropriate way. However, the agreement began to fall apart as the class of knight evolved, and as it became increasingly more common for military campaigns to extend out into foreign lands. This new type of campaign, most prominently the crusades, demanded military service for months or even years, and so knights were far less likely to willingly get involved. Needless to say, it was also during the time of the crusades that the presence of knights in full-scale battles began to decrease. For context, knights had initially made up the core of medieval armies, up to 20% to 30%, but as the crusades arrived and drew on, only around 10% of an army was true knights. By 1380 the presence of knights in armies dropped to around 6%, and knights rarely even engaged in battle personally. The knight class was steadily relegated more to the role of an officer, with actual armies mostly made up of peasants, men-at-arms and mercenaries. Men-at-arms were the real heavy cavalry in the mid to late medieval periods, with cavalry knights fast become a rarity. ## Knights Co-Existed With Guns And (Possibly) Invented The Term Bulletproof There is a perception that the medieval era came to a screeching halt the moment that firearms first appeared in 14th century Europe, with gunpowder ushering in the sweeping changes of the Renaissance. To an extent this is true, and gunpowder did indeed closely parallel armoured knights vanishing from battlefields. But it was a much more gradual shift than most assume, with the complicated transition allowing armoured knights and firearms to exist in the same era at the same time. There is, in fact, even a popular speculation that knights gave birth to the term "bulletproof." The remaining military knights were being peppered by bullets for the first time, and after enjoying centuries of semi-protection from arrows and crossbow bolts, now had to deal with the reality that bullets were far more dangerous than either. So, naturally, knights began to seek out reliable blacksmiths who could make armour strong enough to withstand musket balls, and contrary to popular belief, medieval armour could indeed resist early firearms; at least some of the time. It's said that as proof to their clients that their armour could stop a bullet, a blacksmith would fire a shot into the armour, thus providing "proof." This ritual supposedly became so common that armour on display today, showing distinctive dimples, is pointed at as a leftover from a blacksmith firing a "bulletproof" shot into the chest plate. Some historians dispute this bulletproof story, but either way, the real point is that armoured knights and firearms did coexist. So then, if it wasn't gunpowder that officially made knights obsolete, what was it that transitioned the world from medieval warfare into the next era? Well, as we've already alluded to, by the time firearms became common traditional warrior knights barely existed regardless. The term knight had become more an indication of social standing over the course of the 12th century, referring to a noble or land holder rather than a military unit. To try make sense of these social changes, a distinction began to be drawn between *milites gregarii*, a non-noble cavalryman, and *milites nobiles*, true knights. The late-12th century also saw the knight and noble classes officially merge, further diluting the true warrior into a measure of status. What it all really came down to, however, was simply a matter of cost and convenience. As said, knights rarely engaged in battle themselves anymore, and even in the role of strategist and tactician no longer had a particularly good reputation. The later failed crusades had demonstrated that knight-led armies could easily be defeated, and by units perceived as far less prestigious. It therefore became cheaper and more economical to hire already organised, war ready mercenaries, or, by the mid-16th century, to fund and maintain a dedicated standing army. Traditional knighthood disintegrated over the 14th and 15th centuries, with Holy Roman Emperor Maximillian I, 1459 – 1519, often referred to as the "last knight." But, lest we forget knights and knighthood still exist to this day, even if just as an honorific. The Sovereign Military Order of Malta, the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre, and the Order of Saint Lazarus are all still alive and well, largely focused on charity. It's also still possible to be knighted by the British Royal Family for making significant contributions in a given field, with some of those most recently knighted including composer John Williams, actor Stephen Fry, and football manager Gareth Southgate. ## Key Takeaways - Knights were elite soldiers trained from age 7 to kill, involving rigorous physical and combat training. - The concept of chivalry was flexible and evolved over time, with its true practice debated among historians. - Knights often engaged in violent feuds and tournaments, sometimes causing more conflict than resolution. - Knights were required to serve only 40 days a year, but this changed with the demands of the crusades. - Knights coexisted with early firearms, and some armor could resist musket balls. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### At what age did a knight's training begin? A knight's training began at the age of 7. ### What was the role of a page in a knight's training? A page was a young boy sent to the lord's household to undergo a heavy fitness regime, academic studies, and hunting outings. ### What were the seven points of agilities in a squire's training? The seven points of agilities included fencing, wrestling, long jumping, bow shooting, climbing, swimming, riding, and dancing, all performed while wearing full armour. ### How did the concept of chivalry evolve over time? Chivalry evolved from a code of conduct for elite cavalrymen to include behaviour towards lower-ranking soldiers, nobles, and ladies, as well as aspirations like defending the Church and respecting the weak. ### What were tournaments, and how did they contribute to violence among knights? Tournaments were popular spectator sports where knights competed in battles and jousting duels. They often led to violent feuds, revenge killings, and even full-scale conflicts. ### How many days a year were knights required to work for their lord? Knights were required to work 40 days a year for their lord, though this could extend during times of war or conflict. ### How did the role of knights change during the crusades? During the crusades, the role of knights shifted from being the core of medieval armies to more of an officer role, with actual armies mostly made up of peasants, men-at-arms, and mercenaries. ### Did knights coexist with firearms, and what is the term 'bulletproof' associated with? Yes, knights coexisted with firearms. The term 'bulletproof' is speculated to have originated from blacksmiths firing shots into armour to prove its strength. ### What led to the decline of traditional knighthood? The decline of traditional knighthood was due to the increasing cost and inconvenience of maintaining knights, the rise of mercenaries, and the failure of knight-led armies in later crusades. ### Do knights and knighthood still exist today? Yes, knights and knighthood still exist today, primarily as honorific titles and in charitable orders like the Sovereign Military Order of Malta and the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre. ## Sources - [Original Side Projects video: 5 Shocking Things About Knights](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2EFwFA2kpQ) ## Related Coverage Simon Whistler https://sideprojects.pub/article/5-shocking-things-about-viking-culture https://sideprojects.pub/article/5-shocking-things-about-viking-culture Thu, 25 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT Vikings are one of the most iconic cultures in all of human history, the fearless warriors raiding coastal Europe with their telltale longships and brutal methods of warfare. But Viking culture went far beyond the beards, battleaxes, and barbaric raids. Today we're going to bring you 5 shocking things about life in the age of the Vikings, ranging from their surprisingly good hygiene all the way to their extensive network of slave trade across Europe. ## Women Were Unusually Free Compared to the vast majority of cultures around the rest of the world, Viking women enjoyed a pleasant number of rights and freedoms, surprisingly making Scandinavia in the Middle Ages one of the most progressive places on the planet in terms of gender equality at the time. Now, this isn't to say that they were completely free citizens. Like most other places across Europe, women were still considered subordinate to their husbands. But there were interesting benefits. For starters, in many places, Viking women were allowed to own property, and although most marriages were arranged, women still had the freedom to initiate divorce if they were being mistreated, and were even allowed to later remarry a different man. And while yes, the duties at home such as cooking and cleaning were considered the responsibility of the wife, this wasn't all. They were also in charge of many tasks involving farms and livestock, duties which they shared alongside their husband. In the event that the husband died, the wife would inherit a large portion of his estate and belongings. In fact, if the man had no sons or close male relatives, the widow would inherit all of his property, and would be referred to as a *Baugrygr*, becoming the official head of the family and inheriting all the rights and powers associated with this position. But what about if a woman wasn't married? Once an unmarried woman reached the age of 20, she was considered an independent adult, and was allowed to decide her own place of residence and was legally considered independent of her parents, a status which was also enjoyed by widows. There is even evidence of female entrepreneurs who ran their own textile shops, and perhaps even women that fought alongside men in combat. In folklore, these warrior women are called shieldmaidens, but their existence is seeming more likely with recent archaeological finds, such as the remains of the Birka female Viking Warrior. It is also known that women could choose to become priestesses, oracles, or seers, as well as respected poets. All of this is in stark contrast to most other cultures at the time, which considered women to largely be the property of their parents until they were handed off to a husband, where their duties were almost entirely bound to the home and childbearing. Examination of skeletal remains has also revealed that the nutrition of girls and boys was of relatively equal value, showing that food was evenly shared among children and not prioritized for the boys. So, while yes, compared to western life today this is still quite restrictive, for the time this was an impressive degree of independence. Unfortunately, it wouldn't last. Sometime around the 13th century, these practices and liberties began to fizzle out, likely due to the widespread adoption of Christianity and subsequent cultural shift. And by the late 1200s, such progressive policies were no longer mentioned in written records. ## The Picture of Health? Movies and TV shows commonly portray Vikings as barbaric, caked in blood and grime with filthy clothing and dirty hair, which is why you might be surprised to learn that they were actually quite hygienic, likely far more hygienic than other European cultures at the time. They were known to bathe regularly, and grooming tools that we've uncovered include combs, razors, and even ear cleaners. These tools were carved from bone and wood, and were often meticulously cleaned and kept in their own cases so they could remain usable for many years. Another part of the average Viking that was quite clean was their hair. Blonde hair was highly valued at the time, to the point that it was commonplace to use soaps with a high lye content to brighten one's hair color, essentially bleaching it. But not only did this make one's mane fairer, it also had the effect of killing an age-old pest, head lice. Most surprising of all, it seems that Vikings actually had good oral hygiene. Obviously good oral hygiene in the Middle Ages still isn't great when compared to today's standards, but for their time, they actually had a decent dental routine. Toothpicks or brushes were commonly used to clean one's teeth after a meal, as evidenced by signs of abrasion on skeletal remains. A 2023 study found that, on average over the course of their lives, adult Vikings lost around 6% of their teeth, excluding their wisdom teeth. Around half of skeletons were found to have one or more minor cavities, and while there were some remains that contained more serious damage, many of them also showed evidence of early dental procedures, such as small holes dug into the molars to relieve pressure and drain pus from infected roots. The head of the researchers, Carolina Bertilsson, noted: > "This is very exciting to see, and not unlike the dental treatments we carry out today when we drill into infected teeth." Overall, keeping oneself clean was a high priority in many Viking communities, and there was generally one day of the week specially designated for washing all of one's clothing. In fact, Norse poetry at the time, such as the *Havamal* and the *Reginsmal*, highlighted the importance of starting the day combed and washed, as one's death could never be anticipated and you wanted to look your absolute best before suddenly arriving in the presence of the gods. The funny part of this is that much of our knowledge of Viking hygiene comes not from the Vikings themselves, but from Christian writers who weren't too fond of it, and denounced it as a vain and pretentious practice that was done in an attempt to seduce Christians. In fact, after a Viking raid sacked the Lindisfarne Monastery in 793, Christian scholar Alcuin wrote a series of letters to English kings letting them know that Viking raids were a punishment from God sent to Britain because the people were becoming too prideful of their appearances. However, elsewhere, these writings start to come off as less of a religious condemnation, and more like some good old-fashioned jealously. Take, for instance, a letter written after the English massacre of Danes in the year 1002, justifying the killing: > "The Danes made themselves too acceptable to English women by their elegant manners and their care of their person. They combed their hair every day, bathed every Saturday, and even changed their garments often. They set off their persons by many such frivolous devices. In this manner, they laid siege to the virtue of the married women and persuaded the daughters, even of the nobles, to be their concubines." So, there you have it, even their enemies were complaining about how clean they were. ## Only the Strongest Survived With the last two topics, we might have made it sound like Viking life was the high life, but we've yet to touch on the darker subjects, one of which was that the Viking culture as a whole had little tolerance for weakness. Not only was infant mortality high right off the bat, but even if you survived childbirth, you had a long road ahead of you. The Vikings valued strength and health to such a degree that if you showed serious signs of weakness, either by being sickly or physically or mentally disabled, there was a high likelihood of your parents simply killing you, either by tossing you in the sea or just abandoning you in the woods. Infanticide was seen as a necessary evil, a way to ensure that the population stayed strong and didn't need to waste resources on those who would only drag the community down. It's a brutal way of looking at life, but that's just the way it was. Interestingly though, in recent years archaeologists have begun uncovering evidence that this wasn't the only reason infants were killed. Between 1995 and 2003, excavations were carried out near lake *Tissø* in Denmark, and revealed some peculiar findings that reinforced older theories of human sacrifice. These were wells with human remains at the bottom, and in one of the wells, four of the five bodies were of small children aged 4 to 7. It was known for many years that sacrifices were an important part of their religion, as they would sacrifice animals or weapons to appease the gods. However, while human sacrifice wasn't exactly agreed upon, these newer findings are evidence that it was indeed taking place. As for why children were sacrificed, Lars Jørgensen of the Danish National Museum explains that choosing a child as the victim was rare, and likely seen as the ultimate sacrifice, something that was only done when they believed things had gone seriously awry and needed to reestablish a connection to the gods. ## They Profited From Slave Trade If the concept of child sacrifice and leaving your kid to die alone in the wilderness wasn't brutal enough, just wait, because it gets worse. While it is true that Viking life was one of high levels of freedom and progression, even for the women as we discussed earlier, this is only true for those who were actually free, as the Vikings were notorious for their extensive use of slaves. Slaves were gathered on large scales through raids of European cities, oftentimes during campaigns specifically launched for the purpose of gathering them. Others were simply born into slavery, either because both of their parents were slaves, or if a free man impregnated an enslaved woman. A slave in the Viking world was known as a thrall, and they were the lowest of the low in society, forced to undergo tasks in farmland, woodworking, or as a concubine. One of their most valuable contributions was to the building and maintaining of Viking fleets. There are some accounts, however, of thralls with an elevated level of permission in society. You could say these people were "almost free", certainly with more rights than other thralls, but not a fully-fledged member of the community. There is a record of a blacksmith giving his slave gold and freeing him, and another of a former thrall being released from his master and later marrying. But as nice as this sounds, it was not the reality for most thralls. Slave labor was not only an important part of the Viking economy, but one of its driving factors, making up the labor-intensive industries of sailcloth manufacturing and tar production. However, not all slaves captured in their horrific raids ended up in Viking territory. It's believed that only a fairly small percentage of captives were actually taken directly back home to Scandinavia, while the rest were more than likely sold into human trafficking networks, sold at other ports across northern and eastern Europe. Thanks to this trade, prisoners had become one of the most profitable spoils of war, further incentivizing future Viking raids that would ravage and brutalize western Europe for hundreds of years. ## Their Ancient Sagas Aren't Purely Fiction For hundreds of years, it was taught in schools that Christopher Columbus was the first European to discover the Americas, bumping into them accidentally on a miscalculated trip intended for Asia. But recently, it's been confirmed that it was indeed the Vikings who became the first to visit the New World, meaning that at least some of their ancient sagas are actually true, and not just folklore as was long believed. It all began with the banishment of Erik Thorvaldsson, better known as Erik the Red. Kicked out of Iceland for manslaughter, Erik traveled west and arrived at Greenland. In fact, it was Erik that named it Greenland, out of hopes that he could attract settlers to the frozen, barren island by giving it such an enticing name, but this didn't exactly work out, and the total Norse population of Greenland at the time was only around two thousand, mostly consisting of people that exported walrus ivory, seal blubber, and narwhal tusks that they marketed as unicorn horns. According to the ancient Icelandic text "Saga of Erik the Red", a fleet of around 25 ships continued to sail west of Greenland, looking for more opportunity. They described three areas they found, *Hellulan*, or land of the flat stones, Markland, or land of the forests, and Vinland, or land of wine. Little did they know at the time, but these lands they had discovered were a part of North America. However, before planning a return trip, Erik fell off a horse and was injured, and instead elected his son, Leif, as the party's new commander. According to the chronicles, sometime around the year 1000 AD, Leif Erikson landed at the place they called Vinland, where they found numerous types of berries growing in the wild, hence the name Vinland, which is believed to be somewhere near Cape Bauld in Newfoundland, Canada. He spent two winters here before leaving. A couple years later, his brother visited the area with a 30-man crew, and it was during this trip that the first conflict erupted with native Americans, when they attacked a group of sleeping natives. A third expedition was launched a few years later by a man named Thorfinn the Valiant, with a crew of 160 spread out across 3 ships. They experienced a cruel winter before allegedly establishing peaceful relations with the natives in the area, trading European food for local furs. For many, many years, it was unclear if these stories had any semblance of truth to them, if the Norsemen had actually discovered the coast of Canada, or if they'd just made the whole thing up as an epic story. It wasn't until the 1960s that evidence began to be uncovered adding credence to the tale. On the coast of Canada, researchers began finding tools from the time that couldn't have possibly belonged to the local natives, such as bronze rings, stone oil lamps, and the slag by-product of iron working. And soon, the scholarly world accepted the idea that it was indeed the Vikings who were the first to set foot in the new world, with L'Anse aux Meadows currently the only confirmed site at this time. It all paints a complex and diverse painting of life in the age of the Vikings, depending entirely on who you ask. To some, the Vikings were a barbaric menace that ransacked villages and sold women and children into slavery. To others, they instituted progressive women's rights, and were among the most adventurous explorers in European history. Of course, the reality is that they were all of this, and more, an incredibly complex society, and one that is highly in the backdrop of human history. ## Key Takeaways - Viking women had significant rights and freedoms, including property ownership and divorce initiation. - Vikings maintained good hygiene, bathing regularly and using grooming tools like combs and razors. - Viking society practiced infanticide and human sacrifice, valuing strength and health above all. - Slave trade was a major part of the Viking economy, with slaves captured through raids and sold across Europe. - Vikings were the first Europeans to reach the Americas, as confirmed by archaeological findings. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### What rights did Viking women have? Viking women had several rights and freedoms. They could own property, initiate divorce if mistreated, and remarry. Widows inherited a large portion of their husband's estate and could become the head of the family if there were no male heirs. Unmarried women over 20 were considered independent adults. Some women were entrepreneurs, and there is evidence of female warriors and priestesses. ### How did Vikings maintain their hygiene? Vikings were quite hygienic. They bathed regularly, used grooming tools like combs and razors, and had a high priority on cleanliness. They used lye-based soaps to bleach their hair and kill lice. They also practiced good oral hygiene, using toothpicks or brushes after meals. One day a week was designated for washing clothes. ### What was the Viking attitude towards weakness? Vikings had little tolerance for weakness. Infants showing signs of weakness were often killed or abandoned. This was seen as a necessary evil to ensure the community's strength and avoid wasting resources. ### What role did slaves play in Viking society? Slaves, known as thralls, were the lowest in Viking society. They performed various tasks like farm work, woodworking, and maintaining fleets. Slave labor was crucial to the Viking economy, particularly in industries like sailcloth manufacturing and tar production. Some slaves could gain elevated status, but most remained in servitude. ### Did Vikings engage in human sacrifice? Yes, there is evidence of human sacrifice in Viking culture. Archaeological findings, such as wells with child remains, suggest that children were sometimes sacrificed as the ultimate offering to the gods when things went seriously wrong. ### Who was the first European to discover the Americas? The Vikings were the first Europeans to discover the Americas. Erik the Red and his son Leif Erikson led expeditions to what they called Vinland, which is believed to be near Cape Bauld in Newfoundland, Canada. ### How did Viking women contribute to the household? Viking women were responsible for cooking, cleaning, and managing farms and livestock alongside their husbands. In the event of a husband's death, the wife would inherit a significant portion of his estate and could become the head of the family. ### What was the significance of the name 'Greenland'? Erik the Red named Greenland to attract settlers to the barren island. The name was intended to be enticing, although the actual population of Norse settlers was quite small, around two thousand, who primarily exported goods like walrus ivory and seal blubber. ### What evidence supports the Viking discovery of the Americas? Archaeological findings in Canada, such as bronze rings, stone oil lamps, and ironworking slag, support the Viking discovery of the Americas. L’Anse aux Meadows is the only confirmed site where these artifacts have been found. ### What was the Viking view on divorce? Viking women had the right to initiate divorce if they were being mistreated. They could also remarry after a divorce, which was a significant freedom compared to many other cultures at the time. ## Sources - [Original Side Projects video: 5 Shocking Things About Viking Culture](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9vA5GwC3jI) ## Related Coverage Simon Whistler https://sideprojects.pub/article/5-strange-weapons-that-somehow-worked https://sideprojects.pub/article/5-strange-weapons-that-somehow-worked Thu, 25 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT A wise man once said that if an idea is stupid, but works, then it's not a stupid idea, and nowhere does that wisdom hold more true than with weapons, as over the years a LOT of them have been produced that seem utterly bizarre from the outside looking in, but, when they were given a chance, did actually work – or kind of did anyway. And today, we shall be having a look at five such weapons… so let us begin! ## 1. War Pigs Let's kick things off with War Pigs; yes, you heard us right – War Pigs. We suspect that you'll be just as disappointed as we were to learn that a War Pig was not a pig which was ridden into battle cavalry style, as that would have been incredible, but instead, were pigs that were deployed as counter measures; the ancient equivalent to chaff being thrown out of the back of a jet to throw off guided missiles. But, counter-measures to what? The answer lies in the war elephant; colossal beasts that were the ancient equivalent of armoured tanks, i.e., pure and unbridled death machines that were abjectly terrifying to face, and capable of breaking through enemy lines as if they weren't even there. Fortunately, for those on the receiving end of them, every weapon has a flaw that can be exploited, and for elephants, that was that fact that, as living creatures, they were capable of fear. Invoke that feeling in them, and in an instant, they would break and rout from the battlefield. And turns out; you can do that by setting pigs on fire and running them at the elephants – who knew? We have no idea how this was first discovered, as that detail has long since been lost to time, and in fact, we barely even know who made use of them and how, so old is the history we are discussing, and so scant the surviving evidence as a result. We do have the odd tidbit of information here and there however, an example of which can be found in the works of Polyaenus, a Greco-Roman writer hailing from the 2nd century AD. He spoke of War Pigs in his *Strategemata*, an eight volume work that compiled strategies and tactics from the best Generals of the day, quote: > "At the siege of Megara, Antigonus brought his elephants into the attack; but the Megarians daubed some swine with pitch, set fire to it, and let them loose among the elephants. The pigs grunted and shrieked under the torture of the fire, and sprang forwards as hard as they could among the elephants, who broke their ranks in confusion and fright, and ran off in different directions." Other sources, however, don't mention explicitly that the pigs had to be set alight, and instead simply allude to their having to be injured or frightened in some way to get them squealing. This may indeed have been with fire, with the sources just omitting that detail, or it may have been by another method, we just don't know. As for an example of such a source, consider *Naturalis Historia*, a 1st Century AD work by Pliny the Elder, a Roman Naturalist, which says the following, quote: > "(Elephants) bear down the body of the army, and stamp (the armed men) underfoot. But these same are affrighted with the grunting of swine; and if wounded or put into a fright, they always go backward, with scarcely less mischief to their own side." Then there are sources that don't mention the pigs as having to be injured at all, and instead say that merely their presence was enough to terrify war elephants, an example of which comes from *De Natura Animalium*, a 2nd or 3rd Century AD work by Claudius Aelianus, a Greco-Roman author and teacher of rhetoric, quote: > "The Elephant has a terror of a horned ram and of the squealing of a pig. It was by these means, or they say, that the Romans turned to flight the perfumes elephants of Pyrrhus of Epirus, and that the Romans won a glorious victory." Thanks to those surviving sources then, and others like them, we can be pretty certain that war pigs were indeed used as a counter-elephant weapon in the Ancient Period… but that's about all we can say on the matter with any certainty, with the combined evidence for more specific assertions simply not existing. However, and we REALLY can't stress this enough, do remember to approach ancient texts with a healthy scepticism, as this is what follows our last quote: > "This same animal is overcome by beauty in a woman and lays aside its temper, quite stunned by the lovely sight." Professional zoologists we are not, but yeah, we're pretty sure that ain't how it works; like we say – healthy scepticism! ## 2. The Lantern Shield We've all been there, folks; you want to stab someone, you want to stop yourself from being stabbed, and you want to be able to see yourself doing both of those things – but alas, God only gave you two hands, whatever is one meant to do in such situations?! Well, worry no longer, because the clever sorts of Renaissance Italy have got you covered with THIS: the Lantern Shield. It was a weapon that was an elaborate combination of a small shield, a lantern, spikes, and an armoured gauntlet; all of it fused together to provide both offensive and defensive capabilities while maintaining the ability to see in low-light conditions. The shield itself was usually perfectly round, barring a small cut out to allow the wrist to bend back, with holes that were big enough to save a bit of weight, but not so big that they compromised the shield as a defensive implement. A weapon as seemingly bizarre as this was naturally crafted for a VERY specific purpose, which in this instance was to offer a practical solution for nighttime duels and urban patrols; and while outwardly bizarre, you can get the logic, can't you? It's one less hand for lighting, and one more for fighting! Further still, integrated as it was into the Lantern Shield, the lantern itself could become a weapon, as you could stick it right in the face of your enemy; potentially disorientating them in the heat of combat without risk of it being smashed. Or rather, we should say that all that is how we THINK the Lantern Shield was used, as, on account of its age, coming from the 15th and 16th centuries to be precise, there is a LOT about it we don't know due to sources just not surviving to the current day. For example, it is commonly believed, as we just stated, that it was used for nighttime patrols, but by whom, because did you notice that every single surviving example of a Lantern Shield looks RATHER fancy? That isn't just selective presentation, that is just how all the surviving examples look; so were people REALLY procuring such expensive armour just for their period's equivalent of the police… In two words: yes, maybe. When you consider that suitably well-heeled Italians were buying stuff like this for their guards… it suddenly isn't inconceivable at all. Or, it could just be that the fancy and expensive ones were the only ones they bothered to look after, and thus are the only ones that survive today – who knows! Then there's the question of whether they were ever used in REAL combat, i.e., military combat. The answer to that, at present, is usually a no, with most historians believing they were used purely for duelling and night patrols, as we've already laid out. But with so much of our understanding of renaissance and medieval history being pieced together from whatever scraps of sources happened to survive into the current day… you can never say never! ## 3. The Nuclear Bazooka Would you believe us if we were to tell you that the US Army had a Nuclear Bazooka in its arsenal back in the black and white days of the Early Cold War? It sounds crazy, doesn't it? And yet, that's EXACTLY what they did have. Kind of anyway, because while the term 'Bazooka' has become a common term nowadays for referring to any shoulder fired missile system, in reality, if we wish to be pedantic, and believe us we do, the term only applies to a very specific family of American made recoilless rifle anti-tank rocket launchers, one that began with the original M1 Bazooka first produced in 1942, and ended with the M20 Super Bazooka, which started rolling out of the factories in 1952. And while no, there wasn't a nuclear tipped one of THOSE, the US did have a separate, and much, MUCH larger recoilless rifle that fired nukes, and that'd be the 'Davy Crockett Weapon System.' So, by common parlance; yes – they did indeed have a Nuclear Bazooka! Oh, and if you're wondering, because it is a term you don't come across too much nowadays, a 'recoilless rifle' simply refers to a type of weapon that fires a projectile in a way that negates the recoil of traditional artillery or shoulder-fired systems. It achieves this by way of a whopping great hole out the back, which allows the mass of gas that would normally create recoil to pass straight out of the weapon without exerting any force upon it. As for the Davy Crockett specifically, however, it came in two different flavours: the M28, which had a range of 2km, and the M29, which doubled that to 4km. And if you are thinking that they sound like awfully short ranges for a nuclear weapon, at least from a crew staying alive perspective, hold that thought, because we think it just might not be quite as bad as it first sounds. It's a bold take when it comes to the Davy Crockett, we know, but bear with us, because we just might be onto something here. Both variants fired the exact same munition; a 'M388 Nuclear Projectile' – inside of which was a W54 miniature warhead, which, when tuned for the Davy Crockett, made a bang in the 20 tonnes of TNT equivalent kind of area. This is an absolutely tiny yield, with the 'Little Boy' bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima in August 1945, which was already nothing by modern standards, having a yield 750 times greater than it. This tiny yield was just about enough to produce a fireball 18.5m in diameter, within which nearly everything would be instantly vapourised, a damage radius of 125m, inside of which all but the most heavily reinforced concrete buildings would collapse, and a radiation radius of 425m, a lengthy exposure to which would likely prove fatal a month or so down the line. So, while many like to paint the Davy Crockett as an 'instant death weapon' for its crews, by the numbers alone, you can see how there were ranges at which it could be deployed without posing any threat at all to its operators; so long as they were stood down wind of it of course – upwind would be a WHOLE other matter. As for when and how it was used, it was in service between 1961 and 1971, with the first six of those years being spent on active deployment in West Germany, where, were war to break out, they were tasked with decimating advancing Communist Armoured Formations primarily, and secondarily, using the radiation emitted during those attacks to 'poison' land scorched earth style, thus slowing the Communist advance. This is in keeping with the wider NATO plan to whittle the Communists down as part of a protracted initial fighting retreat through Western Europe. Knowing that then, is it fair to consider it a 'suicide weapon,' when not only was it long enough ranged to not hit its crews, if deployed correctly, but NATO forces weren't even intending to be going anywhere near their detonation sites for a long, LONG time afterwards? Either way, after its six years of field deployment, it then spent four years in storage, before finally being scrapped and retired. And get this, it wasn't even retired for being dangerous and ridiculous too; with the ACTUAL reason being the development of more effective battle doctrines and conventional weapons that could decimate armoured formations just as effectively, without any of the security and control risks that came with having nuclear weapons floating around small and out of the way garrisons. Does all of this mean that it wasn't a testimony to the ignorant naivety of the Early Atomic Age, and one of the single most ridiculous weapon systems ever deployed? No, of course not, but while both of those things are absolutely true, we can also recognise that the usual 'suicide gun' line that gets thrown around isn't really a fair assessment of the thing. But all of that, ultimately, is just our own musing on the topic, and we certainly don't claim to be beyond reproach; so there's every chance we could be wrong - but hey, we'd far rather take a risk and encourage some interesting debate on the topic instead of just regurgitating the usual talking points! ## 4. Ye Olde Fast Firing Guns In terms of rate of fire, firearms design in the Early Modern Period was stagnant, with their basic go-to design, the super slow single shot muzzle loader, essentially having remained unchanged for centuries. This stagnation sparked no joy for the gunsmiths of the time, as they knew that faster-firing guns were theoretically possible, and that such advancements would be absolute game-changers once perfected, but they were shackled by the primitive technology of their time, which made fast-firing guns—anything like what we know today—flatly impossible. That didn't stop them from trying to make them though, which led to all manner of weird and wacky gun designs emerging as they attempted to achieve faster rates of fire within the constraints of their period's technology. And since it was loading the gun that took ages, some went down the route of adding multiple barrels to their guns. Sure, this would mean that loading would take an absolute age, but it could be done in the comfort of your own home, in your own time, when no one was trying to kill you, leaving you with a bugger load of rounds immediately on hand, and ready to go, when the proverbial brown and stinky hit the fan. For examples of the kind of designs they came up with, consider things like THIS, the Pepperbox Revolver. It was a multi-barrelled handgun popular in the early to mid-19th century, and it achieved a faster rate of fire by way of a distinctive cluster of rotating barrels; simply give a spin after firing, and happy days, you've got another fully prepped barrel ready to go! They normally came with around 4-6 barrels, but, if the gunsmith got carried away, they could go WAY higher. The 'Pepperbox' design wasn't just limited to pistols too; as you could get rifles that worked in the same way, as Russian examples show, but do note, these were VERY rare, with pistols being the most common sort of Pepperbox you would come across. Pepperboxes also had a forerunner in the Volley Gun, a type of design which in one form or another dates back to the 15th century, and that, despite (sometimes) being outwardly similar to the Pepperbox, varies in one key way: whereas the Pepperbox allowed you to place single shots at your leisure, a Volley Gun, as the name suggests, let the whole lot rip with a single trigger pull. This, naturally, limited its utility somewhat, but when it found its niches, in situations where a whole area had to be covered with lead VERY quickly, it was a devastatingly effective tool, with bank guards often using them so that they could (hopefully) put down a whole armed gang at once. They too were also not limited to a single weapon type, with Volley Guns coming in pistol form, long arm form, and even artillery form. For examples, consider the 18th century 'Duckfoot Pistol,' a sub-type so named for the arrangement of its eight barrels, the 'Nock Gun,' which the British Royal Navy used to sweep the decks of enemy ships before boarding, and the 17th century 'Organ Gun.' Not every early fast firing gun just upped the number of barrels, however, as the Harmonica Gun can attest to. With the earliest known example coming from a Swiss Gunsmith in 1742, the Harmonica Gun used a single barrel and a sliding metal block, known as a 'slide' or 'bar,' containing a series of preloaded chambers lined up horizontally that resembled the reeds in a harmonica, hence the name. To fire it, the shooter would manually align each chamber with the barrel and the ignition mechanism, typically a flintlock or percussion system. After firing a shot, the shooter would slide the block sideways to bring the next chamber into position, and they were good to discharge another round. It too came in pistol and longarm form, and is yet another great example of the, to us modern observers at least, WEIRD ways that the gunsmiths of old tried to get ever faster rates of fire out of their creations. ## 5. The Lunge Mine It's well known that the Japanese loved themselves a good Banzai during WWII - their RATHER enthusiastic mass bayonet charges. But while sometimes effective against enemy infantry, SURELY, they never employed them against tanks, right? Well, actually, yes – yes they did, but they didn't use regular old bayonets when doing so, because that would be utterly ridiculous, and about as much use as a chocolate tea pot. Instead, they used THIS, the 'Shitotsubakurai,' or 'Lunge Mine.' And now, having seen one, we know what you are thinking: "wait, is that just an explosive on the end of a stick?" And to that, all we can say is yes; that is EXACTLY what it is, with the Lunge Mine being comprised of a conical hollow charge encased in a metallic container affixed to the end of a 150cm long wooden pole. The charge itself was 29cm in length, 20cm in diameter, and contained 3kg of TNT explosive. Quite cleverly too, it wasn't just a 'dumb' explosive, but was actually a shaped charge, a specialist type of munition that takes all the energy of a blast, which normally emanates out in all directions, and focuses it onto a single point so that it can better penetrate hardened armour plate. Quite cleverly too, those three little prongs poking out the front made sure that the explosive charge detonated at the ideal distance for inflicting the most damage. This means that, quite shockingly we have to say, the Lunge Mine did ACTUALLY work as an effective anti-tank weapon, with it being shown in post war testing that it could get through give or take 150mm of steel plate if it impacted at a perfect angle of 90 degrees, and around 100mm if it impacted at 60 degrees. This was more than enough for the typical types of tanks that the Americans were fielding in the Pacific Theatre, with even the beefiest and most juiced up M5A1 Stuart Light Tank maxing out at 50.8mm of armour, and the most highly optimised M4A3 Sherman Medium Tank topping out at 107.9mm. We should clarify, however, when we say that the Lunge Mine worked as an effective anti-tank weapon, that was very much under IDEAL conditions, i.e., when the operator could actually get up to a tank to poke, because the US Military, like basically EVERY military ever in fairness, deployed supporting infantry alongside its tanks to protect them from anti-tank capable enemy equivalents… and, as many a Japanese soldier found out, it takes way less time to shoulder your rifle and squeeze a trigger than it does to leap out of a bush and sprint up to a tank. The vast majority of Lunge Mine operators, therefore, were killed before they ever had a chance to put it to use. This also means that while it was TECHNICALLY effective, in real terms, it was actually utter junk. If you are wondering why Japan would ever create such a thing, they were a VERY late-war development, first appearing at the Battle of Leyte in December 1944. This late in the war, Japan knew full well it had no hope of defeating the Americans, but also didn't want to surrender, and so it kept dreaming up increasingly weird, almost Wallace-and-Gromit-esque contraptions to make up for the facts that its factories lay in absolute ruin, and it had all but completely lost access to strategic resources as its military situation collapsed. Oh, and if you're wondering, yes, Lunge Mines did kill their operator too. ## Key Takeaways - War pigs were used in ancient battles to scare war elephants, exploiting the elephants' fear of pigs' squeals. - The Lantern Shield, used in Renaissance Italy, combined a shield, lantern, and spikes for nighttime combat. - The Davy Crockett Weapon System, a nuclear bazooka, was deployed by the US Army during the Cold War to counter Soviet tanks. - Early fast-firing guns, like the Pepperbox Revolver and Volley Gun, used multiple barrels to increase rate of fire. - The Lunge Mine, a Japanese weapon from WWII, was a shaped charge on a stick used in desperate anti-tank attacks. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### What were War Pigs used for in ancient warfare? War Pigs were used as counter-measures against war elephants. They were set on fire or injured to make them squeal, which would terrify the elephants and cause them to break ranks and flee. ### Who mentioned the use of War Pigs in their writings? Polyaenus, a Greco-Roman writer from the 2nd century AD, mentioned the use of War Pigs in his work 'Strategemata'. ### What was the Lantern Shield used for? The Lantern Shield was used for nighttime duels and urban patrols. It combined a small shield, a lantern, spikes, and an armored gauntlet to provide both offensive and defensive capabilities while allowing the user to see in low-light conditions. ### What was the Davy Crockett Weapon System? The Davy Crockett Weapon System was a recoilless rifle that fired nuclear projectiles. It came in two variants: the M28 with a range of 2km and the M29 with a range of 4km. It was used by the US Army during the early Cold War. ### What was the yield of the Davy Crockett's nuclear projectile? The Davy Crockett's nuclear projectile had a yield of approximately 20 tonnes of TNT equivalent. ### What were Pepperbox Revolvers? Pepperbox Revolvers were multi-barrelled handguns popular in the early to mid-19th century. They achieved a faster rate of fire by rotating a cluster of barrels, allowing the user to fire multiple preloaded shots in succession. ### What was the Lunge Mine used for during World War II? The Lunge Mine, or 'Shitotsubakurai', was used by the Japanese as an anti-tank weapon during World War II. It consisted of a shaped explosive charge on the end of a wooden pole, designed to penetrate tank armor. ### How effective was the Lunge Mine against American tanks? The Lunge Mine could penetrate up to 150mm of steel plate at a 90-degree angle and around 100mm at a 60-degree angle, making it effective against most American tanks in the Pacific Theatre, such as the M5A1 Stuart Light Tank and the M4A3 Sherman Medium Tank. ### Why were Lunge Mines considered ineffective in real combat? Lunge Mines were considered ineffective in real combat because operators were often killed by supporting infantry before they could get close enough to use them on tanks. ### What was the Harmonica Gun? The Harmonica Gun was an early fast-firing gun that used a single barrel and a sliding metal block containing preloaded chambers. The shooter would manually align each chamber with the barrel to fire multiple shots in succession. ## Sources - [Original Side Projects video: 5 Strange Weapons That Somehow Worked](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWqf2QlCCus) ## Related Coverage Simon Whistler https://sideprojects.pub/article/5-tanks-so-terrible-theyre-almost-impressive https://sideprojects.pub/article/5-tanks-so-terrible-theyre-almost-impressive Thu, 25 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT Tanks are supposed to be war-winning machines – brutal, mobile fortresses that carry the fight and shrug off return fire. But sometimes, what rolls out of the factory floor is less a steel beast… and more a smoking embarrassment. In this article, we're diving into five armoured disasters that earned their place in the scrapheap of history. Some were rushed into service when desperation trumped engineering. Others were peacetime projects, full of promise on paper but completely DOA when reality got involved. One never made it past the prototype stage. Another never made it out of training exercises. And one made it into battle – only to make its crew wish it hadn't. From overheated messes to under armoured toys, from marketing flops to full-blown wartime liabilities, these are tanks that failed hard – loudly, publicly, and sometimes fatally. And if you think that's harsh, just wait till we get to the last entry. It's a tank many still worship today… but when you look past the reputation and into the reality, the only thing it truly excelled at was letting people down. ## The Covenanter: Britain's Rolling Kettle On paper, the Covenanter looked like it could be everything the British Army could need and more to carry it through the early stages of WWII – low slung, big road wheels, stylishly sloped armour, and a modest, but perfectly adequate for the time 40mm main gun. So what was the problem? Well, to cut to the chase, it was rushed into production, like really, REALLY rushed. Its development was commenced in 1939, and production began that same year. The reason for this rush was exactly what you would imagine it was given the year: war with Germany was then a matter of 'when,' and not 'if,' and it was blatantly apparent that Britain just did not have enough tanks, hence the Covenanter being rushed through development to satisfy the age of wisdom of 'owt is better than nowt.' So short were the British of tanks in fact, and so brown were the War Office's underpants as a result, that an initial order for 100 Covenanters was placed in April 1939 – before even so much as a single prototype or production evaluation vehicle had left the production line. 'Be reet,' the powers that be reasoned, however, as times were then so pressing, that any issues that came up could simply be fixed while the production line was rolling, and retroactively rolled out to ones that were already with their units. And sure, that wisdom absolutely would have held true if the Covenanter just needed a bit of tinkering around the edges to see it right – a new part here and there to correct small imperfections that were missed during its rushed production. But when the issue turned out to be that the core design itself was a big old pile of crap, that cannot be fixed quite so easily. The chief issue was its radiator, which had been placed right at the front of the tank, and fed to the rear mounted engine via really long coolant pipes that led through the crew compartment. Make no mistake, you get their logic for doing this: place the radiator at the front, which will force airflow onto it during movement, and thus improve cooling, but the issue was that those pipes simply couldn't provide the waterflow needed to properly allow the radiator to do its thing thanks to their length and limited internal pressure, and what's worse, since they led through the crew compartment, they bled heat along the way. As a result, both the engine and the crew were simply too hot to work properly. Yet, incredibly, 1,771 of these rolling kettles were built between 1939 and 1943, and not one of them ever fired a shot at the enemy; with them being relegated to the British Mainland for training and civil defence duties – there was a handful that were sent to North Africa for hot weather trials… but that went as direly as you would expect. In the end, their service was ended with their production, both coming to an end in 1943, when it was also declared obsolete, and all hulls, save for the bridge laying variants, were ordered to be scrapped. Frankly, you wonder why they kept it in production for as long as they did, it wasn't like Britain was short of decent designs – it was quantity they were short of, not quality. Why not have the LMS works that produced the Covenanter make Crusaders instead? They had very similar roles after all, and the Crusader, actually, you know… WORKED? ## The Saint-Chamond: France's Trench-Diving Disaster In 1917, France's second attempt at a heavy tank – the Saint-Chamond – combined grand ambitions with fatal design flaws. It was an enormous box of a vehicle, half as long again as its predecessor, the Schneider CA1, and armed with a formidable 75 mm gun that protruded from its nose. On paper, this seemed like an absolute winner: big armour, big shooty bit… literally what more did you want out of a tank in those days? Or so its designers reasoned anyway. Turns out, mobility is what else you could want, because the Saint-Chamond, all 23 tons of it, rode on ridiculously short caterpillar tracks – with it actually just using the tracks and chassis of a civilian tractor, with the 'tank' bit just being plonked on top to expedite development and production. This created an absolutely horrific overhang, at the end of which was perched a hell of a lot of weight courtesy of that 75mm gun. This ended exactly the way you would imagine, with the Saint-Chamond diving nose deep into any wide trench it tried to cross, and then getting stuck with its arse waving in the air, totally immobile until it could be dragged out – and it did have to be rescued too, as its 90 horsepower engine wasn't exactly up to the job itself. But how did this even happen? Sure, hindsight is 20:20 and all that, but surely its designers saw this coming? Well, actually, they did, the issue was that FAMH, the company that designed and produced it, was more bothered about securing a contract than it was actually making a decent tank. You see, Schneider, with their CA1, had beaten FAMH to the post by a whole year – and this didn't exactly spark joy for their accountants, who saw every sale Schneider got as one that could have been FAMH's, if only they had a bloody tank to flog! As a result, corners were cut, haste was encouraged, and out trundled the Saint-Chamond in 1917. It would first see combat that same year, at Laffaux Mill on May the 5th to be precise, and it went about as well as you would imagine: 16 were deployed, three were destroyed by enemy fire, and even more still took themselves out of the battle by getting stuck. To be fair to FAMH too, as some may say we've clowned on them unfairly here, they DID make efforts to improve the Saint-Chamond once it was in production, with an extra 8.5mm of armour being added to the front, a sloped roof that would allow satchel charges to roll off, and a new observation port being added from the 151st vehicle – 400 were made in total – and it also received a meatier new gun – specifically a 75mm Model 1897 – from the 210th vehicle. None of these did anything to address the fundamental issue however: that of its propensity for getting stuck thanks to the overhang – if anything, the extra armour at the front only made it even worse. To be even fairer still, too, we do have to admit that by the time of the August to November 1918 Allied Hundred Days Offensive, which saw the breaking of trench deadlock, and the return of open warfare, the Saint-Chamond did start to perform MUCH better – because open warfare meant less trenches and deep craters to fall into. BUT, this must be remembered as a happy little accident at best – it, like its British equivalents, was designed first and foremost to cross trenches and then give the business to the Bosch, and for that, it simply was not up to the task. ## The AMX-40: France's Unsellable Export Our next terrible tank was France's earnest attempt to sell a 'modern' main battle tank on the cheap: the AMX-40. Unveiled in the early 1980s, it was supposed to be the export follow-up to France's successful AMX-30 – which was a cracking tank make no mistake, but so cracking that it proved to be a smidge too pricy for many developing nations to acquire. With this in mind, the AMX-40 was specifically crafted as a lightly armoured, but fast-moving platform that still packed a powerful 120mm smoothbore gun. It sounded like a good idea on paper, after all, it wasn't like the Chinese hadn't found tremendous export success with their Type 62, which itself was designed along similar lines, and for similar reasons, specifically as a stripped down and shrunken Type 59. But unfortunately for the French, such success was not theirs to repeat, and the AMX-40 ended up as a tank without both cause and customer, and quietly faded away come the '90s; having failed to attract even a single customer. And yet, despite its failure, the AMX-40 wasn't all bad on paper. In the firepower department, it kept pace with the big boys. That 120 mm cannon could fling shells as hard as any other NATO tank gun of the era, and it even boasted a quirky bonus: a 20 mm autocannon alongside the usual machine guns for tackling pesky aircraft or light targets. It also had then-modern electronics: a laser rangefinder, ballistic computer, and thermal sights were part of the package of available upgrades. By the mid-1980s, French engineers had also introduced a stabilized fire-control system so it could shoot more accurately on the move. On the mobility side, the AMX-40 was a sprinter too: a 1,100 hp diesel engine (upgraded to 1,300+ hp in later variants) gave it a top speed around 70kph – a smidge faster than an Abrams, and a LOT faster than a Challenger 1. In theory, this meant excellent 'shoot-and-scoot' capability, but the problem was what would happen when the AMX-40 couldn't scoot fast enough to avoid incoming fire, as it'd blow up – particularly against the more meaty warheads the Soviets were starting to roll out around that time. Unaware of their looming failure, France's GIAT Industries – who built the thing – produced four prototypes and showed them off at exhibitions like Eurosatory, hoping for foreign orders. Spain was the most serious potential customer for a while, and Saudi Arabia also kicked the tracks – quite literally – during desert trials in 1987. There, it was pitted head-to-head against the Abrams, Challenger 1, and even a Brazilian contender – the EE-T1 Osório – and the French tank's mobility gimmick totally backfired. It still used the relatively narrow tracks inherited from the old AMX-30 you see, and in the deep sand those skinny tracks struggled – it couldn't put that juicy power to weight ratio to use, and it struggled, the tracks became overstressed, and ultimately, failed. In the end, finding themselves thoroughly unimpressed with the French offering, Saudi Arabia went with the proven American Abrams, and the French tank was left idling with no takers. By 1990, the writing was on the wall. The Cold War was in its closing arc, and as a result, the world was suddenly flooded with surplus top-tier tanks being sold at bargain prices. Why would a country buy a risky new AMX-40 when they could get a used Leopard 1 or M60 for cheap, or receive hand-me-down T-72s from former Soviet stocks? They wouldn't, was the answer, and so GIAT finally pulled the plug that same year – with not a single production model ever having been made. ## Literally Any Tankette: The Category That Couldn't Let's mix things up a bit now, and look not at a particular tank model, but an entire category of them – among which there genuinely cannot be found a single redeeming example: the tankette. These were the miniature two-man tanks, usually without a turret, that many armies flirted with in the interwar period – that magic time when WWI had proven that tanks as a general idea were most big and clever, but the specifics ins and outs of how they were most effective had yet to be fully worked out, leading to a period of 'flinging sh*t and seeing what stuck' in tank design. Tankettes were one of the pieces of proverbial thrown, and they had a straightforward enough concept behind them: be small, be cheap, be able to carry a machine gun or small cannon for a bit of punch. They were NEVER intended to be a substitute for true tanks by any nation that gave them a try, with them instead typically being seen more as a specialist infantry support or reconnaissance vehicle. In reality, however, they ended up being little but death traps on tracks. ANY tankette you could pick – be it the British Carden-Loyd, the Italian CV-33, the Polish TKS, or the Japanese Type 94 – proved wholly inadequate the moment it was thrown into real combat. They had paper-thin armour, often 6 to 12 mm at best, which could often be perforated by ordinary rifle bullets or machine gun fire. To explain further, consider the Czechoslovak VZ.33, as an example. During its testing, engineers discovered bullet holes in its armour. Their response to this discovery? 'Be reet,' followed by welding up the holes, and signing it off as good to go. Indeed, it is telling that when the Germans annexed the Czech half of Czechoslovakia, they did NOT take the vehicles for themselves – as more typically, they'd slap an iron cross on anything foreign they came by and push it into service for themselves. It was that bad that even they weren't interested. Indeed, when Italy deployed scores of L3 tankettes against British forces in North Africa, the results were tragicomic. Italian tankettes were cut to ribbons; their 8 mm machine guns couldn't dent Allied tanks, while any anti-tank rifle, never mind a field gun or actual proper anti-tank gun, turned the L3's into colanders. So small and weak were they in fact, that even wire entanglements, and muddy terrain could stop them in their tracks – quite literally – which is exactly what happened in some early WWII campaigns, where many tankettes got stuck or bogged and had to be abandoned. An Imperial War Museum article on the tankette says it best, noting that while these vehicles may have been "effective" for policing colonised populations or chasing rebels, they were utterly "inadequate for modern warfare" when pitted against a well-armed foe. Perhaps the saddest part of the tankette story is that so many nations wasted time and money on them. Britain's early Carden-Loyd tankette inspired MANY copies around the world, and yet by WWII, even the British themselves recognized the concept's futility, with there only being a single recorded combat use of them by the Brits during the conflict, and that'd be around May to June 1940, when around 200 tankettes took part in the defence of the Dyle-Namur Line in Belgium. As for how they performed, badly, in a word. Instead, they mostly ended up just using them as handy transports for the MG's, which would then be pulled out, and set up in their traditional manner. But at least the British had alternatives. Poland, facing a ferocious onslaught and in a desperate defence down to the last man, did not, and so it pushed its TKS' – itself a Carden-Loyd derivative incidentally – into proper full-on front-line combat, and they were massacred, proving to be mere fodder for the hungry panzers that circled around them. They DID manage to get a few kills with their variants that sported a 20mm WZ.38 autocannon, but they had a mere 24 of these as compared to a total inventory of 575, and even these few kills were against the weediest things the Germans brought with them – Panzer I's and the like – and even then were rare, and VERY lucky. The Japanese, and indeed the Thais, to be fair, did actually have some success with them. BUT, that fact is testimony more to the strength, or lack thereof, of their opposition, than it is any merit of their Type 94's and Carden-Loyd's respectively. As evidence of that claim, consider this: when the Chinese started getting serious hardware sent to them from the Western Allies, the Japanese tankettes began to suffer the exact same fate as their European counterparts. Similarly, when the Soviets joined the fray in 1945 and invaded Manchuria, the Japanese tankettes still in service – which was actually still quite a lot – were simply brushed aside as mere obstacles in the path of advancing Soviet armour. Still though, while tankettes may have been a total technological dead end, from the Carden-Loyd, the British did at least create the Universal Carrier, which was a belting little bit of kit. So every cloud and all that we guess. ## The Panther: The Overrated Diva And to close us off, let's have an entry that may just prove a smidge controversial: the Panzerkampfwagen V Panther. Now, we know what many of you are thinking now, "But SideProjects, however could you say something so brave and bold," or, to those less inclined towards flattery, "what an absolute load of w*nk, everyone knows the Panther was one of the best tanks of WWII?!" And to those of you thinking such things, bear with us, because we firmly believe that the Panther, in STARK contrast to its common reputation, was actually lowkey kind of a heap of junk. A cool looking one, make no mistake, but a heap of junk nonetheless. Certainly, at face value, it does look like we've lost the plot a bit here, we mean, come on, a VERY powerful 75mm gun, excellent frontal armour, and plenty of go – what's not to love, after all? It's reliability, that's what's not to love – because it was bloody dreadful, maybe even comically so in fact. Let's rewind to its big debut: Kursk, July 1943 – the largest tank battle in history, and the moment Hitler hoped his shiny new wunderwaffe would swing the tide back in Germany's favour. 184 Panthers were assembled in record time and rushed to the front, and of them, only 10 remained operational by the fifth day, with 85 of the losses coming from mechanical failure, and 25 by fire, including two that caught fire while being offloaded from their delivery trains – and we've done the maths, yes, that DOES mean that more were lost to unreliability than enemy fire. A large part of this was caused by its engine, the Maybach HL 210, which was plagued by overheating and oil leaks, which caused both mechanical failure and fire. So bad was this, that by September '43 it was replaced by the HL230, and, to be fair, this did stop the random fires, but overall reliability was still atrocious. This continued unreliability came from the fact that its final drive system – originally designed for a mere 30 ton tank, rather than the Panther's 40+ tons – was also incredibly fragile, with field reports indicating an average lifespan of just 150km before failure. For context, a Panther could get upwards of 260km of range out of a single tank of fuel if being driven on the road, meaning that, often times, it needed a new final drive system more than it needed its fuel tank topping up. This simply is not acceptable in a front-line tank; it took tanks out of action when they were needed in the front lines, it wasted the time of mechanics, who only had so many hours in a day to work, and it put a HUGE strain on logistics having to keep a steady supply of new final drive systems both produced, and delivered to the front. Then there's the matter of its suspension. Sure, interleaved road wheels look VERY cool – we'd never try to claim they didn't – but have you ever stopped to consider how much of a monumental pain in the arse they were to maintain? Think of it this way – a suspension arm breaks, or a road wheel on the inside needs changing, look how much other stuff you have to unbolt just to be able to get to the part that needs to be changed? And of course, the Nazi war machine wasn't exactly short of stuff that needed repairing at any given time – the mechanics' work day could have been FAR better spent than spending half of it faffing about with a fancy over-engineered suspension… there's a reason NO ONE used this sort of set up after WWII, and the faff of maintenance is that reason. And here's another stat to REALLY sell our thesis to you all: in Normandy, post-battle assessments found that over 50% of abandoned Panthers showed NO combat damage whatsoever, meaning that instead they had been abandoned due to mechanical breakdown, or lack of fuel. So, just how did this become the case then? Just why was it such a heap of junk? The root of the problem was actually quite simple: much like the Covenanter we looked at earlier, the Panther had been rushed into production to meet political expectations rather than mechanical reality. As a result, corners were cut, and the Panther as we know it – warts and all – came to be. Even when improvements were made – and they were, over time – the Panther never really lost its diva energy. Late-war versions were better, yes, but they were still high-maintenance, fragile, and utterly dependent on supply lines and support crews that Germany increasingly lacked. Tank crews dreaded drawing Panthers. Not because they feared combat, but because they knew that driving one was essentially a gamble: would you make it to the fight today, or would you spend it waiting for a tow? And look – credit where it's due – when it did make it to the fight, the Panther could be devastating. Its gun was world-class. Its frontal armour was more than a match for most Allied weapons. A functioning Panther, set up in a good position with a competent crew, could – and did – punch well above its weight. But war isn't won on hypotheticals and highlight reels. It's won by what shows up, holds together, and gets the job done. On that front, the Panther just didn't deliver. In total, over 6,000 Panthers were built – a staggering commitment of resources for a tank that so often failed to deliver a return on investment, and yet, for every Panther firing a shot in anger, another was being cannibalised for parts or limping back to repair. It was, in effect, a luxury tank in an economy that could barely afford an austere one. So yes, it had potential. Yes, it scared the hell out of Allied tankers – but only when it actually worked, which wasn't enough to matter. And that's why the Panther, despite its reputation, earns a rightful spot on this list. It wasn't the best tank of the war, and nor was it even close to the top of that list. It was a glorious failure given eternal relevancy in the popular zeitgeist by the fact that, by pure fluke, it ended up being big, and looking cool. ## Key Takeaways - The Covenanter tank was rushed into production during WWII, leading to severe overheating issues due to poor radiator design. - The Saint-Chamond tank's design flaws, such as short tracks and excessive overhang, made it prone to getting stuck in trenches. - The AMX-40 tank failed to attract customers due to its narrow tracks, which struggled in deep sand and led to mechanical failures. - Tankettes, like the Carden-Loyd and CV-33, were ineffective in combat due to their thin armor and vulnerability to small arms fire. - The Panther tank, despite its powerful gun and armor, was unreliable and often broke down, leading to high maintenance demands. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### What was the main issue with the Covenanter tank? The Covenanter tank had a critical design flaw with its radiator placement and coolant pipes, which led to overheating problems for both the engine and the crew. ### Why was the Saint-Chamond tank ineffective in combat? The Saint-Chamond tank had a significant overhang due to its short caterpillar tracks, causing it to get stuck in trenches and other obstacles, making it ineffective in combat. ### What was the intended market for the AMX-40 tank? The AMX-40 was designed as a cheaper alternative to the successful AMX-30, intended for export to developing nations. ### Why did the AMX-40 tank fail to attract customers? The AMX-40 failed to attract customers due to its narrow tracks, which struggled in deep sand during desert trials, and the availability of surplus top-tier tanks at bargain prices. ### What were tankettes primarily used for? Tankettes were intended as specialist infantry support or reconnaissance vehicles, not as substitutes for true tanks. ### Why were tankettes considered ineffective in modern warfare? Tankettes had paper-thin armor, often 6 to 12 mm at best, which could be perforated by ordinary rifle bullets or machine gun fire, making them inadequate for modern warfare. ### What was the main problem with the Panther tank? The Panther tank was notorious for its unreliability, with mechanical failures often outweighing combat losses, particularly due to issues with its engine and final drive system. ### How did the Panther tank perform in the Battle of Kursk? In the Battle of Kursk, only 10 out of 184 Panthers remained operational by the fifth day, with 85 losses due to mechanical failure and 25 by fire. ### What was the issue with the Panther's suspension system? The Panther's interleaved road wheels were difficult to maintain, requiring the removal of multiple components to access and repair individual parts, making it a significant maintenance burden. ### Why did the Panther tank have a high abandonment rate in Normandy? Over 50% of abandoned Panthers in Normandy showed no combat damage, indicating they were abandoned due to mechanical breakdown or lack of fuel. ## Sources - [Original Side Projects video: 5 Terrible Tanks.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Dk8lGhA0LE) ## Related Coverage Simon Whistler https://sideprojects.pub/article/5-things-about-biology-youre-wrong-about https://sideprojects.pub/article/5-things-about-biology-youre-wrong-about Thu, 25 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT Biology: it's what makes you "you", instead of being like a banana or something. It's the study of living organisms, their physiology, anatomy, evolution, and so on. The study of biology is fundamental to many facets of society, such as medical science, yet most people's knowledge of the subject is rather limited, and in some cases incorrect. To be fair, some of these misconceptions are the result of high school biology curriculums seemingly not having been updated since the 1800s. But we're here to right that wrong, so today we'll be looking at five things that you're probably wrong about when it comes to biology, particularly human biology. ## Punnett Squares If you took a high school biology class, you're almost certainly familiar with the concept of a Punnett Square. This is how the concept of dominant and recessive genes is generally taught in the classroom. As a refresher, let's quickly take a look at the most commonly used example, eye colour. Blue eyes are recessive, which means that if a person has one gene for blue eyes and one for brown, they will have brown eyes. The Punnett Square shown here is used to explain that if two brown eyed parents each have one dominant and one recessive gene, there is a 75% chance that their child will have brown eyes and a 25% chance that their child will have blue eyes. However, despite being the most commonly used example, this is total nonsense. Although they are taught to students as essentially the final word in genetics, Punnett Squares are only useful for traits that are a binary option controlled by a single gene. Eye colour is obviously not binary, as a person's eyes can be brown, blue, green, grey, hazel, or amber. There are also 16 different genes that play a role in a person's eye colour, making it all much more complicated than a simple 2x2 grid can represent. That's not to say that Punnett Squares are inherently wrong, as there are human traits for which you could use this. The presence of a widow's peak, attached earlobes, and dimples are all examples of monogenetic traits that could be represented using these squares. But for the majority of human traits, Punnett Squares are useless. Most human traits are controlled by multiple genes and have a lot of variation. This is still an accurate representation of how each individual gene is inherited, as each parent has two copies of the gene with a 50% chance to pass either one to the child, but the proposed outcomes in the eye colour scenario are wildly inaccurate. Think about height, for example. At the high school level where Punnett Squares are taught, being tall is often depicted as a dominant trait. You may see identical squares to the eye colour one we previously showed depicting the probability of tall parents having a tall or a short child, but what exactly does that even mean? How tall does a person need to be to be considered tall? If anything above average is considered tall, that means a tall male in the United States could be anywhere from 5 foot 10 to 7 feet tall. That is a huge difference, and the simplistic view provided by Punnett Squares does not account for such massive variations. In reality, height is controlled by over 700 genes, and environmental factors play a huge role as well. Although Punnett Squares are a useful tool for teaching the very basics of genetic inheritance, schools have done the general public a grave disservice by not expanding on the ideas and creating the false impression that all genetic traits can be neatly explained by a simple 2x2 box. ## Respiration vs. Breathing Most people believe that respiration and breathing are synonymous and can be used interchangeably, and with good reason. If you look up the word "respiration" in the dictionary, the first definition you will see is "the action of breathing". However, while that definition may represent the common usage of the term, in the context of biology this isn't even half of the story. Looking beyond the first definition, you may see that in biology respiration is defined as "a process in living organisms involving the production of energy", but that biological definition is rarely addressed. Breathing is a mechanical process by which oxygen-rich air is inhaled into the lungs and carbon dioxide-rich air is exhaled. This is also known as pulmonary ventilation, which refers to the volume of air flowing into and out of the lungs. Once the air enters the lungs, the process of external respiration begins. Even though it is taking place inside your body, it is referred to as external respiration because it's the part of the process that interacts with the air from the external environment. During this process, oxygen is transferred from the air into the bloodstream and carbon dioxide is removed from it to be exhaled. The blood then carries the oxygen throughout the body so it can be used in cellular respiration. This is a biochemical process by which the oxygen is used to create energy. Because it requires oxygen this is called aerobic respiration, and it is how our bodies get most of their energy. If oxygen supplies aren't sufficient to create the amount of energy required, such as during intense exercise, anaerobic respiration can take place as well. This process is less efficient and creates lactic acid as a byproduct, which can result in muscle fatigue and cramping. But back to aerobic respiration, this predominantly takes place in the cells' mitochondria, which is why they are referred to as the powerhouse of the cell. The mitochondria oxidize glucose, resulting in carbon dioxide, water, and adenosine triphosphate, or ATP. ATP is a nucleotide that provides energy to the cells so they can perform whatever specific action that type of cell is supposed to. It is this synthesis of ATP that is the main purpose of respiration, and the mechanical act of breathing is merely a means to facilitate the biochemical process of respiration. Again though, while most people do get this wrong, it's a very understandable mistake. Breathing is part of the respiration process, and it gets the most attention because it is the only part that is readily observable. ## Human Ancestors People love to know where they came from. For each individual person, this may relate to their family tree, the history of their nation as a whole, or even the entire human race. However, when it comes to human evolution, and evolution in general, people get a lot of things wrong. One common mistake people make is believing that humans evolved from monkeys. More than anything, this is likely just confusion and/or apathy regarding the differences between monkeys and apes. A slightly closer (but still incorrect) belief is that humans evolved from chimpanzees. As with most things, the truth is more complicated than that. Humans did not evolve directly from chimpanzees, instead humans and chimps shared a common ancestor somewhere between 5 to 15 million years ago. Different populations of the primitive ape evolved separately, with one lineage developing into chimps and the other evolving into humans. So what was that shared ancestor? Well, we don't know that part yet. There have been a few candidates, but so far the common ancestor between humans and chimpanzees has not been conclusively found. However, it gets even more complicated than that. By this point, most people are probably aware that modern humans, or *Homo sapiens*, aren't the first human species to exist. Humans have existed for millions of years now, but modern humans have only been around for the past 300,000 years or so. There have been at least 21 different species of humans, with others yet to be discovered and some candidates that have been discovered but aren't yet officially classified as their own species. Of course, most people would struggle to name more than one other human species, with the most well known being Neanderthals. However, there are misconceptions about this as well, much of which dates back to a single illustration from 1965, originally titled *The Road to Homo Sapiens*. You've almost certainly seen the image hundreds of times, though you probably know it better by its newer name: *The March of Progress*. Although this image remains ubiquitous in classrooms, pop culture, and memes, it has received massive criticism since its creation for incorrectly implying that evolution is a linear process. While it is true that you could trace the evolution of modern humans back from one species to another until reaching that unknown ancestor we share with chimps, this ignores the majority of human species that have existed. In fact, Neanderthals wouldn't even appear in *The March of Progress*, as modern humans did not evolve from Neanderthals. Instead, both *Homo sapiens* and Neanderthals evolved separately from the species *Homo heidelbergensis*. While one could argue then that Neanderthals don't belong in something documenting the lineage of modern humans anyway, that's a needless oversimplification of human history. Not only are Neanderthals our closest relatives to ever exist despite being the result of branching evolution, but *Homo sapiens* and Neanderthals interbred, and Neanderthal DNA still exists in people today. ## Where Plants Get Their Mass Everyone knows that trees (and other plants) get their nutrients from the ground. It's why planting in fertile soil is so important, and trees have long, sprawling root systems that they use to absorb water and vital nutrients from the ground. But where does all of their mass come from? There's a good chance that this isn't something you've actually thought about before, though the logical answer seems to be that it too comes from the soil. However, this is not actually the case. The majority of a tree's mass comes from the air. One of the earliest quantitative studies on plant growth was published in 1648 by Jan Baptist van Helmont, a scientist from Brussels. Van Helmont planted a willow tree in a known, enclosed quantity of dry soil. He then watered the tree and monitored its growth for the next five years. At the end of the experiment, the tree's mass had increased by 164 lbs, or 74 kg. However, after the soil was weighed, he discovered that in those five years the soil had only lost 57 grams. His conclusion was that the tree's additional weight must have come from the water, but that's because carbon dioxide wasn't discovered until just over 100 years later. Still, while his conclusion may have been incorrect, his experiment does show just how little of a tree's mass is actually taken from the soil. Instead, it comes from the carbon dioxide that trees take in to perform photosynthesis. All known life on Earth is made of carbon, and it is the carbon in carbon dioxide that allows trees and other plants to grow. That's not to say that the nutrients in the soil aren't still important though. Elements like nitrogen and sulfur are needed for the formation of amino acids and proteins, phosphorous is vital for ATP and nucleic acids, and various metals like iron and copper are important for photosynthesis. And of course the water absorbed through the soil is necessary as well, as all known life requires water. The idea that something as massive as a tree could be essentially made entirely from air seems counterintuitive, but that's because we tend to think of air as being empty, weightless space, rather than as a collection of gasses. At sea level, one cubic meter of air weighs about 1.22 kg. That's not a lot based on the volume, but it's not nothing either. And each person breathes in 7 or 8 cubic meters of air every day, so with that perspective it's not hard to see how trees could accumulate a meaningful amount of carbon each day. ## You Know What They Say About Guys with Big Feet… It's a comment that comes up all the time, often in a joking context, but for many people it is a firmly held belief: men with bigger feet have bigger penises. Where exactly this belief originated is unclear, though it's probably safe to assume that it can be traced back to a man with huge feet and a tiny member. There are other variants of this saying as well, related to height, weight, hand size, and the distance from the end of the thumb to the end of another finger on an outstretched hand. Which other finger you're supposed to measure to is unclear, as you can find different accounts claiming all four possible fingers with total certainty. Of course, for a long time this was just speculation, perhaps supported by anecdotal evidence. Fortunately, scientists are dedicated to answering all of life's most important questions. As such, there have been numerous studies comparing measurements of various body parts to penile length. Quite frankly, there have been entirely too many studies on the matter. But regardless of whether or not the research was necessary, it was certainly conclusive. Across all the various studies, there was no meaningful correlation found between foot length and penis length. The same was true of hand length, though this should not be surprising since hand length and foot length have a strong correlation. When it comes to height and weight, things get a little more complicated. Height did show a statistically relevant correlation with penis length, but it was also a very weak correlation. Although weight was not an indication of penile length, which makes sense since weight is variable anyway, there is a condition known as buried penis. Excess fat in the pubic region can essentially bury a portion of the penis. This gives the appearance that it's smaller because less is visible, but has no bearing on the actual size. While people seem to have an incredibly strong desire to be able to know how much a man is packing just by glancing at other physical characteristics, all of the research indicates that this simply can't be done. Or at least it did until a few years ago, when researchers found a correlation between penis length and nose size. Thus far, there have been three papers published on this topic, and all of them found a correlation between larger noses and larger penises. That said, while the results are interesting, they should not be deemed conclusive yet. One of the studies only found a weak correlation, one found a moderate correlation, and the third was moderate to strong. However, the strongest correlation was found in a sample size of only 126 men, the next strongest in a sample of 377 men, and the weak correlation occurred when the sample size was increased to over 1,000. Since the results became less convincing the larger the sample size was, there's always the chance that this was just pure coincidence with the smaller sample sizes. Also, these studies were conducted in Japan, Korea, and China, and there are genetic traits that are more common in different areas of the world. Even if future results remain consistent across East Asia, the same may not be true across the rest of the world. Despite the passionate desire for people to be able to tell a man's penis size just by looking at him fully clothed, thus far there is no conclusive way to do so. But hey, if you're that concerned you can always just ask. After all, dating apps are full of men who are listed as 6 feet tall and who would never lie or exaggerate about size. ## Key Takeaways - Punnett Squares oversimplify genetics, as most human traits are polygenic. - Respiration involves energy production, not just the mechanical act of breathing. - Humans and chimpanzees share a common ancestor, not a direct evolutionary line. - Most of a tree's mass comes from carbon dioxide absorbed from the air. - Body parts like feet and hands do not reliably indicate penis size. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### What is a Punnett Square and what is it used for? A Punnett Square is a diagram used to predict the genotypes of offspring from a particular cross or breeding experiment. It is used to teach the basics of genetic inheritance, particularly for traits controlled by a single gene with dominant and recessive alleles. ### Are Punnett Squares accurate for all human traits? No, Punnett Squares are only useful for traits that are a binary option controlled by a single gene. Most human traits are controlled by multiple genes and have a lot of variation, making Punnett Squares inaccurate for these traits. ### What is the difference between respiration and breathing? Breathing is the mechanical process of inhaling oxygen-rich air and exhaling carbon dioxide-rich air. Respiration, in a biological context, refers to the process of producing energy in living organisms, which includes both external respiration (gas exchange) and cellular respiration (energy production). ### Did humans evolve directly from chimpanzees? No, humans and chimpanzees shared a common ancestor between 5 to 15 million years ago. Different populations of this primitive ape evolved separately, with one lineage developing into chimpanzees and the other into humans. ### How many different species of humans have existed? There have been at least 21 different species of humans, with more yet to be discovered and some candidates that have been discovered but aren't yet officially classified as their own species. ### Where do trees get most of their mass from? The majority of a tree's mass comes from the air, specifically from the carbon dioxide that trees take in to perform photosynthesis. The carbon in carbon dioxide allows trees and other plants to grow. ### Is there a correlation between foot size and penis size? No, numerous studies have found no meaningful correlation between foot length and penis length. This belief is a common misconception. ### Is there any scientific basis for the idea that men with bigger feet have bigger penises? No, scientific studies have shown that there is no meaningful correlation between foot length and penis length. This idea is a myth. ### What is the March of Progress and why is it criticized? The March of Progress is an illustration that depicts the evolution of humans in a linear fashion. It is criticized for incorrectly implying that evolution is a linear process, ignoring the majority of human species that have existed and the complex nature of human evolution. ### What is the role of soil in a tree's growth? Soil provides essential nutrients like nitrogen, sulfur, phosphorus, and various metals that are important for a tree's growth. However, the majority of a tree's mass comes from the carbon dioxide it absorbs from the air through photosynthesis. ## Sources - [Original Side Projects video: 5 Things About Biology You’re Wrong About](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87Eg9o_dUwo) ## Related Coverage Simon Whistler https://sideprojects.pub/article/5-times-israel-hunted-down-nazis https://sideprojects.pub/article/5-times-israel-hunted-down-nazis Thu, 25 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT They thought they had escaped. They thought they were untouchable. But the past has a way of catching up with you. After World War II, thousands of Nazis vanished into the shadows, hiding behind new identities in faraway lands. Others simply left Europe and lived openly in countries with governments that were, shall we say, "accommodating" to ex-Nazis. But, in 1948, Israel was formally created, and this new country was not about to forget. The Holocaust had left scars too deep to heal, especially with some of its orchestrators still walking free. The Israeli intelligence agency, Mossad, became their worst nightmare. Patient, relentless, and unforgiving, they tracked down some of the most elusive war criminals—men who had orchestrated genocide and then fled, hoping time would erase their crimes. ## The Capture of Adolf Eichmann – "Operation Finale" He was the architect of the Holocaust. The man who made genocide efficient. Adolf Eichmann didn't build the gas chambers or pull the trigger himself—he made sure the trains ran on time. As an SS officer, Eichmann oversaw the logistics of mass deportations, sending millions of Jews to their deaths with the precision of an accountant. Cold, detached, and efficient. When the war ended, many high-ranking Nazis were rounded up and put on trial. But Eichmann disappeared. For years, he was a ghost, a rumour, a name whispered in the dark. The world had no idea where he was, but that's not to say people weren't looking. Eichmann had fled Europe like many former Nazis—through what was known as the ratlines, underground escape networks leading to South America. With the help of a Catholic priest, Eichmann made his way to Argentina in 1950 under the alias Ricardo Klement. He built a new life, working at a Mercedes-Benz factory and living in a modest house in Buenos Aires with his wife and children. He thought he was safe. Then came the tip. Lothar Hermann, a German Jew who survived Dachau, also lived in Argentina. His daughter, Sylvia, had unknowingly started dating Eichmann's son, Klaus—who boasted about his father's role in the Nazi regime. Sylvia, suspicious, relayed this information to her father. Lothar contacted Israeli authorities, and things quickly ramped up. Eichmann had altered his appearance, aged, and tried to erase his past, but intelligence agents staked out his house for weeks, watching him return home every night on the same bus, always walking the same route. Mossad became all but certain. It was him. The order was given. Take him alive. On the evening of May 11, 1960, Mossad agents waited in a parked car close to his house. As Eichmann stepped off his usual bus and walked home, they struck. One agent lunged, wrestling him to the ground. Another covered his mouth. He fought back, but he was no soldier anymore—just a middle-aged man who had spent too long living a normal life. They stuffed him into the car and drove off. For nine days, he was held in a safe house and interrogated. At first, he denied everything. But when agents confronted him with details only Eichmann would know, he broke down and admitted his identity. Now, the problem was getting him out of Argentina. Extradition was out of the question—Argentina had a history of protecting former Nazis. Instead, Mossad came up with an audacious plan: they would smuggle him out on an Israeli plane disguised as a drunk flight crew member. They drugged Eichmann and dressed him in an El Al flight uniform. On May 20, 1960, he was quietly loaded onto a plane and flown to Israel. When the news broke, the world was stunned, and Argentina was furious. But Israel had made their move, and there was no turning back. Eichmann's trial began in April 1961. It was the first time Holocaust survivors had had the chance to testify about the horrors they endured. The trial was televised worldwide. It was gripping, horrifying—heartbreaking television. For months, the world listened as survivors recounted the suffering Eichmann had orchestrated. He sat in a glass booth, emotionless, claiming he had just been "following orders." On December 15, 1961, Adolf Eichmann was sentenced to death. He was hanged on June 1, 1962—the only person Israel has ever executed by law. His body was cremated, and his ashes scattered at sea, so there would be no grave, no shrine, no place for Nazi sympathisers to gather. Justice had been served. But this was only the beginning. ## The Execution of Herbert Cukurs – "The Butcher of Riga Meets His End" Herbert Cukurs wasn't merely a Nazi officer; he was a sadist whose name became synonymous with cruelty. In the monstrous annals of humanity, this man was one of the worst. As the second in command of the Arajs Kommando, a Latvian SS unit, Cukurs played a pivotal role in the massacre of over 30,000 Jews during the Holocaust. Survivors recounted his brutality—not just in action, but in demeanour. He reportedly laughed as he set fire to synagogues with people still inside, shot infants in their mothers' arms, and dragged women to their deaths with a whip in hand. Before the war, Cukurs had been a national hero in Latvia—a celebrated aviator known as the "Latvian Lindbergh." His fame stemmed from daring solo flights showcasing his engineering prowess and piloting skills. Pre-World War 2, he was an impressive human being. However, his legacy took a dark turn during the German occupation, where he became infamous for his involvement in atrocities, including the Rumbula massacre, where approximately 25,000 Jews were murdered over two days in late 1941. After the war, Cukurs vanished, leaving behind precious little in terms of clues. He fled to Brazil in 1946, travelling through Germany and France before settling in São Paulo. There, he established a new life as a pilot, operating sightseeing tours over South America. Unlike many fugitive Nazis who concealed their identities, Cukurs brazenly kept his name, even appearing in local magazines and maintaining a public presence. By the 1960s, the Mossad had eyes everywhere. Holocaust survivors identified him, and Israel decided that Cukurs couldn't be allowed to live freely. Unlike Adolf Eichmann, who was captured and tried, Cukurs was marked for assassination—a mission not of retribution but of justice. Operation Bramburg was set in motion. A Mossad agent, Yaakov Meidad, operating under the alias "Anton Künzle," posed as a wealthy Austrian businessman with a decorated Eastern-front war history. Over several months, he built a relationship with Cukurs and gained his trust. In 1965, Meidad lured Cukurs to a safe house in Montevideo, Uruguay, under the pretence of discussing a business venture. The moment Cukurs stepped inside, the Mossad team attacked. The confrontation was vicious; despite his age, Cukurs resisted vehemently, nearly biting off one agent's finger. However, he was ultimately overpowered, thanks to a hammer to the head. The agents confronted him with his crimes, ensuring he understood why this reckoning had come. Then, a single gunshot to the head ended his life. His body was found in the trunk of a car, along with a note that read: > "This is for the 30,000 victims of Riga." Another note had been sent to media outlets: > "Taking into consideration the gravity of the charge levelled against the accused, namely that he personally supervised the killing of more than 30,000 men, women and children, and considering the extreme display of cruelty which the subject showed when carrying out his tasks, the accused Herberts Cukurs is hereby sentenced to death." The assassination sent shockwaves worldwide. Media outlets initially dismissed the note as a prank, but upon discovering the body, the gravity of the operation became evident. The mission was a stark reminder of the atrocities committed and to deter any attempts to grant amnesty to Nazi war criminals—a topic under debate in West Germany at the time. Cukurs's death was a message: justice doesn't forget. Even decades later, those who perpetrated unimaginable horrors would be held accountable, ensuring that the memories of their victims were honoured and that history would not repeat itself. ## Tracking Franz Stangl – "The Commandant of Treblinka" Franz Stangl didn't just run a concentration camp—he ran one of the deadliest places in human history. As Commandant of Treblinka, he oversaw the extermination of nearly 900,000 Jews in just over a year. He wasn't just another SS officer following orders. He was efficient, methodical, and disturbingly detached. Stangl saw himself as a simple administrator. He later admitted he never thought about the victims—only about keeping the process running smoothly. He viewed Treblinka like a factory. His job wasn't to kill, just to ensure the machine worked. After the war, he was arrested by American forces—but like many Nazis, he found a way out. In 1948, he escaped a prison camp in Austria and fled to Italy, where he was hidden by a network of Nazi sympathisers and members of the Catholic clergy. With forged papers, he boarded a ship to Brazil. There, he built a new life. A family man, a hardworking employee at a Volkswagen factory in São Paulo. He was a ghost—another Nazi who had vanished into the world. For nearly two decades, no one knew where he was. Then came Simon Wiesenthal—the relentless Nazi hunter. A survivor of the camps, Wiesenthal had dedicated his life to tracking down those who had escaped justice. He followed a trail of old Nazi connections, tracing Stangl to Brazil in the mid-1960s. Once Mossad got the intelligence, they acted. Unlike Cukurs, Stangl wasn't to be assassinated—he was to be dragged back to face justice. With the help of Brazilian authorities, Stangl was arrested in 1967 at his home in São Paulo. He was caught off guard—after more than 20 years on the run, he had finally let his guard down. He was extradited to West Germany, where he was put on trial for the murder of 900,000 people. Stangl showed little remorse, claiming he was just a soldier doing his duty. His sentence: life in prison. But justice didn't wait long. In 1971, six months after his conviction, he died in his cell of heart failure. One more Nazi wiped from the earth. ## The Failed Assassination of Josef Mengele – "The Angel of Death Slips Away" If there was one man who deserved a brutal end, it was Josef Mengele—Auschwitz's Angel of Death. A doctor in title only, Mengele carried out grotesque human experiments on prisoners. He was obsessed with twins, injecting chemicals into their eyes to try and change their colour, sewing them together in cruel, senseless procedures. He conducted surgeries without anaesthesia, subjected children to freezing experiments, and decided, with a flick of his wrist, who would live and who would die. Unlike many Nazis who fled in desperation, Mengele planned his escape well in advance. He knew the war was lost, and he had no intention of being captured. In 1949, with forged papers, he slipped into Argentina, just like Eichmann. But unlike Eichmann, Mengele never hid his name. He lived openly, socialising with other Nazis in Buenos Aires. He ran a business, swam at private clubs, and even applied for German citizenship under his real identity. He was confident, untouchable. Mossad had their eyes on him. In 1960, the same team that had just captured Eichmann was given a second target: Mengele. They had found his home. They had a plan. But they had a problem. Two simultaneous extractions were too risky. The Eichmann operation had exposed Mossad's presence in Argentina, and security forces were already on alert. They had to prioritise Eichmann—a guaranteed capture—over Mengele, who had layers of protection around him. By the time they returned for him, Mengele was gone. He had escaped to Paraguay and later Brazil, aided by influential friends. He remained on the move, always one step ahead of his hunters. In the 1970s, Simon Wiesenthal got close—but never quite close enough. Mossad tried again and again. They sent agents. They tracked leads. But Mengele had learned from Eichmann's fate—he became a ghost, constantly relocating, avoiding routine, trusting no one. In 1979, the chase ended—not with a bullet, but with water. Mengele, living under an alias in Brazil, suffered a stroke while swimming. He drowned in front of friends who knew exactly who he was but buried him under his false identity. For years, there were doubts. Was it another act of deception? It wasn't until DNA testing in 1992 confirmed it—Mengele was dead. Mossad never forgave themselves for letting him slip through their fingers. He didn't deserve to die a free man. ## The Hunt for Alois Brunner – "The Ghost of Damascus" Alois Brunner was one of Adolf Eichmann's most trusted men. A dedicated SS officer, he was directly responsible for deporting over 100,000 Jews to the gas chambers. He organised transports from Austria, Greece, Slovakia, and France, personally ensuring that thousands of men, women, and children boarded trains bound for extermination. Unlike some Nazis who later claimed ignorance, Brunner was unapologetic. Even decades after the war, he was proud of what he had done. He once told a journalist, "All of them deserved to die. I regret nothing." Brunner was supposed to be among those tried at Nuremberg. But when the war ended, he disappeared. For years, intelligence agencies searched for him. He wasn't in South America. He wasn't in Europe. Then, in the 1950s, Mossad confirmed the truth: Brunner had fled to Syria. There, under the protection of the Syrian government, he advised the regime on intelligence and torture techniques. He was, essentially, untouchable. Syria refused to extradite him, and any attempt to extract him would be a diplomatic disaster. So, Mossad got creative. In 1961, he was sent a letter bomb by Military Intelligence Unit 188, a branch of the Israel Defense Forces. When Brunner opened it, it exploded, blinding him in one eye. But Mossad wasn't finished. In 1980, they sent another letter bomb, disguised with packaging from an Austrian herb distributor he had previously used. This time, he lost four fingers. Still, Brunner remained defiant. From his hideout in Damascus, he boasted about his crimes, occasionally granting interviews where he spat on his victims' memories. The world never got to see him on trial. In the 1990s, as Syria fell into turmoil, Brunner disappeared completely. Brunner was sentenced to death in absentia in France in 1954, and for crimes against humanity in 2001. Reports surfaced that he had died sometime between 2001 and 2010, in miserable conditions in a basement under house arrest. One of the former guards said that Brunner, who went by the name of Abu Hussein, "suffered and cried a lot in his final years. He couldn't even wash himself and ate only eggs or potatoes." Mossad never caught him. But they made sure his life was one of pain, fear, and isolation. He never knew peace—just as his victims never had a chance to. ## The Hunted They thought they could disappear. That time would erase their crimes, that the world would forget. But Israel didn't forget. The men who orchestrated genocide—who sent millions to their deaths with the cold efficiency of bureaucrats—believed they could live out their days in peace. Some of them did, slipping through the cracks of history. But for others, Mossad was waiting. These missions weren't just about revenge. They were about justice. About remembrance. About sending a message that no matter how many years passed, the crimes of the Holocaust would never be ignored. Some were captured and made to answer for their actions in court. Others were executed in the shadows, their deaths a whispered warning to those who might follow in their footsteps. The message was clear: There is no hiding from history. *Olivier Guiberteau* ## Key Takeaways - After WWII, many Nazis escaped to South America and lived openly or under new identities. - Israel's Mossad agency relentlessly tracked down and captured or killed Nazi war criminals. - Adolf Eichmann, the architect of the Holocaust, was captured in Argentina and tried in Israel. - Herbert Cukurs, known as the Butcher of Riga, was assassinated by Mossad in Uruguay. - Josef Mengele, the Angel of Death, evaded capture and died in Brazil under an alias. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### Who was Adolf Eichmann and what was his role in the Holocaust? Adolf Eichmann was the architect of the Holocaust. As an SS officer, he oversaw the logistics of mass deportations, sending millions of Jews to their deaths with the precision of an accountant. ### How did Mossad capture Adolf Eichmann? Mossad agents staked out Eichmann's house for weeks, watching his routine. They then captured him as he walked home from the bus, held him in a safe house for nine days, and smuggled him out of Argentina disguised as a drunk flight crew member on an Israeli plane. ### What was the outcome of Adolf Eichmann's trial? Eichmann was sentenced to death on December 15, 1961, and was hanged on June 1, 1962. His body was cremated, and his ashes were scattered at sea to prevent any grave or shrine from being created. ### Who was Herbert Cukurs and what were his crimes? Herbert Cukurs was a Latvian SS officer known as the 'Butcher of Riga.' He played a pivotal role in the massacre of over 30,000 Jews during the Holocaust, including the Rumbula massacre. ### How did Mossad execute Herbert Cukurs? Mossad agent Yaakov Meidad, posing as a wealthy Austrian businessman, lured Cukurs to a safe house in Montevideo, Uruguay. There, Cukurs was overpowered and executed with a single gunshot to the head. ### Who was Franz Stangl and what was his role in the Holocaust? Franz Stangl was the Commandant of Treblinka, overseeing the extermination of nearly 900,000 Jews in just over a year. He saw himself as a simple administrator, ensuring the efficient operation of the camp. ### How was Franz Stangl captured? Simon Wiesenthal tracked Stangl to Brazil, and with the help of Brazilian authorities, Mossad arrested him at his home in São Paulo in 1967. He was extradited to West Germany and sentenced to life in prison. ### Who was Josef Mengele and why was he known as the 'Angel of Death'? Josef Mengele was a doctor at Auschwitz who conducted grotesque human experiments on prisoners, particularly twins. He decided who would live and who would die with a flick of his wrist, earning him the nickname 'Angel of Death'. ### How did Josef Mengele evade capture? Mengele escaped to Paraguay and later Brazil, aided by influential friends. He constantly relocated, avoiding routine and trusting no one. He drowned in Brazil in 1979 while swimming after suffering a stroke. ### Who was Alois Brunner and what was his role in the Holocaust? Alois Brunner was one of Adolf Eichmann's most trusted men, responsible for deporting over 100,000 Jews to the gas chambers. He organised transports from various countries and was unapologetic about his crimes. ## Sources - [Original Side Projects video: 5 Times Israel Hunted Down Nazis](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UcCKrv_Ne6w) ## Related Coverage Simon Whistler https://sideprojects.pub/article/5-times-nukes-nearly-launched https://sideprojects.pub/article/5-times-nukes-nearly-launched Thu, 25 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT Truly, there are few prospects more terrifying than that of a nuclear war, something that, in its worst and most deadly iteration, could well have the potential to not just end advanced human civilisation as we know it, but potentially, all human life, period. But at least it's never happened, right? As, after all, nuclear weapons were used in WWII, and after seeing just how truly devastating they were, the button was never pushed ever again – or so the story goes. And while, yes, that is indeed true, thank God, that doesn't mean that we haven't come really, **really** close to crossing the nuclear Rubicon; usually by accident, but also, and perhaps more shockingly still, intentionally, with the occasional General seemingly not having gotten the memo after WWII. It's a prospect that is every bit as fascinating as it is terrifying, and so, today, we are going to be satisfying that curiosity by having a look at five times that the nukes were nearly launched. ## 1. The Stanislav Petrov Incident Even by Cold War standards, the US and the USSR weren't exactly getting along come the 1980s. In 1979 alone, for example, the former had deployed RSD-10 Pioneer Medium Range Nuclear Missiles—capable of striking targets in West Germany, France, and the UK in less than 10 minutes—to its Western border in response to a NATO condemnation of its Invasion of Afghanistan the same year, and in turn, the US had adopted its so called 'Double-Track Decision' in December, which called for the deployment of Pershing II Medium Range Nuclear Missiles—themselves capable of hitting targets in Ukraine, Belarus, or Lithuania in sub-10 minutes—should talks to see the aforementioned RSDs removed from Europe fail. This, naturally, was a bit of a tense situation, and what was needed in response was for calm heads to prevail on both sides of the Iron Curtain, so that the super powers could sit down at the same table, talk it out like adults, and find a way to step back from the nuclear brink with both their dignities, and indeed the world, still intact. This being the Cold War however, that is not what happened, and instead, what happened was chest beating and windmilling a plenty on both sides; with the US going out of its way to 'probe' Soviet radar systems by flying bombers right towards Moscow, and other important targets, only to pull them away just before they entered Soviet Airspace. The Soviets, for their part, did **exactly the same** to NATO countries in return. What the world **really** didn't need amidst all of that was for an early-warning satellite to take a peculiar turn, and start falsely reporting that the other team had lit the match on some of its missiles, as, with things the way they were, the powers that be were far more likely to take leave of their senses, and order an immediate and full retaliation in response. Alas, on the 26th of September 1983, that is exactly what happened, as one of the Soviet Oko early-warning satellites, being monitored from an apocalypse proof bunker near Moscow, suddenly started saying that it had identified a single missile launch from the Continental United States, and then four more mere moments later. Sat at the console was one Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov. According to the regulations, he should have phoned it into his superiors immediately, to give them all the time needed to get every possible missile out of its silo, and every possible bomber into the air, so that they could make damned sure that if they were going down, America was going down with them. Luckily, however, Petrov was one of God's thinkers, and so, as he sat there with the phone in his hand, being well aware of **exactly** what was at stake, he took a brief moment to consider the situation logically, and quickly happened upon the realisation that a launch of merely five missiles just didn't make sense; the Americans knew that if they launched even one missile, that they'd be getting the Soviet's entire arsenal in return, so surely they'd go all out? Sensing that something was amiss, Petrov then went to compare the data his Oko satellite was feeding him with data from over-the-horizon radar installations, which showed… nothing. With that, his phone was placed back in its receiver, and the world was saved, with it later being found out that the false alarm was triggered by an unusual alignment of sunlight reflecting off of high-altitude clouds. It's a good thing he was so level-headed too, because at that time the Soviet Leader was one Yuri Andropov, a former KGB man who harboured a **deep** mistrust of his American equivalent, and if the incorrect data had been relayed to him, well, let's just say a reasoned and well considered response would have been unlikely. ## 2. The Korean War Nuclear weapons **may** have also been dangerously close to being deployed in the Korean War too; and we can't stress the word 'may' enough – as it's quite the unclear and contentious matter all in all. Certainly, there is no doubt that the US was willing to use them, as, on the 1st of August 1950, the 9th Bomb Wing of the US Airforce, which was equipped with 10 B-29 Bombers, each carrying a single Mark 4 Atomic Bomb apiece, was dispatched to Guam, where they were to stay on standby as a so called "Atomic Task Force," one that was primed and ready to go, should the call come down. Knowing that, the question is less 'would they have done it,' and more 'under what conditions would they have done it.' It is also a question that revolves around one man, and that would be Douglas MacArthur, the Chief of United Nations Forces in Korea, as many argue that he was **rather** enthusiastic to smash the big red button. What **is** known for certain is that on the 9th of December 1950, he requested authority as a Field Commander to deploy atomic bombs as he saw fit; albeit stressing that he only wished to use them if the United Nations Forces were pushed back to the point of being routed from the Peninsula. And he didn't want to just use them on North Korean and Chinese troops on the Peninsula either, as 15 days later, on Christmas Eve in fact, he submitted a list of prospective targets to the Pentagon. We won't worry about what he called these, as he used a word that has aged **very** badly, but we will worry about what his aim was: to decimate both North Korea and China so extensively, that continued military resistance became impossible, and for this, he had chalked up 34 targets. With time, some of the Joint Chiefs became so concerned over the prospect of MacArthur getting a bit trigger happy with the nukes, that in 1951 they completely pulled the 9th Bomb Wing from his roster, and instead handed it to Strategic Air Command; an organisation that had absolutely nothing to do with MacArthur. As a result, there were no blurry grey lines, no middlemen of unclear authority; just the President that would give the order, the B-29s that would execute it, and a single direct line of command and communication between the two. Eventually, MacArthur was stripped of his command all together on the 11th of April, and so the matter became moot… but would he have **actually done** it? That's the question we need to get to the bottom of, and unfortunately, it's a question to which there is no clear answer even 70+ years after the fact. For example, MacArthur himself swore under oath before a Senate Enquiry after the war that he had **never** explicitly recommended their use, and had also publicly admonished Truman in 1960 when the Former President had suggested that he had. But then, on the flipside, he said this in a 1954 interview, quote: > "I could have won the war in Korea in a maximum of 10 days.... I would have dropped between 30 and 50 atomic bombs on his air bases and other depots strung across the neck of Manchuria.... It was my plan as our amphibious forces moved south to spread behind us—from the Sea of Japan to the Yellow Sea—a belt of radioactive cobalt. It could have been spread from wagons, carts, trucks and planes.... For at least 60 years there could have been no land invasion of Korea from the north. The enemy could not have marched across that radiated belt." But wait, it gets more complicated still, because while at this point, we might be tempted to write MacArthur off as a Doctor Strangelove character made real, both Presidents Nixon and Kennedy later claimed that he had urged **extreme** caution and hesitancy in deploying nuclear weapons when offering them personal counsel. Ultimately, we simply don't know for certain. Someone was lying, that much is clear, but as to whom it was, it's likely we will never know at this point when the primary sources are full of such contradictory claims. ## 3. The Norwegian Rocket Incident Our next nuclear near miss **actually occurred** after the Cold War, specifically on the 25th of January 1995. It was caused by the launch of a Black Brant XII rocket from the Andøya Rocket Range in Norway. It wasn't even a military mission, with the rocket in question being a simple research rocket whose only payload was a load of measuring equipment, and the people who launched it, they were but humble American and Norwegian scientists, who were eagerly anticipating learning all manner of interesting things about the aurora borealis over Svalbard. Unbeknown to them, however, their rocket, launched from where it was, with the trajectory that it was, just so happened to coincide with a corridor that the Russians predicted the Americans would use, if they were to launch the Minuteman III ICBMs that they had in their North Dakota silos, and aim them at Moscow. It got worse still however, because when the Olenegorsk early-warning radar station in Murmansk Oblast detected the Black Brant, to them, the speed and flight pattern resembled that of a US Navy submarine launched Trident ICBM; particularly if the US was trying to get the drop on Russia with an atmospheric detonation – the kind that would create an EMP effect that would devastate their electrical infrastructure, and leave the whole country's defence grid blind. Neither interpretation left a clean pair of underpants, and so the alert was raised, escalated through the military's hierarchy, and eventually found its way to then President Boris Yeltsin. Fearing the worst, he immediately had Cheget, the 'nuclear briefcase' that allowed him to communicate instantaneously with all of Russia's nuclear forces from anywhere in the world primed, and with it, he ordered all of his submarine commanders to ready their missiles, and all of his bombers to get fuelled up and into the air, before then sitting down to watch the situation develop with his top military advisors. For eight minutes they sat there, Yeltsin ready and willing to give the greenlight if he deemed it necessary. Fortunately, the Black Brant then began to veer away from Russian Airspace, and thus it was deemed that whatever it was, it posed no threat, and so the country's nuclear forces were stood down. Now, I know what you are all thinking, why didn't the scientists just inform Russia of what they were doing to prevent exactly this situation from happening? Well, funny story, they did, as well as 29 other countries in fact. But unfortunately, 90's Russia was… how to put it eloquently… 'a bit of a mess,' we'll say, and as a result, the scientists' heads up never reached where it needed to go; having gotten lost in a sea of incompetent bureaucracy, with some sources even saying that the report was passed solely to the Russian Coast Guard and Civilian Shipping Authority, after it had been interpreted as a warning to shipping as to where the rocket might end up landing. If that sounds unbelievable, find your nearest Russian and ask them for their memories of the 90s; it was a **wild** time – and that's putting it mildly. ## 4. The NORAD Computer Glitch 1979, as we have already discussed, was a year when tensions started to **really** build up between the US and the USSR, after a series of unfortunate events that began with the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan. What we haven't already discussed, however, was that 1979 also had its own nuclear near miss separate to all of that, and it all happened at the North American Air Defense Command, or NORAD, a Binational Military Command between the US and Canada that monitors and defends the two nations' airspace and provides early warnings of potential threats from the air, space, or sea. As for what caused the near miss, that'd just be a simple computer glitch. It was 3am when the display screens at NORAD's Cheyenne Mountain Complex in Colorado decided to go haywire. One moment, everything was quiet. The next, the screens lit up with the chilling message that 250 Soviet ICBMs were en-route to turn the US: enough to reduce the country to little but an atomic wasteland. Naturally, this little late-night surprise immediately put the US on full alert. The data got forwarded to every big-name command centre you can think of; the Pentagon's National Military Command Center, Strategic Air Command Headquarters, the Alternate National Military Command Center – the whole lot were immediately informed and put on high alert, with bombers being put into the air and missiles being primed ready to launch. Even the National Emergency Airborne Command Post—the plane that serves as the President's flying apocalypse proof war room—was prepped for take off. Luckily, in what is a recurring theme in nuclear near misses, a logical approach was chosen, with the powers that be wanting to make **absolutely sure** these missiles were both real, and coming their way, before they ordered a full retaliation. And much like had happened to Stanislav Petrov, supplementary ground-based radar systems and satellite data was checked, which showed… nothing. Not a single missile, just empty sky. They sat it out a few minutes just to be sure, and when sufficient time had passed to make it clear that no missiles were inbound—about seven minutes—a big breath was taken by all, and America's nuclear arsenal was stood down. So, what happened then? The answer to that, could just be the worst one we have seen yet, as this one wasn't even caused by a civilian rocket that they were ignorant of, or an early-warning satellite getting a duff reading off of some unforeseen weather condition, no. Instead, it was caused by human error, as some bright spark had loaded the wrong tape into the NORAD computer; specifically, one that was meant to be used for training exercises, and made the computer simulate the Russians launching a full surprise attack. Knowing that, we suspect that said training tape went missing shortly afterwards, the only hint as to where it ended up being a single poor recruit who was walking like John Wayne for weeks afterwards. ## 5. The B-59 Incident As far as nuclear flashpoints go, there was probably none greater than the Cuban Missile Crisis, when, for 13 terrifying days in October 1962, the US and the USSR locked horns over a load of R-12 Medium Range, and R-14 Intermediate Range, Nuclear Missiles that the Soviets had plonked in the crisis' titular country. The story is a well told one: lots of fear, lots of chest beating, and the USSR eventually pledging to remove its missiles from Cuba openly in exchange for the US removing some missiles from Turkey secretly – all the while their nuclear arsenals were primed and pointed at one another, ready to go at a moment's notice. But that synopsis, while terrifying enough in its own right, is only actually part of the story, because in the shadows, or more specifically under the waves, as the broader crisis played out, there was a far, **far** closer shave with nuclear Armageddon. It happened on the 27th of October, aboard B-59, a Soviet Project 641 Class submarine that was packing a little something extra: a T-5 nuclear tipped torpedo… and it **very** nearly launched it. Nuclear torpedoes, in case you don't know, are a uniquely terrifying sort of weapon. Quite literally just being 'normal' torpedoes, but with a nuclear payload, they can be deployed to outright destroy multiple ships that they catch in their blast, both surface and submerged, as well as destroy countless more as they create waves of such intense force and pressure that ships caught in it, simply crack and fall apart. As for how B-59 came to nearly launch its T-5, that would be because the US Navy was blockading Cuba during the crisis, and to prevent said blockade from being circumvented, **all** submarines that were detected were ordered to surface and identify themselves; and this was communicated by the dropping of reduced yield training depth charges in their vicinity. Doing so was a well understood practise, but unfortunately, conditions aboard B-59 weren't exactly conducive to keeping a clear head. In fact, they were basically akin to a living nightmare, having been submerged for days, and thus being unable to recharge batteries, take on fresh air, or vent heat. As a result, oxygen was running low, carbon dioxide was building up, and the crew was sweaty, exhausted. And none were affected by those terrible conditions more than B-59's Captain, Valentin Savitsky. In his stressed state, when depth charges started detonating around him, he was convinced that his submarine was under attack, and that it was go time as a result; a situation that wasn't helped by his being cut off from Moscow – and thus having no idea if a wider attack was under way. Finally snapping under the pressure, he declared, quote: > "We're going to blast them now! We will die, but we will sink them all — we will not disgrace our Navy!" Now, while that might have been a jolly exciting declaration, in Soviet Doctrine, the call wasn't his to make, with the deployment of nuclear weapons being **such** a big deal, that it could only be done with unanimous agreement of all Senior Officers on board. At that time, there were three such Officers, and while B-59's Political Commissar Ivan Maslennikov agreed, the 2IC, Vasili Arkhipov, did not. He reasoned that such an extreme choice should only be made following **clear** orders, and after much screaming across the sub's bridge, Maslennikov and Savitsky came around to his way of thinking. Then, with nothing else to be done, B-59 surfaced, was told by the US Navy that no war had started, and that was that; potentially world ending escalation had been averted. The Soviets, as you would well expect, were quite keen to keep what had (nearly) happened aboard B-59 under wraps, and so the story was hidden, and its protagonist gagged for 40 years, with Arkhipov's world saving heroics only coming to the surface, pun intended, during a conference that marked the 40th Anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 2002. Sadly, Arkhipov had passed away only four years prior, and so he never got to know of the reverence with which he is now regarded. But, for what it's worth Arkhipov, if you happen to get YouTube up in heaven; on behalf of every human of your time, today, and from the future, all of whom live only because of your decision – thank you. ## Key Takeaways - The world has come close to nuclear war multiple times due to accidents and miscommunications. - Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov prevented a potential nuclear war in 1983 by correctly identifying a false alarm. - During the Korean War, General Douglas MacArthur's intentions regarding nuclear weapons remain unclear. - A Norwegian research rocket launch in 1995 nearly triggered a nuclear response from Russia due to misinterpretation. - Human error and technical glitches have played significant roles in near-miss nuclear incidents. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### What was the Stanislav Petrov Incident? The Stanislav Petrov Incident occurred on September 26, 1983, when a Soviet early-warning satellite falsely reported that the United States had launched missiles. Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov, who was monitoring the satellite, logically deduced that the report was incorrect and did not relay the false alarm to his superiors, preventing a potential nuclear retaliation. ### What was the Korean War's nuclear threat? During the Korean War, the U.S. had B-29 bombers equipped with atomic bombs on standby. General Douglas MacArthur requested authority to use nuclear weapons if United Nations forces were pushed back. The Joint Chiefs later removed the bombers from his command to prevent unauthorized use. ### What happened during the Norwegian Rocket Incident? On January 25, 1995, a research rocket launched from Norway was mistaken by Russian early-warning systems for a U.S. missile attack. President Boris Yeltsin was prepared to order a nuclear response but stood down after the rocket's trajectory veered away from Russian airspace. ### What caused the NORAD Computer Glitch? In 1979, a computer glitch at NORAD's Cheyenne Mountain Complex in Colorado simulated a Soviet missile attack. The alert was quickly determined to be false after checking supplementary radar systems and satellite data, preventing a potential nuclear retaliation. ### What was the B-59 Incident during the Cuban Missile Crisis? On October 27, 1962, the Soviet submarine B-59, equipped with a nuclear torpedo, was detected by the U.S. Navy. The submarine's captain, believing they were under attack, wanted to launch the torpedo. However, the second-in-command, Vasili Arkhipov, refused to agree, preventing a nuclear escalation. ### Why was the Korean War nuclear threat contentious? The Korean War nuclear threat is contentious because General Douglas MacArthur's statements about his willingness to use nuclear weapons were contradictory. He denied recommending their use under oath but later described a plan involving atomic bombs in an interview. ### What was the significance of the Black Brant XII rocket launch? The Black Brant XII rocket launch from Norway in 1995 was significant because it was mistaken for a U.S. missile attack by Russian early-warning systems. This incident highlighted the dangers of miscommunication and the potential for nuclear escalation during the post-Cold War era. ### How did the NORAD Computer Glitch affect U.S. military readiness? The NORAD Computer Glitch in 1979 put the U.S. military on high alert, with bombers being put into the air and missiles being primed for launch. The incident underscored the importance of verifying data before taking drastic actions. ### What role did Vasili Arkhipov play in the B-59 Incident? Vasili Arkhipov, the second-in-command on the Soviet submarine B-59, played a crucial role in preventing a nuclear escalation during the Cuban Missile Crisis. He refused to agree to launch a nuclear torpedo, despite the captain's insistence, thereby averting a potential nuclear conflict. ### What was the outcome of the Stanislav Petrov Incident? The outcome of the Stanislav Petrov Incident was the prevention of a potential nuclear war. Petrov's logical assessment of the false alarm and his decision not to relay it to his superiors averted a catastrophic response from the Soviet Union. ## Sources - [Original Side Projects video: 5 Times That The Nukes Were Nearly Launched](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxxWL43t4aM) ## Related Coverage Simon Whistler https://sideprojects.pub/article/5-unsettling-solutions-fermi-paradox https://sideprojects.pub/article/5-unsettling-solutions-fermi-paradox Thu, 25 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT Where is everybody? This haunting question was pondered by physicist Enrico Fermi as he peered into the night sky. The universe is so unbelievably vast, he thought to himself, so densely populated with innumerable galaxies in every direction we look. Each of these galaxies contains billions of stars, and billions more planets. And if even a small percentage of planets are habitable, given the sheer number of them, the universe must be teeming with life. And if the universe is teeming with life, at least some of them must have become intelligent, perhaps space-faring civilizations. But if that's the case, why haven't we found anyone? What we have is a logical train of thought that tells us alien civilizations likely exist, while simultaneously finding absolutely zero evidence that they do. This contradiction forms the basis of what is known as the Fermi Paradox, and there are many, many resolutions to it. Some are a bit strange, like the Zoo Hypothesis, which basically states that earth was created by aliens as some sort of experiment, and the reason we can't find any aliens in our galactic neighborhood is because they are intentionally hidden from our view. Other solutions are downright laughable, like the idea that various governments have made contact and are simply hiding the evidence from the public. But on the more serious side of things, there are many resolutions to the Fermi Paradox that are not only plausible, but perhaps even concerning. Without further ado, here are five of them that are particularly unsettling, the ones we really hope aren't true. ## The Dark Forest Our first solution is that there are indeed other civilizations, perhaps in star systems quite close to us, but we've yet to find them because they are all actively hiding from us and each other. In this scenario, everyone is listening, and no one is talking, afraid that even a single transmission could attract a hostile civilization. This is known as the dark forest hypothesis, in which the universe is likened to a quiet forest, and each civilization is like a creature that inhabits it, too afraid to speak out. Perhaps other civilizations are already aware of the danger surrounding them, and that's why they remain silent, while our naïve planet continues to call out into the trees, unaware that the forest is filled with hungry wolves. This was perfectly described in the 1987 novel *The Forge of God*, in which one of the characters explains: > "We've been sitting in our tree chirping like foolish birds for over a century now, wondering why no other birds answered. The galactic skies are full of hawks, that's why." And the idea that other civilizations might be hostile isn't very far-fetched when you look at how humans have even treated each other on earth when two different worlds have collided—just remember what happened when Europe discovered the Americas. Perhaps the galactic forest isn't filled with a bunch of docile creatures avoiding an apex predator, but rather populated only by hunters, all poised to strike first out of self-preservation. Some theorists have taken this a step further, and pointed out that perhaps it is actually the nature of intelligent life to destroy others that it comes across. If the galaxy has a limited number of useful resources, say, rocky planets, then it would be in the best interest of a super-advanced civilization to wipe out any competition in sight and keep all the resources for itself, in a way similar to how humans have taken over the earth. It's generally accepted that the most efficient way for a super-predatorial civilization to do this would be through the use of lethal probes, which would be sent to star systems showing signs of life. This is known as the Berserker Hypothesis, and it implies that if we ever do come across an alien spacecraft wandering through our solar system, we have no way to know if its purpose is communication, exploration, or our annihilation. With all the unknowns, perhaps it is best to stay quiet until we better understand the dangers in the dark. ## The Great Filter Our next resolution is the idea that at some point along the path of evolution, somewhere between the formation of life and becoming a space-faring civilization, there exists some sort of barrier, which either prevents life from advancing or destroys it entirely. This barrier is known as the Great Filter, first put forward by economist Robin Hanson in the 1990s. Hanson's original publication listed nine steps that must be met before one can travel the stars: 1. A habitable star system, including stable solar weather and habitable planets. 2. The formation of reproductive molecules, like RNA. 3. The combination of these molecules into simple, single-celled prokaryotic organisms. 4. The evolution to complex single cell-life, or eukaryotic organisms. 5. The development of sexual reproduction, which greatly enhances genetic diversity. 6. The evolution of multi-cellular life. 7. The rise of intelligent creatures capable of using tools. 8. The formation of these creatures into a civilization, with the potential to explore space (which is where humanity currently is). 9. An exponential rate of colonial expansion into the cosmos. The idea is that the Great Filter could lie among any one of these steps, preventing the majority of life from advancing to space colonization, and therefore preventing us from easily finding them. For example, if mass extinction events, like asteroid impacts or super volcanic eruptions, occur too frequently, there could be millions of planets around the galaxy perpetually stuck at Step 6, unable to evolve into intelligent beings that use tools because life on their planet keeps getting wiped out and starting over. Or, perhaps, the great filter is self-destruction at some point in Step 8, as a civilization advanced enough to explore the universe is also advanced enough to invent weapons to destroy itself, such as nuclear bombs. The problem this all poses to mankind is that we don't know if we've already passed the Great Filter, or if it still lies ahead of us. Finding more clues around the galaxy could help us narrow this down. For example, if we found independent multicellular life on Mars, we could assume that the earlier steps don't contain the Filter, as it would be unlikely for two adjacent planets to both pass through it. This would actually be bad news, as it would mean the filter is more likely to be ahead of us. On the other hand, it could be that Step 2, the formation of reproductive molecules, is far rarer than we originally thought, and life is therefore less common than we anticipated. If this is true, it would mean that we've long passed the Great Filter, and we aren't in imminent danger of extinction. And, tying in with the Berserker Hypothesis from the Dark Forest, perhaps the Great Filter is another civilization, snuffing out those who reach Step 8 and begin to pose a threat. There are dozens of possible filters. It could be that the first few steps are easy, and planets everywhere are swarming with microscopic life, but that it rarely advances past this. Or, the filter could be time itself, as it may simply take an incredibly long time to advance from step to step, leaving life exposed to any number of catastrophes. Or maybe interstellar travel is too expensive, too difficult, or too dangerous. On a lighter note, though, it is possible that the filter stopping civilizations from exploring the Galaxy isn't some grandiose extinction, but that they simply don't feel like it. Some theorists have argued that if a civilization reaches a certain point of comfort and sustainability in their solar system, they may simply see no need to expand outward. If this is true, it may be humanity's curiosity that makes us truly unique. ## Impossible Communication An unfortunate possibility of finding an alien civilization is that we may have absolutely no way to communicate with them. On this line of thinking, the resolution to the Fermi paradox is that alien civilizations are in fact broadcasting messages throughout space—we just either can't detect them or don't even recognize them as messages. It's been hard enough cracking codes that other humans have left behind for us, like deciphering ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, and just imagine how long it would take to get an understanding of the language spoken on the isolated North Sentinel Island, if it's even possible at this point. But, as complex as human languages get, at least people everywhere share things in common, like emotion and biology, which can serve as a foundation for understanding each other. Not to mention that the majority of our languages likely share common roots, even if those roots do go back hundreds or thousands of years. But we have absolutely no clue how an alien species could communicate, and this could be the reason we've yet to find them. Humanity sends out waves in the electromagnetic spectrum to send long distance messages, but we have no idea if other civilizations would use or understand these. They might communicate in other ways, like by sending streams of neutrinos, adjusting the color or composition of their host star, or using some natural phenomena that we've yet to even discover. It's also possible that the issue of communication might not be a result of how different the species themselves are, but of how advanced one of them has become. If another civilization is sufficiently advanced, it's possible that they do indeed understand our messages, but simply disregard them as we are far too primitive to even bother with. On a biological level, there is only a fairly small difference between us and chimpanzees, but this tiny difference has allowed us to dominate the planet, invent computers, airplanes, and Coca-Cola. Imagine if an alien life form is just that tiny bit smarter than us. We might be simply incapable of understanding them or their goals in the slightest, much the same way that a gorilla has no chance of understanding how GPS works. ## Looking in the Wrong Place Another resolution to the Fermi Paradox says that the universe is indeed full of life, but we are simply looking in all the wrong places. As humans, we live on a rocky planet, which orbits a G-type main sequence star, also known as a yellow dwarf, even though its light is actually white. Because of this, our search for life across the cosmos generally consists of looking for rocky, earthlike planets near stable stars similar to our sun. But what if we are the exception? According to Planetary Scientist Alan Stern, the more common form of life might not be on rocky planets, but rather on icy moons. If moons like Jupiter's Europa, with a thick outer layer of ice, and presumably a liquid interior, contain the necessary ingredients for life, they may be the most common habitat in the galaxy. After all, living in the subsurface ocean of an icy world would grant extra protection against asteroid impacts, solar events, and other dangers from outer space. It would also make a wider range of orbits habitable around its sun. If these underwater worlds across the galaxy harbor the majority of intelligent life, it would make sense why we haven't found them yet. Their structure would, by nature, block much of their transmissions, making them harder to detect, while also making them overall less likely to explore their surroundings. If such worlds exist, they might have entire eons in which civilizations rise and fall without ever venturing through the ice layer, unaware that an entire universe exists outside their moon. It would be very difficult to locate such life, as we would likely have to physically land on the moon before we could detect signs of it. On a similar note, others have suggested that apart from the icy moons, the dominant habitable planets may be water worlds—rocky planets similar to earth, but with far less continental landmass. It could be on these oceanic planets that intelligent life develops, but is never able to take to the stars. As one scientist put it: > "In which case, the evolution of creatures like us, with hands and fire and all that sort of thing, may be rare in the galaxy… In which case, when we do build starships and head out there, perhaps we'll find lots and lots of life… but they're all dolphins, whales, squids, who could never build their own starships." It would certainly be a surprise to find out that land-based life forms are the exception in the galaxy, but it would certainly explain why we've yet to receive any radio signals from alien civilizations: they simply don't have that kind of technology. It's also been proposed that highly advanced civilizations might not live on planets, or moons, at all, and have instead moved on to permanently live on space stations. This would allow the civilization to move freely around their solar system, or perhaps even between stars, and sadly, would mean that our exhaustive search for earth-like exoplanets is rather pointless. These stations would likely be so small that it would be very difficult for us to detect them at all unless they came rather close to our solar system. ## We Are Alone The final, and perhaps most unsettling resolution of all, is that there is no paradox. That our assumption that life in the universe is common is simply false, and humanity, and earth, is an abnormality. This isn't a resolution that sits well with most people, not just because it paints a bleak picture of an empty universe, but because it seems to violate the Copernican Principle. The Copernican Principle is the general assumption in cosmology that earth isn't special. That, based on probability, there's a very, very low chance that we are always the exception, some irregularity or surprise. It's far more likely that we are average, meaning we must not be alone. But our very existence may be what breaks this principle. If our exhaustive searches of the galaxy continue to come up empty-handed, we may be forced to accept that *we* are the anomaly, and are actually alone in the Milky Way. But just because we might be alone right now, doesn't mean we always will be. Perhaps our strangeness is not in the location or method in which we evolved, but simply *when* we evolved. We may just be far ahead of our galactic peers on the evolutionary timescale, the first to develop space travel, telescopes, and advanced mathematics, while on other planets intelligent life is just starting to figure out the use of basic tools or how to start fires. On another note, we aren't actually certain if interstellar travel is possible. If it turns out that it takes far too long or is simply not worth the resources, civilizations may never make contact, and remain isolated in their solar systems. But this is all just speculation. As of right now, as far as we can tell, our civilization is the only one around, and we may need to come to terms with the fact that the endless expanse of space is indeed entirely devoid of life. ## Key Takeaways - The Fermi Paradox questions why, despite the vast number of stars and planets, we have not found evidence of extraterrestrial civilizations. - The Dark Forest hypothesis suggests that alien civilizations may be hiding to avoid detection by potentially hostile others. - The Great Filter theory proposes that there is a barrier in the evolution of life that prevents most civilizations from becoming space-faring. - Communication with alien civilizations may be impossible due to vastly different methods or advanced intelligence. - It is possible that we are alone in the universe, challenging the Copernican Principle that Earth is not special. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### What is the Fermi Paradox? The Fermi Paradox is the contradiction between the high probability of the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations and the lack of contact or evidence for such civilizations. ### What is the Dark Forest Hypothesis? The Dark Forest Hypothesis suggests that other civilizations are actively hiding from each other, afraid that any transmission could attract hostile civilizations. ### What is the Great Filter? The Great Filter is a theoretical barrier that prevents life from advancing to space-faring civilizations, which could be at any stage of evolution. ### What is the Berserker Hypothesis? The Berserker Hypothesis proposes that advanced civilizations might use lethal probes to eliminate competition for resources, making the galaxy dangerous for emerging civilizations. ### Why might we be looking in the wrong places for alien life? We might be looking in the wrong places because the majority of life could be on icy moons or water worlds, which are harder to detect and less likely to develop space-faring technology. ### What is the Copernican Principle? The Copernican Principle assumes that Earth is not special and that there is a low probability that we are the exception in the universe. ### What if we are alone in the universe? If we are alone, it means that our assumption that life is common in the universe is false, and humanity is an abnormality. ### What are some possible reasons for the Great Filter? The Great Filter could be due to frequent mass extinction events, self-destruction of advanced civilizations, the rarity of forming reproductive molecules, or the difficulty and danger of interstellar travel. ### Why might communication with alien civilizations be impossible? Communication might be impossible because alien civilizations could use methods we don't understand or recognize, or they might be too advanced for us to comprehend. ### What are some alternative habitats for life in the galaxy? Alternative habitats for life could include icy moons with subsurface oceans, water worlds with minimal landmass, or space stations inhabited by advanced civilizations. ## Sources - [Original Side Projects video: 5 Unsettling Solutions to the Fermi Paradox](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8BwNgZ_Utqs) ## Related Coverage Simon Whistler https://sideprojects.pub/article/5-weapons-well-ahead-of-their-time https://sideprojects.pub/article/5-weapons-well-ahead-of-their-time Thu, 25 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT Ever since World War II, when the globe was in the throes of the Cold War, countries have placed vast importance on the development of the most advanced and innovative weapons technologies. From nuclear bombs and ever-varying ways to deploy them, to futuristic systems like Reagan's Star Wars, the world has seen some pretty advanced weaponry displayed and even used, sometimes to incredibly destructive outcomes. But humankind's search for the biggest and best weapon is nothing new. You could go back as far as prehistoric days and witness an arms race to wield the biggest club in the cave. A look back through history reveals some truly spectacular innovation and inventions. Historians are hard-pressed to find a time in the past when humans weren't engaged in the age-old schoolyard quarrel, "my weapon system can beat up your weapon system!" Let's take a trip through time and examine moments in history when humankind's wish for destructive power surpassed the technology of their time. These are five weapons that were well ahead of their time. ## Leonardo da Vinci's Armored Car World War I wasn't called the War to End All Wars for no reason. This was when some of the deadliest and most destructive uses of technology were first used on a mass scale for the entire world to witness. The advent of the machine gun saw the gruesome end of the heroic charge towards enemy lines, chemical and biological weapons took warfare to a microscopic level, and artillery greeted soldiers with a destructive bang. However, one of the most influential military innovations of The Great War was the tank. It was originally conceived to break the months-long stalemate caused by trench warfare and punch through enemy lines. The tank revolutionized how armies executed infantry maneuvers. The original idea for the tank, however, came many centuries before when, in 1485, Leonardo da Vinci toyed with the idea of an armored car. His design and drawings put forth the idea of a warfare vehicle that was impervious to a wide range of attacks, capable of moving in any direction, and able to use a variety of weapons. The genius of da Vinci further shines in a letter he wrote to the Duke of Milan about his concept. In this letter da Vinci predicted the ability of his tank to break through enemy lines, paving the way for infantry troops to follow unobstructed and remain free from harm. This idea is much like the Blitzkrieg strategy of the German army in World War II. However, like most of da Vinci's brain children, his idea for a medieval tank could not be supported by the technology of his day. The steering system would have been too complex to work properly, and the wheels would have been too flimsy to support the vehicle. The weapons on the tank used black gunpowder which would have rendered the interior of the tank toxic and unbreathable after only a couple of rounds of firing. It took technology several hundred years to catch up to da Vinci's idea and make the tank a workable weapon. ## Leonardo da Vinci's Thirty-Three Barreled Organ As mentioned before, the introduction of machine guns in World War I provided a vulgar wake up call to those soldiers still dreaming of a heroic charge towards enemy lines. Gruesome scenes of piles of bodies that had been mowed down were an all-too-common site on the trench-filled battlefields. The idea for the machine gun came well before its widespread use in the Great War. Just like the tank, the idea for this weapon came many centuries before from none other than Leonardo da Vinci. Da Vinci noticed that the cannons and artillery of his time were quite ineffective. They took too long to reload and often misfired. To solve this problem, da Vinci devised a contraption comprising three sets of cannons, divided into groups of eleven and fastened to a rotating platform in the middle. In theory, the three sets of guns would allow one set to be firing while the set previously fired were cooling down and the next set to fire were being loaded by soldiers. This would allow a continuous or near-continuous rate of fire. The assembly of several artillery pipes next to each other gave the impression of a musical organ, akin to the ones you would see in churches during da Vinci's time, which earned this potentially destructive invention its benign name. As with the tank he designed, da Vinci's Thirty-Three Barreled Organ was never made or used in battle. It remained an idea in his head and drawings on paper until the machine gun as we know it today was used. ## Greek Fire The Vietnam War was one of the first military conflicts to see the use of modern media. News reports, pictures, and videos of the horrors of war made their way back to the home front and turned many Americans against their government's actions. Perhaps some of the most gruesome examples of war are the stories and pictures detailing the use of napalm. Also called Agent Orange, this weapon was first used in the Pacific Theater during World War II and in the Korean War. However, the U.S. military dropped dozens of times more napalm on Vietnam than in the previous two wars and burned thousands of acres of Vietnamese jungles and countless villages and inhabitants. The Pulitzer-prize-winning photograph by Nick Ut of Phan Thị Kim Phúc popularized the anti-war sentiment in the U.S. Millenia before napalm's use in any twentieth century war, however, the military of the Byzantine Empire put to use what we know today as Greek Fire. Though very similar to napalm, Greek Fire's exact formula is still unknown. Byzantine infantry troops would use Greek fire in clay pots, which they would light on fire and launch at the enemy. That's right, a napalm filled Molotov cocktail. If on sea, Byzantine sailors would shoot pressurized streams of it at enemy ships. The effectiveness of Greek Fire came from its imperviousness to water. It would instantly set ablaze whatever it came in contact with, be it troops or ships, and continue burning even underwater. Greek fire was such an effective weapon against enemy troops and potential invaders alike that Byzantine emperors closely guarded their stores of this agent and the formula used to make it. Scientists and historians have tried to guess and replicate the formula, but the only remnants of this weapon that have lasted until today are the ancient stories of its fiery destruction and death. ## Archimedes' Death Ray The idea of a death ray has captivated audiences ever since the Star Wars movies popularized the idea with their planet-destroying Death Star. Even today, the idea of a death ray seems futuristic and far-fetched. However, some historians claim that a death ray could have been used as long ago as ancient Roman times. Whereas the Death Star was the superweapon of the evil empire in Star Wars, the death ray in history was the tool of those fighting the evil empire. In this case, the empire was the Romans, and whether they were evil depends on what historian you ask. Another thing up for debate among historians is how effective the death ray was, or if it even existed at all. As the story goes, the Roman empire laid siege to the city of Syracuse in 214 B.C.E. Unfortunately for the Romans, Syracuse was home to Archimedes, one of the greatest minds of his time, if not all of history. Archimedes allegedly thought up the idea of using mirrors to harness the natural power of the sun and direct it towards the invading Romans. His death ray used multiple mirrors along a shoreline or the city wall which trained their reflection of the sun on the incoming Roman ships. The concentrated heat of the sun then set the wooden ships on fire. It remains a debate still today whether this method would work in reality or if it was ever used before. Archimedes' death ray was first mentioned by the historian Galens over 350 years after the Roman invasion of Syracuse. As for the effectiveness of Archimedes' weapon, many teams, ranging from the MythBusters to scientists at MIT, have put it to the test. The MythBusters had little success showing the death ray as an effective weapon. However, the team at MIT managed to set a replica of a roman ship on fire; the only caveat being the replica ship was stationary, not advancing towards a city or bobbing upon rough seas. However, the Greek scientist Dr. Ioannis Sakkas used seventy mirrors operated by just as many people to set a moving rowboat on fire. Perhaps these teams did not have as great of minds as Archimedes and could not put this great idea to effective use, or perhaps the historian Galens lent his telling of history a little artistic flair. Either way, Archimedes' death ray is a captivating tale and a weapon well ahead of its ancient setting. ## Armored Battleships Any U.S. history buff, especially enthusiasts of the Civil War, will tell you that one of the greatest military innovations to come from that conflict is the use of armored ships. The first clash of two ironclad ships, a battle in 1862 between the CSS Virginia and the USS Monitor, put the use of unarmored ships to rest for good. As you probably guessed, though, the idea of an armored ship was conceived and used many centuries before, this time in East Asia in 1500s. When Japanese forces invaded Korea in 1592, they attributed their successful campaigns to the muskets they bought from the Portuguese and their aggressive tactics of boarding enemy ships pirate style. The Korean forces quickly responded to these threats, though, with the invention of the Geobukseon, or Turtle Boat. Aptly named, this warship sported iron siding to shield from musket fire and an overhead covering layered with spikes to deter any Japanese soldier wanting to board uninvited. Unlike their Civil War counterparts, the Turtle Boats were not steam-powered, using instead the workforce of over eighty well-protected rowers. These ships did, however, boast twenty-three cannons effective for up to 500 meters, or 1600 feet, and an intimidating dragon head on the bow that spewed sulfur smoke to shield the warship's movement from enemy eyes. ## Key Takeaways - Throughout history, humans have continually sought to develop the most powerful weapons. - Leonardo da Vinci designed an armored vehicle and a multi-barreled weapon centuries before their time. - Greek Fire, used by the Byzantine Empire, was an early form of napalm, effective against troops and ships. - Archimedes' death ray, using mirrors to concentrate sunlight, is debated but remains a fascinating concept. - The Korean Turtle Boat, an armored ship from the 1500s, predated similar innovations used in the American Civil War. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### Who designed the armored car that inspired the tank? Leonardo da Vinci designed the armored car in 1485, which inspired the modern tank. ### What was the purpose of Leonardo da Vinci's Thirty-Three Barreled Organ? The Thirty-Three Barreled Organ was designed to provide a continuous or near-continuous rate of fire, addressing the inefficiencies of cannons and artillery of da Vinci's time. ### What was Greek Fire and how was it used? Greek Fire was a weapon used by the Byzantine Empire, similar to modern napalm. It was launched in clay pots or shot in pressurized streams, setting ablaze whatever it contacted and continuing to burn even underwater. ### What was Archimedes' Death Ray and how did it work? Archimedes' Death Ray allegedly used mirrors to concentrate sunlight and set Roman ships on fire during the siege of Syracuse in 214 B.C.E. The effectiveness of this method is still debated. ### What was the Geobukseon, or Turtle Boat, and when was it used? The Geobukseon, or Turtle Boat, was an armored warship used by Korean forces in the 1590s to defend against Japanese invasions. It featured iron siding, an overhead covering with spikes, and cannons. ### What was the significance of the battle between the CSS Virginia and the USS Monitor? The battle between the CSS Virginia and the USS Monitor in 1862 marked the first clash of ironclad ships, signaling the end of unarmored ships in naval warfare. ### What was the impact of napalm in the Vietnam War? Napalm was extensively used in the Vietnam War, burning thousands of acres of jungle and countless villages, and turning many Americans against the war due to its gruesome effects. ### Why was Leonardo da Vinci's armored car not built during his time? Leonardo da Vinci's armored car could not be built during his time due to technological limitations, such as the complexity of the steering system, the fragility of the wheels, and the toxicity of black gunpowder inside the vehicle. ### What was the Blitzkrieg strategy and how did da Vinci's armored car concept relate to it? The Blitzkrieg strategy involved rapid, overwhelming force to break through enemy lines. Da Vinci's armored car concept was similar, as he predicted it could break through enemy lines, allowing infantry to follow unobstructed. ### How did the Byzantine Empire use Greek Fire in naval battles? Byzantine sailors used Greek Fire by shooting pressurized streams of it at enemy ships, which would set them ablaze and continue burning even underwater. ## Sources - [Original Side Projects video: 5 Weapons Well Ahead of their Time](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXr2GYsvnjA) - [https://www.toptenz.net/weapons-that-were-ahead-of-their-time.php](https://www.toptenz.net/weapons-that-were-ahead-of-their-time.php) - [https://editions.covecollective.org/chronologies/33-barreled-organ](https://editions.covecollective.org/chronologies/33-barreled-organ) - [https://www.worldhistory.org/Greek_Fire/](https://www.worldhistory.org/Greek_Fire/) - [https://www.warhistoryonline.com/vietnam-war/history-napalm-vietnam-war.html](https://www.warhistoryonline.com/vietnam-war/history-napalm-vietnam-war.html) - [https://www.realmofhistory.com/2020/03/26/14-exceptional-weapon-systems-history-ahead-times/](https://www.realmofhistory.com/2020/03/26/14-exceptional-weapon-systems-history-ahead-times/) ## Related Coverage Simon Whistler https://sideprojects.pub/article/5-weird-theories-about-space https://sideprojects.pub/article/5-weird-theories-about-space Thu, 25 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT This article is going to make your brain hum and probably hurt in equal measure. As much as humans like to think we're advanced and knowledgeable when it comes to scientific fields and cosmological understanding, we've barely scratched the surface. Not too long ago, we thought the Earth was flat, and even the great Albert Einstein's ideas are now starting to look a bit outdated thanks to the bewildering world of quantum mechanics, which states that something can exist here, and here at the same time — but can't explain to you how. Today we've got five of the weirdest cosmological theories to tell you about, guaranteed to leave you scratching your head and questioning the very reality you've long believed to be true. Strap in — things are about to get very strange. ## The Multiverse Hypothesis One of the most intriguing, controversial, and plain mind-bending cosmological theories is the Multiverse Hypothesis, which suggests the existence of multiple universes beyond our own. Now, bearing in mind that our own cosmos includes around 350 billion galaxies and the observable known universe spans somewhere in the region of 94 billion light years, the notion that this might be just a single speck in a much larger Multiverse is enough to make your head spin. You might think this is a purely new, radical idea, but it originated from a few Ancient Greek philosophers, namely Leucippus and Democritus, in the 5th century — ideas that were gradually added to and expanded on over the coming centuries. The term 'Multiverse' was first used by American philosopher and psychologist William James in 1895, and the idea has gradually inched its way into the collective cosmological consciousness. However, it remains a deeply polarising idea. It's difficult even to start getting your head around the multiverse hypothesis. How can we even picture multiple gargantuan universes? One of the most common and probably easiest visual images to process is a children's ball pit, where each ball in the pit is a different universe. Or perhaps billions of individual bubbles floating through a giant room is a better way to think about it. Like everything else we will discuss today, there's absolutely no evidence to suggest the multiverse theory is correct. Still, there are certain problems with current and established cosmological theories that might give it some weight. Let's start with the Big Bang. Most scientists, cosmologists, and just about everybody else, accept the theory that our universe was created thanks to a mighty explosion around 13.8 billion years ago. A trillionth of a second after the event, the universe was roughly the size of the Earth to the Sun but grew rapidly in the first few seconds — faster than the speed of light, according to some calculations — before slowing down, though it is still expanding. That all sounds perfectly reasonable, but what existed before the Big Bang? One component of the multiverse theory is that our Big Bang was one of many that have occurred, with each setting off growth that eventually spawned its own universe. Another idea is that the Big Bang created the many bubbles that burst from it and have been evolving independently — possibly with their own physical laws and realities. Proponents argue that this could explain the fine-tuning of physical constants and why fundamental laws are ideally suited for life to emerge. Suppose there is an infinite number of universes. In that case, there must also be an infinite number of atom and particle combinations — the overwhelming majority of which cannot support life, but the tiniest number can. ## The Simulation Theory Are we living in a computer program? If you think that's wobbling into the strange and wonderful world known as lunacy, you might be right — then again, maybe that's just how you're programmed to think. The Simulation Theory proposes that our reality, including the entire universe and everything within it, is nothing more than a computer simulation created by an advanced civilization or higher beings. This might sound like a cosmic conspiracy theory straight out of *The Matrix*, but much of it has its roots in a paper published in 2003 by an Oxford Professor, Nick Bostrom, titled "Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?". Though vaguely similar ideas were mentioned in ancient times in China, India, and Greece. The Simulation Theory sounds utterly preposterous from the outset, and yet several leading figures in science have, at the very least, accepted that this isn't a theory we should dismiss out of hand. At the heart of the Simulation Theory lies the hypothesis that an advanced civilization, possibly far more technologically adept than ours, has developed the capability to create simulations of its reality. These simulations could be so intricate and lifelike that the simulated beings — us — within them might believe they live in a tangible, physical universe, unaware that it is all a digital fabrication. Those supporting this theory point to the rapid advancement of virtual reality and computer simulations in our society. Of course, the likes of *The Sims* and *Minecraft* are still a world away from this, but isn't it logical to believe that at some point, our computer game characters will become so advanced that they will essentially be able to think for themselves as humans do? Knowing where to stop with this theory is difficult because it can begin to get fantastical. Are we actually the simulation of a master race that lived on Earth millions of years ago but evolved to the point where they don't exist in the same way we do? Are we programmed participants in a game created by a single omnipotent player? Could that even be who some consider God? Then there's the idea of what is reality and for that, let's look at a quote by theoretical physicist David Bohm: > "Reality is what we take to be true. What we take to be true is what we believe. What we believe is based upon our perceptions. What we perceive depends on what we look for. What we look for depends on what we think. What we think depends on what we perceive. What we perceive determines what we believe. What we believe determines what we take to be true. What we take to be true is our reality." ## White Hole Theory If you thought the idea of black holes was a confusing mind-bashing theory, welcome to the world of white holes — where everything happens in reverse, and cosmology becomes even more bewildering. A black hole is formed when a massive star exhausts its nuclear fuel and collapses under the force of its own gravity. This collapse creates a region in space with such intense gravitational pull that nothing, not even light, can escape from it. The immediate area around a black hole is called the event horizon, and anything that crosses the event horizon is trapped within the black hole, and from there, your guess is probably as good as mine. One theory is that black holes act as wormholes linking different worlds or universes, perhaps even a multiverse superhighway if you wanted to start blending these theories. If that were the case, it would only make sense that there must be an exit to the wormhole. And since black holes never emit anything, it would only make sense — and I'm using that term very loosely — that the exit must be different to the entry — which is perhaps where white holes come in. White holes can be considered the "time-reversed" versions of black holes, expelling everything rather than consuming it. While no direct evidence of white holes has been observed, they have captured the imaginations of scientists, science-fiction writers, and those wacky folk who tend to believe absolutely everything on the internet. While this idea is very much theoretical, it was predicted by Einstein's theory of gravity, although his notion of a singularity within a black hole where nothing could pass would seem to dampen the idea, along with its connection to wormholes. But who knows? Even Einstein's theories are now being questioned by quantum mechanics. Are white holes the key to time travel or parts of the intricate fabric of space-time? We'll leave the white hole theory with one final mind explosion. While there is no evidence of white holes, one idea seems to fit the criteria. What if the big bang was the result of a white hole? What if everything that has been spewing from it for the last 13.9 billion years came from a completely different area or another time? We'll just leave you to chew on that idea for a few seconds. ## The Big Splat Theory As discussed earlier, one of the principal problems the Big Bang theory leaves behind is what happened before this mighty eruption that created us all. What existed before life began, and what happened to what existed before life began? The Ekpyrotic theory, also known by the far less eloquent Big Splat theory, is a cosmological model that suggests our universe was created through the collision of two higher-dimensional worlds, referred to as branes, themselves part of a much greater form that we simpletons can only dream of ever genuinely understanding. Before we come to the Big Splat, let's briefly look at the Brane Theory, which has quite a bit in common with the multiverse hypothesis. Brane theory, short for membrane, is part of the more extensive string theory and suggests that we live within higher-dimensional membranes floating through space or perhaps the larger multiverse. We, humans, experience our reality through four dimensions; three visually, height, width, and depth, and another through time, which only goes one way. However, according to string theory, the universe operates with as many as ten dimensions, and different parts of our membrane experience different dimensions. The universe we see around us would then consist of only a small membrane layer. Think of it as a single piece of paper within a larger stack — with some room between each piece. Therefore, each membrane is its own universe within its own reality governed by its own laws and motions. So that's a rough outline of membrane theory. The idea behind the big splat theory is that a universe is created when two of these membranes collide, which converts their kinesthetic energy into matter and energy, creating an eruption that sparks life into existence — the big bang. This intense inferno pushes the two membranes apart, and they begin accelerating away from each other. However, another part of these theories is that the universe and its life are cyclical. This means that the two membranes begin to slow down, and eventually, the process is reversed, and they begin accelerating towards each other. When they finally meet, they smash into each other, and another big bang occurs. This creates two entirely different universes, almost certainly in a radically different form than what we have now, and the whole process begins again. ## Messages from Faraway Every few years, an excited ripple emerges from those tasked with scanning the skies for extraterrestrials, usually accompanied in the papers by rather dampening warnings not to get our hopes up. And they're usually right. Humans have been scanning the universe with a range of radio telescopes since the late 1950s and have so far found absolutely nothing. However, there have been some headline-grabbing false starts that we still can't explain. One of the most famous occurred in 1977 when astronomer Jerry Ehman, who was using the Ohio State University's Big Ear radio telescope to search for possible radio signals coming from space, came across something extraordinary. Dubbed the 'wow signal' after the single word Ehman wrote next to the findings, what he recorded that day was an intense signal coming from the Chi Sagittarii star system that lasted 72 seconds. Unfortunately, the signal was only ever heard once and has never been fully explained, though it did add some much-needed vigour to a SETI program that was beginning to flounder. As technology has improved, so has our capacity to scan the night sky. Over the last couple of decades, there have been several promising leads, such as the Breakthrough Listen project that recorded signals coming from a small red star called Proxima Centauri, or signals coming from the star YZ Ceti and the rocky exoplanet that orbits it, called YZ Ceti b by the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array of telescopes in New Mexico. One explanation frequently used to dismiss findings is the existence of pulsars, highly dense and rapidly rotating neutron stars, which are the collapsed cores of massive stars that have undergone a supernova explosion. Their rapid spinning gives the impression that they are blinking while beaming out intense electromagnetic radiation from their poles, like giant lighthouses. And here's where some of that weirdness comes in. There is a loose theory, still well out of the mainstream, that while pulsars are entirely natural, it's not out of the realms of possibility that an advanced civilization could manipulate them to send messages to Earth — and perhaps even to use their waves as some kind of intergalactic highway that could push spacecrafts at much faster speeds than would be possible without them. In a paper written in 2014 and published in *New Astronomy*, it was suggested that radio waves coming off pulsars could be encoded with information sent from a satellite orbiting nearby, or even more radically by constructing a scaffold around the pulsar and placing messages directly in front of emitting waves. They could then be used in reverse to listen to messages coming back to them from distant space. It sounds like they're stretching possibility to absolute breaking point, but after the theories we've gone through in this article, it might not seem so outrageous. ## Key Takeaways - The Multiverse Hypothesis suggests multiple universes exist beyond our own, with no evidence but intriguing explanations for cosmological mysteries. - The Simulation Theory proposes our reality is a computer simulation created by advanced beings, with roots in ancient philosophy and modern science. - White holes, theoretical counterparts to black holes, expel matter and energy, potentially linking to time travel or the Big Bang. - The Big Splat Theory posits our universe was created by colliding higher-dimensional worlds, or branes, in a cyclical process. - The 'Wow! signal' and other unexplained radio signals hint at potential extraterrestrial communication, though pulsars offer a natural explanation. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### What is the Multiverse Hypothesis? The Multiverse Hypothesis suggests the existence of multiple universes beyond our own, with each universe potentially having its own physical laws and realities. ### Who first used the term 'Multiverse'? The term 'Multiverse' was first used by American philosopher and psychologist William James in 1895. ### What is the Simulation Theory? The Simulation Theory proposes that our reality, including the entire universe and everything within it, is nothing more than a computer simulation created by an advanced civilization or higher beings. ### Who published the paper that discussed the Simulation Theory? Oxford Professor Nick Bostrom published a paper in 2003 titled 'Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?' which discussed the Simulation Theory. ### What are white holes? White holes are theoretical objects that are the 'time-reversed' versions of black holes, expelling everything rather than consuming it. ### What is the Big Splat Theory? The Big Splat Theory, also known as the Ekpyrotic theory, suggests that our universe was created through the collision of two higher-dimensional worlds, referred to as branes. ### What is the Wow Signal? The Wow Signal was an intense radio signal detected in 1977 by astronomer Jerry Ehman, coming from the Chi Sagittarii star system, which lasted 72 seconds and has never been fully explained. ### What are pulsars? Pulsars are highly dense and rapidly rotating neutron stars, which are the collapsed cores of massive stars that have undergone a supernova explosion. They beam out intense electromagnetic radiation from their poles. ### What is the Brane Theory? Brane Theory, short for membrane, suggests that we live within higher-dimensional membranes floating through space or perhaps the larger multiverse, with each membrane being its own universe within its own reality governed by its own laws and motions. ## Sources - [Original Side Projects video: 5 Weird Theories About Space](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClUc8ubSYQ4) ## Related Coverage Simon Whistler https://sideprojects.pub/article/5-weird-things-everyday-life-soviet-union https://sideprojects.pub/article/5-weird-things-everyday-life-soviet-union Thu, 25 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT The Soviet Union, an empire that once covered vast parts of Eurasia, has long captivated our imagination. Yet, most of our understanding is confined to Cold War rhetoric and iconic symbols such as Sputnik, nuclear weapons, and the Berlin Wall. While fascinating, this perspective only scratches the surface, and neglects the quirky and frankly… **WEIRD** aspects that characterized daily life in this complex nation that was oh so different from our own. So, today, let's put aside the political chest-beating and grandiose military icons, and instead zoom in on those bizarre and weird details… this is 5 unusual things about life in the Soviet Union. ## 1. Car Ownership Car ownership is something we all take for granted in the western world. For us, it is all but a given that basically anyone can afford a car one way or the other. Sure, it may not be a Rolls Royce or a Lamborghini, but still, the possibility of *A* car is open to basically all of us. This was not the case in the Soviet Union, where car ownership was a privilege enjoyed by only a select few. Worse still, for the lucky few who did manage to get their hands on a car, the process of **ACTUALLY acquiring** it was a bureaucratic hellscape that required the jumping of many hurdles, and often, the crossing of several palms with roubles. To explain this further, let us begin with that most basic of obstacles to car ownership: the cost. For the average Soviet citizen in the 1980s, their yearly salary was roughly 2,000 rubles a year including all bonuses and incentives. This, frankly, was nowhere near enough to even begin to cover the cost of buying a car. Take for instance the most prestigious car a Soviet citizen could aspire to own – the mighty GAZ-24 Volga, the cost of this bucket of magnificence was a staggering 16,480 rubles in 1984… just over eight times that average salary of 2,000 rubles a year… so clearly, the average Soviet citizen wasn't affording a Volga. But surely, we hear you cry! This was communism, the state must have provided a cheap and cheerful car to the *masses*? Well, they did… kind of, in the form of the venerable VAZ-2101. This reliable and utilitarian workhorse could be yours for the low low price of only 6,000 rubles in 1984… a mere three times the average salary – what a bargain, what a steal, how can you argue with such value! To really put this AMAZING value into perspective, the equivalent cost of the Volga and VAZ in the United States would have been around $280,000 and $105,000 respectively in 1984. For comparison, a Lamborghini Countach and a Ferrari Testarossa cost $100,000 and $94,000 respectively in that same year. But let's say someone *actually managed* to save up the mega bucks needed to buy a car in the Soviet Union, after all, people did own these cars, so evidently it was viable on some level… what then was the process of actually getting your hands on one? Well, there were no car dealers in the Soviet Union, so rather than the time-honoured western tradition of verbally jousting with a silver-tongued con man eager to empty your wallet, you instead had to go to your employer, and while putting on your best Oliver Twist impression ask if: "Please sir, may I have a car?" You see, in the Soviet Union the allocation of cars was controlled by the trade unions, with each union being given a quota of cars to distribute to the companies under its purview each year. Then, it was the responsibility of the companies to decide which of its workers deserved to be allowed to buy the cars they had been assigned. But the bureaucracy didn't stop there folks, oh no no, because if you were lucky enough to be selected to buy a car, your application then had to go back to the government, who would then run a background check to make sure you hadn't had any naughty opinions that would make you unworthy of owning a car – this background check alone could easily take over a year. Then, after waiting just to find out if you were allowed to buy a car, you then had to go on a waiting list. For you see, if a company had more wannabe motorists than cars (which they always did, all of the time) names were added to a list, with the companies incoming allocation of cars being distributed to the people at the top of the list, and given the low number of cars produced by the Soviet Union, it could easily take up to ten years for your name to reach the top of the list. It wasn't all bad however, at least car insurance was cheap in the Soviet Union, and better still, if you didn't hit anyone all year you got your premium refunded… so that's something! ## 2. Air Travel Air travel, to most of us in the western world, is mundane to the point of being a chore; an unenjoyable but necessary exercise we all endure to jet off to exotic locales around the world. But really, when you think about it, we actually have it pretty good: basically everyone can afford to do it, the government doesn't restrict how and why we can travel, and we have a smorgasbord of airlines to choose from, each competing to offer us the most convenient schedules, the best prices, and the finest in-flight services. This… was not the case in the Soviet Union. Let's start with the choice (or rather lack thereof) of airlines available to the Soviet jetsetter. They had just one: Aeroflot. But while Aeroflot (state owned of course) may have been the only game in town, they were a behemoth of a company, with a fleet of over 10,000 aircraft, and over 600,000 people on its payroll. This however shouldn't be taken to assume that the Soviet Union had surprisingly advanced infrastructure, quite the opposite, airports and planes simply proved cheaper to build than modern rail and road infrastructure. Then there was the cost, which was simply astronomical. Consider this: a one-way ticket from Moscow to Khabarovsk, a city in the country's far east, would cost about 180 rubles in the 1980s, just over the nation's whole average monthly salary. More staggering was the cost of a flight from Moscow to Vladivostok, which would set one back an exorbitant 240 rubles. Contrast this to the present day, where a Muscovite earning an average monthly salary of 51,000 rubles can secure a one-way ticket to Vladivostok for approximately a tenth of their monthly salary, and the inaccessibility of air travel in the Soviet era truly becomes apparent. But the weirdness doesn't stop there, as for some reason, Aeroflot, the only airline in the whole country, advertised. The adverts were suitably odd too. Some, such as the typical glamour shots of picture perfect air stewardesses who looked mysteriously just like the picture perfect girls in all the other adverts were understandable enough, but where it got really weird was when it got… well, for want of a better description, SOVIET, such as this 1962 poster which advertises Aeroflot with all the patriotic zeal you'd expect from a 1930s propaganda poster encouraging you to charge into Nazi machine gun fire for the Motherland. As for why a company with a state provided monopoly put so much effort into its advertising… your guess is as good as ours. Then there was the food on board. Considering this presents us with two possibilities: either Aeroflot was used exclusively by bodybuilders, or the service was just a bit crap, because you had one option – the ever tasty, the ever nutritious, and not at all bland: chicken and rice. The dish became so predictable in fact that it became a running joke amongst frequent flyers, not the funny kind of joke mind you, the 'laugh the pain away' kind of joke. There was one exception to this monotonous culinary litany however – international flights. Because you see, on international flights, there might be foreigners, and the foreigners might go back home and tell their foreigner friends about the chicken and rice, thus besmirching the glorious name of the Soviet Union and all of its efforts in illustrious socialist construction! Photography was also explicitly banned on flights. This seems to be rooted primarily in jingoistic ego, with the Soviet Government, for some reason, being **absolutely terrified** that the west would discover what the cabins of its airliners looked like… again, your guess is as good as ours! ## 3. Militarised Education The Soviet Education system is often touted as one of the regime's major successes, and frankly, it's hard to disagree with this. It was renowned for its high standards of teaching, particularly in the STEM subjects, it was free at all levels regardless of social status, and typically did a fantastic job sending talented young people off into suitable fields that would allow them to thrive in their future careers. But despite this overall quality, like everything in the Soviet Union, it also had its fair share of eyebrow raising weirdness, primarily its highly militarised nature. Under this system children were free to enjoy their innocence until their teenage years, at which point 'Initial Military Training' was introduced into their curriculum. This had two aims. Firstly, it was to prepare young men for their compulsory military service, ensuring that they were familiar with the rudiments of military life and basic operations before their formal induction, and secondly, it was to foster a sense of camaraderie and collectivist thinking within all members of the class – collectivism naturally being a bit of a big deal in the communist Soviet Union. As part of this program, twice a week, the students would swap their usual classrooms for makeshift military grounds, donning khaki uniforms and being led through their paces by retired military officers. These individuals, often battle-hardened veterans, saw their jobs as either a great honour, raising the next generation of New Soviet Men, *or*, an easy way of topping up their military pension – it depends who you ask! The training was immersive and comprehensive. Beyond mere marching drills, the students were taught tactical manoeuvring, how to respond to chemical and nuclear attacks, and even basic medical procedures like wound dressing and CPR. The realities of handling a weapon, from maintenance to accurate firing, were also part of this intense immersion. Anecdotal evidence suggests that for many students, the sheer thrill of holding an actual firearm, albeit in a controlled environment, was an experience unlike any other. The training was also not just confined to school boundaries. As sometimes, for a special treat, students would get to go to local military bases, where they would test their skills, and get to do the *really cool* stuff that was not safe to do on school grounds. One such example being hand grenade throwing, an activity that for many was the highlight of the course. But as fun as this all was, as the students progressed towards the end of their tenth grade, the reality of their training began to dawn upon them, as in an act that signified the transition from the controlled environment of school to the real world, the military instructors would ask each male student about their preferred direction when they were drafted into the military. This was nothing if not a reality check, reminding students that while ditching normal lessons to play with Kalashnikovs was certainly fun, there was ultimately a very serious, and quite morbid methodology behind it all. Yet, despite this distinctly macabre undernote, years later, many of the students look back on this time with a strange sense of nostalgia. They recall the excitement, the novelty, and the sense of belonging that this unique part of their education brought them. For them, it was an embodiment of the larger societal values prevalent in the Soviet Union and an ingenious mechanism to instil discipline, resilience, and unity amongst its young citizens, and in the process, it left an indelible mark on those who underwent it, creating generations of individuals who were as adept at navigating the challenges of life as they were the battleground. ## 4. Grocery Shopping In the Soviet Union, even the common ritual of grocery shopping, a typically mundane chore, was just a bit odd. For starters, the range of food stuffs was limited, and the few available were always in short supply, making the term "deficit" a customary part of the Soviet lexicon… except in Moscow that was, which, as the capital and most important city in the country, was always prioritised for grocery goods, becoming something of a commercial promised land – a utopia where all goods were available at all times… usually. This relative abundance triggered regular mass influxes of shoppers from surrounding towns and cities (and occasionally even other republics) on shopping expeditions colloquially referred to as "sausage trains". This phenomenon extended to other cities too. Moscow might have been the pièce de résistance of the Soviet Union, and therefore received the highest priority for supplying with grocery goods, but many other cities, such as republic capitals like Kyiv and Yerevan, and nuclear cities such as Pripyat, were also given a high priority for supplying with food, and so they received "sausage trains" of their own from their surrounding areas. But while the distribution of food in the Soviet Union might have been unusual, so too was its retailing. Far removed from the one-stop supermarkets of the West, the Soviet Union was characterised by highly specialized stores – bread stores, milk stores, fish stores, meat stores, and the like, each dedicated to a single type of product. But even these highly focused outlets had their idiosyncrasies; for instance, bread (when available) was highly subsidised by the state and therefore extremely cheap, which led to farmers buying it in excessive quantities to feed their livestock as it was cheaper than animal fodder (the difference of course going straight into their pockets). Similarly, milk products weren't typically pre-packaged, instead being cut or portioned out on the spot – leading to customers turning with all manner of bizarre household containers to fill up with milk. But perhaps the oddest, and certainly most famous aspect of Soviet grocery shopping was the endless queuing. This was a consequence of the sporadic supply of goods, as if you didn't know when the next supply was coming in, you made **damned** sure to get in line and get some whenever the opportunity presented itself. This shopping trend led to the wide proliferation of an essential Soviet shopping accessory – the *avoska*. This was a simple string bag that you **kept about your person at all times**, ensuring that should a passing store suddenly get a delivery of new stock, you were in position to pounce on it and be at the front of the queue – lest you return home to grab your bag, only to return minutes later and find the store already sold out. It wasn't all haggling and queues however, if you had connections, you were a king amongst men. All it took was a friend or family member to be working at a store, and you could skip the serpentine lines and just buy (or be given) your goods through the backdoor on demand. So prolific was this, that often a stores staff would put large amounts of their shipments aside for this explicit purpose – it not being rare at all for an entire stores staff to be in cahoots. Theft was also prolific from stores, but not by customers as you might imagine, but by the staff. Often times, items weren't even stolen for personal consumption, but for bartering, with it being simpler to just trade goods stolen from work rather than trying to procure things from official channels – have a chicken coop that needs painting? Well just go and see your uncle Yuri who works at the Antonov factory with a nice leg of five finger discounted lamb in hand, and he'll slip you some aircraft paint in return. Indeed, in the Soviet Union, it was often a jobs ability to open up alternative means of generating income and procuring goods that determined its desirability… and that segways nicely into our final chapter! ## 5. The Most Prestigious Job in the Union If we were to ask you to think of the most prestigious job one could aspire to in the Soviet Union, what would come to mind? Perhaps a cosmonaut, dangerously pushing the bounds of science while having the media treat you like a rock star? Or maybe an atomic scientist, using your elbow grease to single handedly protect your nations superpower status? Whatever you thought of, we are willing to bet it wasn't taxi driver. This may sound crazy, but in the Soviet era, driving a taxi was one of the most lucrative, and therefore one of the most prestigious jobs one could hope to land. At face value this proposition sounds absurd, as they only had a salary of around 150-200 rubles per month in the 1980s, pretty much dead-on average for the time, but you see, the great winnings afforded by this profession didn't come from the salary, but rather all the other things they could do off the books when they got their hands on a taxi. One common trick involved exploiting a loophole in the way that Soviet taxi companies were run. The way it worked was taxi drivers were given a quota of miles they had to cover and customers they had to pick up on any given day, when these quotas (which were often set by Taxi rank managers who were just as much on the fiddle as their drivers were) were met, the metre was turned off and all subsequent takings went straight into the drivers' pocket. Some drivers, those who rank managers were sticklers for the rules, achieved the same effect by manipulating their taxi meters with makeshift tools, reducing the kilometres driven to conveniently just around the minimum quota each day. The managers were no fools of course, they knew full well that every single taxi under them conveniently coming in at almost exactly the minimum mileage every day was a clear sign the driver was on the fiddle – but they could never prove anything concretely, and so it continued. Many drivers also made sure to hang around airports, train stations and hotels. The advantage here was twofold, firstly it provided a steady stream of long-distance fares that quickly ate up that minimum mileage, and secondly, it provided them with plenty of clueless foreigners who would be unaware of local taxi rates, and thus were prime for fleecing. Some savvy drivers also profited from Gorbachev's anti-alcohol campaign. As part of this campaign, the hours during which alcohol could be purchased were restricted, with most stores being forbidden to sell alcohol late at night. So, what did the taxi drivers do? They purchased vodka during the day and resold it at premium prices at night, exploiting a ready market of desperate consumers. Everyone knew this too, so the Taxi drivers didn't even have to patrol for customers… the customers came to them. There was also another, seedier 'extra' activity that some Soviet taxi drivers partook in under the cover of darkness – they worked as pimps, developing illicit partnerships with prostitutes, and leveraging their taxis as pimpmobiles. The setup was simple yet effective - the drivers would ferry prostitutes to and from their clients, providing a degree of safety and mobility that was otherwise hard to come by. In exchange, the drivers took a sizable cut from their earnings. This shadowy, nocturnal ecosystem thrived in the underbelly of the Soviet cities, facilitated by the ubiquitous yellow cabs that could discreetly blend into the urban landscape. It was a risky and morally dubious enterprise, but for these drivers, the allure of quick, substantial cash outweighed the legal and ethical considerations. These strategies may have been morally dubious, but they worked, and as a result taxi drivers were easily among the wealthiest citizens in the Soviet Union, a far cry from their western counterparts. ## Key Takeaways - Car ownership in the Soviet Union was rare and required navigating bureaucratic hurdles. - Air travel in the Soviet Union was expensive and limited to one state-owned airline. - Soviet education included mandatory military training for teenagers to prepare for service. - Grocery shopping in the Soviet Union involved long queues and specialized stores. - Taxi driving was one of the most lucrative jobs in the Soviet Union due to off-the-books earnings. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### How common was car ownership in the Soviet Union? Car ownership was a privilege enjoyed by only a select few in the Soviet Union. The average Soviet citizen in the 1980s earned around 2,000 rubles a year, which was not enough to afford even the most basic car, the VAZ-2101, which cost 6,000 rubles. ### What was the process of buying a car in the Soviet Union? The process involved asking your employer for permission, undergoing a government background check, and then waiting on a list for up to ten years due to the low number of cars produced. ### How expensive was air travel in the Soviet Union? Air travel was extremely expensive. For example, a one-way ticket from Moscow to Vladivostok cost 240 rubles in the 1980s, which was more than the average monthly salary. ### What was the food like on Aeroflot flights? The food on Aeroflot flights was notoriously bland, consisting mainly of chicken and rice. This became a running joke among frequent flyers. ### What was the Soviet education system like? The Soviet education system was known for its high standards, particularly in STEM subjects, and was free at all levels. However, it was also highly militarized, with initial military training introduced in the teenage years. ### What was grocery shopping like in the Soviet Union? Grocery shopping was characterized by limited food supplies and endless queuing. Specialized stores sold single types of products, and having connections could help skip the lines. ### What was the most prestigious job in the Soviet Union? Surprisingly, driving a taxi was one of the most lucrative and prestigious jobs due to the various off-the-books activities taxi drivers could engage in. ### How did taxi drivers in the Soviet Union make extra money? Taxi drivers exploited loopholes in the system, manipulated taxi meters, fleeced foreigners, resold vodka at premium prices, and even worked as pimps. ### What was the 'sausage train' phenomenon in the Soviet Union? The 'sausage train' phenomenon referred to mass influxes of shoppers from surrounding towns and cities to Moscow and other priority cities for grocery shopping due to the relative abundance of goods. ### What was the 'avoska' and why was it important? The 'avoska' was a simple string bag that Soviet citizens kept with them at all times to be ready to queue for goods when they became available. ## Sources - [Original Side Projects video: 5 Weird Things About Everyday Life in the Soviet Union](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hh6goO0EomU) ## Related Coverage Simon Whistler