The FIFA World Cup Trophy is one of the most coveted and expensive trophies in sports. It is made of 18-karat gold and valued at $250,000. But the winning team of the World Cup doesn’t get to keep the trophy, and players get medals instead for first, second, and third…

As we have probably often experienced, memories are not always as exact as we remember them. They can be highly suggestible and influenced by others’ recollections, pictures, the passage of time, or how we might have perceived something to happen when it didn’t. …

George R. Lawrence was an innovative photographer in the late 1800s who designed the world’s largest camera to take the largest panoramic photograph possible of a new and exquisite train called the Alton Limited. The huge camera was known as the Mammoth Camera. Lawrence had already become known for his…

Traveling around the world in the late 1800s was a challenging task, especially when trying to recreate the travels in the famous Jules Verne novel Around the World in Eighty Days. But one American journalist and a rival she didn’t know about took on the feat during the time period…

Mount Everest was named after Sir George Everest, a previous British Surveyor General of India, in 1865. But Everest didn’t even want it named after him, and it’s believed he never saw the mountain. In the span of many decades during the early 1800s, the Great Trigonometric Society of British…

A hot dog cart might be as much a part of New York City as the Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building, but what does it cost to run a portable eatery in one of the most expensive cities in the world? Like everything else in New York…

Astronomers have long wondered where comets came from. Where would something made of frozen gases, rock, and dust originate only to be observed and then reappear after a very long time or sometimes never to be seen again? …

On July 11, 1986, a military airplane crashed at 2:00 AM in the Sequoia National Forest in California, killing the pilot and causing a 150-acre brush fire. It was a crash the United States Air Force didn’t want anyone to know about. The reason was because the airplane that had…

We’re all probably familiar with the canned laughter that takes place on television sitcoms, but how and why did this laughter, known as a laugh track, get started? Added laughter in television shows can be traced back to a sound engineer named Charley Douglass, who worked at CBS in the…