Title: All Articles & News Stories

If you want to see the right way to stick it to the man, you’ve got to look at the greats of classical music.

Reader Brian wants to know: Why is Acme the stock company name used in cartoons and other pop culture?

Alternate history, long popular with fiction writers, has also been explored by historians and journalists. Here are some of their intriguing conclusions.

Alcohol is a vasodilator. When you have a drink, the volume of blood brought to the skin’s surface increases, making you feel warm.

The smoke alarms in my apartment building are both ridiculously sensitive and ridiculously loud. They regularly go off even when there’s no smoke, and I often have to scramble up on top of a chair to reset them because a pot of boiling water is producing

Next time you smile politely at a stranger, think of a gorilla baring his big pointy fangs while looking like he's just heard the best joke of his life. The grin doesn't mean what you might think—it's actually the great ape's equivalent of politely

First off, popcorn isn’t just any old corn. It’s a cultivated strain of flint corn known as zea mays everta. Its kernel is also a whole grain—it consists of the bran (the hull or outer covering), the germ (the “embryo” that germinates into a plant), and t

The most famous abbey in England right now is not actually an abbey at all — it’s a castle. Highclere Castle is the stand-in for Downton Abbey, the eponymous location of the mega-popular British series about an upstairs-downstairs household in the early 1

In 1793, the French smashed the old clock in favor of French Revolutionary Time: a 10-hour day, with 100 minutes per hour, and 100 seconds per minute.

Installment #51: On January 4, 1913, Count Alfred von Schlieffen, the architect of Germany’s plan of attack on France, died in bed of natural causes at the age of 79—thus missing, by just 19 months, the flawed implementation of his flawed plan, and the en

Fictional characters, and even real-life folks, often talk about animals and people—particularly snarling dogs and knife-wielding lunatics—being able to “smell fear” on people. No one ever seems to be able to describe just what fear smells like, though.

In 1662, a 19-year-old Isaac Newton started carrying a leather-bound journal, which he used to track finances and work out math problems. But he also used it to hide something secret. On two pages, Newton scribbled a cryptic code, a code that went unsolve