The Elephant Who Took 3,000 Doses On August 3, 1962, researchers Louis Jolyon West and Chester Pierce dart-fired 297 milligrams of LSD into Tusko, a 14-year-old, roughly 7,055-pound (3,200 kg) Indian elephant at Oklahoma City Zoo. They were testing whether LSD could trigger musth, the violent state male elephants periodically enter, and scaled the dose … Read more
A Royal Lunch and a Trip to Orbit Here’s a pairing that shouldn’t work: a king and a hot dog. In 1939, Franklin D. Roosevelt served hot dogs to King George VI at the Roosevelt family home in Hyde Park, New York, a meal said to have made headlines on both sides of the Atlantic. … Read more
Terror in the Dark In March 1898, British engineers arrived at the Tsavo River in what is now Kenya to build a railway bridge for the Uganda Railway. Roughly 3,000 workers, mostly Indian laborers along with local Africans, camped along the riverbank. Soon after, two maneless male lions began slipping into camp at night, dragging … Read more
The Pouch in the Alley Picture a gem exposition, tables lined with velvet trays, dealers murmuring over loupes. Mrs. Emery’s table held her usual mix: aquamarines, a handful of so-so sapphires, garnets, bloodstones, and the piece she was proudest of, a flawless emerald. Then came the noise. A minor traffic accident outside pulled the whole … Read more
The Man Who Invented Sound Recording… and Sealed It Away Alexander Graham Bell is famous for the telephone, but through the 1880s he also ran the Volta Laboratory in Washington, D.C. testing methods for capturing and reproducing voice, partly because his wife was deaf. Bell and his collaborators gave the Smithsonian more than 400 discs … Read more
The Storm Started Losing Pieces In early 2019, people aiming backyard telescopes at Jupiter noticed something off. The Great Red Spot looked stretched and lopsided, nothing like its usual tidy oval. By April, observers described thin streams of reddish material peeling off the storm’s edge and drifting into surrounding clouds, as if the Spot were … Read more
“Just Follow My Voice” You know the scene: the pilot is down, a passenger with zero flight hours gets handed a headset, and a calm voice on the radio talks them through landing the plane. Hollywood has sold this fantasy since Airport 1975 (Universal Pictures, October 18, 1974), in which a small aircraft crashes into … Read more
The Drawing Nobody Could Explain Picture a comment section going quiet, then exploding with guesses, because nobody had the faintest idea what they were looking at. That was the scene on Neatorama.com on December 20, 2010, when the site posted a sketch by inventor and cartoonist Steven M. Johnson: a tangle of parts that looked … Read more
Element 120: The Periodic Table’s Next Impossible Row The Element That Doesn’t Exist Yet Element 120 doesn’t exist. Not yet. Chemists call it unbinilium, symbol Ubn, a placeholder name for something no lab has ever produced. If it’s made, it will be the first atom ever to sit in the periodic table’s eighth row, a … Read more
Dinner at 20,000 Riel a Kilo In 2008, a kilogram of beef in Cambodia cost 20,000 riel, roughly $4.88 at the time. In Koh Thom district, near the border with Vietnam, many families didn’t cut meat from the table, they swapped it. Spicy, garlic-fried field rat became the dish of the moment, sold openly at … Read more