Slavutych (Ukrainian: Славу́тич) is a city in northern Ukraine, purposely built for the evacuated personnel of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant after the 1986 disaster that occurred near the city of Pripyat. Geographically located within the Ripky Raion…

Flossie Wong-Staal (born August 27, 1947), née Wong Yee Ching (Chinese: 黄以静; pinyin: Huáng Yǐjìng), is a Chinese-American virologist and molecular biologist. She was the first scientist to clone HIV and determine the function of its genes, which was a major…

NASA needed a supercomputer to get us to the Moon, and it had to be generations ahead of the state of the art at the time.

Gerald Rudolph Ford Jr. (born Leslie Lynch King Jr.; July 14, 1913 – December 26, 2006) was an American politician who served as the 38th president of the United States from August 1974 to January 1977. Before his accession to the presidency, Ford served…

John H. White (born 1945 in Lexington, North Carolina) is an American photojournalist, recipient of a Pulitzer Prize in 1982.

Orchard mason bees are small bees native to North America and are very good pollinators for flowers and fruit trees. Instructions for the Mason Bee House

Virginia Eliza Clemm Poe (née Clemm; August 15, 1822 – January 30, 1847) was the wife of American writer Edgar Allan Poe. The couple were first cousins and publicly married when Virginia Clemm was 13 and Poe was 27. Biographers disagree as to the nature of…

The animated movie about two Spix's Macaws saving their species ends happily. The real world version doesn't

School bus yellow is a color that was specifically formulated for use on school buses in North America in 1939. The color is now officially known in Canada and the U.S. as National School Bus Glossy Yellow and was originally called National School Bus Chrome.…

The 50 "gold" coins and pottery had earlier been buried by the crew of the BBC show Detectorists.

Siegfried Samuel Marcus (18 September 1831 – 1 July 1898) was a German inventor. Marcus was born of Jewish descent in Malchin, in the Grand Duchy of Mecklenburg-Schwerin. He made several petrol-powered vehicles, the first one in 1864, while living in Vienna…

For most Asians, lactose intolerance is something we just have to live with. Embedded in our DNA is our propensity to rush to the nearest restroom after [...]

The Mathematical manunoscripts of Karl Marx consist mostly of Karl Marx's attempts to understand the foundations of infinitesimal calculus, from around 1873–1883. A Russian edition edited by Sofya Yanovskaya was eventually published in 1968, and an English…

Laurence Kim Peek (November 11, 1951 – December 19, 2009) was an American savant. Known as a "megasavant", he had an exceptional memory, but he also experienced social difficulties, possibly resulting from a developmental disability related to congenital…

Missing Step in Man, Monkey and Guinea Pig required for the Biosynthesis of L-Ascorbic Acid

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Decades ago, many colleges required students to pass a swim test in order to graduate. Today, only a few cling to this tradition, Dartmouth being one of them.

Stefan Mandel used an algorithm to win the lottery 13 times. But his biggest jackpot still came down to luck.

Sam Houston: Sam Houston, U.S. lawyer and politician, a leader in the Texas Revolution (1834–36). He later served as president (1836–38; 1841–44) of the Republic of Texas and was influential in Texas becoming a U.S. state in 1845. The city of Houston is named…

441 votes and 79 comments so far on Reddit