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 Slightly Different Graduation Ceremony Mid-year graduates at Middlebury College in Hancock, Vermont, celebrate their graduation in a unique way by skiing down the college’s ski slope for their graduation procession, all while donned in their caps and gowns. The tradition goes back to the 1970s when the college began offering admission to students in…

A Different Perspective on the Pyramids of Giza The Pyramids of Giza are the last remaining Seven Wonders of the Ancient World and the best-known monument in Egypt. They include the Great Pyramid, the Pyramid of Khafre, and the Pyramid of Menkaure. The Great Sphinx of Giza is also located here on the Giza Plateau. …

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? …

The Kopp-Etchells Effect A curious phenomenon occurs when military helicopters land in dusty desert conditions. The blades produce an incredible halo of light at night as they hit the sand and the dust. Observers and pilots had no specific name for what was causing the halos, but there were many theories. Photographer and…

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…

A City That Lost Its Letter Cleveland, Ohio, was founded on July 22, 1796, and named after a surveyor of the Connecticut Land Company named Moses Cleaveland. But when did the city of Cleveland lose its “a?” One explanation was that the “a” got taken off by one of the city’s newspapers, the Cleveland Advertiser, which…