It’s the day before the Kalends of September and you know what that means: it’s the birthday of Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, aka the emperor Caligula. This one is a special birthday even under a numerical system without a zero because if Caligula really had been the immortal deity he hallucinated himself to be, …
Month: August 2012
WWII-era bomb detonated in downtown Munich
Another unexploded Allied bomb from World War II was discovered in Germany on Monday, but unlike some of the earlier examples which were removed and defused without difficulty, this one was destined to play a more dramatic role. The 550-pound US bomb was found during construction work at the site of the late, lamented Schwabinger …
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Smithsonian buys Benjamin Franklin’s silk suit
A three-piece silk suit Benjamin Franklin wore in 1778 while serving as the United States of America’s first ambassador to France has been purchased by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. The iconic garment had been on loan to the museum from the Massachusetts Historical Society in Boston since the 1970s for conservation and …
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230-million-year-old mites found in Dolomite amber
Scientists have found two gall mites and a fly preserved in 230-million-year-old Late Triassic amber from the Dolomite Alps in northeastern Italy. These are the first arthropods (a phylum of invertebrates including insects, arachnids and crustaceans) found in amber from the Triassic. Although arthropods appear in the fossil record starting in the Early Cambrian period …
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Family receives soldier’s will left on a bus in 1944
In October of last year, employees at the National Express bus depot in Birmingham were clearing out the lost property office so it could be painted when they came across something that had been lost since 1944. When she moved a heavy cardboard box on top of a dusty old metal cabinet, Christine McDaid found …
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Historic Green-Wood Cemetery vandalized
Brooklyn’s historic Green-Wood Cemetery was brutally vandalized the night of Monday, August 20th. Grounds workers discovered during the course of their duties Tuesday morning that at least 43 memorials, monuments and gravestones had been intentionally damaged. Some of the damage was minor, disrespectful but fixable with a cleaning. Much of it was considerably more severe, …
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Experts dig under parking lot for Richard III’s grave
King Richard III, last Plantagenet king of England and the last king of England to die in battle, was buried exactly 527 years ago on August 25th, 1485. Today, on the anniversary of his burial, archaeologists from the University of Leicester will try to dig him up again. It’s the first archaeological excavation ever to …
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The last XXIV hours of Pompeii on Twitter today!
Today is the 1933rd anniversary* of the eruption of Vesuvius that destroyed the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum. Starting at 8:00 AM MT, Pliny the Elder will tweet the eruption live just as it all went down. FOLLOW HIM! I felt this was a fitting occasion for my first tweet, which was actually a retweet. …
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Jesus Monkey restoration eclipses original
On Monday, August 6th, a group from the Centro de Estudios Borjanos (CESBOR), an institution dedicated to research and support of the history and culture of the small town of Borja, outside Zaragoza in the autonomous region of Aragon, northeastern Spain, visited a local church to examine the condition of a certain fresco. The painting …
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Unknown MLK recording found in Nashville attic
A previously unknown interview given by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1960 has been discovered in the attic of a Nashville home. Stephon Tull was looking through old boxes of his father’s when he came across a reel labeled “Dr. King interview, Dec. 21, 1960.” He borrowed an old reel-to-reel player from a friend …
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