The first genetically engineered organism was created in 1973. That was just bacteria and not something that most everyday people would be excited about, but it set a precedent. Genetic engineering has grown in leaps and bounds since then, usually for the benefit of mankind. Scientific illiteracy and propaganda have made people suspicious of GMOs…
Author: Ian Fortey
The world is full of accidents that can lead to either great or terrible things. A terrible accident can cost a life while a serendipitous one can lead to a helpful discovery like penicillin. But not every accident needs to be high stakes. Some of them are just entertaining and firmly entrenched in the world…
You’re unlikely to find anyone who’s ever typed even one document who’s never made a typo. They happen all the time and not even because we don’t know how to spell or can’t type. It’s just that sometimes our brains get ahead of us. You already know what you planned to say, so the typo…
Usually when you hear about a genetic condition in the media, it’s presented as rare. You may be surprised to learn that around 60% of people will endure some kind of health problems related to a genetic condition. The symptoms can range from extremely mild to absolutely devastating. Many of the more common or severe…
Though we often think of amendments in relation to the US Constitution, any nation or state with a constitution has likely amended the document many times over its history. The state of Alabama developed a constitution in 1901 that they have amended 977 times as of 2022. So a constitution is by no means written…
Humans are very preoccupied with origins. Massive companies exist to trace your ancestry through DNA. When you meet new people, you like to know where they’re from. You want to know where the food you eat comes from, where people in positions of power were educated. We’ll even watch the origin of Spider-Man three separate…
Death is rarely the sort of thing that inspires wonder or delight. Typically, it’s an event that brings about sorrow and introspection. But every so often, a death occurs that’s just perplexing and weird. And when it comes to royalty, they seem to be subject to these unusual and inauspicious deaths more than the general…
A dog’s nose is remarkably more adept at its function than a human nose. Though it’s hard to give a precise numerical value to sense acuity, a dog’s nose is considered between 10,000 times and 100,000 times as sensitive as a human’s. An analogous example would be vision. At this level of acuity, for every…
Mankind has been fascinated by the idea of building something in our own image for centuries. Technology is only just catching up with our dreams these days and humanoid robots are slowly but surely becoming a reality. The kind of reality that pop culture assures us will kill us all. And it’s easy to laugh…
Price fixing is probably as old as industry itself. It occurs in almost any competitive business when two or more parties realize that, instead of competing with each other to make money, they can agree on setting fixed prices for their products to artificially drive them up, forcing consumers to spend more no matter what.…
Winning the lottery seems to be the definition of lucky. In the US, you have a one in 176 million shot of winning the Mega Millions lottery. State lotteries have odds of one in 42 million. So pulling this off is pretty dramatic. Despite that, some lottery winners have made the unfortunate discovery that money…
Doctors have been prescribing medicine for far longer than most people realize. Early prescriptions were etched on clay tablets over 4,000 years ago. The first drugstore was in Baghdad in the eighth century. Medicine has evolved greatly in that time, and the number of prescriptions doctors prescribe has skyrocketed. Upwards of 4.69 billion were filled…
The side hustle has become all too commonplace these days, with many people needing to secure a second income stream just to get by. Even people you’d think are pretty secure with their earnings, like these well known celebrities, have taken up side gigs. 10. John Malkovich Has His Own Clothing Line John Malkovich…
The Paycheck Protection Program was set up in 2020 by the US government as a business loan plan to assist businesses during the Covid-19 pandemic. A massive $953 billion was made available for employers so that they could continue to pay employees. That was what the money was supposed to be for. But with that…
There were 39,000 organ transplants performed in 2020. That’s a lot of potentially life-saving operations. But it’s also worth noting that there are 106,572 people on donor lists. So the need far outweighs the ability to fill it. That’s part of the reason why there are some rigorous standards in place to qualify for an…
No one likes to be sick, and in the age of Covid this hits home more than ever. The moment you get a cough or fever, you have to wonder if it’s just a cold or something worse. And even if it’s not a devastating and lethal illness, if you’re sick with anything, you’re going…
They say the truth is stranger than fiction and while that may not always be true, sometimes the real world is more than willing to throw a few curveballs our way. As an example, look no further than nature. Even something as simple as plantlife can become exceedingly bizarre and downright creepy when you start…
It’s not easy to make the sun go away. Aside from limited cloud cover, we only experience solar eclipses on a very infrequent basis. And there’s no sinister Mr. Burns out there making a sun blocking device that keeps us in eternal shade. That said, there have been a handful of times in history when…
When it comes to throwing everything at a wall and seeing what sticks, few organizations commit as hard as the military. They’re willing to try anything to see if it gets them an advantage, from using bats as explosives to giving psychic soldiers a try. Not every idea works, of course, and sometimes an idea…
We live in an age in which France is lining up flying taxis to help people navigate the next Olympic games and several world governments have stated plans to land a human on Mars within the next decade or so. It’s no wonder, then, that with this level of technology at our fingertips, people have…
Organized crime has become a very hard to understand facet of the modern world. Arguably, no one wants to support crime but, by the same token, we have a habit of elevating organized crime figures to a kind of hero status. You need to look no further than Tony Soprano to appreciate that. And while…
Sumerian is the oldest written language, dating back to 3100 BCE. Language itself is believed to have started somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 years ago, when humans developed the capacity to speak using what we understand as a voice box. And since that time it’s estimated humans have come up with an estimated 31,000 languages.…
Human history is full of examples of people claiming to have a link to the divine, to the world of the dead, to spirits and more. Alexander the Great visited the Oracle at Amun in 332 BC. Astrology was developed in the 3rd millennium BC in Mesopotamia. Fortune-telling goes back as far as 4000 BCE…
There’s no doubt humans are the most clever animals on the planet Earth. We developed tool making 2.6 million years ago and in the present we have Swiss army knives and cheese graters, so it’s all worked out well. While animals have yet to develop iPhones and vape pens, that doesn’t mean they haven’t developed…