Gray Area in San Francisco hands its Grand Theater to the 1990s techno-counterculture on August 12 and 13, when R.U. Sirius and the crowd behind the cyberculture magazine Mondo 2000… Read the rest of the article: Cyberpunks, mutants, and mondoids gather in San Francisco in August

In the 19th-century Kingdom of Travancore, in what is now Kerala, India, every lower-caste person owed a poll tax starting around age 14. The tax on men was called talakkaram,… Read the rest of the article: The legend of India's "breast tax" and the woman who defied it

In 2005, scholars revealed a fragment of papyrus 115 containing the earliest known copy of the passage in the Book of Revelation that names the Number of the Beast. It… Read the rest of the article: The oldest surviving Book of Revelation says the beast's number is 616

In June 1979, a single called "Ready 'n' Steady" by an artist listed only as "D.A." spent three weeks on Billboard's Bubbling Under the Hot 100 chart, peaking at number… Read the rest of the article: A song charted on Billboard in 1979 without ever being released

In November 1997,  the world learned that the byte sequence F0 0F C7 C8 would stop any original Pentium, Pentium MMX, or Pentium OverDrive. The Pentium F00F bug made it so that any… Read the rest of the article: Four bytes could freeze any Pentium in 1997

Early in Zelda II: The Adventure of Link (1987), the player walks into a house in the town of Ruto, where a bearded man in a purple tunic announces: "I… Read the rest of the article: "I am Error" was never a mistranslation — it was a programmer's joke

In early 1900s Germany, a math teacher named Wilhelm von Osten toured the country with Clever Hans, a horse who could apparently add, subtract, multiply, divide, tell time, and answer questions… Read the rest of the article: The math-solving horse who fooled scientists still haunts AI research

Look closely at a lot of 15th- and 16th-century European portraits and you'll find a housefly sitting on the frame, the sitter's sleeve, or a page of an open book… Read the rest of the article: Renaissance painters kept adding a realistic fly to their portraits

John I of France, called the Posthumous, was born on November 15, 1316, and died on November 19, 1316. He's the youngest person ever to be king of France, the… Read the rest of the article: France once had a king who reigned for four days — his entire life

In 1971 two Northrop-trained engineers in Van Nuys set out to build a flying car called the AVE Mizar, and the design was about as literal as it sounds: they… Read the rest of the article: The time two guys bolted a Ford Pinto to a Cessna and called it a flying car

The idea that a particular kind of weather — hot, still, and heavy — arrives just before an earthquake is old and stubborn. One geologist has called earthquake weather one of the… Read the rest of the article: The stubborn old belief that certain weather precedes earthquakes

The International System of Units capitalizes a unit's symbol only when the unit is named for a person, which leaves the liter with a lowercase l that is easy to… Read the rest of the article: A chemist invented a fake Frenchman to justify capital L for liters

In 1946, with Britain still on wartime rationing and short of cooking fat, Clement Attlee's government approved a plan to plant peanuts across 3 million acres of Tanganyika, a stretch… Read the rest of the article: Britain's £36 million peanut farm harvested less than it planted

Sometimes someone proposes removing all time zones and using one clock for the whole planet. Then the time is the same everywhere at the same moment. When the clock shows 08:00 in London, it also shows 08:00 in New York and Beijing. But in New York the sky is dark, as it usually is at 03:00. In China it is late in the afternoon. This idea sounds strange, but many groups already use one clock. Airlines, militaries, the International Space Station, and agencies such as NOAA all use one global clock, UTC. They do this because an error in the calculation between two time zones is dangerous in aviation or on a spacewalk. Arthur C. Clarke suggested the one-clock idea in 1976. An economist and an astrophysicist at Johns Hopkins University made it part of a proposal to change the calendar. But this system does not remove the problem. Each region still opens its shops, starts its schools, and eats lunch at the UTC hour that matches its daylight. So the "business hours" are 13:00 to 21:00 in one place and 22:00 to 06:00 in another place. This system replaces time-zone offsets with local customs, and those customs do the same work. Also, the date changes in the middle of the afternoon in parts of the Americas and the Pacific. Previously:• Scientists explain our dislike of Daylight Savings Time

For many centuries, people have seen balls of light during thunderstorms. These balls are from the size of a pea to several meters across, and they move through the air… Read the rest of the article: For centuries people have watched glowing orbs drift through storms

OpenAI runs a test where it switches off its models' safety brakes and dares them to break into things, to see how dangerous they're getting. Last week the models took… Read the rest of the article: To ace a hacking test, AI broke out and hacked a real company

In 1675, the French astronomer Jean Picard noticed something strange while carrying his mercury barometer through a dark room: the mercury glowed as it sloshed around the bulb. Two centuries… Read the rest of the article: A YouTuber rebuilt a mercury light bulb discovered in 1675

When you open a credit card, you probably expect your home address expecting it to stay with your bank. According to 404 Media, it doesn't — the address travels through… Read the rest of the article: Open a credit card, and ICE learns where you live

RAF pilots flying over the Middle East in the 1920s kept seeing huge shapes laid out on the ground: two long stone walls converging into an enclosure, with a tail.… Read the rest of the article: RAF pilots spotted 6,000 stone traps invisible from the ground

The Darvaza gas crater in Turkmenistan's Karakum Desert — 60 to 70 meters across, 30 meters deep, and burning since 1971 — earned the nickname "Door to Hell" thanks to… Read the rest of the article: Turkmenistan's "Gates of Hell" crater is finally going out after 54 years