Zack Proser wrote up everything he knows about public speaking after years of giving tech talks. The most useful section is on propranolol, the beta blocker concert musicians have been… Read the rest of the article: Propranolol doesn't kill public speaking dread — it just stops your body from becoming a shaky mess

At 3:17 a.m. on January 30, 1948, radio officer Robert Tuck aboard the Avro Tudor Star Tiger acknowledged receiving a bearing from Bermuda — and was never heard from again.… Read the rest of the article: Star Tiger sent its last radio message at 3:17 a.m. in 1948. No wreckage was ever found.

Since at least 1960, submarine personnel in Antarctic waters had been hearing a mechanical, repetitive quacking — pulses between 60 and 100 Hz arriving every 1.6 to 3.1 seconds. They… Read the rest of the article: Submarine crews heard a mysterious quacking in Antarctic waters for 50 years before anyone figured out what it was

On May 18, 1935, the Maxim Gorky — the largest aircraft in the world, a Soviet eight-engine behemoth with a 63-meter wingspan roughly equal to a modern Boeing 747 —… Read the rest of the article: A stunt pilot doing loops around the Soviet propaganda megaplane crashed into it, killing 45

The "Paul is dead" rumor spread from college gossip in 1966 to an international phenomenon by October 1969. The first published article ran September 17 in the Drake Times-Delphic student… Read the rest of the article: Fred LaBour invented most of the 'Paul is dead' clues as a joke and was stunned when the world believed them

February 30 has occurred exactly once in recorded history. In 1712, the Swedish Empire — midway through a botched switch from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar — had already… Read the rest of the article: February 30 happened once, in 1712 Sweden — and May 35 still happens every year in China

For almost three centuries, Scottish juries had a third verdict available to them alongside "guilty" and "not guilty." "Not proven" was an acquittal with a legal effect identical to not… Read the rest of the article: Scotland abolished its 300-year-old 'not proven' verdict — the one Walter Scott called 'that bastard verdict'

In March 2014, the funk band Vulfpeck released Sleepify — ten tracks of silence, each just over 30 seconds long. The band encouraged fans to stream it on a loop… Read the rest of the article: Vulfpeck gamed Spotify with a silent album and funded a free concert tour

On the evening of October 19, 1970, an Air Force Academy cadet and his fiancée parked near a relative's house in Burke, Virginia. A man in a white suit with… Read the rest of the article: The Bunny Man was a real hatchet-wielder in 1970 Virginia — but the internet turned him into something else entirely

On or after October 8, 2009, Bobby and Sherilynn Jamison and their 6-year-old daughter Madyson disappeared from a remote area of Latimer County, Oklahoma. Their pickup truck was found abandoned… Read the rest of the article: An Oklahoma family vanished in 2009 with $32,000 cash, a trancelike home video, and no explanation

After Apollo 11 in 1969, President Nixon had 250 commemorative plaques made, each containing about 50 milligrams of lunar dust — roughly four rice-sized particles — mounted in acrylic plastic… Read the rest of the article: Nixon gave Spain moon rocks from Apollo 11. Spain lost them.

In the 1950s, while helping invent computers, John Von Neumann was puzzling over the minimum requirements for a self-reproducing machine. Kevin Kelly has been asking the same question about civilization:… Read the rest of the article: Kevin Kelly's plan for the smallest library to restart civilization

Daniel Sanchez-Estrada didn't attend the Fourth of July protest at the Prairieland ICE detention facility in Alvarado, Texas. His wife called him from a prison phone afterward and asked him… Read the rest of the article: A man got 30 years for moving boxes of left-wing zines

Dust mites eat your dead skin, leave behind microscopic fecal pellets loaded with allergens, and those allergens have a half-life upward of ten years. They are in mattresses, curtains, and… Read the rest of the article: Dust mite allergens have a half-life of 10 years, but a $40 dehumidifier fixes it

In 1997, Robert J. Bradbury proposed the matrioshka brain — a hypothetical megastructure of "immense computational capacity powered by a Dyson sphere." The name comes from matryoshka nesting dolls. The… Read the rest of the article: A computer the size of a star would nest Dyson spheres like Russian dolls

In 1971, Ron Morehead and Al Berry set up camp in the Sierra Nevada mountains to record evidence of Bigfoot. Morehead was a believer. Berry was a skeptic looking to… Read the rest of the article: In 1971 two campers recorded what a Navy linguist calls a nonhuman language in the Sierra Nevadas

At 2:25 a.m. on February 25, 1942 — less than three months after Pearl Harbor — air raid sirens sounded across Los Angeles County. A total blackout was ordered. At… Read the rest of the article: In 1942 Los Angeles fired 1,440 anti-aircraft rounds at nothing

Russia currently has 44 publicly acknowledged closed cities with a combined population of approximately 1.5 million people. The government calls them "closed administrative-territorial formations," or ZATO. Seventy-five percent are run… Read the rest of the article: Russia has 44 secret cities with 1.5 million people that don't appear on public maps

In 1897, The Strand Magazine — the London monthly best known as the home of Sherlock Holmes — published a photograph of a polished green jade specimen under the heading… Read the rest of the article: The Strand once published a jade specimen worth exactly one fat man

In April 1993, Aum Shinrikyo — the cult that would gas the Tokyo subway two years later — purchased Banjawarn Station, a remote sheep ranch covering 404,680 hectares (about a… Read the rest of the article: A Japanese doomsday cult bought a million-acre Australian sheep ranch to test sarin gas