Lists and Stories

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  The Lost Colony of Roanoke In 1587 a small colony was founded on an island off the eastern coast of North America. The settlement would have been the first permanent English colony in the New World, had the settlers not disappeared owing to unknown circumstances. The lost colony of Roanoke is one of the most notorious...
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  The Mechanical Turk: AI Marvel or Parlor Trick? In 1769 a Hungarian civil servant named Wolfgang von Kempelen went to a magic show in Vienna. It wasn’t just any magic show, though. It was being performed in the court of Empress Maria Theresa, and Kempelen, who had training in physics and mathematics, had been invited by the empress herself to...
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  The Mold that Wrecked Ireland The humble potato is native to the Peruvian-Bolivian Andes and was cultivated by the Incas as early as 1,800 years ago. Although the Incas domesticated hundreds of types of potatoes, the invading Spaniards only brought a handful of varieties back with them to Europe during the second half of the...
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  The Most Stolen Work of Art In 1432 the Flemish painter Jan van Eyck—with help from his brother Hubert—completed his masterpiece, Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, which was later put on display in St. Bavo’s Cathedral in Ghent, Belgium. The enormous work—measuring approximately 14.5 by 11.5 feet (4.4 by 3.5 meters) and weighing...
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  The Mysterious Death of Edgar Allan Poe Among his many literary achievements, Edgar Allan Poe is credited with creating the genre of detective fiction with his 1841 story The Murders in the Rue Morgue, paving the way for fictional sleuths from Sherlock Holmes to Nancy Drew. It is fitting, then, that the author’s own death in 1849 remains...
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  The Naked Mole Rat’s Latest Superpower Naked mole rats (Heterocephalus glaber) are unlikely to win any beauty contests in the animal world, but they have some amazing abilities. Naked mole rats belong to a group of about a dozen species of burrowing African rodents called blesmols. They have strong blunt heads with incisor teeth that...
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  The National Museum of Modern Art in Paris Has These 15 Notable Paintings The National Museum of Modern Art at the Pompidou Centre in Paris is one of the world’s most important museums housed in one of the world’s most iconic buildings. This list includes just 15 of the museum’s tens of thousands of artworks by a diverse range of artists. Earlier versions of the...
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  How the Nitrogen Cycle Works Nitrogen is the most plentiful element in Earth’s atmosphere and is a constituent of all living matter. It is essential to human survival as well as the survival of other animals and plants. But even while surrounded by nitrogen in the atmosphere, animals and plants are unable to make use of free...
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  The Oldest Human Ancestor In 2017, our family tree got a little taller: an international team of scientists identified well-preserved fossils of a primitive sea creature that they say is the oldest known ancestor of a wide range of animals, including humans. The microscopic creature—named Saccorhytus after its baglike body...
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  Why Charles Dickens Wrote A Christmas Carol Charles Dickens’s idea for A Christmas Carol originated in the north of England when he traveled to speak at the Manchester Athenaeum, a sort of philanthropic organization for the working poor—a population that was largely uneducated, powerless, exploited by factory owners, and ignored by everyone...
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  The Perils of an Early Spring Outside of the tropics, the spring season is a time of renewal as buds and leaves begin to sprout on trees and other plants, insects and other animals emerge from their winter slumber, birds return from their warm-weather refuges near the Equator, and the pace of outdoor cultural events picks up in...
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  The Perils of Industry: 10 Notable Accidents and Catastrophes The fires of industry have long been stoked with sweat and toil. But often, they claim an even higher human price. Britannica examines 10 of the world’s worst industrial disasters. This list was adapted from a post that originally appeared on the Britannica Blog. list, encyclopedia, britannica,...
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  The Philadelphia Museum of Art Is Home to These 12 Notable Paintings The Philadelphia Museum of Art was founded in 1876 as the Pennsylvania Museum and School of Industrial Art; it adopted its current name in 2025. Today its collection consists of more than 240,000 artworks. This list focuses on just 12 of its paintings. Earlier versions of the descriptions of these...
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  The Plot to Assassinate George Washington The history of the United States would not be the same without George Washington. During the American Revolution he was commander in chief of the American colonies’ military. He was the first president of the United States and set the precedent for a peaceful transition of power. His face is on...
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  The Real Science Behind Frankenstein For those of us who got our introduction to Dr. Frankenstein and his monster from the movies, reading Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus for the first time can be a surprising experience. The 1931 Universal Studios film is a classic in its own right, but it doesn’t...
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  The Riots of the Long, Hot Summer The “Summer of Love” in the United States took place alongside rising racial tensions in many of the country’s cities. Nearly 160 riots occurred across the United States in the summer of 1967. While young white Americans traveled to California and other locations to push against one set of cultural...
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  The Rise of the Machines: Pros and Cons of the Industrial Revolution The Industrial Revolution, the period in which agrarian and handicraft economies shifted rapidly to industrial and machine-manufacturing-dominated ones, began in the United Kingdom in the 18th century and later spread throughout many other parts of the world. This economic transformation changed...
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  The Seven Sacraments of the Roman Catholic Church The Roman Catholic Church has seven holy sacraments that are seen as mystical channels of divine grace, instituted by Christ. Each is celebrated with a visible rite, which reflects the invisible, spiritual essence of the sacrament. Whereas some sacraments are received only once, others require...
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  The Social Contract and Philosophy What, if anything, justifies the authority of the state? What are the proper limits of state power? Under what circumstances, if any, is it morally right to overthrow a state? Within Western political philosophy, one of the most influential approaches to such questions asserts that the state exists...
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  The Solar Eclipse That Made Albert Einstein a Science Celebrity In February 1919 two teams of astronomers from the Greenwich and Cambridge observatories set out for Sobral, Brazil, and Príncipe (an island off the coast of Africa), respectively, with sophisticated equipment that would allow them to photograph a solar eclipse as it cut across South America, the...