quote [ The job of an executioner in medieval England was detestable. Nobody invited them to their homes. They were not allowed to go to the church, and some schools did not even take the children of executioners. ]

quote [ On a rocky outcrop high above the Mulde River in the small town of Colditz in Saxony, Germany, sits the massive Colditz Castle. Once the former residence of kings of Saxony, this fortress was turned into a maximum security prisoner-of-war camp during World War 2 for incarcerating incorrigible Allied officers who had repeatedly attempted to escape from other camps. ]

quote [ In the January 1861 issue of The Dental Cosmos, the first major journal of American dentistry, a Pennsylvania dentist named WH Atkinson documented three cases of a remarkable phenomenon that he had encountered over a period of forty years in practice. ]

quote [ We live in a world where some tasks would be impossible to do if not for absurdly dedicated hobbyists. If you own a metal detector, you know what we mean. ]

quote [ For the first time, hundreds of photos, lantern slides and glass plate negatives are available to the public ]

quote [ Two thousand-year-old object found at Roman fort in Northumberland in 1992 has been reassessed by archaeologists ]

quote [ The journey of the ?Love Tester,? from serious-seeming science to the penny-arcade amusements. ]

quote [ Some American companies are such a part of our everyday lives, they?re taken for granted, the likes of Apple, Microsoft and Google for example. But there is another company that although it can be seen everywhere, no-one notices. ]

quote [ For a very short five years, Wilmington, Los Angeles, was connected to the Willmore area of Long Beach by a street railway, initially pulled by a horse and later by a steam engine. ]

quote [ As far as islands go, Manhattan is one of the most famous and instantly recognisable. But if you were to charter a boat and sail around its coastline and through New York?s natural harbour you?d come across many more islands so small that hardly anyone knows are there. ]