quote [ Behind the transformative star photographs of the 1880s lay a complex collaboration between astronomers and engravers. ]

quote [ The wine key helped make airtight wine bottles?and modern wine culture?possible. ]

quote [ In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the United States conducted one of the most ambitious experiments in human undersea habitation: Project Tektite. ]

quote [ How the shipping container, a dominant force in ocean shipping, came from a truck driver whose invention proved to be too good at its job. ]

quote [ In mid-19th century Italy, two eccentric aristocrats set forth on parallel projects: constructing ostentatious castles in a Moorish Revival style. Iván Moure Pazos tours the psychedelic chambers of Rochetta Mattei, optimised for electrohomeopathic healing, and Castello di Sammezzano, an immersive, orientalist fever dream. ]

quote [ Ash from the explosion may have led to crop failure and famine in southern Europe, leading some Italian cities to import grain?which possibly carried fleas infected with the bubonic plague ]

quote [ On a freezing January night in 1393, music and laughter filled the Hôtel Saint-Pol, a sprawling palace on the right bank of Paris. The French court had gathered for a masquerade ball in honour of a lady-in-waiting?s remarriage ? a diversion meant to lift the spirits of King Charles VI, a 24-year-old monarch already shadowed by bouts of mental instability. ]

quote [ Researchers are uncovering what they think is the metropolis of Marsmanda, an iron-making city that could rewrite the history of the famed trade route ]

quote [ In March 1923, when British mountaineer George Leigh Mallory was touring the United States to raise money for an expedition to Mount Everest planned for the following year, a journalist asked why he wanted to climb Everest. He famously replied, ?Because it?s there.? ]

quote [ The legend of the Edmund Fitzgerald lives on, thanks to Gordon Lightfoot?s immortal song and a fresh crop of memes. ]