Today in 1889, inventor Louis Glass moved his "nickel-in-a-slot" into a saloon in San Francisco, beginning the age of the jukebox and giving the generations without smartphones and streaming services the chance to push a button and listen to a song. Plus: Chris Nikic has just become the first person with Down syndrome to finish an Ironman triathlon.
On this Election Day, here’s a story about an early and not-too-well-known effort to help count votes that came from none other than Thomas Edison. Plus: photographer Ryan Donnell has been documenting some of the most unusual polling places in the country.
Millions of people have back pain that just plain makes things harder to do. A team at Vanderbilt University has developed an exosuit that may ease all that back strain. Plus: how do you let an economist know he's won the Nobel Prize when you don't have his phone number? Have his fellow winner knock on his door in the middle of the night, of course.
Shoes only last for so long, but they're made from materials that last seemingly forever. Designer Shahar Asor has an alternate idea: shoes for kids with an expiration date. Plus: a pizza place in Brooklyn is letting customers order "comforting words" along with their food.
Shaving dates back tens of thousands of years, and it's gone in and out of fashion more times than we can count. And for a time in 1945, there was an idea to replace razors with a series of hair treatments involving X-rays (!) Plus: Hannah Grace is a makeup artist in the UK who has won lots of fans by turning herself into optical illusions.
UCLA scientists have made little thermoelectric coolers that are only 100 nanometers wide, so small the eye can't see them on its own. They're not quite refrigerators yet, but if you have little sodas or bags of grapes, maybe reach out anyway. Plus: on the International Day of Sign Languages, we celebrate the amazing world of sign language interpreters at heavy metal concerts.
The Cold Tube cools people off, similar to air conditioning, but using half the energy. Which sounds pretty cool. Plus: an experimental musician makes a delicious and funky new keyboard out of watermelon and kiwi.
On this day in 1988, the Ostry family of Bruno, Nebraska got 328 people to lift a barn - a real, actual barn - and moved it 110 feet by hand. That's some impressive crowdsourcing.
Many of us are getting ready for our weekly shopping trips over the weekend, figuring out what we want to put in our carts. Those carts, by the way, are all due to a guy in Oklahoma who, on this day in 1937, decided to take the shopping basket and give it wheels. Plus: on National Cheese Day we pay tribute to the hardest, chewiest cheese in the world: churrpi!
Today in 1967, the town of St. Paul, Alberta officially opened the world’s first UFO landing pad. So why is there a UFO landing pad in east central Alberta? Plus: on this date in 1941, a man called Richard Burgess received a patent for exercise wings - but don't worry, they weren't intended to get their users to fly.
