Sorry, Simpsons fans: the world's greatest burper is neither "The Critic" Jay Sherman nor Eudora Welty, but an Italian guy in a wrestling mask who calls himself Rutt Mysterio.
Autonomous robot boats are a thing! Over time, researchers have taught them to row themselves gently down the stream and to connect to each other autonomously - soon they could help clean the water or even turn themselves into temporary footbridges.
A research team at Imperial College London has developed food freshness sensors that can be embedded in the packaging of meat and fish and detect the gases that show up when food spoils.
Last week Southern California saw a bloom of ladybugs so big it showed up on radar! As it turns out, there's a whole field of science called aeroecology that's using our increasingly accurate radar to track insects, birds and bats.
Today is the start of the Banana Split Festival in Wilmington, Ohio, where the banana split was born. Of course, if you were in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, locals would point out their town had banana splits three years before Wilmington.
Researchers at Washington State University say they’ve found a way to make jet fuel out of something the world throws out in great quantities every day: household plastic.
Storm damage isn't cool, weird or awesome, but the ways we spot storms and warn people about them are pretty great. And they've come a long way from the time when the US Army Signal Corps banned anyone from using the word “tornado” in forecasts so as not to scare the public!
Attractions - especially weird ones - are a time-honored way to drum up business from people who are at best casual baseball fans, and lately that's extended to team names, including the Jacksonville Jumbo Shrimp, the Vermont Lake Monsters, the Binghamton Rumble Ponies and the Rocket City Trash Pandas.
A project to build a clock that will run for 10,000 years got us thinking about how we measure time - and amazingly, 10,000 years is more time than has passed since the invention of hours, minutes and seconds.
On this day in 1992, John Thompson of North Dakota lost his arms in a farm accident. He then got himself emergency care in time so that he got his arms back.
Today in 1965, a landmark moment in the history of televised profanity: an f-bomb live on the BBC! We'll look back at some choice moments where people used choice words on the air.
Today in 2019, a woman in Sweden rose to an unthinkable occasion: she rescued all six of her children, including three under 5 years old, while their house burned down.
Supposedly this month in 1891 a sailor named James Bartley was swallowed by a whale and lived! But The Straight Dope took a closer look and found this story was almost certainly too good to be true.
The phrase “jump the shark” is now a shorthand we use for the moment a show or a story turns absolutely ridiculous and keeps heading downhill. But why the heck did it happen at all?
