Frank Zappa is back out on tour. Now if you’re scratching your saying, wait, isn’t Frank Zappa dead? Well, yes, but this is the era of hologram concert tours!
Everything is connected to everything else - and there's no better example of that than this week's news that a song by Ariana Grande is putting money into the state pension program in Michigan.
Tired? Smoke breaks. Inspired? Scent breaks. Researchers from the University of Pittsburgh and Brown University are looking at whether pleasant smells can help curb cravings for nicotine.
If you’re mourning Notre Dame cathedral today, well, you’re not the only one. Here’s a story from its long history that might make you feel a little more hopeful.
Tax Day gives a lot of us the blues - which, as it turns out, actually kind of works. April 15 is the birthday of the Empress of the Blues, Bessie Smith.
During the Cold War, the CIA flew U2 planes all over the globe, to see what the Soviets were up to. Two researchers just went back through those photos for archaeology's sake - and found a lot.
The surest sign of spring is neither the calendar nor the weather. It’s the reappearance of Peeps, which are the stuff of candy and cultural legend now.
Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville invented a way to document sound more than a decade before Thomas Edison developed his wax cylinders. So why isn't he remembered as the king of recording?
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?
