Boston's Skinny House is four stories tall with rooms only 10 feet wide, and was reportedly built just to block another house's view of the harbor. "Spite houses" have been regularly built for these kinds of reasons, it turns out.
Sputnik IV, to be specific, had some trouble getting back to Earth as planned. Today in 1962, pieces of the Soviet spacecraft ended up crashing into a street in Manitowoc, Wisconsin - so the town started holding a SputnikFest to celebrate their place in space history.
Today in 2016, Celeron, New York unveiled and dedicated a statue of its most famous resident, TV legend Lucille Ball. It took the place of a different statue from 2009 that had been nicknamed "Scary Lucy."
In the old days, tennis balls were white, but when documentary film legend David Attenborough pushed the BBC to carry the Wimbledon tournament in color, the tennis world realized those balls weren't showing up very well for home viewers.
As sea levels rise, small island nations like Kiribati face some tough choices. A European design studio has an idea that might help: sustainable buildings that can collect rainwater, generate electricity, and help grow food. And they float.
On this day in 1917, a massive storm destroyed most of the small village of Hallsands, in southern England. Nearly everyone in town moved away after that, but one resident, Elizabeth Prettejohn, stayed for the rest of her life, until the mid 1960s.
A lock of Abraham Lincoln's hair just sold for $81,000 at auction, a reminder that a) people will pay lots of money for lots of things, and b) hair was a pretty important keepsake in the 19th century - people back then even made it into art.
Our entire show is based on the idea that we might say something interesting enough that it might get you to perk up your ears, figuratively speaking. Or, as a team at Saarland University has found, maybe not so figuratively speaking.
Today marks one hundred years since the community of Enterprise, Alabama, put up a very special monument in the middle of town: a statue of a Greek woman holding a boll weevil, an invasive pest that had ruined the local cotton crop. Wait, what?
A project is tracking steppe eagles through text messages. But the eagles have been crossing into other countries and their trackers are using roaming data!
A mission to Mars would take years of travel - but today's space food doesn't last long enough. Scientists at Washington State University are working on a way to fix that.
