On or around this day in 1922, a pilot wrote the first skywriting message in the United States. It was a way to demonstrate an advertising technique that would be a big part of business for the next few decades.
Today's the birthday of a mystery author known to millions of kids, Donald J Sobol. He wrote the Encyclopedia Brown series, about a 10 year old detective who solved cases because he knew, as his nickname suggested, all sorts of unusual and obscure facts in the era way before the internet.
Today in 1979, a story that sounds like it came straight out of a movie: two families in Communist East Germany escaped to the West by making and flying a hot air balloon.
A research team at the University of Rochester and the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands has found a way to bioprint a strong, flexible and eco-friendly material that could one day serve as fabric for t-shirts, energy storage for space missions and much more.
Today in 2019 a runner in the London Marathon set a world record, though it wasn’t recognized as such right away. Here's the story of Jessica Anderson, who was looking to break the world record for fastest marathon run in a nurse’s uniform.
Champ and Major are the new White House dogs, but there have been lots of pets at the president's house over the years, including Rebecca the raccoon, who definitely left her mark on the place during Calvin Coolidge's presidency.
The sunk-cost fallacy - when we keep at something even when it’s really not worth it anymore, just because we’ve already put so much time or effort in - is a part of human nature. But new research shows it's also a part of the nature of - this is the best part - video game playing monkeys.
We use hundreds of billions of latex gloves a year, for a lot of important reasons. Scientists at Cranfield University in the UK are developing an eco-friendly latex glove that uses less energy to produce and will biodegrade in weeks rather than centuries.
This week marks two years since the end of a lawsuit over who had the world record in car sales! Not that we're short on stories these days about people disputing numbers.
To mark our 400th episode, we have stories of some of the people who have set world records for screaming! Two of them are educators, though I don't think they practice on their students.
The community of Asbestos, Quebec has decided to rename itself. Now it's up to the residents to decide whether the town should be named Trois-Lacs, Apalone, Phénix or - wait for it - Jeffrey.
A sensor developed at MIT uses a set of microneedles to push through packaging and determine whether the food inside is safe to eat, which could prevent food waste and help head off outbreaks of salmonella.
