All articles tagged with #history
A cultural-history essay traces picky eating back to 1915, showing how doctors attributed children’s food refusals to stomach trouble while parents eagerly chased evolving dietary advice. It argues that parental beliefs and prevailing cultural norms — not just kids’ tastes — shape what children end up eating, revealing how attitudes toward parenting and food have shifted over time in the US and beyond.
The Verge marks Apple’s 50th anniversary with a photo-driven tour of its history, from Apple II and Macintosh roots through iMacs, iPhone, and flagship stores, showing how a rebellious startup grew into a global tech titan.
Apple marks its 50th anniversary, tracing its journey from a garage startup in 1976 to a $3.5 trillion tech titan, with $416 billion in revenue, $112 billion in net income, 166,000 employees, and over 2.5 billion active devices, driven by design, privacy and a loyal brand; the piece covers milestones like the iPhone era, near-bankruptcy in the 1990s, Jobs’s return, and current celebrations plus memorabilia auctions.
Archaeologists in Maastricht say they’ve uncovered skeletal remains beneath the floor of St. Peter and Paul Church that a deacon says are 99% likely to be Count d’Artagnan, the famed musketeer. The find includes a buried bullet, a 1660 coin, and the skeleton’s position under the former altar, with a sample sent to Germany for analysis.
LeBron James became the NBA’s all-time leader in regular-season games played (1,612), while Kevin Durant moved to No. 5 on the all-time scoring list with 32,294 points on a Saturday slate packed with milestones—plus Shai Gilgeous-Alexander’s 40 points fueling OKC’s 11th straight win and Luka Dončić continuing a 9-game stretch of 30+ points, among other late-game thrills across the league.
Tommy Shelby is haunted in 1940 as he confronts a Nazi counterfeit plot and a rival son, guided by Ada and Kaulo, while the film threads myth and Romany lore. Visually striking and fan-friendly, it leans into nostalgia but suffers from thin characterization (notably Duke) and overused tropes, delivering atmosphere over a decisive narrative. Netflix release, 1h52m, directed by Tom Harper and written by Steven Knight.
On the 100th anniversary of Robert Goddard’s first liquid-fueled rocket, Ars staffers share their most memorable launches—from the Space Shuttle Endeavour and Discovery to a Soyuz-FG flight—celebrating how these milestones shaped modern spaceflight and left lasting impressions on observers.
A curated list of 51 myths and legends once dismissed as hoaxes that later gained proof or evidence—ranging from Norse Vinland and the Lake Nyos disaster to the Terracotta Army, Komodo dragons, rogue waves, germ theory, black holes, and NSA surveillance—illustrating how curiosity and scientific investigation can turn legend into fact.
Version History traces Furby’s 1998 rise—from a California roots project to a toy sensation—highlighting its clever tech and personality that made it seem alive, and arguing what its history suggests about the future of human–machine interaction and AI design; the episode features David Pierce, Victoria Song, and Sean Hollister and links to primary sources like the Furby patent and contemporary coverage.
BuzzFeed's crowd-sourced list highlights 15 widely taught school facts that later research debunked, spanning taste maps on the tongue, Pluto’s planetary status, credibility of .org sites, Rosa Parks’s narrative, the food pyramid, glass as a flowing liquid, left-brain/right-brain myths, fat-focused dietary advice, T. rex lips, the Midnight Ride, pyramids built by slaves, Brontosaurus taxonomy, behavior genetics, exoplanet prevalence, and Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel colors—each item is explained with updated science or archaeology to show how our understanding has evolved.
BuzzFeed collects 25 technologies once pitched as futureproof—from pagers, Palm Pilots, GeoCities, Zip drives, and TiVo to 3D TVs and early smartphones—only to show how quickly they faded as smartphones and cloud-based services dominated, compelling a shift away from standalone devices toward always-connected ecosystems. The piece blends reader anecdotes and nostalgic reflections on how rapid obsolescence reshaped everyday tech, and invites further examples of misfired futurism.
Quanta previews a special series on the evolving foundations of mathematics, highlighting newly unearthed letters that suggest Cantor’s 1874 proof of different-sized infinities may have involved plagiarism, underscoring ongoing efforts to rethink math’s core ideas.
Astronaut John Glenn reported thousands of tiny, luminescent particles swirling around his Friendship 7 capsule during the 1962 Earth orbit, prompting NASA concern about potential impact. The “fireflies” were later explained as sun-illuminated ice particles, a phenomenon confirmed on later flights.
A Lifehacker guide compiling 10 practical YouTube tricks, including how to search transcripts with Ctrl-F, set sleep timers, create precise timestamp links, navigate with keyboard shortcuts and frame-by-frame controls, temporarily speed up playback on mobile, set video quality defaults, use incognito to curb recommendations, and remove videos from your history to keep recommendations clean.
This piece catalogs ten cars noted for notably poor aerodynamics, listing their drag coefficients (0.4–1.05 Cd) and explaining how design choices—ranging from early brick-like shapes to modern high-downforce track cars—made them wind-inefficient. Examples span the Ford Model T (0.79 Cd) and Mercedes Simplex (1.05 Cd) to the Plymouth Prowler (0.49 Cd), Citroën 2CV (0.52 Cd), VW Beetle variants (0.48–0.40 Cd), Dodge Viper ACR (0.541 Cd), Caterham Seven (0.60 Cd), and others, noting data limits and exclusions (no SUVs/trucks) and highlighting aero evolution toward contemporary efficiency.