Interesting Thing of the Day

A Saskatchewan city with a funny name has some surprising history beneath its streets. From sweatshops to speakeasies, underground operations boomed in the early years of the 20th century.

If a spider can be cute, friendly, and comical, it would have to be a member of the Salticid family. These tiny spiders can jump up to 6 inches, but they're not as scary as they sound.

Most videoconferencing designs, which put the camera above or to the side of the screen, prevent you from making eye contact with the other participants. Research is underway to give participants true eye-to-eye communication.

One of the most vexing unsolved cryptographic puzzles of the last two centuries may point to buried treasure, but odds favor a more prosaic explanation.

If you need to disassemble a large tree and carry it a hundred yards or so, just find yourself a few million leaf cutter ants. That's not hard to do in Central America.

A seemingly miraculous plastic invented in the late 1980s appeared to be completely fireproof and a nearly perfect insulator, capable of withstanding 10,000°C without breaking a sweat. So why is it still not for sale?

You know the old saying: you get what you pay for. But smart retailers underpromise and overdeliver, making their customers feel they are getting a little something extra.

Several techniques are being developed to convert the output from digital cameras into signals the human brain can understand, making them into primitive but functional artificial eyes.

The way beliefs spread from one person to another resembles, in some ways, the way a virus spreads. A modern theory of idea epidemiology casts new light on religions, fads, political movements, and more.

According to this fringe linguistic theory, every sort of human behavior, from football games to church services, is fundamentally linguistic in nature.

That quirky band from the '80s may have made their reputation with songs like Rock Lobster and Love Shack, but they're under-appreciated for creating truly innovative music. And they're still touring!

You know the old myth that water drains clockwise in one hemisphere and counterclockwise in the other? Surprisingly, there's something to the story, but it's not quite as simple as one might imagine.

The Theory of Relativity says that nothing can accelerate to a speed faster than light. But a hypothetical particle called a tachyon gets around this rule because it started out going faster than light.

A two-person exercise performed by t'ai chi practitioners aims to help the participants identify areas of tension in their bodies. But it's more like dancing than sparring.

Where once Paris's waste disposal system was the Seine, now it's a massive network of tunnels that almost exactly mirrors the streets above. And more goes on there than meets the nose.