Interesting Thing of the Day

Something drove Sarah Winchester to keep adding to and remodeling a large house in San Jose, California, keeping it continuously under construction for 38 years. The result is mysterious indeed.

Yet another December holiday deserves shelf space at the greeting card store. According to legend, the two-week period on either side of the winter solstice is a time of smooth sailing.

Neither sugars nor alcohols, the substances known as sugar alcohols are natural sweeteners that may be great for diabetics or bad for people on low-carb diets.

If you like the idea of a quiet getaway to escape the chaos of modern life, you might consider taking it a step further. Give up speaking for a day or a week, and you could be surprised at what you hear.

In the Sierra Nevada mountains of eastern California lies the remains Bodie, once the state's second-largest city. A bustling mining town in its heyday, it's now lovingly preserved in a state of arrested decay.

Rare yet marvelous institutions, membership libraries are open only to those who have paid their annual dues. In exchange you get access to a place where books are taken as seriously as they should be.

It's hard to imagine a circus performance that didn't include a trapeze act. This apparatus, which has been around for nearly 160 years, was invented by the same guy (yes, a guy) who created the leotard.

Mud isn't generally considered a very useful or beautiful substance, but one of the latest trends in art (especially popular among young Japanese children) is making elegant, shiny balls out of ordinary mud.

An 11th-century Parisian abbey later became the home of a fantastic museum of arts and trades, which is to say, mostly inventions. But the exhibits aren't the only interesting things about the building.

The clock tower that rises from the British Houses of Parliament is often mistakenly called Big Ben, but that's actually the nickname of one of the bells inside. That's just one of several surprising facts about this well-known clock.

Of all the ways we might have chosen to greet each other, we decided upon handshakes as the norm. This gesture has an uncertain history, and getting it just right may be harder than you think.

In the late 1800s, a Russian ophthalmologist invented an artificial language that was intended to be culturally neutral and thereby help to unite the world. Its success should be self-evident.

Many units of measurement (both historical and modern) derive from the typical size of body parts such as hands, feet, and arms.

Never mind the sensationalized stories you see in movies. This major religion may seem unfamiliar to practitioners of religions that began in the Middle East, but it's not as wacky as you may think.

Scientists understand what causes tsunamis, but detecting them, figuring out where they're headed, and warning the affected areas in time turns out to be massively complicated.