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Articles

This Drone Hunts Down Apple Disease

These drones are striking against a different kind of enemy: apple scab

These Spectacular Cutaways Give You An Insider’s View of Your Food

Nathan Myhrvold and a team of photographers have sliced meats, vegetables, pots, pans and ovens in half to produce stunning cross-sections of cooking

Dell Laptop Users Weren’t Crazy, Their Keyboards Really Did Smell Like Cat Urine

Some users speculate that polymers could have been to blame, though others pointed to nitrogen, one of the main components of urine

Screenshot from Un Chien Andalou, the Surrealist film that Dalí collaborated on with Luis Buñuel

Salvador Dali Suffered From the Irrational Fear That Insects Were Crawling All Over His Skin

The condition is almost always accompanied by tactile hallucinations of crawling sensations and visual hallucinations of the non-existent insects

5 High-Tech Ways to Scare Anyone This Halloween

Forget spaghetti for brains and grapes for eyeballs, these ultra-realistic props will take fright night to whole new level

From the road, it would be easy to overlook this small, unassuming chapel located in one of the oldest towns in southwestern Poland. But the wooden doors hide a spectacular, macabre interior. The skulls and leg bones of over 3,000 victims of wars and plagues cover the walls and ceiling, and a crypt below, accessible through a trapdoor, houses over 21,000 additional remains. Between 1776 and 1804, the local priest, Vaclav Tomasek, painstakingly gathered, cleaned and carefully arranged skeletons recovered from numerous, shallow mass graves left by the Thirty Years’ War, Silesian Wars and cholera outbreaks. Modeled off of similar ossuaries and catacombs in Rome, the chapel was intended as a shrine for the dead, as well as a “memento mori” for the living. 

On the church’s altar, Tomasek placed the bones of important figures and curiosities, including the skull of the local mayor, skulls with bullet holes, a skull deformed by syphilis and the bones of a supposed giant. When the chapel's creator passed away in 1804, his skull was placed on the altar as well.

View the photos above or explore the 360° interactive panorama on  Kaplica Czaszek’s official site  (in Polish).

This Beautiful Chapel in Czermna, Poland, Is Constructed Out of Thousands of Human Bones

Shin bones decorate the ceiling, skulls line the walls and over 21,000 bodies are buried in the basement

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Watch a Tick Burrowing Into Skin in Microscopic Detail

Their highly specialized biting technique allows ticks to pierce skin with tiny harpoons and suck blood for days at a time

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This Eagle Statue Is One of the Greatest Romano-British Artworks Ever Discovered

Archeologists in London just turned up a pristine 1,800-year old Roman statue of an eagle devouring a serpent

The Dinosaur Hall was originally called the “Hall of Extinct Monsters” (seen here in a photograph from the 1930s) when the Natural History Museum opened in 1910.

About Deep Time: A Preview of the Natural History Museum’s Fossil Hall Renovation

The new Deep Time Hall will connect paleontology to modern life

Our Brains Evolved to Recoil at the Sight of Snakes

Around 60 million years ago, our primate ancestors figured out that the sight of a snake meant trouble

A Family Tree of You And Your 13 Million Closest Relatives

A big data project to connect all the people

Horseshoe crab

Animal Specimens, From Fish to Birds to Mammals, Get Inked

Inspired by Japanese fish rubbings, two University of Texas biologists make spectacular prints of a variety of species at different stages of decay

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Watch People Drawing Their Own Brains

Beware, your brain can force you to spend a lot more time than you might think watching these

The Sriracha Factory Could Get Shut Down. Panic?

Stock up now, the Sriracha factory is facing shutdown

What Is Sex Like for Someone with Synesthesia?

The researchers found that the people with synesthesia seem to go into more of a trance during sex than those without

These Scientists Are Using Bees to Spread Pesticides

Since they’re already going to the flowers anyway, why not give them some pesticides to carry?

Will This $15 Device Protect Against School Shootings?

High school students in Washington D.C. have designed the DeadStop, a simple attachment that instantly locks armed intruders out of classrooms

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Appreciate the Mathematical Beauty of Every Day Objects

Given math’s applicability to everything in our world and beyond, it’s not so far fetched to think that a theory of everything really does exist

Pumpkins and beer make for golden photo ops and marketing gags–but the theme is beginning to feel old.

Pumpkin Beers Don’t Have to Be the Worst Thing to Drink This Fall

In 1984, there was one pumpkin beer in America. This October, there are more than 500. We find the best ones from the patch

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