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Cool Finds

Cool Finds

The First Photos of Free-Falling Snowflakes Reveal Their Imperfections

Collisions in mid-air often produce ice crystal aggregates, rather than single symmetrical flakes

Paul Allen used his superyacht Octopus to locate a Japanese battleship near the Philippines.

Cool Finds

Microsoft Billionaire Finds Enormous Sunken Japanese Battleship

Paul Allen used his megayacht to locate the long-lost ship, which has been missing since World War II

Cool Finds

A Paralyzed Woman Operated a Flight Simulator Using Only Her Thoughts

Electrodes implanted in the brain are shown to enable those with quadriplegia to achieve amazing feats

Cool Finds

Vigilantes in Quito Have A Mission to Correct Graffiti Artists’ Spelling and Grammar

Meaning is important, the group says to explain their illicit copyediting duties

Our familiar, and only true, Moon -- the only photos of the 'second moon' are of a distant, blurry object

Cool Finds

Bet You Didn’t Know About the Earth’s ‘Second Moon’

Even astronomers didn’t realize it was following the Earth until 1997

A view of the dense Honduran rain forest.

Cool Finds

Amazing Ruins of a Long Lost City Discovered in Honduras

A scientific expedition into the depths of the Honduran rain forest discovered a lost city

Cool Finds

Grave Robbers Once Held Charlie Chaplin’s Body For Ransom

Months after his death, thieves stole the actor’s body in hopes of a $600,000 payout; it didn’t turn out as they had hoped

A TV tower on Burnt Island in Fife, Scotland, reaches just 410 feet -- but others of its kind top 2,000

Cool Finds

The Fourth Tallest Man-made Structure Isn’t a Building at All

TV towers and power station chimneys are some less well-known record-breakers in the history of super-tall structures

Cool Finds

Someone Found Chris Hadfield’s Flight Suit in a Thrift Store

The astronaut isn’t sure how his suit made its way to a Toronto second-hand shop

Victor Hugo with friends during his exile to Guernsey

Cool Finds

Victor Hugo Also Created Dramatic Pen and Ink Drawings

The sketches, many done with pen and ink, are almost modern and surreal

On March 3, 1939, Harvard freshman Lothrop Withington, Jr., swallows a, live, squirming goldfish to win a ten dollar bet. He reportedly practiced the feat for days before by swallowing baby goldfish and tadpoles.

Cool Finds

The Great Goldfish Swallowing Craze of 1939 Never Really Ended

A Harvard undergrad’s $10 bet set off a sensation among college students that still echoes on the Internet today

Cool Finds

This Is How New Words Enter the Vernacular of ASL

Selfie, photobomb and five-second rule all have signs in progress

This image of a Martian sunset was captured in 2005.

Cool Finds

Watch the Sunset from Mars

Opportunity rover helps capture a hauntingly blue view of nightfall on the Red Planet

Cool Finds

Impatient Scientists Used Paint-By-Numbers Technique to Create the First Image From Mars

Scientists used raw data to create their first image of the red planet

A rover developed by Grumman Aircraft Engineering Corporation and considered for use in the early 1970s, not a moon race competitor

Cool Finds

Forget the Race to the Moon. These Rovers Will Race on the Moon.

It’s going to be a pretty slow race, however

Screen shot of video "Global ship traffic seen from space - FleetMon Satellite AIS and FleetMon Explorer"

Cool Finds

See Shipping Traffic Move Through Straits Around the World

A visualization shows a week’s worth of vessel movement

Cool Finds

Meet the Man Who Can Taste Words

For some, taste mixes with other sense—a form of synesthesia that isn’t as common as experiencing the colors of words

A man walks on a tight rope in the remote mountain village of Tsovkra-1.

Cool Finds

The Russian Village Entirely Populated by Tightrope Walkers

The circus-skill tradition goes back so far in tiny Tsovkra-1 that no one knows quite how or why it started—but it may end before long

Peanut butter, known to the National Institute of Standards and Technology as SRM 2387.

Cool Finds

The Weird World of Standard Reference Materials, From Peanut Butter to Whale Blubber

Get the full story behind a $761 jar of peanut butter and other exorbitantly priced everyday objects used by scientists

Cool Finds

Found: One Lost Sherlock Holmes Story

It was in the attic, my dear Watson

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