Amusing Planet

Nearly two centuries ago, a strange hill rose above the flat landscape of London's East End. It stood high enough to appear on maps, ser...

Nearly a century before the Vietnam War, the United States undertook one of its first military interventions in East Asia. It was not a full...

During the medieval period and early modern Japan, decapitation was a common method of execution for criminals and defeated enemy warriors. ...

Scattered across Florence, in the narrow streets, is a curious architectural feature that many visitors walk past without noticing. Set into...

Long before the first commercial oil wells appeared in North America, Chinese engineers had already mastered the art of drilling deep into t...

Not all forms of communication are based on speech or writing. Just as the Inca encoded information in strings and knots known as quipus , a...

A remote village in north-western China, on the edge of the Gobi desert, is said to have been founded by Roman soldiers. According to this c...

Somewhere in the hills of Virginia, the United States, according to an enduring legend, there remains buried a vast fortune in gold, silver,...

More than two thousand years before modern engineers bored tunnels beneath rivers and seas, ancient writers told of an astonishing passage h...

In the summer of 1953, a stray dog stepped off a freight train at the railway station of Campiglia Marittima, a small town in Tuscany, Italy...