The sarissa is a spear that was in use in the early third century BC and was between 180 and 300 inches in length (4.5–7.5 m). During Alexander the Great‘s conquests and the Wars of the Diadochi, this ...

The Ultima Tower is a 2-mile-tall, 1-mile-wide structure planned to be built to protect the environment from excessive human development. The Ultima Tower is the tallest building ever planned for the ...

Chicago’s unbuilt masterpiece, the Illinois Tower in 3D modelling. (Image: Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, David Romero) It was in Illinois that Frank Lloyd Wright, “the father of modern architecture”, ...

About 35,000–40,000 rings made up the armor and the rings could hardly rust thanks to the constant friction between them. The Gallic Celts invented the lorica hamata before the Romans. The Latin ...

A native Chicagoan, Sandy Allen was born in 1955. At age 10, she was 6 feet 3 inches tall (190 cm), and by the time she was 16, she was already 7 feet 1 inch (216 cm). In 1976, Sandy Allen was ...

The Toba catastrophe was an eruption of the supervolcano of the same name that occurred between 77,000 and 69,000 years ago in modern-day Indonesia. Although the exact date is unknown, studies of ...

Albert Einstein had a close relationship with his sister, Maria (Maja) Einstein. At Bern’s University, Albert Einstein was awarded his “habilitation,” the qualification to conduct teaching. The fact ...

On September 24, 1853, under orders from Napoleon III, Rear Admiral Febvrier-Despointes officially took possession of New Caledonia for France, an island in the Pacific located 18,000 km from mainland ...

In many derogatory titles that had little to do with the actual inhabitants of the area, Tartaria became the most popular term for Central Asia and Siberia in European sources. European knowledge of ...

Elsa Einstein was Albert Einstein's cousin and his second wife. She was born on January 18, 1876, in Hechingen and died on December 20, 1936 in New Jersey.

During Genghis Khan’s rule, a tradition was followed where the most attractive women from each tribe were selected by Genghis Khan to be his concubines. Aside from Mongolian women, these concubines ...

The Shaolin monks brought the Gùn (Chinese: 棍), a staff used in their style of stick combat, to Japan. In that region, the gùn underwent various changes before becoming known as the bō. During this ...