Amusing Planet

In the historic city of Guanajuato, in central Mexico, lies one of the world's most unsettling collections of human remains.

The electric vehicle might seem like a very modern invention, but is actually as old as automobile itself.

On the morning of March 23, 1849, a wooden box was loaded onto a wagon in Richmond, Virginia.

In 19th-century Munich, a woman with no formal banking experience began promising ordinary people extraordinary returns on their savings.

On a cold April morning in 1875, three men ascended into the sky above Paris in a balloon, hoping to push the boundaries of human flight.

On October 31, 1926, Toronto lawyer and millionaire Charles Vance Millar died suddenly of a heart attack.

For a few hours on a December day in 1962, two men floated at the edge of space beneath a giant balloon, peering into the heavens through a telescope.

When Douglas Corrigan climbed out of his weather-beaten Curtiss Robin at Baldonnel Airfield near Dublin on 18 July 1938, he claimed to have made a simple navigational error.

In July 1952, reports of a railway disaster in Poland began circulating in the Western media.

During the early 1860s, reports of violent robberies known as garrottings filled British newspapers.

On June 21, 1913, a tiny woman weighing barely 80 pounds climbed into an airplane over Los Angeles and prepared to do something no woman had ever done before.

On the morning of April 16, 1947, residents of Texas City, a busy industrial port on the Gulf Coast of Texas, watched smoke rise from a cargo ship moored at the docks.

Milo of Croton was the strongest man in the ancient Greek world, or so the stories say.

Underneath the narrow streets, churches, and palaces of the Italian city of Siena lies a sprawling network of underground aqueducts that supplied water to the Tuscan city for centuries, enabling it to flourish despite a chronic lack of nearby rivers and s…

For nearly seven decades, one of the most feared men in Rome lived an otherwise ordinary life.

More than a century before Albert Einstein revolutionized physics with his theory of general relativity, and nearly two centuries before astronomers accepted the existence of black holes, an English clergyman and scientist named John Michell proposed a st…

It appears that quite a few people have been killed or brought to justice for having failed to deliver on their promise of turning ordinary metals into gold, in other words, alchemy.

In the first century BC, nearly two thousand years before the invention of the microscope, the Roman scholar Marcus Terentius Varro made a remarkable observation about the cause of disease.

For centuries, travellers to the southern tip of South America returned with astonishing stories.

In the early hours of April 27, 1865, a steamboat packed with nearly two thousand exhausted Union soldiers drifted northward on the Mississippi River.

One of Hong Kong’s most unusual sights is the stone wall tree—a mature tree growing directly out of a masonry retaining wall.

Most wartime diaries are written on paper.

Nearly two centuries ago, a strange hill rose above the flat landscape of London's East End.

Nearly a century before the Vietnam War, the United States undertook one of its first military interventions in East Asia.

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.

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

Not all forms of communication are based on speech or writing.

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

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

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