The Man Who Owns the Moon. He Has Been Selling It Since 1980.
In 1980, Dennis Hope was unemployed, going through a divorce, and living in San Francisco. He was not doing well. So he did what any reasonable person would do in that situation. He claimed ownership of the Moon. Then he claimed Mars. Then Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto, along with all their…
Every Other Country Tried to Scare Teenagers Off Drugs. Iceland Tried Something Else.
Iceland teen drug prevention was not built around warnings, bans, or awareness campaigns. It was built around a completely different question. In 1998, Iceland had one of the worst teenage substance abuse records in Europe. More than half of Icelandic 15 and 16 year olds had been drunk in the past year. Alcohol-related accidents and…
Social Facilitation Psychology: Why Being Watched Changes Everything
Social facilitation psychology begins with a cyclist and a stopwatch. In 1898, Norman Triplett noticed something while reviewing official cycling records. Cyclists racing against other riders consistently posted faster times than cyclists racing against the clock alone. He ran a controlled experiment to test it. Children winding fishing reels went faster when another child was…
Gamsutl Village: The Last Man Who Refused to Leave
Gamsutl village has no road. There used to be one. It collapsed decades ago and nobody rebuilt it. Now the only way in is a two-hour hike up a mountain path that the original residents carved out for moving cattle. The village sits at an altitude of 1,418 metres above sea level in the Gunibsky…
The Morphine Addict Who Accidentally Invented the World’s Most Consumed Drug
John Pemberton Coca Cola was never meant to be a drink. It was meant to be a cure. He set out to stop being in pain. In April 1865, at the Battle of Columbus in Georgia, Pemberton suffered a saber wound to the chest. Like most wounded veterans of that era, he became dependent on…
Why Memes Replace Feelings. and Why That Should Worry You
The relationship between memes and feelings seems obvious until you look at it directly. You feel something. Someone else made a meme about something close to it. You forward it. The feeling seems shared. But something in that exchange is not quite what it appears to be. You learned the word pointing at the same…
Solomon Shereshevsky: The Man Who Could Not Forget Anything
Solomon Shereshevsky arrived at Alexander Luria’s office in Moscow sometime in the 1920s as a journalist who had been sent there by his editor. The editor had noticed something strange. Shereshevsky never took notes in morning briefings. Never wrote anything down. Yet he could repeat back every instruction, every name, every figure, without error. The…
Why Daylight Saving Time Still Exists, Nobody Voted for It
Daylight saving time Europe has been trying to end itself since 2018. It has not managed it yet. The European Commission asked 4.6 million people a simple question. Should we stop changing the clocks? Eighty-four percent said yes. The Parliament voted to end it in 2019. The deadline was set for 2021. It is now…
What Your Brain Is Actually Building While You Are Unconscious
A new study from UC Berkeley has now mapped the brain circuit behind deep sleep growth hormone release. The jellyfish does not know it is sleeping. It has no brain to know anything. No cortex tracking the hours. No alarm set for morning. And yet, every night, the pulses slow and the nerve net goes…
The Universal Flood Myth: Collective Memory or Genetic Inheritance?
The universal flood myth is one of the most documented phenomena in the study of human culture. Over 200 distinct flood narratives exist across world religions and civilisations from ancient Mesopotamia and Hindu scripture to Aboriginal Australian oral traditions and Native American legend. These cultures had no contact with each other when their stories formed.…
