Just before Francisco Pizarro arrived in South American in 1532, the Inca empire covered 350,000 square miles and boasted a million inhabitants. Yet P...
It's a pretty miserable thing to break a bone. There's the initial blinding pain, all of the medical procedures during a trip to the hospital and then...
The annals of history hold a special place for people who have carried out treachery and betrayed their own. Thousands of years later, their names are...
When the Jet Age came about, pilots found they had a brand new problem with their brand new planes: how to bail out when they found themselves in a pi...
You've seen them in your home and probably squealed in terror, but now it's time to learn all about cockroaches. From their ability to run incredibly...
If there is an American legend who is both real-life and larger-than-life it is Davy Crockett. While he may not have ""kilt him a b'ar"" when he was t...
About 2,400 years ago Aristotle mentions the use of diving bells, apparatuses that convey divers to the bottom of the sea -- or at least below the sur...
That laziest of backyard games, horseshoes, is also a very ancient one, developed by people following Greek armies more than 2,000 years ago. Since th...
The Babylonians, one of the earliest civilizations, were the first to use fingerprints to differentiate people, but it wasn't until the 19th century t...
Dressing up in duct tape-covered cardboard suit of armor and pretending you're an elf warrior for a weekend at a state park might sound like a pretty...
Being ravenous eaters of decaying flesh, vultures have long been shunned by humans. But because of their disgusting habits, vultures provide a much-ne...
Ever since the real estate bubble in the U.S. burst in 2008, American cities have had to deal with a substantial uptick in abandoned houses. Faced wit...
When you need to take down a 20-story building, a wrecking ball won't do. Instead, you'll need to turn to the handful of companies in the world that a...
In this week's SYSK Select, what you hear is not a test, instead it's Chuck and Josh discussing the cultural history of the Hip-Hop movement. Born out...
Warning: This episode on instruments designed solely to produce extreme human suffering during the Middle Ages in Europe is very graphic in nature. Se...
Back in 1966, the Supreme Court decided that suspects in criminal cases had the right to be reminded that they didn't have to talk to the fuzz if they...
For about 375 million years, plants have been using pollen (aka plant sperm) to propagate their species. And the technique has stuck around because it...
You've probably heard about Burning Man, it's a week-long party in the middle of a desert made of 50 thousand people living pretty much without rules,...
According to a 2009 poll, more Americans believe in ghosts than don't. But what are ghosts exactly? If they do exist, what are they made of and why ar...
In 2008 Bitcoin, the world's first decentralized, anarchistic all-digital currency, was introduced to the world. Its value has risen, fallen and risen...
