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History & Archaeology

Civilisations lost and found. Ancient structures that defy explanation. The past refuses to stay buried.

The Antikythera Mechanism Is 2,000 Years Old. We're Still Working Out What It Could Do.

Recovered from a Roman-era shipwreck in 1901, the Antikythera mechanism is the most sophisticated mechanical device to survive from the ancient world. New imaging technology is revealing it was even more complex than we thought.

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HISTORY & ARCHAEOLOGY

The Easter Island Statues Walked. The Evidence Has Been There the Whole Time.

For decades, the question of how the moai were moved across Rapa Nui seemed unanswerable. A 2012 experiment, confirmed by subsequent research, demonstrated that the answer was hiding in plain sight — in the oral traditions of the island's own people.

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HISTORY & ARCHAEOLOGY

The Tartaria Tablets: Did a Balkan Culture Invent Writing 1,000 Years Before Sumer?

Three small clay tablets found in Romania in 1961 carry symbols that predate the earliest known writing by a millennium. Whether they constitute writing at all is a question that has divided archaeologists for sixty years.

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HISTORY & ARCHAEOLOGY

Göbekli Tepe Is 12,000 Years Old and We Still Don't Know What It Was For

The world's oldest known monumental structure was built by hunter-gatherers who, according to the prevailing model of prehistory, shouldn't have been capable of building it. The site keeps producing new questions.

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HISTORY & ARCHAEOLOGY

The Ness of Brodgar: The Neolithic Complex That Is Rewriting Scottish Prehistory

Beneath a strip of land between two lochs in Orkney lies a 5,000-year-old ceremonial complex larger than Stonehenge. Excavations have been running since 2003 and the site keeps expanding.

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History & Archaeology

The Hessdalen Lights Have Been Glowing for 40 Years. Science Still Has No Answer.

The Cursed Productions: Seven Horror Films Whose Sets Were Plagued by Genuine Tragedy

Folk Horror's Second Coming: Why Ancient Dread Is the Most Relevant Genre of the Moment

Scotland's Most Genuinely Unsettling Locations — And What the Evidence Actually Says

Thin Places: The Ancient Idea That Some Locations Are Closer to the Other Side

The Fringe Desk Halloween Watchlist: Seven Films That Take the Darkness Seriously

The Pentagon's UAP Office Has Now Filed Over 800 Reports. The Explanations Are Getting Stranger.

James Webb Is Finding Galaxies That Shouldn't Exist. Cosmologists Are Quietly Alarmed.

The Antikythera Mechanism Is 2,000 Years Old. We're Still Working Out What It Could Do.

The Easter Island Statues Walked. The Evidence Has Been There the Whole Time.

The Tartaria Tablets: Did a Balkan Culture Invent Writing 1,000 Years Before Sumer?

Göbekli Tepe Is 12,000 Years Old and We Still Don't Know What It Was For

The Ness of Brodgar: The Neolithic Complex That Is Rewriting Scottish Prehistory

Operation Paperclip: How the United States Recruited Over 1,600 Nazi Scientists After the War

The Stargate Project: The CIA Spent 20 Years Investigating Psychic Spies. The Declassified Record Is Stranger Than You'd Expect.

The Soviet Woodpecker: The Cold War Signal That Jammed the World's Radios for a Decade

MKUltra: What the Declassified Record Actually Shows

Acoustic Kitty: The CIA Spent $20 Million Turning a Cat Into a Spy

Voyager 1 Went Silent for Five Months in 2023. NASA Wasn't Sure It Was Coming Back.

NASA Crashed a Spacecraft Into an Asteroid on Purpose. It Worked Better Than Anyone Expected.

Betelgeuse Dimmed So Dramatically in 2019 That Astronomers Thought It Might Be About to Explode

The Wow! Signal: The Most Compelling Evidence for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Ever Recorded — and It Lasted 72 Seconds