Transcript You are probably familiar with the term decimation. The word is usually used in English to mean “to cause great destruction or harm”. However, to ancient Rome, the word had a very different and very specific meaning. It was one of the most devastating and brutal forms of punishment that the military could inflict. …
Transcript Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, known to history as just Nero, was not the best of Roman Emperors. In fact, on most lists of Roman Emperors, he would rank somewhere near the bottom. In no small part, this is due to how he reacted after the greatest fire ever to engulf Rome and what …
Transcript In 1901, Swiss archeologists Gustave Jequier discovered a large stone stele in what is today western Iran. That large stone was 2.25m or 7.5 feet tall and was covered with cuneiform writing. After it was translated, it was found to have been a list of 282 laws written down by the Babylonian King Hammurabi. …
Transcript Since the year 1790, New York City has been the largest city in the United States. Given the population density of the city, the vast majority of the people there rent apartments. Now imagine if everyone in New York who switched apartments had to do so on the exact same day every year. Well, …
Transcript There are many foods that are considered an acquired taste. Foods that might not be very palatable the first time you try it, or something that just doesn’t sit right with most people. It could be something as simple as blue cheese, or something like the Filipino delicacy, balut, which is a boiled, fertilized …
Podcast Transcript It is arguably the world’s oldest game, yet it is one of the most popular cybersports. It has been called the game of kings, and yet it can be mastered by children. Its origins are truly global having passed through several of the world’s greatest civilizations, and it can and is played almost …
Podcast Transcript In 1941, after the German invasion of the Soviet Union, a 24-year-old woman in Ukraine volunteered to join the Red Army. She was initially pressured to become a nurse like most women who volunteered, however, that wasn’t what she wanted to do. She wanted to be on the front lines. Within a year, …
Podcast Transcript Located in the heart of Paris, along the banks of the River Seine, lies the Louvre. It has over 750,000 square feet of gallery space, over 615,000 items in its collection, and in a non-pandemic year, gets over 10 million annual visitors. Yet, it wasn’t always a museum, and the way it acquired …
Podcast Transcript Secrecy is a huge part of military success. You want to be able to communicate with your own forces without the enemy finding out what your plans are. As America entered World War II, they were in need of a method of communication that couldn’t be cracked by Germany or Japan. They found …