In 2017 Femi Kuti held one continuous saxophone tone for 51 minutes and 38 seconds. This player is using the same kind of trick: breathing in through the nose while still blowing out. Near the end of a breath, the cheeks puff full and squeeze that air out to keep the note going while a quick inhale sneaks in through the nose. Didgeridoo players lean on it heavily. I rate it harder than any fast solo.

Only 8.6% of people in Burundi used the internet in 2024. Uganda was at 8.9%. In the U.S., the figure was 94.7%.

One levee break in the Midwest floods, and one man convicted for it. In 1993 the Mississippi broke through the West Quincy levee in Missouri, flooding farmland and closing the Bayview Bridge for 71 days. James Scott got life in prison. It's still argued over, and I'm not convinced the evidence was strong enough.

Stitched leather, a little padding, no face mask. That was head protection in football before plastic took over. Riddell introduced a plastic shell helmet in 1939, and the NFL made helmets mandatory in the mid 1940s. Face masks spread through the 1950s. I'm amazed anyone finished a season in one of these.

Same worker, same record. Claim Social Security at 62: $1,400 a month. Wait until 70: $2,480. That's 77% more for waiting.

The houndskull bascinet looks odd for a reason. That long snout gave blades and lance points a glancing surface, so blows slid away from the face. It was popular in the late 1300s. The visor also left a pocket of air in front of the face, with holes for breathing, and a mail curtain called an aventail hung from the rim to guard the neck and shoulders. Coolest helmet of the medieval period, hands down.

A Paris apartment sat locked for about seventy years with a Boldini portrait of its owner, the courtesan Marthe de Florian, inside. Her granddaughter fled the Nazis for the south of France and never came back, and the flat was opened only after she died in 2010. With the painting was a love note from Boldini. At auction, ten bidders pushed the portrait to €3 million. For me, one sealed room like this beats a dozen museum period rooms.

Tutankhamun left his coffin for good on November 4, 2007. Zahi Hawass moved the mummy into a climate controlled glass case in the tomb's antechamber, because humidity from thousands of daily visitors threatened it. Much of the damage was older, though. In 1925 Howard Carter's team cut the body apart and used hot knives to free the head from the gold mask. I suspect his excavators did him more harm than three thousand years in the ground.

Jupiter Island: a typical home worth $10.14 million, the most of any U.S. city or town Zillow tracks. Atherton is next at $8.52M, Sagaponack third at $7.93M.

The camera is drawing those waves, not the string. Most phone cameras use a rolling shutter, scanning the frame line by line, not all at once. A fast vibrating string lands at a different point on each line, and the two rhythms combine into wavy patterns that never happen on the guitar. I still love these clips.

Game Pass Ultimate went from $14.99 in 2019 to a peak of $29.99 in Oct. 2025, then got cut to $22.99. It's still 53% more than where it started.

Sound can draw its own shape in fire. Gas fills a long perforated tube with a speaker at one end. At a suitable steady frequency a standing wave forms inside, and gas escapes unevenly between the spots where pressure swings and the spots where it holds steady. The flames rise and fall in the pattern of the wave. Every physics classroom should be required to have one.

Popcorn Sutton wrote his own book on moonshine and called it Me and My Likker. He turned an old Appalachian trade into a folk legend. A run starts with a mash of corn and sugar left to ferment. The still heats it, the alcohol boils off before the water does, and the vapor cools into clear liquor in a coil called a worm. My bet: his recipe beats half the craft whiskey on shelves today.

Looks like a snowstorm, but those streaks are dust and ice drifting past the camera, with real stars behind them. Rosetta's narrow angle camera recorded these frames in June 2016 while orbiting comet 67P, looking toward the constellation Canis Major. Some bright specks are likely cosmic rays hitting the camera. In November 2014 the mission's Philae lander became the first spacecraft to land on a comet nucleus. The real story beats the blizzard myth easily.

Witold Pilecki got himself arrested on purpose in 1940 so he could get inside Auschwitz. He built a secret network, smuggled reports out, and escaped in 1943 through the camp bakery. In 1948, Poland's communist regime shot him after a show trial.

Each queen of the night flower gets exactly one night. It opens after dark and wilts before dawn. Whether it blooms only one night a year depends on which plant you mean. The nickname covers several night blooming cacti, and big Epiphyllum oxypetalum plants can put out several crops of blooms in a season, all heavily scented. I'd stay up for it over most meteor showers.

France's last public execution, and the crowd is a big reason it was the last. Eugen Weidmann, convicted of six murders, was guillotined outside Saint-Pierre Prison in Versailles on 17 June 1939. It ran late into daylight, so photographers got clear images and someone filmed it. Papers described a disgusting, unruly crowd, and President Albert Lebrun immediately banned public executions. I'm convinced the camera did more to end the practice than any speech could.

The colorized film is said to show India in the early twenties, and the backdrop was anything but calm. The Prince of Wales arrived in November 1921, in the middle of Gandhi's non cooperation movement, and riots in Bombay marked his visit. Gandhi called the campaign off after violence at Chauri Chaura, and in March 1922 he was arrested and sentenced to six years. Knowing that changes how every frame of footage like this reads.

A burning ammunition ship blew up in Halifax harbour on December 6, 1917, killing around 2,000 people. Train dispatcher Vince Coleman stayed at his telegraph key to stop incoming trains and was killed at his post. Halifax still sends Boston a Christmas tree every year.

This monk is meditating in freezing cold, and one Tibetan Buddhist practice, g tummo, is known to measurably raise body heat. In the early 1980s researcher Herbert Benson measured monks warming their fingers and toes by several degrees. A 2013 study found forceful vase breathing generated the heat, while visualization helped sustain it. It's my favorite example of how the body can do far more than we train it to.