In 1790, in Alexandria, Virginia, an 80-year-old enslaved man astonished prominent visitors with feats of mental calculation so advanced they questioned whether he might once have rivaled Isaac Newton.

On February 28, 2005, with temperatures just above freezing on a Kansas tarmac, Steve Fossett climbed into a strange, mantis-like aircraft with one goal: to fly solo around the world without stopping or refueling.

At the 1912 Stockholm Olympics, a young Japanese marathoner named Shizo Kanakuri vanished during the race—and Sweden listed him as missing for 50 years.

In rural Sardinia, especially in areas like Marghine, Planargia, and Gallura, stories tell of a mysterious woman known as Sa Femmina Accabadora.

Just before midnight on March 12, 1928, a sound like thunder ripped through San Francisquito Canyon in California. Residents, jolted from their sleep, thought it was an earthquake.

On the morning of August 7, 1974, crowds in lower Manhattan looked up and saw what seemed impossible: a man walking on a thin steel cable stretched between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, a quarter mile above the ground.

Every year on March 14, math enthusiasts around the globe celebrate Pi Day. The date, written as 3/14 in the American format, reflects the first three digits of π, the mathematical constant representing the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter.

Around 30,000 land mines were laid across the Falkland Islands by Argentine forces during their 1982 invasion. While intended to stop British troops, the fenced-off areas instead became accidental sanctuaries for penguins and native plants, untouched by humans.

Dr. Samuel Mudd, sentenced to life for aiding Lincoln’s assassin, would face a yellow fever epidemic in 1867 that turned a Union military prison into a scene of desperation.

On September 2, 2016, 71-year-old Lawrence John Ripple walked into the Bank of Labor in Kansas City, Kansas. Carrying no weapon, he handed a teller a note that read, “I have a gun, give me money.”