"The city of Troy. Was thought to be most likely mythical from the time that Homer wrote The Iliad c. 750 BCE until the site was excavated in 1871, roughly 2600 years later."
"The Nightstalker. The citizens actually captured him from a picture in the newspaper. I think he was “held” (read beat the f@#k up) by the neighbors until cops arrived. He held LA in probably it’s most fear of all time. No rules, no selection pattern and his destruction was as vulgar as it gets. His capture is a f@#king awesome story."
"While it is an ongoing process and we have not nearly all the answers i would argue some of the most fascinating discoveries have to do with the mystery of space and its exploration.
It is basically a journey from “the earth is not flat” to “earth is the center of the universe” to “the sun is the center of the universe” to “there are other planets next to the sun and the earth” to “the entire universe is a static mix of stars and nebulas” to the detection of other galaxies (first one was Andromeda galaxy) to the detection of the true scale of the universe which contains billions of galaxies and is vast beyond imagining etc etc.
And every year and with every new project like James Webb 2 years ago we gradually get more and more knowledge about life in the cosmos over a span of 13.8 billion years. How crazy is that. I reckon in our lifetime we will solve the dark energy and dark matter mysteries and many more!But until that happens a lot of stuff that happens in space is fascinating and not really explainable.
I like the saying “there is magic but it’s not in Hogwarts but in space”…at least for the time being."
"Why socks tend to “vanish.”
A study showed that, because of their material and shape (a flattened “tube”) they can hold a very large static electrical charge for their weight (most often acquired from tumble drying).
This charge makes them stick to all sorts of objects –and people’s clothing– where they can be transported to different places unnoticed. And because they are “boomerang”-shaped, with one heavy end, they soon work themselves free via pendulum motion. Then, again because of their flatness and weighted-at-one-end shape, they can easily slip into the cracks between objects when they drop.
Also: Cats and dogs love their weird combination of cleaned stink, and often steal these fallen socks."
"I feel like the finding of the Rosetta Stone has to be up there. Suddenly, after thousands of years you can start to translate Egyptian hieroglyphs? That was a long wait with an amazing payoff."
"Not 100% provable on whether this was solved, but I found the Super Mario 64 Tick Tock Clock Upwarp to be very interesting. A decade long mystery to figure out how a glitch occurred. Nobody could figure out how to do it, but we have recorded proof of it happening. A $1000 bounty was put on a way to reproduce the glitch. Decompilation of the code showed no possible way to accomplish it. People thought for the longest time that the video used mods or something. Later, people theorized it was caused by cosmic rays hitting the cartridge just right to flip a single bit at that exact moment in time to cause the upwarp. This part was mentioned in a Veritasium video."
"How genetic information is passed on to offspring. If you read Darwin’s On the Origin of Species he basically predicts that there must be some physiological method for genetic code to be passed down, then DNA was discovered like 100 years later."
"Catching killers like Bundy, Gacy, and Dahmer. Lots of people talk about how horrific and disgusting their crimes were and they forget that these monsters were caught. Granted, oftentimes not due to ace detective work by three letter agencies, but by regular people catching them on something mundane.
Bundy was caught after he was stopped by local police for speeding and the officer found him in a stolen vehicle. Gacy was caught after he was spotted on surveillance footage handling marijuana. Dahmer was found out after he solicited a potential victim who then flagged down local police officers. Hell, even Robert Pickton was caught by Canadian police after his property was raided, not for suspicion of murder, but for the suspected possession of illegal firearms."
"Fermat’s Last Theorem.
Statement: For any integer n > 2, the equation an + bn = cn has no positive integer solutions.
First posited in 1637, the proof was published in 1995."
"The location of the Richard III body."
"One big mystery that has been solved since I was a kid is “what killed the dinosaurs?” It turns out to be an asteroid that hit near the Yucatan, killing every single animal that couldn’t hide in a burrow on land and most of the big sea animals, too. You look at kids dinosaur books from the early 80s and there were a lot of different hypotheses. Another is “where did the moon come from?” Now everyone accepts it was created by another planet crashing into the earth, but in the 1980s there were several reasonable possibilities still being compared."
"I’m gonna go with Dennis Rader aka BTK Killer. This serial killer basically got away with murdering many people in the 70s and 80s, “retired”, but then sometime around 2005 some journalist began writing a book about BTK.
Rader did not like that. To him, his sick dream was to go to a random library and leave proof that he was BTK in this book of drawings/collections/admissions he made and that he hoped someone would find years after he was dead, whereupon he would forever be talked about. In BTK’s mind, the author was taking his own story away from him. So Rader came out of retirement, posting random letters and leaving strange packages in town announcing his imminent return, and writing to newspapers that BTK was back and would kill again.
Ah, but this wasn’t the 70s/80s anymore. Now there were security cameras in more places and one spotted a figure leave one of the packages before driving off in a black Jeep Cherokee. Also Rader communicated with police that he would rather send them a disk with a Word document saved on it (they assured him it was impossible to track anything from a disk) than send letters. It was 2005 after all.
That was a lie. When they got the disk, they searched the meta data and found “Christ Lutheran Church” and the document was last saved by someone named “Dennis”. A quick search on the ol’ Internet revealed Dennis Rader used to be president of the f@#kin’ church council! Police then drove by his address and HELLO: black Jeep Cherokee parked in the driveway.
Before they moved in for the arrest, they took DNA (again, DNA analysis not available in 70s/80s). Taking blood that was earlier procured from under the fingernails of one of his victims when she scratched him, they then obtained a warrant to use Rader’s daughter’s pap smear test as a comparison.
The family match was confirmed. Police swarmed Rader’s block and arrested him without incident. He confessed to things immediately but seemed hurt that police lied to him about tracking someone down with a computer disk, to which one detective incredulously replied, “You’re a serial killer and we were trying to catch you.”"
"I am gonna go in a different direction here I will say finding out what actually causes sickness. For much of humanity this argument had fierce advocates of miasma to why did you make God give you leprosy? The black plague and a pope surrounding himself with candles which attracted fleas and allowed his survival is the greatest doesn’t matter it worked ever."
"What is the structure of the atom and how does matter behave as they do- heat, electricity and a bunch of other cool stuff. Quantum mechanics will appear to be a case of extreme mental gymnastics to explain things… But it is the foundation of all the technological development and progress that we have had in the last 100 years or so."
"Delphi murders. I thought they’d be unsolved forever. So glad they got him, even more so that he’s literally admitted to it now."
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Humans can’t be used as an example. Unlike any other species, we go very far out of our way to make sure the weak and feeble-minded survive.