World’s Strangest

Now that college basketball season is in full swing, hoops fans are hearing a lot about teams’ home arenas during broadcasts. While it’s easy to figure out the origins of many of these namesake arenas—basketball fans surely know where Rupp Arena and the Dean Smith Center got their names—some aren’t as clear. Who was Cameron, [...]

What if Shakespearean costumes were designed by an artist who drew superheroes? That would never happen, right? In 1969, Sheldon Feldner contacted Marvel Comics, asking if one of Marvel’s artists would be interested in designing costumes for a production of William Shakespeare’s play Julius Caesar by the University Theatre Company at Santa Cruz at the newly-built [...]

Artist Rob Vargas created this graphic using data from a study by the University of California at San Diego. Americans consume 3.6 zettabytes a day. A zettabyte is one billion trillion bytes. That’s a lot of LOLcats! Link via Fast Company | Artist’s Website

Every year, Lake Superior State University publishes a list of overused words that should be banned: Word “czars” at Lake Superior State University “unfriended” 15 words and phrases and declared them “shovel-ready” for inclusion on the university’s 35th annual List of Words Banished from the Queen’s English for Mis-use, Over-use and General Uselessness. “The list this year [...]

Japanese researchers have succeeded in developing see through goldfish, whose beating hearts and other organs can be seen through their transluscent skin.  The move to develop see through goldfish (and other animals) was spurred by the desire to reduce/eliminate dissections of animals, still a sore point for many. The joint team of researchers at Mie University [...]

High school seniors Kenny, Martina, Ray, and Carol Crouch, quadruplets from Danbury, Connecticut were all ecstatic when they found that all four were accepted into Yale University. The Crouches’ perfect batting average represents a first for Yale — the first time in anyone’s memory that it has offered admission to quadruplets. It is also, of course, [...]

In a recently-presented scientific paper, Ian Lancashire and Graeme Hirst from the University of Toronto’s Department of English and Department of Computer Science demonstrate changes in the vocabulary used in Agatha Christie’s later novels. The professors digitized 14 Christie novels (and included two more available in the Gutenberg online text archive), and then, with the aid [...]

Most of us remember our college roommates as partners in crime who ate all our Easy Mac. Some famous athletes may remember their roommates as “that four-time Super Bowl winner who slept on the bottom bunk,” though. Here’s a look at 11 famous roommate pairings from the world of sports: 1. Tony Dungy and Flip Saunders The [...]

Are you thinking of getting a graduate degree, but want something with a narrower focus than an MBA or a JD? Schools around the world offer all sorts of incredibly focused graduate degrees to students who are trying to break into very specific fields. Here’s a look at a handful of programs you might not [...]

Students at the Technical University of Wroclaw, Poland, decorated the outside of their building with a giant LED clock that displays the time in binary. It consists of eighteen round windows, with green windows representing hours, blue windows representing minutes, and red windows representing seconds. Link (in Polish) via Gizmodo | YouTube Video | Photo: Wroclaw [...]