Lord Byron was a Romantic poet, aristocrat, and British politician best known for the works of Don Juan and Childe Harold's Pilgrimage in the 19th century. The crazy true story of Lord Byron includes fame, fortune, and a wild string of affairs across Europe until his death at age 36 in Greece.
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Many of those who study dictators as either political commentators or psychological investigators make the point that the reverse side of narcissism is paranoia. These two traits have emerged in an interweaved manner through the behavior of countless dictatorial figures throughout history.
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Thanks to Hollywood, modern people think being a medieval knight would be cool. But we are wrong, oh so very wrong. You may want to hold off on teleporting back through time to claim your title as Sir Whatever until after you've read about what it was really like to be a medieval knight.
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The Dead Sea -- at 413 meters (1,414 feet) below sea level, already the lowest point on the Earth's surface, according to CNN -- has been consistently sinking further into the ground over the last 50 years. Its water level fell six meters in each of the first two decades after 1976.
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According to National Geographic, the tombs of Ancient Egyptian pharaohs typically were stocked with "everything they might need or want in the afterlife" -- and that included preserved food.
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AM NY recently reported that West Nile virus claimed the life of one New Yorker, and five others were diagnosed with the disease. Cases were also confirmed in Massachusetts, California, and Ontario, Canada, in September 2020, and authorities in Texas identified the virus in mosquito pools.
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Pies today come in every shape and size and have transformed in every culture they've come into contact with. This is the long history of pie explained.
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When bands break up, it's usually because the members got into a fight or there were creative differences between the group and their management. But there are those few instances when bands fragment because they thought they weren't successful. The Zombies believed that when they broke up in 1967.
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Edison's predictions a century ago about air travel, mass production, electric trains, and smartphones (kinda) were more or less on the mark. His forecast about the role that steel would play in our lives, however, ended up a cold, lifeless heap in the slush pile of attempted augury.
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Few of us really understand why these beautiful arcs appear in the sky. Sure, it has something to do with sunlight and water droplets -- but what, exactly?
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Plague doctors were scary guys in dark robes and long, beaked masks under hats ... right? Here's what it was really like being a plague doctor.
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In reality, Revere didn't complete the whole ride, wrote Smithsonian Magazine. Nor was he the only rider. He was, however, a real person. According to the Encyclopedia Brittanica, he was a silversmith and engraver, as well as an American revolutionary.
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Sharp, loyal, savage, and obedient, Grese quickly rose in rank out of 170 female SS staff to become the warden of the women's camp, which had 30,000 women in 62 barracks. The barracks were the epitome of squalor and disease, and Grese compounded this suffering many times over.
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The fable originated with "one of Washington's first biographers, an itinerant minister and bookseller named Mason Locke Weems." When Washington died in 1799, Weems immediately saw an opportunity to fulfill the American public's desire to learn more about the founding father.
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MERS, also known as MERS-CoV, or Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus, is a virus transferred to humans from infected animals -- in this case, dromedary camels, the ones with one hump. MedicalNewsToday reports that MERS-CoV was first discovered in Saudi Arabia September 20, 2012.
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At 6'4" he was effectively a giant for his times. He felled trees, split rails, and drove railroad spikes. He was also quite the wrestler. You wouldn't have wanted to fight this guy in close combat. But that doesn't mean he was the best soldier.
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The CDC said there are four different kinds of dengue viruses, and so some people may get the disease up to four times in their lifetime if they're unlucky. While generally considered a mild condition, people do die from dengue. About 400 million are infected with dengue every year.
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Hart Island has been host prisoners of war, quarantined city dwellers, convicts, the mentally ill, and more. And, almost always, it has been set aside for the burial of New York City's indigent and unclaimed dead. This is the messed up history of New York's Hart Island.
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Ebola is a pretty nasty disease. The virus can cause symptoms that you'd expect to see in a horror film. The more mild symptoms include fever, body aches, fatigue, and intense vomiting and diarrhea. The more extreme cases include kidney and liver impairment.
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Yellow fever has a history of plaguing humans for centuries. While today a vaccine can protect us, it had a history of affecting Panama Canal construction.
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The CDC cites statistics from the World Health Organization: "in 2018, 228 million clinical cases of malaria occurred, and 405,000 people died of malaria, most of them children in Africa" with underdeveloped immune systems. It is fatal if not treated.
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Four months after the incident, The Guardian reported further that an independent pathologist contracted by Ebossé's family to investigate the death concluded that it was impossible for him to have been killed by an object thrown from the stands.
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Stories of unbelievable hubs of science, like Atlantis. Stories of places filled with sin, like Sodom and Gomorrah. On occasion, they turn out to be very real places. Such might be the case of Iram of the Pillars, a place much like Sodom and Gomorrah, that stems from a sister legend in the Quran.
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Besides such a lovely pedigree, Victorian England was also home to some of the most disgusting lines of work possible -- including being a "rat catcher."
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If the stars had aligned slightly differently, the muscle-bedecked action star would have portrayed one of most important roles in the franchise. But, in the end, he joined the ranks of other "almost" Star Wars stars, which in turn kept the franchise from becoming something akin to Judge Dredd.
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Falling from any great height is terrifying. The feeling of plummeting toward earth in free-fall, sure, some people love it, but not others. So, what's the farthest someone's fallen, without the safety of a parachute, and lived to tell about? These are the highest falls that people have survived.
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The sinking of the Titanic on 15 April 1912 is remembered more than a century later as one of the biggest disasters in history: the hubris of the vessel nick-named "The Unsinkable" burst by a collision with an iceberg, and the deaths of 1,496 people on board. But there's more to the story.
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