Althea Grant

Imagine if the Great Wall of China wasn’t this massive stone and brick behemoth snaking across mountains and deserts but instead, a giant wooden barricade stretching thousands of miles. It sounds almost cartoonish, doesn’t it? But here’s the twist: in the early days, the idea wasn’t as far-fetched as you might think. The possibility that … Read more

Imagine waking up one day to find out that the entire World Wide Web—your favorite place to scam Netflix passwords, watch cute cat videos, or dive into obscure Wikipedia rabbit holes—was hidden behind a paywall. Not just a few premium sites, but the whole shebang. The idea sounds absurd now, right? But trust me, this … Read more

Imagine logging on to YouTube and instead of endless cats doing backflips or people unboxing the latest tech gadget, you’re greeted by profiles, heart icons, and perhaps awkward video dates. Hard to picture, right? But that’s exactly the bizarre, barely-remembered backstory behind what could have been one of the world’s biggest dating sites—if history had … Read more

Back in 2005, when astronomers discovered Eris—a Tenth Planet wannabe lurking way out beyond Neptune—the cosmic status quo rattled. Pluto, once comfortably perched as the ninth planet, suddenly found itself sharing the stage with a host of icy bodies competing for the spotlight. If you think Pluto’s demotion to “dwarf planet” was inevitable, you’re in … Read more

Imagine the world’s most legendary conqueror, Alexander the Great, barely making it out of his teenage years alive. Hard to picture, right? We’re so used to thinking of Alexander as this unstoppable force, a celestial blend of genius and destiny. But as a youth, he was no invincible titan. In fact, a brush with death … Read more

It’s wild to think that America, a country so stubbornly loyal to miles, pounds, and gallons, once came dangerously close to ditching it all for the metric system. You know, that neat, decimal-based system where everything bites off chunks of ten—meters instead of feet, liters instead of pints. It makes perfect sense on paper, yet … Read more

It’s one of those stories that sounds like it’s been wrapped in legend and polished over decades: a messy lab bench, a forgotten petri dish, and a mold that changes the course of human history. Penicillin was stumbled upon by accident, but the real shocker? It was nearly dismissed as nothing more than a lab … Read more

Imagine a city teetering on the edge of disaster, a spark waiting to ignite a catastrophic blaze, yet somehow, the inferno almost never began. It sounds like the setup for a thriller, but this was London in 1666, the very moment before the Great Fire that forever reshaped the city. The irony? The whole thing … Read more

Imagine a world where you pick up your phone, dial a number, and the voice on the other end belongs to someone nobody remembers. Someone almost erased from history, overshadowed by the name that everyone now associates with the invention of the telephone. It’s wild to think about how inventions we take for granted could’ve … Read more

Imagine a world where the dissemination of ideas was shackled, where the written word wasn’t a tool of enlightenment but a weapon of control. That’s exactly what was on the verge of happening with the printing press—a marvel that we now take for granted as the bedrock of modern communication. You might think that the … Read more