This may sound like an internet hoax but it isn’t. In January of 2015, farmer Derek Gow from Devon had to put down seven of his rare breed Heck cows. The reason for their demise? The cows were so aggressive they had tried on multiple occasions to attack him and his farm hands (and this is a breed with large …

In the 19th century there were a number of Asian nations that had sealed themselves off from the outside world, most famously Japan and China but Korea did it too. The idea was that they had seen what the rest of the world had to offer and they weren’t impressed. So after sealing themselves off from foreign influence their societies …

New chemical compounds are discovered or created regularly, some are created where the properties can already be guessed at, others are complete surprises, in 1930 a new compound was discovered by Ruff and Krug in Germany. It was very volatile so was ignored until a few years later interest was rekindled by Nazi scientists at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. It …

Delicious chocolate has a far stranger history than you may at first think biting into its brown creamyness. Chocolate is derived from Theobroma cacao seeds, better known as cocoa beans, which are indigenous to South America. The very earliest discovery of chocolate being processed for human consumption comes from drinking cups that have been dated to around 1,750 BC. These cups were …

We are often told how “civilised” and how much better the Romans were than the surrounding barbarians (the word barbarian comes from the Roman era, the Romans couldn’t understand these languages and thought they were just saying “bar, bar” all the time so barbarian means some who says bar all the time). However the Romans weren’t always as smart as …

Rasputin is one of those rare historical figures who lives on more as a myth than a man. The photos of him are genuinely eerie and there’s no denying his power as an adviser in Tsar Nicholas II’s court. He was associated with spirtual healing and the occult. However a calmer view of him reveals a man who was like …

Not a lot of attention (beyond Greece) is given to the Byzantine empire, this is in part because after a brief flourish after the end of the Roman Empire in the West the tale of this civilisation is one of constant, steady decline. However while Western Europe was mired in many wars of invasion after the collapse of the Roman …

The “Stuff” in museums can come from many different countries, so how did it get to be on display in a museum? Should some of it be returned? Jem Duducu discusses just this in his latest video…

You know those outrageous stories of rich British aristocrats behaving in a very odd manner? Well John “Mad Jack” Mytton is the very pinnacle. What you are about to read will sound made up, but Mytton’s biographer, Charles James Apperley, assures us the modern reader that he told Mytton’s exploits without exaggeration. In general mental heathcare was rudimentary in the …

How many times has the US Air Force dropped nuclear bombs on Spain? The answer is just the once but they did drop four of them… By the 1960s the world was in the most tense phase of the “Cold War”. The “West” was in a nuclear standoff with the Soviet Union. Both sides had enough nuclear weapons to ensure …