Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More

Located above 66°33? Latitude North is the region we call the Arctic.  The Arctic is unlike any other environment on Earth, even the Antarctic. It is sparsely populated and has unique wildlife and a biome that can’t be found anywhere else.  It is completely dark in the winter and the sun never sets in the summer…and of course, it is really cold Learn more about the Arctic and what makes it so spec...

In the third century BC, Rome faced its greatest enemy. One man, a Carthaginian general named Hannibal Barca, led an army into the Italian peninsula and terrorized Rome for over a decade, despite having fewer resources and fighting on Rome's home turf.  He handed the Roman Republic many of its most humiliating defeats and, in the process, developed a reputation as the greatest general in the ancie...

In 1977, NASA took advantage of a once-in-a-lifetime alignment of the planets to send two probes to the outermost reaches of the solar system.  They sent back the best images and data yet available about Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune.  The program was a smashing success. However, the probes didn’t stop traveling. They kept going and going, all the while maintaining contact with Earth. They...

On April 15, 1452, a child was born, the illegitimate son of a peasant woman and a local notary in the village of Vinci, which was then part of the Republic of Florence.  Given his illegitimate status, no one expected much of the young man, so he was apprenticed in the studio of a local artist.  He would go on to become, not just one of the world’s greatest artists, but one of the earliest enginee...

On October 13, 1972, a fight transporting a Uruguayan rugby club crashed into the Andes Mountains.  For the following 72 days, survivors of the crash were stranded in the ice and snow, forced to survive in sub-zero temperatures, battling starvation and avalanches.  Desperate to escape the mountains, two of the crash survivors trekked across the harsh terrain for 10 days, eventually finding rescue...

On February 22, 1946, George F. Kennan, a career diplomat working in the American embassy in Moscow, sent an 8,000-word cable to the State Department in Washington. In it, he explained why the Soviet Union behaved as it did, outlining its unique combination of a communist ideology and historical Russian paranoia and suspicion.  He also gave a prescription for how the United States should respond....

You may have noticed, on occasion, that friends you have from totally different parts of your life sometimes know each other.  It often comes as a surprise, but it actually shouldn’t. It turns out that the world is highly connected via personal relationships.  In fact, it has been suggested that any two people in the world are only six degrees apart from each other via friends of friends of a frie...

For thousands of years, many theories have been put forward as to the cause of communicable diseases.  These theories ranged from the religious to the magical and sometimes quasiscientific, but what they all had in common was that there was no proof for anything.  Over the centuries, these theories became dogma and often prevented a better understanding of diseases. It wasn’t until the 19th centur...

Adolf Hitler was unquestionably one of the evil people, not just of the 20th century, but in all of history.  His very name has become a metaphor for someone bad or someone you want to associate with someone horrible.  However, he was a person, and as such, he had parents, siblings, nieces, and nephews. How did they deal with being related to the most infamous person in the world, and what exactly...

In 1585, Sir Walter Raleigh established an English colony on an island in what is today the state of North Carolina. After a slow start, over 100 people moved to the island to start a new life and establish this English outpost at the edge of the new world.  When a ship returned to the colony in 1590, what they found shocked them and began a mystery that remains unsolved to this day. Learn more ab...

The Ivory Coast, or as it is officially known, the Republic of Côte d'Ivoire, is a country located on West Africa’s southern coast. It is a small nation known for its agricultural production.  Despite its small size, the Ivory Coast is one of the most populous countries in West Africa, with a population of 31.5 million, and roughly 78 different languages are spoken. Despite recent political upheav...

The English language is weird.  We have words that are spelled the same but sound different. We have words that are spelled differently but sound the same.  We have words that sound nothing like how they are spelled, and a host of exceptions that you just have to know and remember. …and then for some reason, we have totally different arbitrary words for different groups of animals. In fact, we hav...

Everything we know in the world is ultimately dependent on energy. Energy fuels our bodies as well as our civilization. Energy is literally everywhere and all around us. Yet for the longest time, we had no idea what energy really was. It wasn’t until relatively recently that scientists had a grasp on energy as a concept, and once they did, they unlocked the related concepts of work and power.  Lea...

September is upon us. It means going back to school and the autumnal equinox.  The days get shorter in the north and longer in the south. The name September means sevenths, even though it is now the 9th month of the year. Most importantly, it is the time when you have questions and I have answers. Stay tuned for the 34th installment of questions and answers on this episode of Everything Everywhere...

In the first century, Rome underwent a major political transition when the Emperor Nero died after being declared an enemy of Rome by the senate.  With his death, the Julio-Claudian dynasty came to an end, ushering in a period known as the Year of the Four Emperors. For the common people, many of them simply didn’t believe that Nero was dead. In fact, many thought that he would one day return.  Le...

Between 1706 and 1718, a group of pirates established a haven in the Bahamas.  Using a code and system of rules that they developed themselves, the pirates created their own forms of self-governance to maintain order within a society that was otherwise lawless.  This community grew into a community of thousands of pirates before the British put an end to it. Learn more about the Republic of Pirate...

In 1972, the Olympics returned to Germany for the first time since being hosted in Berlin in 1936. The Games were intended to present a new image of West Germany, one that would reject the image portrayed at the previous Nazi-hosted Games and showcase a modern, peaceful nation. That didn’t happen. Instead, it became known for a terrorist attack on the Israeli Olympic team, which led to the death o...

In the 1980s, an Englishman by the name of Maurice Ward developed a  material which he claimed could withstand temperatures of thousands of degrees Celsius. Not only could the material withstand high temperatures, but it could also protect anything in proximity from high temperatures.  This product didn’t result in a revolution in material science. In fact, it was never produced at all, and in the...

Starting in the late 1970s and lasting for seventeen years, a series of bombings terrorized the American public.  Primarily targeting technology companies and universities, these attacks befuddled law enforcement officials for almost two decades. The bomber became one of the most wanted criminals in the history of American law enforcement.  When he was finally caught, the perpetrator wasn’t quite...

In 1968, the colony of Spanish Guinea was granted independence and became the Republic of Equatorial Guinea.  In its first open election, which turned out to be its last, it elected as president Francisco Macías Nguema. He very quickly turned out to be a dictator. However, he wasn’t just a dictator. He became one of the worst dictators of the 20th century.  Learn more about Francisco Macías Nguema...

In the year 54, the Roman Emperor Claudius died, and his adopted son Nero became the Emperor of Rome at the age of 16.  His reign was one of the most infamous in history, and over 2000 years after he came to power, his name is still used to invoke the image of a cruel ruler and a despot. But what exactly made him so bad, and was he really as bad as the legends say? Learn more about Emperor Nero an...

We have all looked at a map and seen all of the different countries represented by different colors. A country has some sort of border, and everything inside that border is what makes up the country.  However, there are some exceptions. There are exclaves, which are bits of a country that are separated from the main landmass, and enclaves, which are parts of a country totally surrounded by another...

At the end of the 15th century, Spain had almost completed the Reconquista and the removal of the Caliphate in the Iberian Peninsula, ending centuries of Islamic rule. One of the first things they did was usher in an attempt to unify and purify the country as a Catholic one, rather than a multi-religious one.  After receiving permission from the Pope, the Spanish monarchy persecuted hundreds of th...

Strategically located in the Eastern Mediterranean Sea, with access to Europe, Asia, and Africa, is the island of Cyprus.  Cyprus has a history that goes back as far as civilization itself, and it has had a history with almost every major civilization and empire around the Mediterranean..  Its history isn’t just a relic of the ancient world. It has remained strategically important and a source of...

The 19th century was one of rapid technological advancement.  Of all of the innovations to come out of this century, and there were many, perhaps none was more important than that of the telephone.  The telephone radically changed communications, allowing personal communications over long distances.  Despite what many people are often told, this invention wasn’t simply the genius of one man, but w...