The Bank of England recently unveiled the new £50 bill featuring famed mathematician and codebreaker Alan Turing. Turing is recognized for his breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, philosophy, and even theoretical biology. However, he was most famously known for cracking the ‘Enigma’ code during World War II and helping shorten the conflict, saving countless lives. The banknote is one of the steps that the British government is taking to posthumously amend the wrongs committed against Turing during his life – namely the wrongful conviction for his homosexuality under Victorian-era laws…

How can you read a letter without opening it? The answer is with x-ray scanners! Scientists recently deciphered the contents of a 300-year old sealed letter from the Netherlands by virtually “unfolding” it with the help of a high-resolution x-ray scanner and a computer algorithm. Surprisingly, scientists were able to translate most of the letter, which was originally written in French. The correspondence in the letter, which was dated July 31, 1697, was revealed to be a request for a death certificate from Jacques Sennacques to his cousin Pierre Le Pers, a French merchant. The success of this…

Seventy-five years ago on Tuesday, November 20, 1945, the trials in Nuremberg, Germany began. It had been six months since the surrender of the Nazis and the end of World War II. More than 12 million Jews and non-Jews had been massacred by a man who was driven by antisemitism and the belief in Aryan (German) superiority. Key Nazi officials who were accused of war crimes, involvement in the Holocaust, and other injustices against humanity, were tried for over a year. They ultimately received death or imprisonment sentences or were acquitted. Let’s take a closer look at the trials and how it…

When we think of the Maya civilization, tall stone pyramids come to mind. But these ancient people were quite the engineers! Recently, scientists made a remarkable discovery in the city of Tikal in modern-day Guatemala. Here, they found evidence of an elaborate water filtering system within one of the city’s largest water reservoirs. They believe the filtering system may have been used to remove toxic metals like mercury, poisonous algae, and bacteria. Impressively, these materials are still used in modern-day water filtration, which just goes to show how technologically advanced the Maya…

Have you wondered how dogs became man's best friend? Or, why there so many dog breeds? On October 30, a study published in the online journal Science revealed more information about the history between dogs and humans, dating back to thousands of years. From previous studies, it was known that sometime between 15,000 to 40,000 years ago, humans first encountered a friendly gray wolf, and that forever changed the relationship. The dogs of today are descendants of and were domesticated from gray wolves. One study suggested that dogs may have been domesticated twice since their origin, but…

A figure of a giant kitty has been discovered in the Nazca lines in Peru, giving the world more insight to the culture of this ancient civilization. Learn all about it here!