Author: Gary Arndt

The year 1972 saw two epic contests between the United States and the Soviet Union. The first was American Bobby Fischer defeating Soviet Grandmaster Anatoly Karpov for the world chess championship. The other took place on a basketball court in Munich in the gold medal game of the Olympics. It was one of the most controversial moments in Olympic history, and the ramifications of that game are still reverberating today.

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1902, the French governor of Indochina faced a huge problem in the city of Hanoi. They were suffering from a massive infestation of rats and the rats could carry diseases, including the plague. The governor implemented a plan to get rid of the rats. Thousands of people were recruited in the effort. However, the program had a serious flaw. Not only didn’t it solve the problem, but it made things worse. Learn more about The Great Hanoi Rat Massacre of 1902/

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Located on the French Riveria, just a few kilometers from the border of Italy, sandwiched between the mountains and the sea, is the tiny country of Monaco. Monaco has several distinctions among the countries in the world, not just for its size, but for its population and its history. Learn more about Monaco, the smallest and wealthiest principality in the world, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

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Secrecy is a huge part of military success. You want to be able to communicate with your own forces without the enemy finding out what your plans are. As America entered World War II, they were in need of a method of communication that couldn’t be cracked by Germany or Japan. They found the answer they were looking for in the languages of Native Americans. Learn more about Navajo Code Talkers and the other Native American languages used in World War II

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To explore the universe humans have made any manner of telescopes. These telescopes can observe visible light, infrared light, radio waves, and even x-rays. One of the most important forces in shaping the universe is gravity. How can astronomers observe gravity? In 2002, the National Science Foundation, Caltech, and MIT managed to build a gravitational observatory.

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Weather systems on Earth aren’t stable. There are cycles that weather patterns go through which can have enormous effects around the globe. There is probably no more important weather cycle than the one meteorologists called the Southern Oscillation. This cycle can have dramatic implications for temperatures and rainfall all over the world. Learn more about El Nino and La Nina and the Southern Oscillation on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

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In the Dialogues written by Plato in the year 360 BC, he wrote of a place called Atlantis. Atlantis was a place where the citizens were half-gods and half-men, yet it was destroyed in a cataclysmic event. Ever since then people have been speculating about where Atlantis was and who the Atlantians were. Learn more about the history of Atlantis and the various theories of where it was and if it even existed, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

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Brooklyn wasn’t always a part of New York City. It used to be a separate city located across the East River from New York, which at the time was only on the island of Manhattan. For decades, people talked about a bridge to connect New York and the growing city of Brooklyn to facilitate travel and commerce. In 1883, that bridge finally opened. Learn more about the Brooklyn Bridge on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

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You are probably familiar with the term decimation. The word is usually used in English to mean “to cause great destruction or harm”. However, to ancient Rome, the word had a very different and very specific meaning. It was one of the most devastating and brutal forms of punishment that the military could inflict. Learn more about Decimation, the ultimate collective punishment, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

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In 1965, the director of research at Fairchild Semiconductor, Gordon Moore, made a prediction about the future of semiconductors. He said that over the next ten years, the number of transistors on an integrated circuit would double every two years. His prediction didn’t just hold true for the next 10 years, but it has held true for almost 60 years, and it had driven the global computer industry.

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