The name dysprosium traces back to the Greek word dysprositos, meaning hard to get at or hard to obtain, a reference to the extraordinary difficulty that chemists faced in separating it from the tangl...

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix came out about a year after I graduated high school, though I wasn't into the series at the time. I ended up watching it three years later in 2010 and genuine...

The Hong Kong dollar, carrying the symbol $ and the currency code HKD, is the official currency of Hong Kong. It divides into one hundred cents, and monetary authority over it rests with the Hong Kong...

The Hong Kong dollar, carrying the symbol $ and the currency code HKD, is the official currency of Hong Kong. It divides into one hundred cents, and monetary authority over it rests with the Hong Kong...

Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes was easily one of my favorite games on the Nintendo GameCube. It's wild how little time actually passed between it and the original Metal Gear Solid on PlayStation. K...

From Russia with Love is a 1963 spy film directed by Terence Young and the second entry in the James Bond film series. Produced by Eon Productions, it stars Sean Connery as MI6 agent James Bond. Alber...

I watched Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire around 2010, missing its original 2005 theatrical release entirely. In fact, I didn't pick up the books until after I'd already started working through th...

The Magnavox Odyssey², stylized as the Magnavox Odyssey2, was a second-generation home video game console released in 1978.It was also marketed as the Philips Odyssey² and sold internationally under a...

My wife introduced me to The Big Bang Theory about six years ago. Initially, I found the show annoying and frankly a little insulting toward nerd culture, but after spending roughly a year watching th...

The mouflon is a wild sheep native to Southwest Asia and is widely regarded as the most likely ancestor of domesticated sheep breeds. Technically speaking, every major modern gaming platform, includin...

I remember when Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban first hit book shelves, though I wasn't actually into the series at the time. I mostly just remember the buzz among my classmates back in middl...

The word “literature” derives from the Latin littera, meaning “letter.” Though it originally described written work, the term today extends to oral traditions that were eventually set down in writing....

Legally Blonde is a movie that most Millennials, the so-called Oregon Trail mini-generation, and Gen X genuinely adore. It came out in 2001, right as I was starting high school, so part of my fascinat...

Born Gaius Octavius Thurinus in 63 BC, the man who would become the Emperor Augustus came from a family of comfortable means but no particular political distinction.His path to prominence began with l...

I was only 10 years old in 1998, so I don't think I actually caught Rush Hour during its original theatrical run. But it clearly made a big enough splash to become genuinely culturally significant, es...

Amazon.com: War of The Wolf: The Complete Trilogy eBook : America, Adam: Kindle Store

Terbium is a chemical element with the symbol Tb and atomic number 65. It is a silvery-white rare earth metal that is both malleable and ductile. As the ninth member of the lanthanide series, terbium ...

Scribblenauts came out roughly 17 years ago on the Nintendo DS. I remember first hearing about the concept and being genuinely blown away by how revolutionary it sounded. I was never the most artistic...

The Swiss franc became Switzerland's first unified national currency in the year 1850, replacing a disorganized collection of local coins that individual cantons and cities had each been issuing on th...

I very clearly remember when WarioWare, Inc.: Mega Microgames! landed on the Game Boy Advance in the early 2000s. It genuinely came out of nowhere and was a remarkably bold move on Nintendo's part. Wa...

In 2002, I wasn't following the Harry Potter series when Chamber of Secrets first hit theaters. I didn't actually watch it until around 2010, on DVD. I'd genuinely loved the first film, so naturally, ...

Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, most commonly referred to simply as Dr. Strangelove, is a 1964 political black comedy co-written, produced, and directed by Stanle...

The Atari 5200 was a home video game console released by Atari, Inc. in the year 1982, positioned as a higher-end option to sit alongside the popular Atari Video Computer System. The VCS was renamed t...

The Mario Party series has been a long-running, highly successful franchise for Nintendo. It kicked off on the Nintendo 64 in the late 1990s, though I never got the chance to play it back then, mostly...

The English word tiger passed through Old English tigras and Old French tigre before arriving from the Latin tigris, which was itself borrowed from the ancient Greek. Since antiquity, scholars have pr...

In 2001, I was certainly aware that the first Harry Potter movie existed, but I didn't actually dive in until nearly nine years later, around 2010. I also knew about the book series, since even before...

Sunburn is a form of radiation burn affecting living tissue, most commonly skin, caused by overexposure to ultraviolet radiation, primarily from the Sun. The most familiar symptoms include reddened sk...

Leanne Morgan went from a complete unknown to one of the most popular comedians around in a remarkably short span of time. Chuck Lorre, creator of sitcoms like Two and a Half Men and The Big Bang Theo...

Octavia the Younger was born in Nola, Italy, around 69 BCE into a family whose political connections would shape the course of Roman history. She was the elder sister of Gaius Octavius, who would beco...

Resident Evil Zero is definitely one of the odder entries in the entire series. Serving as the franchise's ultimate prequel, it spent several years stuck in development hell before finally landing on ...

Gadolinium is a chemical element carrying the symbol Gd and atomic number 64. When surface oxidation is removed, it presents as a silvery-white metal. It is classified as a ductile and malleable rare-...

The 2000 Spider-Man video game was one of my favorite games growing up, right before I got my Nintendo GameCube. I had the Nintendo 64 version, but I later regretted not going with the PlayStation ver...

Yom Kippur, known in English as the Day of Atonement, holds the distinction of being the holiest day in the Jewish calendar. Rather than a celebration, it is a day devoted to repentance, seeking forgi...

The Merlin miniseries plays almost like its own self-contained movie at times, and it's often been packaged and sold that way. I remember watching it in my 12th grade English class. The special effect...

My Fair Lady is a 1964 American musical comedy drama adapted from the Lerner and Loewe stage musical that had premiered on Broadway in 1956, which was itself drawn from George Bernard Shaw’s 1913 play...

I became a huge fan of The Simpsons around the turn of the millennium as I got a little older, somewhere around 12 or 13. I stayed pretty obsessed with it for years, but by 2007, I'd mostly drifted aw...

The Atari 2600 was developed by Atari, Inc., with the core engineering work carried out at its subsidiary Cyan Engineering. The central problem the team was trying to solve was how to build a home con...

3rd Rock from the Sun is a classic but underrated sitcom from the 1990s. I was a bit too young to catch it during its original premiere, but I know I was watching well before it finally got canceled i...

The word planet comes from the Greek planḗtai, meaning wanderers. In ancient usage, the term applied to the Sun, the Moon, and the five points of light visible to the naked eye that moved independentl...

When I was in middle school and high school, my favorite video game console was the Nintendo GameCube. So it was disheartening watching so many of my friends write it off as kiddie and flawed compared...

The first public accounts of voice recording appeared in a New York newspaper and in Scientific American in November 1877. Thomas Edison had announced his invention of the phonograph, describing its p...

Around the same time Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson was starting to step away from wrestling and into acting, the Mummy franchise was riding high on the success of Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz. He appea...

Cleopatra VII Thea Philopator, whose epithet translates as “father-loving goddess,” was born in early 69 BCE as a member of Egypt’s Ptolemaic dynasty, the Macedonian Greek ruling house established fol...

Metroid Prime Hunters was the very first game that most people could technically play on their Nintendo DS, thanks to the demo that came with every system during its first year of production. But a lo...

Neodymium is one of those elements that quietly drives an enormous portion of modern technology while remaining almost entirely invisible to the people who depend on it. It belongs to the lanthanide s...

I remember back in 2020, my wife told me one of her favorite movies of all time was Practical Magic, a 1998 film I’d never even heard of. So we ended up watching it together on HBO Max toward the end ...

On February 14, 1966, Australia replaced its existing currency with the Australian dollar, which remains in use today. The transition was known as decimalisation, reflecting the shift to a system buil...

As a millennial born in 1988, I considered myself a pretty hardcore Nickelodeon kid, though I watched a fair amount of Cartoon Network too, just not much Disney Channel. Legends of the Hidden Temple w...

Mothra vs. Godzilla is a 1964 Japanese kaiju film directed by Ishiro Honda, with special effects overseen by Eiji Tsuburaya. Produced and distributed by Toho Co., Ltd., it is the fourth entry in the G...

The English word mustard traces back through Anglo-Norman mustarde and Old French mostarde, the latter surviving in modern French as moutarde. The underlying source is the Latin mustum, referring to g...