Answer – Listorati https://listorati.com Fascinating facts and lists, bizarre, wonderful, and fun Sat, 17 Jun 2023 09:47:43 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.7.1 https://listorati.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/listorati-512x512-1.png Answer – Listorati https://listorati.com 32 32 215494684 10 Easy Questions We Still Don’t Know The Answer To https://listorati.com/10-easy-questions-we-still-dont-know-the-answer-to/ https://listorati.com/10-easy-questions-we-still-dont-know-the-answer-to/#respond Sat, 17 Jun 2023 09:47:43 +0000 https://listorati.com/10-easy-questions-we-still-dont-know-the-answer-to/

We know that science doesn’t have the answers to everything, but seeing that it’s 2014 and the future is almost here, there are some questions we really expected it to have answered by now.

10How Does Turbulence Work?

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Everyone has gone through a flight where the pilot asks you to tighten your seat belts because of excessive turbulence, but even though it is so important to things like air safety, we just have no idea how it works. It has perplexed scientists to such an extent that Einstein once famously said, “Before I die, I hope someone will clarify quantum physics for me. After I die, I hope God will explain turbulence to me.”

The problem is aggravated by the fact that wherever the need to study turbulence arises—like in jet propulsion—chemical reactions take place alongside the high pressure and extreme conditions, which makes it difficult for researchers to study the exact conditions needed to produce turbulence. If somehow we could figure it out, it could be applied to a variety of uses since turbulence occurs everywhere in nature. Maybe one day we’d even be able to predict hurricanes or other natural disasters with accuracy, thus minimizing the damage and finally scoring one over nature.

9Why Do Cats Purr?

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We’ve shown before that cats don’t always purr when they’re happy, but the mystery goes way deeper than that. There is no purring organ in the throat of a cat, and even though extensive research has been done on the function itself, the exact origin of the function in the anatomy of cats is still unknown.

It’s theorized that they might do it by the constriction and dilation of the larynx, but no evidence has ever been provided to prove or disprove that theory. It was, however, found that the frequency of a cat’s purr falls somewhere in the range required to accelerate bone regeneration and healing, so it might just be a healing superpower that we had no idea even existed in the animal kingdom. That might also explain why we take it to be a happy sound, as the frequency is not just beneficial for the cat—it tends to make us happier as well.

8What Causes Hypnic Jerks?

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Often when we are about to fall asleep, we experience a kind of a falling sensation which causes us to wake up with a start. It happens to almost everybody, and the sensation is known as a hypnic jerk. It also sometimes happens when you tilt the chair you’re sitting on too far—somehow you can sense when you’re about to fall, and you wake up with a hypnic jerk. We really have no idea what causes them or whether they serve any modern purpose, but science has come up with some interesting theories.

One hypothesis suggests that our bodies developed this mechanism when we used to sleep on branches or high ground, and it was meant to help us avoid a fall. But there is no evidence to support it, and humans rarely slept on trees or precarious cliffs as a matter of habit. Other theories suggest that it happens because of the slowing down of the body’s processes when you fall asleep, but again, there are no scientific studies to support that claim either.

7How Exactly Do Magnets Work?

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Magnetism is a widely observed phenomenon in our universe, but a lot of things about it remain unexplained. For example, why do particles charged with electricity create a magnetic field strong enough to physically move things from far away? And when they do, why exactly do they align themselves to two poles, north and south?

Explanations range from “it’s just one of those things” to particle movement at the quantum level, and MIT even has a whole laboratory dedicated to research on nothing but magnetism. We know that it’s happening, and we have a good idea of what exactly is happening, too—the particles align themselves in a way that adds up their charge in one direction, but it’s not very clear as to why the particles emit a magnetic field to start with. The fact that the Earth’s magnetic field is not well understood either further restricts our ability to understand magnetism.

6Why Do Giraffes Have Long Necks?

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Many may believe that only giraffes with long necks survived evolution because they had an advantage over the other, short-necked ones, but that’s not really true. Longer necks provide no particular advantage to giraffes because they care more about the type of leaf than the height at which it’s situated. If it’s confusing to you, science doesn’t have much of a clue either. There’s just no consensus on the exact conditions that would have caused long necks to be selected positively among giraffes.

One theory is that the giraffes developed long necks as a mating trait—in other words, it helped with the ladies—but there’s not much evidence to support that hypothesis. On the contrary, big, heavy necks, no matter how good they look, would be a definite disadvantage in the wild and are sure to die out at some point in the future. Another theory says that they had to develop long necks because of long legs, but again, that theory is based less on factual evidence and more on a scientist looking at a giraffe and guessing.

5Why Do Birds Migrate?

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We know that birds migrate over really long distances every year to lay eggs or to escape harsh winters. What we don’t know is how they do it at all. The migration of birds remains one of the most mysterious animal behaviors known to science, and even though they’ve been trying hard to solve it for a long time, answers haven’t been easy to come by.

Consider this: Cuckoos migrate and lay their eggs in other birds’ nests, then just fly away to their own business. When the young ones grow up, they make their way to their ancestral lands without any help whatsoever. Scientists do believe that they are able to use a variety of compasses based on the stars and the Earth’s magnetic field, but a compass can only guide you—it can’t tell you the coordinates of a location you should have no idea about. Clearly, cuckoos are one species you don’t want to mess with.

4What Causes Gravity?

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Newton pioneered the study of gravity over 350 years ago, and you’d think that we’d have it all figured out by now. But the more we’ve progressed in our knowledge of the world, the more baffling gravity has become for researchers. For starters, we know the causing particle for each of the four fundamental forces of the universe—except gravity. A graviton is believed to be that particle, but we’re pretty far from actually finding it.

Another thing about gravity is that it is the weakest of all the other fundamental forces, yet if we look around the world, that doesn’t seem to be the case at all. Gravity keeps galaxies together, and it is about 1040 times weaker than the electromagnetic force. The fact that it’s so weak makes it all the more difficult to study it in the lab.

3How Do We Store And Retrieve Memories?

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Science has come a long way toward understanding how our bodies work, but memories are still one of the most perplexing problems of the human anatomy. We just have no idea exactly what parts of the brain are involved in the storage of our memories, though we do know that a lot of areas of the brain are involved in the process. Even more confusing than memory storage is memory retrieval. Scientists have been looking into how our brains trace a particular memory from our memory bank since at least the ’20s, but it’s still not clear how we do it.

What we do know for sure is that it has something to do with neurons and the connections between them. When we see something that triggers a memory to be traced, many parts of the brain interact with each other simultaneously to make us remember it. Beyond that, though, the whole thing is a mystery.

2Why Do Women Go Through Menopause?

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Menopause defies all the rules of evolution. The ability to reproduce in the animal kingdom ensures that the species are able to pass on their superior genes, but in humans, something weird happens. Women decisively lose their ability to pass on their lineage at the age of about 45–50, and science just doesn’t have any idea why. From an evolutionary perspective, it is always harmful for a species to completely give up their ability to reproduce, as survival by natural selection ceases to take place once that happens.

One explanation is the grandmother hypothesis, which says that after a point, women should spend more time caring for their grandchildren than their children, but the benefits of that are far inferior to the benefits of giving birth to your own children. It’s also not abundantly found in the animal kingdom. Apart from humans, only two species of whale completely stop breeding at a certain age and go on to live for a significant amount of time. Other animals that experience deteriorating sexual abilities, however, often die out soon after.

1What Are Dreams?

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Dreaming is one thing that’s common to us all. It might differ in the way it happens for some of us, but it’s definitely a resident feature of all of our brains. You’d think that science would be able to figure out why our brains decide to go in LSD mode every night, but sadly, there are no definite answers as to what exactly dreams are. Some people believe that they’re just random images which serve no purpose, while others believe that they carry a deeper meaning, though we’re all pretty much guessing here.

Some theories suggest that dreams are a manifestation of things we’d rather not think about during the day, like sexual fantasies, though many modern scientists don’t agree with that. What they do agree with, however, is that dreams are most likely symbolic of something deep in our psyche, though no one can decisively say what. The jury is divided on whether they serve any purpose at all, and it looks like it’s going to take a long time for us to come to a universally accepted answer.

Check out Himanshu’s stuff over at Cracked or say hi to him on Twitter.

Himanshu Sharma

Himanshu has written for sites like Cracked, Screen Rant, The Gamer and Forbes. He could be found shouting obscenities at strangers on Twitter, or trying his hand at amateur art on Instagram.


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Questions About the Universe We Can’t Answer https://listorati.com/questions-about-the-universe-we-cant-answer/ https://listorati.com/questions-about-the-universe-we-cant-answer/#respond Tue, 07 Mar 2023 16:02:52 +0000 https://listorati.com/questions-about-the-universe-we-cant-answer/

The universe is big. So big, in fact, that even if we learn how to travel at the speed of light and solve all other problems with space travel, we’d still only be able to explore a tiny fraction of what we can currently observe. Of course, even that seems like a thing of the distant, unforeseeable future right now, as our best, most-advanced tools of space exploration today barely allow us to scratch the surface of our own Solar System, let alone the entire universe. 

What our tools can finally do, though, is consistently discover entirely new things that we don’t yet understand. Mounting research is proving that the universe is far from the cold, empty void that we once thought it to be. From weird, scary planets beyond our reach to baffling things going on inside our own galaxy, it’s full of a mind-boggling variety of mysteries and phenomena we just can’t explain…

10. Time

Albert Einstein made quite a few groundbreaking discoveries throughout his career, though his most important contribution to science was his theory of relativity. Contrary to the absolute positions of space and time in Newtonian physics, in Einstein’s view, neither exists without the other, and both are relative to each other as well as the observer. 

While it revolutionized the field of science, it also elevated time from a seemingly uniform dimension of reality to something far more complex. If time is relative and has no meaning outside the fabric of spacetime, then, what exactly is time? 

For now, we can’t say for sure. In fact, we don’t even know if time exists as an absolute function of the universe or not, as every one of our mathematical equations and theories work the same without it. Moreover, we don’t know why it only seems to go forward and always works to increase the amount of disorder in the universe, also known as entropy. That’s why you never see broken pieces of glass coming together to form a complete window, or living cells repairing and fixing themselves over time to get younger. 

9. The Universal Applicability Of Mathematics

One of the most fascinating things about mathematics is its applicability across different, wildly unrelated fields. Fluid dynamics, for one example, doesn’t just help explain fluids and their complex movement. It’s also applicable in economics, military strategy, industrial logistics, banking, and a variety of other areas that don’t seem to be connected in any way.

Within the purview of natural sciences – like physics, chemistry, biology and other fields that deal with observations from nature – this universal applicability of mathematical principles isn’t just odd, it’s downright baffling. It’s easy to find multiple examples of mathematical concepts – like Pi – that work with seemingly distinct areas of study, from spatial geometry to space exploration to banking. It doesn’t make sense – almost like opening a series of locks with a bunch of keys and getting it right in the first or second go every time.

8. Fermi Bubbles

Fermi Bubbles – named after the gamma-ray telescope that first captured them in 2010 – are two humongous, interconnected bubbles of gas, dust and cosmic radiation seemingly emanating out of the black hole at the center of the Milky Way. Only visible in gamma-ray light, they’re about 50,000 light years in total length. For perspective, the entire Milky Way is about 100,000 light years across, making these bubbles perhaps the single largest structure in the galaxy.

For now, that’s pretty much all we know about them, except that they’re also accompanied by unexplained bursts of energy only visible in radio frequencies, along with mysterious hourglass-shaped X-ray structures surrounding the center. One study from May 2020 suggests that they might be related to bursts of gas and dust from the black hole in some way.

7. How Big Is It?

There’s no widely accepted measure of how big the universe really is, or even if it’s measurable with our tools and parameters. From our point of view, we know that it expands to about 46 billion years in every direction, which forms the boundary of what we know as the ‘observable universe’, though that’s hardly its real boundary. In fact, quite a few scientists think that the universe might not have a clearly defined edge at all.

That number merely means that the first ray of light produced after the Big Bang is now 46 billion light years away from us, as the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate. There’s no reason to believe that the edge of the observable universe is the edge of the actual universe, though if it’s not, what lies beyond the realm of spacetime? As of now, we have no way to even guess that. 

Its size isn’t the only problem – we don’t know its shape, either. Is the universe spherical? That’s what most of us assume, though again, we don’t have any evidence to prove or suggest that. For all we know, it might not be a uniform, three-dimensional sphere at all, but rather something like a donut.

6. The Center Of The Milky Way

If we’re ever able to journey to the center of our galaxy, we’d likely find quite a few mysterious objects and phenomena we’ve never seen before. One of them is the supermassive black hole called Sagittarius A, which only shows up in the photos as a faint, barely visible radio source. That’s only a wild guess, too, as there’s a growing school of astronomers that believes that it might be some other type of matter altogether.

What we do know for sure, though, is that it’s unlike anything we’ve seen before. Some astronomers suspect that it’s a Galactic Center Radio Transient – another emerging class of objects observed in other regions of the universe that we don’t really get. 

The center of the Milky Way is also home to huge strands of light – some more than 150 light years across, arranged in symmetrical, artistic patterns that we can’t quite explain. First discovered in the early 1980s, some astronomers think that they’re related to the suspected super black hole at the center, or even the above-mentioned Fermi Bubbles, in some way. 

5. Supervoid

The ‘supervoid’ refers to a humongous region of nothingness about three billion light years from Earth. It’s not exactly empty, but contains 20% less matter than any other part of the universe we can see, spanning across a total distance of over 1.8 billion light years. It’s a part of what the cool scientists are calling exotic physics – a new type of physics that deals with baffling phenomena beyond the frontiers of our knowledge. 

Unlike the more or less uniform distribution of matter in the rest of the universe, the supervoid is unusually under-dense, and we don’t really know why. It’s unusually cold, too, and coincides with another discovery made in 2004 called the ‘Cold Spot’, except the lack of density only accounts for about 10% of the coldness. Moreover, there’s something bizarre at its center that causes any light passing through the void to lose its energy. It’s not a black hole, as black holes emit very clear X-rays and radio waves, though something even emptier and hollower than the rest of the void. 

4. Strange Matter

On first look, strange matter might sound like a general grouping of multiple phenomena we don’t understand – like dark matter or dark energy. Strangely enough, if we may, that’s not the case, as it refers to a specific type of matter that seemingly shifts between the states of matter and antimatter like it’s nothing. First theorized by two MIT scientists back in 1978, strange matter has since been one of the most bizarre phenomena we’ve observed out in the wild.

Of course, we haven’t actually observed it in space, as strange matter is only suspected to be found at the center of neutron stars – super-dense celestial objects formed after the death of stars. At those pressures, even the most fundamental building block of the universe – quarks – cease to exist in their natural form. The only thing that can stay stable at those pressures is the strange quark, or s quark, which can group together and form strange matter.

It’s all hypothetical – as we have no neutron stars lying around in a lab to check for ourselves – though some suspected properties of strange matter have been observed in the lab. Some scientists believe it to be contagious and dangerous, as strange matter could turn other normal types of matter strange, slowly creeping across the universe and engulfing everything in its path until everything is strange. Thankfully for us all, the center of a neutron star is nearly  impossible to escape. For now. 

3. The Darwinian Theory Of Evolution

One of the biggest mysteries of the universe is its seeming emptiness. Why, even after actively looking for so many decades, have we never been able to discover any signs of life other than our own? One could argue that the universe is too big and we’ve only just started exploring it. That might be true, but we’ve still managed to observe quite a large part of it for telltale signs of life. So far, we’ve found none.

According to one fascinating theory, it might just be due to the Darwinian theory of evolution, only applied to universes instead of forms of life. First proposed by the theoretical physicist Lee Smolin, it suggests that universes follow the same principles of evolution and natural selection as life on Earth. As stars turn into black holes, according to the theory at least, they give birth to black holes and multiple other smaller universes with slightly different parameters. 

While most of them die without the development of any form of life, ours might have been a more successful specimen, even if it wasn’t too successful. Life does exist here, though only in one random corner of an insignificant galaxy rather than as a general rule of the universe. Who knows, there might even be universes teeming with life in every corner somewhere out there, as well as universes that are even emptier and colder than ours.

2. What Is It Made Of, Really?

Obviously, it’s impossible to know everything the universe is made of. We can’t even observe most things beyond a small circle within our solar system, let alone calculate the chemical composition of colossal objects in the most distant corners of our universe. Still, you’d think that we have some clue.

As it turns out, we really don’t. Visible matter that follows the rules of physics we know constitutes barely 4-5% of the entire universe. Of the rest, 27 percent is taken up by dark matter – a mysterious type of matter we only know about due to its glue-like effect on distant galaxies and other objects. The remaining 68% is dark energy, easily one of the most mysterious forces we know of in the universe. It seemingly permeates everything we can see in outer space, except we don’t know anything about it, other than the fact that it’s the force responsible for the rapid expansion of the universe – sort of like the opposite of gravity. Speaking of gravity…

1. Gravity

Gravity is by far the weakest of all the four main types of force in the universe – the other three being electromagnetism, and the weak and strong nuclear forces. Yet, it’s the most dominant. You’d find superstructures larger than anything our minds can comprehend in the most distant parts of the universe still following its basic rules. In fact, gravity and electromagnetism are the only two forces with infinite reach, though EM doesn’t even come close to the influence gravity has on reality. It works as an accumulative force, rather than the positive-negative canceling out of the other forces.

What we don’t quite understand, however, is how it works at the quantum level, and that’s putting it simply. We have no clue what gives matter its gravitational properties, or exactly how it interacts with spacetime, even if we definitely know that it does. Time dilation caused by gravity, for one example, is actively accounted for in geo-mapping equipment.

Like time, Einstein was instrumental in shaping up our modern understanding of gravity, and many of his predictions – including gravitational waves – have been proven real in the past few years. We now know that gravity sits at the fundamental core of the nature of our reality, though we’re still no closer to explaining it than he was.

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More Questions From History That Historians Can’t Answer https://listorati.com/more-questions-from-history-that-historians-cant-answer/ https://listorati.com/more-questions-from-history-that-historians-cant-answer/#respond Mon, 27 Feb 2023 09:04:26 +0000 https://listorati.com/more-questions-from-history-that-historians-cant-answer/

In the past, we have examined some of the mysterious questions that keep historians up at night. And today, we are ready to take a look at 10 more…

10. Who Fired the Shot Heard ‘Round the World?

April 19, 1775, is a date that forever changed the world. It was the day of the Battles of Lexington and Concord, the first military engagements between the British and the Americans that triggered the Revolutionary War. That opening salvo of bullets that marked the beginning of the battle has become known as the “shot heard round the world,” thanks to a poem by Ralph Waldo Emerson, but the question is…who fired it?

Unfortunately, the initial skirmish was a mass of chaos and confusion, and nobody is even really sure which side fired the shot, let alone which person. An army of 800 British regulars led by General Thomas Gage entered Lexington at around 5 am that morning, with orders to seize all the weapons and gunpowder stored at Concord. They encountered a militia company of 70 men or so who scattered as the British forces entered the town square. Then, someone somewhere fired that fateful shot. Thinking they were being attacked, the regulars opened fire on the colonists and killed eight militiamen before moving on towards Concord. And thus… the war began.

9. What Happened to the Bermagui Five?

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On the south coast of New South Wales, Australia, there is a small town with nice, lovely beaches, with the intriguing name of Mystery Bay. So what mystery does it refer to, exactly? Well, it’s the 1880 disappearance of the Bermagui Five, a group of men who vanished without a trace in that area while conducting a geological survey.

The group was led by a geologist with the New South Wales Mines Department named Lamont Young, who was working out of the nearby town of Bermagui. This was at the time of the Australian Gold Rush. There was lots of money to be made, so geologists like Young surveyed every bit of Australia in the hopes of finding a new goldfield. On October 10, 1880, Young took his assistant and a boat crew of three and traveled northward to explore a new area of the coast. 

Later that evening, a laborer riding along the coast saw the empty boat, which had drifted into a rocky part of the bay. The sail was tied down. Some of their clothes, books, and equipment were still aboard, and there was a lot of vomit on the floor of the ship. The five men, however, were nowhere to be found, and their fate remains a mystery to this day.

8. Was Nauscopie Real or a Scam?

Around 250 years ago, there was a French engineer named Etienne Bottineau who claimed to have invented a new science, which he called nauscopie, that could be used to “discover ships and land at a great distance.” Nowadays, both the man and his strange claim have almost completely faded from memory, found mostly as minor references in other people’s works. But even in his own time, nauscopie was never seriously studied, both because Bottineau never bothered to write down or explain in detail how it worked, and because he lived on the remote island of Mauritius, back then called Isle de France. 

It seems that, for the most part, Bottineau used nauscopie as his secret weapon to winning bar bets, being able to predict the arrival of ships into port up to four days in advance. But in 1782, he alerted the governor that a fleet of 11 ships was approaching the island. Bottineau then advised him that the fleet had changed course. Fearing that the British might be attacking, the governor dispatched a warship to find out what was going on. When it returned, it confirmed everything Bottineau said – a fleet of vessels was heading towards Mauritius, but then it changed course and headed towards India. So the question remains: was Bottineau simply lucky, a conman, or did nauscopie actually work?

7. Where Is Attila the Hun?

Fewer people have had a more sudden, shocking, and violent impact on the world than Attila, leader of the Huns. The origins of these nomadic people are still uncertain, but they appeared in Europe sometime during the late 4th century AD. In just a few decades, they had established a vast empire and became the biggest threat to the hegemony of the Roman Empire. They could have become the leading force in Europe, if not for the unexpected death of Attila, which surprisingly happened during peacetime, while the Hunnic leader was celebrating his latest marriage.

Many cultures have different customs when it comes to dealing with the dead. Some like to build lavish tombs, mausoleums, even pyramids for their leaders. The Huns were exactly the opposite – they believed Attila’s tomb should be a secret. The Hunnic chieftain was placed in three nesting coffins – one made of iron, one made of silver, and the last one made of solid gold. These were filled with jewels and other priceless treasures that signified Attila’s strength and subjugation of other nations. But they didn’t mark the burial site with any kind of monument and they also killed the gravediggers so that the knowledge of the location would die with them. And that location remains a mystery to this day. 

6. What Caused the Puebloan Migration?

The Ancestral Puebloans are one of the oldest Native American cultures, having appeared sometime during the 8th century AD. For hundreds of years, they lived and thrived in the Four Corners region of the United States, comprised of parts of Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona. But then, during the late 13th – early 14th century, they seemingly disappeared under circumstances that still remain a mystery.

For a while, we thought that the Ancestral Puebloans were wiped off the face of the Earth – maybe by a natural disaster, maybe by enemy tribes. Nowadays, however, scholars are pretty convinced that these ancient people didn’t die out suddenly, they migrated. But there is still the question of what event could determine an entire civilization to pack up and abandon the place they called home for centuries?

It’s still possible that enemy attacks could have been the reason, or a loss of fertile land due to deforestation and soil erosion. Some scientists believe that the culprit was a “megadrought” that made it impossible to grow food in the region. While all explanations are plausible, none have been proven definitively.

5. What Happened to the Joyita?

When it comes to creepy stories about ghost ships, the Joyita has to be right up there. On October 3, 1955, this American merchant vessel left Samoa with 25 people aboard, heading towards the Tokelau Islands. It was supposed to arrive there two days later, but even on October 6, there was still no word from the Joyita. A search and rescue team was dispatched but they were unable to find it.

It was over a month later that another merchant ship stumbled upon the Joyita adrift hundreds of miles off-course. It was partially submerged and listing badly on one side, although it wasn’t in danger of sinking. The people were gone, the cargo was gone, and the interior had sustained a lot of damage. Had the vessel been attacked by pirates, or Japanese fishing boats, or a Soviet submarine? Was there a mutiny or was it all some kind of insurance fraud? No signs of the 25 people aboard the Joyita have ever been found, leaving this puzzle unsolved for the time being.

4. What Happened to Thomas Paine’s Remains?

There once was a time when Thomas Paine was regarded as one of the biggest heroes of the American Revolution. His influential pamphlets inspired many people into action, and when he was finished in America, he traveled to Paris and became involved with the French Revolution, as well. And yet, when he died in 1809, he was broke, childless, and so hated by his peers that only six people attended his funeral. And according to legend, some of his bones were recycled into buttons while the rest were tossed in the garbage. Paine’s ideas and his character have been mostly rehabilitated in modern times, but one question still lingers – what happened to his remains?

Thomas Paine became a pariah in his time mainly due to two reasons. One, his work titled The Age of Reason was seen as an attack on Christianity, and two, following his arrest and detention in France, Paine criticized many of his former revolutionary allies, feeling that they had abandoned him.

When he died, Paine was buried in a modest grave on his farm, but a decade later, a fan of his named William Cobbett arranged for him to be exhumed and shipped to his native England. He hoped to arrange for a grand resting place for Paine but found no takers. Ultimately, Cobbett ended up keeping Paine’s bones in his attic until he died, at which point their fate becomes uncertain. Cobbett’s son sold all his effects at auction, so it is possible that some bones were sold off piece by piece, while others were thrown in the trash. Several people have claimed to possess parts of Thomas Paine, but none have been proven.

3. Where Did the Tamil Bell Come From?

There is a certain category of historical puzzles called out-of-place artifacts and, as its name suggests, it refers to items that have been found in places where they don’t belong. This puts pressure on scholars and scientists to try and explain how they got there, and one of the most prominent examples is the Tamil Bell.

Around 1836, British missionary William Colenso stumbled upon the Tamil Bell in the Northland Region of New Zealand, being used by M?ori women to boil potatoes. After questioning the locals, he found out that they had possessed the bell for many generations, after finding it buried under a tree. Later examinations of the unusual artifact revealed that it was a ship’s bell made of bronze and that it had Tamil writing on it. And it wasn’t modern Tamil, either, but rather an old-fashioned script that had not been used for centuries.

It’s pretty obvious that the bell came from a Tamil ship, but this raises more questions than it answers? Europeans first made contact with New Zealanders in the mid-17th-century, but this was at least a hundred years older than that. Did this mean that the Tamil people and other South Asian cultures knew about New Zealand much earlier than this? Did they have contact with each other or did the bell simply wash ashore following the sinking of a Tamil ship?

2. What Happened to America’s First Black Doctor?

James Durham, sometimes spelled Derham, made history when he became the first Black man in the United States to become a doctor. Unfortunately, most of his life is clouded by mystery and uncertainty, and so is his death, as Durham disappeared one day, never to be seen again.

The future physician was born into slavery circa 1762 in Philadelphia, and for the first two decades of his life, he was owned by several doctors. One of them, John Kearsley, taught James to read and write not just in English, but also in French and Spanish. Durham’s last master was a Scottish physician who lived in New Orleans named Robert Dow. He encouraged Durham to study medicine and also allowed him to practice it on some of his patients.

In 1783, James Durham became a free man. We’re not entirely sure if he paid for his liberation or if Dow granted it, but he was able to open his own practice in the city. It flourished for years, thanks mainly to Durham’s fluency in multiple languages and his willingness to treat patients from all racial backgrounds.

Things were going well for Durham. He even became a correspondent with Benjamin Rush, one of the Founding Fathers and, arguably, the most famous doctor in the country at the time. In 1801, Durham returned to his native Philadelphia. Just a year later, he disappeared and was never heard from again. Some think he moved to practice medicine elsewhere, but others fear that he may have been killed by people who resented his success. 

1. Who Were the Sea Peoples?

Ancient history is filled with mysterious civilizations about whom we know almost nothing, but few of them have had a bigger impact on history than the Sea Peoples. A confederacy of seafaring nations, the Sea Peoples appeared suddenly in the Mediterranean during the 12th century BC and waged war on anyone who got in their way – the Greeks, the Egyptians, the Phoenicians, they all suffered at the hands of this wrathful civilization. 

The Egyptians were the ones who have provided us with the most detailed accounts of the Sea Peoples, as the two sides fought often during the reigns of Ramses II and Ramses III. They also named some of the groups that made up this warring confederation, such as the Tjeker and the Sherden, but this has not helped us pinpoint their origins.

Today, the incursions of the Sea Peoples are considered one of the main factors behind the Late Bronze Age collapse, but their identities, their purpose, and their final fate remain unknown.

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