The contributions of women to our society cannot be overstated, even if those individuals have not received the credit they were due in most historical accounts. Before our modern era, the common perception of women had more to do with their roles as mothers and homemakers rather than as scientists.

But that is an incorrect and unfair characterization. Although female scientists were often denied recognition for their accomplishments, they were responsible for many groundbreaking discoveries and advancements in science. They still are today.

10 DNA

Yes, that’s right. The structure of DNA was discovered by a woman.

Three men won the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for bringing us what we now know as the double helix, the molecular shape of DNA. But the discovery was actually made by a woman named Rosalind Franklin who worked in conjunction with the men.

She was overshadowed by her peers when they accepted the award. However, she made incredible contributions to this discovery even though she was left out of the spotlight.

She managed to take a photo of DNA up close. It resembled an “X” on the film once it was developed. The photo was later called “Photograph 51,” and a play about Franklin was produced with that same title.

This catapulted our understanding of ourselves and the innermost workings of the body, which has helped physics, biology, and chemistry progress exponentially since then.^[1]

9 Earth’s Inner Core

Earth is composed of several layers. Although there are different ways to categorize these layers, we’re going to divide them into the crust, the mantle, the outer core, and the inner core, which was discovered by Danish seismologist Inge Lehmann in 1936.^[2]

The outer core is a molten one, while the inner core of the Earth is completely solid. The discovery of the inner core has helped us to determine the age of the Earth as well as plenty of other things.

By measuring the cooling rate of the Earth’s inner core, we’ve discovered that the inner core is likely to have begun solidifying about 0.5–2 billion years ago. Nonetheless, the growth of Earth’s inner core is believed to play a vital role in generating Earth’s magnetic fields.

8 The Milky Way Structure

Physics Professor Heidi Jo Newberg at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute is well-known for her contributions to our knowledge of the structure of the Milky Way galaxy. The Milky Way is a barred spiral galaxy that contains our solar system. It spans at least an impressive 100,000 light-years.

Newberg and her team found that the Milky Way cannibalizes stars from galaxies that are smaller. Also, they determined that the Milky Way is bigger than previously believed and has more ripples.

In 2002, Newberg’s research discovered that the disk of the Milky Way was corrugated. This led to a revised estimate of the width of the galaxy from 100,000 light-years to approximately 150,000 light-years. However, scientists are still debating this measurement.^[3]

7 Nuclear Fission

As happened all too often back in the day, a woman named Lise Meitner, one of the duo who discovered nuclear fission, was overlooked in 1945 when the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to her partner, Otto Hahn. He accepted it by himself for work the two had done together.

This wasn’t the first time in her life that this happened. She’d discovered radiationless transition in 1923. However, her discovery was overlooked and credited to Pierre Victor Auger, a man who found the same thing two years later. In fact, the phenomenon is named the “Auger effect” after him.^[4]

Meitner came up with the term “fission” as early as 1939 and explained the process in a paper she’d published with the aid of her nephew, Otto Frisch. Nuclear fission was a process that would later become instrumental in the creation of the atomic bomb.

6 Kinetic Energy

Gabrielle-Emilie Le Tonnelier de Breteuil, marquise du Chatelet, was an 18th-century philosopher, mathematician, and physicist. She gave us the first-known description of kinetic energy as well as the first translation into French of Sir Isaac Newton’s famous work Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy. It remains the standard translation to this day.

Kinetic energy is the energy possessed by a particle or object because of its motion. Previously, it had been believed by Newton, Voltaire, and others that kinetic energy was proportional to a moving object’s velocity. Du Chatelet corrected their formula. For one thing, she added that kinetic energy is also dependent upon an object’s mass.

Overall, she released four scientific works and five other works, solidifying her place in history in the fields of mathematics and physics.^[5]

5 Radiation

Marie Curie, a French scientist who was born in Poland, discovered much of what we know today about radiation. She studied radiation in depth, including uranium and thorium, finding both to be radioactive materials. She also came up with a way to measure the total amount of radiation.

Her major claim to fame, however, was the bold (at the time) assertion that radioactivity didn’t depend on an element’s form but on its atomic structure. She was the first person to use the term “radioactivity” and invented a new field of scientific study called atomic physics.

Marie Curie won the Nobel Prize twice–for physics in 1903 and chemistry in 1911.^[6]

4 Pulsars

The day was November 28, 1967. Two astronomers, Jocelyn Bell Burnell and Anthony Hewish, were about to make an amazing discovery—the pulsar—a rapidly rotating neutron star which shoots out a beam of electromagnetic radiation as it spins.

The chances were slim that they’d stumble upon one as the beam from a pulsar needs to be aimed directly toward Earth to be detected. They just happened to be looking at the sky on a clear evening when they made the discovery.

Jokingly, Burnell and Hewish called the electromagnetic pulses “Little Green Men,” suggesting that aliens might be trying to communicate with us through a beam. But it turned out to be a perfectly natural phenomenon in some stars.^[7]

The distinct pulses of radiation emitted from pulsars appear at regular intervals. The “pulsing” nature of the beam is due to the star spinning and the light repeatedly striking the observer’s line of sight.

3 Top Quark

In physics, top quarks are the heaviest of all the elementary particles. This was confirmed by the Large Hadron Collider in 2014. Quarks are tiny particles that make up neutrons and protons, which are two of the three components of atoms. The third component is an electron, also known as a fundamental particle because it cannot be broken down any further. Atoms are the building blocks of matter within our universe.

The six flavors (types) of quarks are up, down, strange, charm, bottom, and, of course, top. The top quark was discovered by Melissa Franklin and a team at Fermilab. This wasn’t the only time that Franklin made a grand discovery in the world of particle physics. She was also part of the team at CERN that discovered the long-anticipated Higgs boson.^[8]

2 Slow Light

Did you know that the speed of light can slow down in some cases?

It certainly can, which we know thanks to Danish physicist Lene Vestergaard Hau who discovered “slow light.” In a vacuum, light travels at 299,792 kilometers (186,282 mi) per second. However, when light travels through matter, it slows down.

By injecting light into something called a Bose-Einstein condensate (a state of matter), Hau and her Harvard team were able to slow down the speed of light to a mere 27 kilometers per hour (17 mph). Even more astonishing, her team made light stop in a Bose-Einstein condensate.^[9]

Hau will go down in history as the first person to ever actually stop light.

1 HIV

Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) has infected over 70 million people and killed over 35 million since its discovery in the 1980s. It is our modern-day version of the black plague in a very real way.

In 2008, French virologist Francoise Barre-Sinoussi shared the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine with Luc Montagnier and Harald zur Hausen. One-half of the prize went to Barre-Sinoussi and Montagnier for their work that discovered HIV. (Zur Hausen received the other half of the prize for discovering human papilloma viruses that caused cervical cancer.)

Barre-Sinoussi’s team sought to find out what was causing AIDs. Suspecting that it might be a retrovirus, they found it when they dissected the lymph node of someone who’d contracted AIDS.^[10]

Frighteningly, Barre-Sinoussi believes that a cure for HIV is next to impossible.

Seeing a dead body is disturbing enough, but for those studying the past, it can be incredibly common. When multiple dead bodies are found, it can make for an interesting insight into the darker parts of history. By examining the tragic final resting places of those from history, life back then becomes alive

10Mayan Decapitations

In 2013, archaeologists discovered 24 decapitated and mutilated bodies at the ancient Mayan city of Uxil. The burying of the victims was quite elaborate: They had been stored in an artificial cave that served as a water reservoir, were covered by a layer of gravel, and then were sealed shut in the caves by a layer of clay. The bodies were discovered after an examination of Uxil’s drainage system; they had been forgotten entirely before then.

The corpses dated from the seventh century, sparking two possible theories. They were either prisoners of war who were brutally executed or they were nobility overthrown. There is evidence to the latter theory because many of the corpses had jade in their teeth, a sign of being in the upper class.

9St. Helena Slave Graves

St. Helena is an island located in the South Atlantic between Africa and South America. At one time, it served as an outpost for slave traders. Any slaves who died during the crossing to the Americas were buried on St. Helena, and in 2012, their bodies were uncovered.

In the 1800s, when Great Britain was trying to cease slave trading in their Caribbean colonies, the Royal Navy would take many of the slaves arriving at St. Helena and put them in colonies. Unfortunately, this wasn’t enough and the slaves who died afterward were burned in mass graves. Around 325 of an estimated 5,000 bodies were found in the graves during the construction of a new airport being built on the island. 83 percent were young people and children.

8Chinese Disease House

In 2015, the charred remains of 97 people were discovered in a 5,000-year-old house located in a prehistoric village in China. The bodies had been stuffed inside of the tiny house—-it was smaller than most modern-day squash courts —then the house was burned to the ground.

Anthropologists studying the site believe that some kind of prehistoric disaster like an epidemic had occurred. A quick-killing disease could have caused the deaths because it appeared that they died suddenly and were obviously buried with very little reverence. However, all of this happened before Hamin Mangha—the modern-day name for the village—began keeping records, so we can only guess about the real reason for the tragic find.

7Neolithic Massacres

In 2006, road construction in central Germany unearthed 26 brutally killed humans dating from the Neolithic era. All of them had bones broken and their skulls smashed in. There was even evidence that they had been either tortured before death or mutilated afterward.

Two other equally disturbing sites had been found—one also in Germany and another in Austria. The discovery in Germany was an apparent “death pit” containing 34 bodies, while the Austrian discovery contained 64 bodies. All of these findings illustrate a violent and uncertain past.

6Durham University Graves

When excavations were being made for a proposed library addition at Durham University in the United Kingdom, a surprising discovery was made: two graves containing 1,700 bodies from the 17th century. The graves had not been previously recorded, so many were scratching their heads as to the origin of the tragedy.

The graves come from a dark and bloody time in England’s history: the English Civil War. It is believed that the bodies belonged to Scottish soldiers taken captive after the Battle of Dunbar in 1650. They were captured by the English revolutionary Oliver Cromwell and probably died from starvation or disease and buried in mass graves then forgotten. It is also believed that some of them might have been those killed during the Battle of Dunbar because the graves of the deceased were never actually recorded.

5Quarantine Island

While digging the foundation for a new museum on the small island of Lazzaretto Vecchio located in the Venetian Lagoon, a grave containing 1,500 corpses were found. The bodies give a clear picture about one of the scariest events to sweep across Europe: the Black Plague. During the 15th and 16th century, Lazzaretto Vecchio served as Europe’s first lazaret—a quarantine colony for those infected.

In 1485, in an effort to end the rapid infection of the population, officials put the infected on Lazzaretto Vecchio, called Lazaretum at the time. Since the bodies were also known to cause the plague to spread, they were buried on the island rather than transported back to the city.

4Paris Medieval Hospital

In January 2015, an expansion of the basement at a Parisian supermarket led to a grisly find: the cemetery of medieval hospital. The hospital, called Hopital de la Trinite, had been built in the 13th century and was then outside the city limits. It served in several capacities, but after the expansion of Paris over the years, the hospital was torn down and its cemetery was forgotten.

The 316 buried in the cemetery could have been the victims of the plague that ravaged Paris in the 1340s, famine, or other factors, but none of them display trauma of any kind, so they weren’t the victims of war. Most people buried in cemeteries similar to the one discovered were moved to the Catacombs, but these weren’t, making the find even more intriguing. The hospital itself was closed during the French Revolution then dismantled in 1812 and built over by other structures.

3Cylon’s Followers

Cylon was a Greek athlete who, thousands of years ago, tried to overthrow the Athenian government. In April 2016, what is believed to be the graves of Cylon’s followers were found. Two graves dating from 675–650 BC contained 85 men, of which 36 were buried bound and shackled.

Cylon was a celebrity athlete who won the double foot race in the Olympics during the seventh century BC. Seizing upon his celebrity status, he gathered a group of his followers and tried to take the Acropolis. They were besieged there, and Cylon and his core group escaped. The remainder of his followers were left there with no food and left after being promised their lives would be spared. Instead, they were brutally killed and allegedly buried in the graves found recently.

2Sacrifice To Anubis

The unearthed catacombs beneath the Ancient Egyptian shrine to the canine god Anubis were found to contain millions of fossils—not of humans but of dogs.

The catacombs were built as a place to leave dogs sacrificially to the Egyptian deity, and the numbers are incredible. An estimated eight million fossils are believed to be held in the catacombs. While many have long since disintegrated or were disturbed by grave robbers, the area of Saqqara near Memphis remains mostly intact.

Other animals have been found, suggesting that the area held other animal shrines. But the most popular was by far the Anubis cult, and the dogs that were served up as sacrifices probably served as a major part of the ancient economy. They were bred and raised specifically for sacrificing, sold to those wanting blessings or good favors from Anubis.

1The First War

In Kenya, a 10,000-year-old mass grave was discovered containing the fossils of several humans who showed signs of violent trauma. This grave is believed contains the victims of the oldest war ever discovered.

The remains were found at Lake Turkana and showed signs of blunt force trauma along with arrow wounds. Some of the tools used to kill the victims were found nearby, were made of obsidian. Even females weren’t spared: One died after her hands were bound, while another was bound and killed despite being pregnant.

In the words of Marta Mirazohn Lahr, the lead author of the study conducted at Cambridge University, “These human remains record the intentional killing of a small band of foragers with no deliberate burial and provide unique evidence that warfare was part of the repertoire of inter-group relations among some prehistoric hunter-gatherers.”

Gordon Gora is a struggling author who is desperately trying to make it. He is working on several projects but until he finishes one, he will write for for his bread and butter. You can write him at [email protected].

Even before the humble beginnings of philosophy in ancient Greece, humans have been obsessed with the idea of substances, where one material ends and another begins, and the general building blocks of life. But over the thousands of years that we’ve studied various materials, we’ve developed a good idea of what’s what. With the science of chemistry and the periodic table, we’ve come to figure out and predict how basic substances or materials work.

Some materials have bizarre and abstract traits and are frankly quite weird. Nature seems to operate by strict rules, where things are seemingly predictable and fit wonderfully into neat little explanatory packages. This gives us the ability to categorize things in different ways and understand them for what they are.

Here are 10 absolutely strange materials that have been discovered by scientists throughout the years.

10 Triiodide

While triiodide itself refers to one chemical which can be mixed with many others to create different chemicals, triiodide, short for triiodide ion, isn’t inherently very interesting. It’s often a yellowish substance that turns red when prepared in such a way to create nitrogen triiodide, with the inorganic compound designation of NI.

What makes nitrogen triiodide so special? It’s ridiculous explosiveness.

Most explosives use chemical processes which are quite complex, or heat and combustion. But not nitrogen triiodide, which is explosive on contact. That’s right. Take a simple gram or so of this powder, set it on a table, touch it with nearly anything, and watch the show.^[1]

All that’s required for it to blow up is simple contact, or friction. This material is so unusual due to its volatility that even touching it can cause it to explode.

9 Vantablack

Vantablack is an artificial material that was developed by Surrey NanoSystems. This coating goes on many things, from paint to carbon objects. It’s the material equivalent of a black hole in that it traps light, so much so that three-dimensional objects coated with the material appear to be two-dimensional as the refraction of any light is so heavily reduced.

It holds the world record for the darkest artificial substance and the darkest black you can buy. The material absorbs 99 percent of all light it comes into contact with.^[2]

People even coated a building with it in South Korea to create “the darkest place on Earth” in a mimicry of the deepest recesses of space. The goal was to create an experience of being absorbed into blackness—a deep, dark cloud of black.

Three-dimensional objects coated in Vantablack actually look like shadows from the profile view. Definitely an interesting material, to say the least.

8 Ultrahydrophobic Material

Ultrahydrophobic material isn’t the stuff we buy to coat leather and suede products or the spray coatings that protect our outdoor wood projects from the rain and other elements. An ultrahydrophobic coating actually causes water to encase itself into tiny spheres that look like gemstones or marbles.

It’s so water-resistant that if you sprayed your old windshield with it, you could drive in the rain at up to 64 kilometers per hour (40 mph) and your windshield wouldn’t get wet.^[3] Goodbye, trusty windshield wipers.

In fact, ultrahydrophobic material repels almost all liquids, causing them to shrivel up into little balls that you can even roll around as if they were actual marbles. This material is genius and has a lot of applications, including those for high-tech industries. It’s also ultra-weird.

7 Ferrofluid

Ferrofluids are a type of liquid that can easily be formed into strange shapes without even touching them. Often dark, blackish, reddish, or grayish liquids, ferrofluids act very much like any other liquid when they’re outside the presence of a magnetic field.

The moment the fluids come into contact with a magnetic field, they become highly magnetized, morphing shapes, bending, or pulling. They do everything our usual solid magnets do, only as a liquid state.

This stuff looks like a dark, liquid metal. It can be purchased online or even made with readily accessible Internet instructions. Like so many other wonders of physics, it’s truly an amazing sight to see ferrofluids in action as they respond to the magnetic field and fall right in line with it. Then they disperse randomly once the magnetic field is removed.^[4]

6 Supercritical Fluid

Supercritical fluid is a material created under certain circumstances of temperature and pressure. It suspends the dividing lines of physical properties as we know them. In short, supercritical fluid is a substance somewhere between liquid and gas. It is a mixture of both, and yet it is neither liquid nor gas.

It occurs when any fluid gets heated above its critical temperature and pressure. Critical temperature is the point where a substance has been heated to such a degree that you cannot liquefy it. Critical pressure is the pressure that’s needed to turn a gas into a liquid at a high temperature.

Supercritical fluid is a gas-like substance with highly liquid properties.^[5] If you were to delve into the atmospheres of some planets, like Jupiter or Neptune, you would be immersed in it. It’s a super-freaky version of all liquids . . . or is it a gas?

5 Nitinol

Nitinol is a trade name for nickel titanium, a metal alloy with some extremely unusual (and important) properties. Nitinol is often used in the medical industry, but it has other applications.

The weird thing about this metal is that it’s almost like the liquid metal featured in the movie Terminator 2: Judgment Day in that it can always return to its original shape. Nitinol has superelasticity, or a memory for its original form.

So if you make an object out of nitinol and then bend it completely out of whack, it’ll automatically crawl and form back into its original shape before your eyes (aka pseudoelasticity). These shape memory properties make it both fun and practical.^[6]

Stents are a great application as nitinol can bend within the human body when needed, has the durability of a metal, and can return to its original form every single time after the force which causes it to warp is released. Nitinol’s bending, shape-shifting properties are activated by heat. At some temperatures, it will bend out of its original state. At others, it will return to its original state.

This temperature difference can be controlled within 1 degree Celsius (1.8 °F). From algae that remembers the light shined upon it to nitinol which always remembers its original shape and returns to it under the right conditions, materials with a “memory” are definitely fascinating and weird.

4 Gallium

Gallium is a metallic element with the atomic number of 31, which even more closely resembles the liquid metal from Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Gallium’s particularly strange characteristic is the low temperature at which it liquefies, which is only a tad shy of 30 degrees Celsius (86 °F). That’s close to room temperature in many places.

This metallic element is bright, shiny, and silvery white in color. When you handle gallium, there’s no ambiguity that you’re handling a liquid metal. As a liquid, this metal can be played with—it rolls and forms into various shapes in your hands.^[7]

Gallium has many practical uses, like LED lights, cabling, and pharmaceuticals. It’s an extremely soft metal, even in its solid state. In fact, it’s so soft that you could slice into it with a knife without much resistance at all. If you made a solid sphere, a ball of gallium, and then picked it up, it would melt in your hand. That’s one fascinating metal.

3 Hydrogel

Hydrogels are a fascinating group of substances, not unlike supercritical fluids. However, instead of being suspended somewhere between a liquid and a gas, hydrogels are suspended somewhere between a liquid and a solid.

A hydrogel maintains its shape and doesn’t flow around objects like a solid does, but it bends amazingly like a liquid with an extremely soft pliability. JELL-O is one famous hydrogel that we all know about. It’s a fun snack for people around the world. But there are other types of hydrogels and other uses for them besides foods.

Due to their flexibility and durability, hydrogels are showing great promise in the world of science for biomaterials, which go on or in the human body. Their ability to completely liquefy, fill a space, and then solidify and still be flexible is mind-blowing.^[8]

Hydrogels are a series of polymers that contain both chemical and physical properties which change their state from solid to liquid seamlessly. When heated, the polymer proteins dissipate and travel more freely. When cooled, those same proteins harden again but not quite as drastically as when water hardens into ice. These proteins make hydrogel one of the most unusual feeling and visually entertaining substances.

2 Graphene Aerogel

Graphene aerogel is the lightest material on Earth and definitely the lightest solid material that we know of. It weighs in at just 0.16 milligrams per cubic centimeter, almost lighter than air. Its density is even lower than helium, although slightly higher than hydrogen, the lightest of all the gases.

Graphene aerogel is created by taking a hydrogel and replacing the liquid contents with air, making the substance 99.98 percent air by volume. This is why it’s so light—it’s empty. There aren’t a lot of the dense atoms of a solid or a liquid to weigh it down. As a result, graphene aerogel is the least dense of all known solid materials.^[9]

On top of being used today for many adhesives, coatings, and fillers, graphene aerogel is also being developed as a lightweight material for 3-D printing that produces precise results. The future of graphene aerogel shows much promise, and this substance is going to be a staple of the future for printing items like lightweight coffee cups or even jewelry.

1 Dark Matter

Dark matter is one of the most elusive substances in the currently known universe, and that makes it arguably one of the most fascinating. Dark matter makes up about 27 percent of the physical universe. It cannot be detected by its luminosity, the refraction of light that we use to “see” and detect regular matter with our eyes and instruments.

Instead, dark matter can only be detected by its gravitational pull. We know it’s out there, but we can’t see it. So we can only perceive its presence by its pull on other objects that we can see.

With its existence first hypothesized in the 1970s, dark matter set the stage to explain the mysterious movements of many objects being pulled in its gravitational field—like galaxies which seemed to miraculously escape the gravitational pull of the larger galaxy cluster to which they belonged.

Gravitational lensing occurs when a substance in space distorts the space fabric and “bends” light from behind it. Even though we can’t see dark matter, this is how we know it exists. It bends the passing light rather than emitting or reflecting light.^[10]

For a frame of reference, dark matter makes up about 27 percent of the observable universe, but observable matter only comprises 5 percent of our universe. About 68 percent of the universe is “dark energy,” a mysterious, elusive energy.

This means that about 5 percent of our universe can actually be seen and detected using observation of the actual substance itself. It can only be perceived by its effect on the tiny sliver of the universe we can see. This makes dark matter one of the strangest substances detected by modern science.

I like to write about dark stuff, fun stuff, weird stuff, history, and philosophy. Here’s a fun one about weird and wacky substances.

It is a common trope in comedy that if a clumsy person enters an antique shop, they are bound to knock over a precariously positioned and priceless Ming vase. For centuries, collectors in the West have sought out the rarest Chinese antiquities, of which Ming vases are just the most famous. As China has boomed economically recently, the prices of Chinese artworks have exploded.

This has led to many cases where people who were about to throw away an old pot or donate a cracked plate to a junk shop have suddenly discovered they are actually in possession of something worth a fortune. Here are ten cases where Chinese antiques turned out to be a windfall.

Related: 10 Amazing Antiques Roadshow Discoveries

10 £1 Million Collection in the Attic

Clearing out the attic can be one of the most annoying tasks for any homeowner. It’s dusty and full of spiders, and then you have to decide which of the things you have stored over the years is worth keeping and which should be put in the trash. Sometimes, though, you might just strike gold.

Edward Radcliffe became an antiques dealer just before WWII, and during his career, he built up a nice collection of Chinese antiques. Some of them were so exquisite that he lent them out to museums around the world. But for some reason, after he died, this collection was dumped in the attic and forgotten for over 50 years before his family decided to get it valued.

Among the stars of the collection was an enamel box made for the Xuande emperor of the Ming Dynasty in the 15th century. Finding one is phenomenally rare, as just four are known to exist in the world. The family must have been pleased when it was valued at 10,000 pounds at auction. They must have been beyond belief when the hammer went down, and it was sold for £288,000. With the rest of the collection selling as well, the whole lot made nearly 1 million pounds.^[1]

9 “Teapot”

The British love a cup of tea, so it is not unusual to find an elderly relative who has a teapot or two stored in their home. In 2020, a man finally sorted through the things his parents had stored in their attic. He found a plastic bag containing a tiny metal and enamel teapot, brought from China in the 1940s by his father. He thought of taking it to a charity shop. Instead, it was taken to an auctioneer who valued it at £100-150.

It soon became clear that it was actually something more special than a teapot. It turned out to be an imperial wine ewer made for the Qianlong emperor in the 18th century and one of only three in the world. On the day of the auction, nine bidders from around the world competed to own the minuscule masterpiece, and eventually, it sold for £380,000.

The owner, a construction worker, was thrilled with his sudden fortune. Asked what he would do with the money, he suggested he might buy a metal detector. With luck like his, who knows what treasures he might find.^[2]

8 Imperial Vase

Familiarity breeds contempt, so something we see every day tends to get overlooked. When an auctioneer visited a friend’s house one day, he noticed that an old vase they had just in their kitchen looked quite special. The tall vase had been bought for a few hundred pounds and was a pretty piece of porcelain – but to the owners, it was nothing too exciting.

It was only years later that the piece, made at the Imperial Court of the Qianlong emperor, was put up for sale, and collectors began to get excited. The rich blue vase is decorated with gold and silver and depicts cranes and bats flying against a cloudy sky. A vase of this age, with this decoration and in this size, caused a stir, and it was valued at around £100,000.

Bidding was fierce, and the vase was sold for £1.2 million. Not bad for an old thing shoved in the kitchen.^[3]

7 Loose Change Bowl

Pottery is a sturdy material but easily broken and damaged. For collectors of antiques, even the smallest chip can destroy the value of a piece, so most will do everything possible to protect their treasures. One family inherited a bowl owned by a well-known collector of Chinese antiques but did not give it the same care as he might have liked. They placed it in a guest room where friends would drop their keys and coins while they stayed.

It was only out of curiosity that they took the 9-inch (22.9-cm) wide turquoise glazed dish to an open day at an auctioneer’s event. It was immediately seen to have been produced for the early Ming Imperial Court. Known as a narcissus bowl, the object caused the valuers’ hands to shake, and the owners were happy to put it up for auction.

The bowl sold for £240,000. Hopefully, the new owner doesn’t toss metal objects into it.^[4]

6 Cracked Umbrella Stand

Sometimes, we are given things and don’t know what to do with them, but we hold onto them anyway for sentimental reasons. One couple in England had come into possession of a blue and white vase as a gift and thought no more of it for 50 years. They relegated it to a spare room, and since it was about the right size, they placed their umbrellas in it. Needless to say, this was not the right way to treat the vase.

The vase turned out to have been made for the court of the Qianlong emperor and had survived centuries mostly intact. Unfortunately, the years of being an umbrella stand had left their mark on the vase, with it being cracked and scarred on the inside. Despite the damage, it was still valued at around £500,000.

Buyers seemed able to overlook the hard life the vase had endured and ended up paying £765,000.^[5]

5 Umbrella Stand

There must be something about priceless Chinese vases that makes people look at them and think, “That would make an excellent umbrella stand.” When an expert from Christie’s auction house was made aware of a large, blue and white dragon vase that had once been an umbrella stand, he asked the French owners whether he could inspect it in person. As soon as he looked at it, he knew that the vase was a perfect example of 15th-century Ming Imperial pottery.

The umbrella stand phase of the vase’s life had miraculously left no trace on the flawless glaze. The large dragon motif was as fresh as the day it had been painted by the imperial artisans. When the vase was put up for auction in Hong Kong, excited bidding led to it reaching $20,447,642.^[6]

4 Yard Sale Bowl

Everyone likes a bargain, and there is nowhere you can pick up an excellent deal as easily as at a yard sale. People use yard sales to get rid of the various stuff they have accumulated over the years and generally just want it out of the house. For $35, you can grab a pretty bowl for your home—or one that might make you a fortune at auction.

When a buyer saw a small blue and white bowl at a yard sale, they liked it so much they didn’t bother to haggle over the $35 price tag. Almost straight away, they suspected they had bought something special and alerted an auction house. It was found that the bowl was Ming porcelain made in the early 15th century in a form called a lotus bowl—with only six examples in museums around the world.

The bowl sold for $721,800, a mere 29,000 times more than it was bought for.^[7]

3 Qianlong Vase

Thrift shops are great places to browse for unusual things because you never know what people have donated. You get to buy things cheap and also help a good cause. Sometimes, you really do find something special.

One shopper spotted a somewhat gaudy-looking vase with a yellow glaze and Chinese characters painted on it. It was only marked at £1 so they decided to buy it. Thinking it might be worth a little more than that, they put the vase on sale on eBay. However, as the price started to skyrocket, they removed it from the site and showed the vase to an auctioneer.

The vase was made at the court of the Qianlong emperor, and a mark on the base stated that it was not meant to be exported from the country. How it came to be in a charity shop in England is not known. At auction, the vase sold for £480,000. ^[8]

2 Brush Pot Donation

Thrift stores do not always let valuable antiques slip through their fingers. Volunteers who sort through donated objects are often given advice on spotting potentially important pieces and having them shown to experts. When one worker at St. Peter’s Hospice charity shop in Bristol, England, picked up a cracked old wooden pot that had been handed in and, for some reason, suspected it might be special—despite it not looking very promising.

The pot turned out to be a brush pot used in calligraphy and was made from bamboo around 1700, which perhaps explained why it was so cracked. Not only did the pot have a charmingly carved landscape scene on it, but it was also created by Gu Jue, one of the foremost bamboo workers at the time.

Luckily for the charity, this precious little object did not end up on their shelves and sell for a pittance. It went to auction and sold for £360,000, far outstripping the estimate of £15,000.^[9]

1 Shoebox Vase

If this list does nothing else, it should make you consider clearing out your attic. The ultimate case of a treasure lurking in the attic comes from France and involves one of the finest Chinese vases ever to be offered for sale.

Sotheby’s auctioneer might well have missed out on this discovery as the owner of the vase simply sent them an email saying she had found some Asian objects in her attic as she prepared to move but would not be able to send them any photographs. Some other details she provided suggested they might be worth looking at, so they invited her to bring them in. Riding on the metro, she carried the vase in a shoebox. The owners had relegated it to the attic after deciding it was “too pink” for their tastes.

The vase, with its animal motifs, was so lovely that even if it had been a copy of what it looked like, it still might have been worth €100,000. However, the experts recognized it as genuine. It really was a vase made for the Qianlong emperor’s birthday and given an auction estimate of €700,000. It blew past this when bidding started and finally sold for €16,182,800.^[10]

Space is unbelievably large and mysterious. It is unlikely that we will completely explore it before the end of humanity. Every once in a while, we discover some mysterious celestial body or observe some unexplainable anomalies.

We rarely have answers to these mysteries. All we do is brainstorm over what they could or could not be. Nevertheless, some are so weird that we have considered them as evidence of the existence of some intelligent life out there.

10 Oumuamua

In October 2017, astronomers detected a mysterious object floating through our solar system. They named it Oumuamua. It flew close to the Sun—reaching one-fourth the distance between the Sun and the Earth—before suddenly accelerating and escaping from our solar system.

Astronomers do not know what Oumuamua is or the cause of its sudden acceleration. Some astronomers have suggested that it is an abnormal comet. Others think it is an asteroid, a less than fully formed planet, a solar sail, or a large body of ice that broke off from a destroyed planet.

Shmuel Bialy and Avi Loeb of Harvard University suspect that Oumuamua is a solar sail, which is a solar-powered spacecraft. Bialy and Loeb think that the sail was built by aliens to explore our solar system.

However, other astronomers disagree. Zdenek Sekanina of NASA believes that Oumuamua is an icy comet without a tail. He suggested that Oumuamua lost the water and gases that would have formed its tail when it strayed too close to the Sun.

Gregory Laughlin and his team at Yale University agree that Oumuamua is made of ice even though they do not think it is a comet. They believe that it used to be part of an icy planet that was destroyed after straying close to a larger planet.^[1]

Amaya Moro-Martin of the Space Telescope Science Institute thinks that Oumuamua is the remnant of a partly formed planet. He and his team suspect that the planet was still forming at the time it was flung out of its star system. If this is true, Oumuamua is the first less than fully formed planet we have found.

9 Tabby’s Star

In 2011, scientists studying data captured by NASA’s Kepler spacecraft discovered that a star named KIC 8462852 frequently dimmed before brightening up again. The star is also known as Boyajian’s star or Tabby’s star.

Scientists proposed several causes for this bizarre behavior. Some suggested that the dimming was caused by a group of comets orbiting the star or some other unconfirmed materials in our solar system. Others think that it is caused by the dust around a black hole between Tabby’s star and Earth.

One group of astronomers believed that this effect was generated by a megastructure built by some intelligent life. They think that the star dimmed when the orbiting megastructure passed between the star and the Kepler space telescope. This suggestion generated the most curiosity, causing other scientists to try to determine the real cause of the dimming event.

Dozens of telescopes observed the star when it dimmed again in May 2017. Scientists soon discovered that this was not caused by a megastructure because such an object would block all colors of the star’s light from reaching the telescopes rather than simply dimming it. Scientists concluded that the dimming effect happened due to space dust orbiting the star.

However, they could not decide on the origin of the dust or confirm whether it is really dust. It also seems like the dust is being blown away from the star. This is why some scientists think that an undiscovered celestial body is creating more dust to orbit the star.

In 2016, Brian Metzger of Columbia University suggested that the dust was released from a planet or moon destroyed after straying too close to Tabby’s star.^[2]

8 FRB 121102

Fast radio bursts (FRB) are strong radio signals we sparingly receive from space. Although scientists cannot confirm the origin of these signals, researchers think that they are emitted by exploding stars or neutron stars getting consumed by black holes. FRBs often disappear as soon as they appear. However, not FRB 121102.

Scientists have received over 150 signals from FRB 121102 since they received the first signal on November 2, 2012. Scientists have traced these FRBs to a distant galaxy three billion light-years away even though they cannot confirm the specific source.^[3]

According to one theory, the signals are from a neutron star. However, another theory says that the FRBs could be emitted by technology used by aliens to power their spacecraft. Scientists do not believe that aliens deliberately sent these signals to contact us because they were released three billion years ago. Humans didn’t exist at the time, and Earth was filled with single-celled organisms.

7 The Dark Flow

Astronomers have identified a group of distant galaxies traveling at a speed of over 1.6 million kilometers per hour (1 million mph). They do not know how or why the galaxies are moving that fast or where they are heading. Nevertheless, they have decided to call the mysterious motion “the dark flow.”^[4]

Astronomers suspect that the dark flow is caused by some massive but undiscovered celestial body pulling the group of galaxies toward itself. The galaxies are moving away from Earth for now, but scientists do not rule out the possibility of this phenomenon reversing direction and moving toward Earth in the future.

6 The Cow

In June 2018, a bright flash suddenly appeared somewhere in the Hercules constellation 200 million light-years away. The flash was so bright that it was equivalent to the light emitted by 10–100 supernovae. Scientists called it AT2018cow or “The Cow.” It remained bright for two weeks before it started to fade.^[5]

Scientists analyzed X-ray and ultraviolet waves emitted by the flash and concluded that it was caused by a black hole consuming a white dwarf. (A white dwarf is what is left when a small star dies.) However, others think that The Cow was actually caused by a black hole or neutron star formed after the death of a star.

5 A Mysterious Signal From A Sunlike Star

On May 15, 2015, astronomers operating the Russian telescope RATAN–600 detected a strange radio signal from a Sunlike star 94 light-years away. The star is called HD 164595 and is almost like our Sun. Both stars have similar chemical properties and temperatures. However, HD 164595 is 1 percent lighter and 100 million years younger.

Some astronomers suspect that the mysterious signal was released by aliens because the star system containing HD 164595 also has a Neptune-like planet called HD 164595 b. Scientists think the star system could contain other undiscovered planets, including an Earth look-alike.

However, other experts doubt that the signals are from aliens. First, the astronomers who detected the signals did not inform anyone for a whole year. Also, the mode of construction of the RATAN–600 telescope makes it difficult for it to pinpoint the exact location of a signal. So, the HD 164595 star system might not even be the source of the signal.

Besides, the aliens would have needed at least 50 trillion watts of energy to direct the signal to Earth. This is more than what the whole of humanity uses at any time, and it is unlikely that aliens would have rallied such massive energy just to direct a signal at us.^[6]

4 A Mysterious Supervoid That Is One Of The Largest Objects In Space

Space is filled with empty areas called voids. Some voids are so large that they are called supervoids. The average supervoid could contain 10,000 galaxies. However, they do not because they are usually not dense enough.

One of these supervoids is the one of the largest discovered objects in space. Located three billion light-years away, the supervoid is so large that objects will take hundreds of millions of years to travel through it—even if the object is traveling at the speed of light. Scientists required three-dimensional maps to locate and study this supervoid.

Curiously, scientists have discovered that the supervoid could also drain energy from lights traveling through it. It will also continue to get bigger as the universe expands.^[7]

3 Mysterious Radio Signals From The M82 Galaxy

In May 2009, British astronomers detected strange radio signals while monitoring an exploding star in the M82 galaxy. Radio signals from space often become stronger over several weeks before they begin to weaken. However, the signals from the M82 galaxy remained the same even though the source of the emission was moving incredibly fast.

Some scientists believe that the radio signals were released by a supermassive black hole in the M82 galaxy. This is plausible because most galaxies have supermassive black holes that emit radio waves right in their centers. However, the signals did not originate from the middle of the M82 galaxy.

Other scientists have suggested that the radio waves were actually emitted by a microquasar, a black hole that is formed when a huge star explodes. Microquasars are much smaller than the supermassive black holes at the center of galaxies, although they still have masses between 10 and 20 times the mass of our Sun.^[8]

Some scientists believe that the mysterious waves, which do not contain X-rays, could not be emitted by microquasars, which send out both radio waves and X-rays. However, there are suggestions that the microquasar could be located in an unusual environment that eliminates the X-ray.

2 CMB Cold Spots

Our universe is filled with leftover energy from the big bang which is called cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB). It covers every part of the universe except some areas called CMB cold spots. Scientists do not know how or why CMB cold spots exist. Some experts even think that the cold spots are actually one of the supervoids we mentioned earlier.

However, two astronomers from Durham University in England disagree. Tom Shanks and Ruari Mackenzie suggest that a CMB cold spot is the point of collision between our universe and an alternate universe. Shanks and Mackenzie made the claims after analyzing light emitted from thousands of galaxies in our universe.

They discovered that CMB cold spots were surrounded by several small voids instead of one huge supervoid. The small voids themselves were surrounded by small galaxies. While Shanks and Mackenzie agree that these could be caused by something explainable with physics, they believe that another plausible reason may be a collision between our universe and an alternate universe.^[9]

1 The Zombie Star

A supernova is the massive explosion that occurs when a star runs out of fuel. It often denotes the beginning of the end of a star’s life. However, scientists have discovered that this is not always so.

In 1954, astronomers observed the massive iPTF14hls star, which is 500 million light-years away, explode into a bright supernova. In 2014, they observed the same iPTF14hls star explode into a supernova again. Initially, astronomer Iair Arcavi thought that the 2014 supernova was caused by a different star that had somehow managed to travel to the location of the star that exploded in 1954.

However, he was surprised when he realized that it was the same star. Later, iPTF14hls was nicknamed the “zombie star” because it seemed to have returned from death. While iPTF14hls remains the only star to have ever been observed exploding twice, scientists believe that multiple explosions are common in stars with masses of at least 100 Suns.

Nevertheless, astronomers believe that iPTF14hls is dead for good this time. They could be wrong, though. Supernovae shine very brightly for three months before gradually becoming black. iPTF14hls shone brightly for over two years. We may need to wait a few decades before it explodes again.^[10]

Stars are some of the most important heavenly bodies in our universe. We’ve already talked about some of the most captivating—and deadliest—planets that orbit the stars, but these luminous celestial bodies are intriguing in their own right.

We often think of stars as huge, hot, round masses of hydrogen and helium even though they are not always so. Astronomers have detected lots of stars that destroy our well-established notions. These discoveries are odd and ultimately fascinating.

10 The Egg-Shaped Star

What is cooler than a round star? Obviously, one that’s shaped like an egg.

Enter Vega (aka Alpha Lyrae or Alpha Lyr), an egg-shaped star located 25 light-years away from us. It is one of the most popular stars out there, and astronomers seem to study it more than they do our own Sun.

Vega has a weird shape because of its superfast rotational speed, which is 93 percent of its critical velocity (aka “critical rotation,” the maximum rotational speed when the star would break apart). Vega is so fast that it completes one rotation on its axis in just 12.5 hours. Our Sun completes the same in 27 days.

This has left Vega bulging 23 percent wider at its equator than at its poles. The abnormal shape has transferred so much energy away from the equator that it is 2,200 degrees Celsius (4,000 °F) cooler than the poles.^[1]

9 Two Massive Stars Merging Into One

Over a decade ago, astronomers discovered a massive star in the Camelopardalis (“Giraffe“) constellation 13,000 light-years from Earth. They called the system MY Camelopardalis.

Originally, amateurs had thought they were seeing a single massive star. But astronomers soon realized that they were looking at two massive stars closely orbiting each other. In fact, the partners complete orbits around each other in just 1.2 days.

The bigger star has a mass 38 times that of the Sun, while the smaller one has a mass 32 times that of our Sun. Astronomers later realized that the partners are going to slam into each other someday and create a ginormous stellar beast with a mass 60 times that of the Sun.^[2]

In fact, the atmospheres of the stars are already interacting. This will continue until the stellar cores finally fuse into one. Astronomers do not know precisely what will happen at that time. However, they speculate that the merger will create a large explosion that releases massive energy.

8 The Star With Spiral Arms

When we think of spiral arms, we envision galaxies like the Milky Way. However, star SAO 206462 is here to prove us wrong because it has two spiral arms. SAO 206462 is in the Lupus (“Wolf”) constellation about 460 light-years away from Earth. The star is surrounded by a very wide circumstellar disk made of dust and gas.^[3]

This broad disk is almost two times the width of Pluto’s orbit. Astronomers know that spiral arms can develop around a star when new planets are materializing inside its disk. In fact, they think that the two spiral arms were formed by two new planets developing inside the disk.

7 The Star With Water Clouds

We know that stars are insanely hot. For example, our Sun averages around 5,500 degrees Celsius (10,000 °F) in the photosphere. However, how about a star that is just 100 degrees Celsius (212 °F)? That is the boiling point of water, which is too cold for a star. But that is the temperature of CFBDSIR 1458+10B (pictured above on the right).

It is a brown dwarf 75 light-years away from Earth in the CFBDSIR 1458+10 binary system. A binary system has two stars that orbit each other.

The mass of a brown dwarf falls between that of a giant planet and a small star. It is too big to be called a planet but too weak to be considered a real star. Brown dwarfs are considered failed stars because they do not have enough mass for gravity to cause nuclear fusion, which is how stars produce light and heat.

Even at that, CFBDSIR 1458+10B is too cold for a brown dwarf. The temperatures of most known brown dwarfs are often between 177–327 degrees Celsius (350–620 °F), which is still considerably hotter than CFBDSIR 1458+10B’s 100 degrees Celsius (212 °F).

Astronomers believe that conditions on CFBDSIR 1458+10B are more like those of a large planet than those of a regular brown dwarf. They even think that this cold brown dwarf may have clouds that contain water.^[4]

6 The Star That Became A Diamond Planet

It is not often that we hear of a star becoming a planet, much less a planet covered in diamonds. But this unnamed star did just that.

Astronomers discovered the star-turned-planet when they received some pulsar signals in our Milky Way. Pulsar signals are radio waves and radiation released by fast-rotating neutron stars, which are the collapsed cores of dead giant stars.

Astronomers discovered something was amiss when they found that the spin of the pulsar appeared to be affected by gravity. This type of spin could only happen if an exoplanet was orbiting the pulsar.

In fact, astronomers detected an exoplanet rapidly orbiting the pulsar at close range. The exoplanet also had a very large mass (like that of Jupiter) even though it was only five times bigger than Earth. At first, this didn’t make sense. An exoplanet orbiting that close to a high-gravity star shouldn’t have such a large mass that was so tightly packed.

Astronomers soon discovered that the exoplanet had once been a star that was part of a binary system. The pulsar had been the second star, and the two had orbited each other in those days. However, the stars eventually burned through their fuel and got so close that the bigger one yanked the matter from the smaller star.^[5]

The result was a cold planet that orbits a pulsar. However, there is beauty in the destruction. Astronomers believe that the fusion-less planet is comprised of crystalline carbon, the same material that makes up diamonds.

5 The Star Within A Star

A Thorne-Zytkow object (TZO) refers to a star that is inside another star. The object was named after physicist Kip Thorne and astronomer Anna Zytkow. Together, they proposed the existence of such a star in 1975. Thorne and Zytkow said that TZOs are formed when a neutron star gets consumed by a red supergiant star.

As previously mentioned, a neutron star is the collapsed core of a dead giant star. A red supergiant is an old star that is almost out of hydrogen—a major element it needs to create light and heat. Red supergiants are the largest stars in the universe and can reach up to 2,000 times the size (in diameter) of our Sun.

In 2014, astronomers believed that they had found a TZO, which they named HV 2112. The star was in a dwarf galaxy 199,000 light-years away from Earth. HV 2112 resembles a very bright red supergiant. However, it is considered a TZO because it contains large amounts of some elements that are not released by typical red supergiants.^[6]

4 The Roundest Star

We often think that planets and stars are round even though they are not. They are actually wider along their equators due to the centrifugal force that occurs when they rotate. Approximately 5,000 light-years away from Earth lies Kepler 11145123, a star that is the roundest natural object known to exist at this time.

Typically, the faster the rotation, the wider the star or planet is at the equator. Earth is not perfectly round. The Sun and star Kepler 11145123 aren’t, either. However, Kepler 11145123 comes close.

Earth is 21 kilometers (13 mi) wider at its equator than at its poles. Using that same relative measurement, the Sun is about 10 kilometers (6 mi) wider and Kepler 11145123 is only 6 kilometers (4 mi) wider. This is especially impressive because Kepler 11145123 is twice the size of the Sun.

Astronomers concede that their diameter estimate for Kepler 11145123 may be off by a couple of kilometers. That’s a small margin of error, though. On average, the diameter of Kepler 11145123 is 3.2 million kilometers (2 million mi).^[7]

3 A Star Smaller Than Jupiter

We often consider stars to be large heavenly bodies, even though that is not always so. They could be much smaller, say the size of Saturn. Compared to Earth, Saturn seems huge: Approximately 764 Earths would fit into Saturn.

However, that is still much smaller than the size of our Sun. About 1.3 million Earths would fit into the Sun. Saturn is also smaller than Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system. Nevertheless, astronomers have discovered a star that is the size of Saturn. That star is EBLM J0555-57Ab, which is 600 light-years away from us.

EBLM J0555-57Ab would not have enough internal pressure for nuclear fusion to occur if it were smaller. As we mentioned earlier, nuclear fusion is how stars produce heat and light. This size is just right to meet the minimum mass requirements for nuclear fusion in a star. Anything smaller and it would have been a brown dwarf—one of those failed stars with insufficient mass for gravity to cause nuclear fusion.^[8]

2 The Double Double Star

The Epsilon Lyrae multiple star system is 160 light-years away from Earth. This fascinating system contains a bit of a surprise. It looks like a binary system where two stars are orbiting each other. But upon closer examination, each of those stars is a binary itself. In other words, each star is really two stars orbiting each other. Each pair also orbits the other pair. As a result, the system contains two binaries within a binary (aka “The Double Double”).

From Earth, each stellar pair seems so close together that we could confuse both stars in each set for a single star. This happens even though these individual stars are actually so far apart that they take around 1,000 years to complete a single orbit around the other in its stellar pair.

The binaries themselves are also far apart. The distance between the two sets is 10,000 times the range between the Earth and the Sun. The binaries require around 500,000 years to complete a single revolution around each other.

Interestingly, astronomers have discovered a fifth star that orbits one of the stellar pairs. These space scientists also believe that other undiscovered stars are orbiting in Epsilon Lyrae. In all, astronomers think the system involves 10 stars.^[9]

1 The Star With A Tail

When we think of tails in space, we usually envision comets. Mira (“Wonderful”) is here to prove us wrong. It is a binary star in the Cetus constellation 350 light-years away from Earth. One star is a red giant called Mira A, and the other is a white dwarf called Mira B. A red giant is a dying star, while a white dwarf is a dead star.

Astronomers detected the stars while checking out the universe in ultraviolet light. They found that some comet had left a tail that was 13 light-years long. That is 20,000 times the average distance between Pluto and the Sun. However, they soon discovered that the tail was actually coming from the red giant Mira A.

The tail is shedding several elements, including carbon and oxygen, which astronomers think could create new solar systems. Mira has been releasing these elements for over 30,000 years.^[10]

When Pompeii was first discovered, wealthy young gentlemen were expected to embark on Europe-wide tours to learn the continent’s history. A visit to Pompeii quickly became a key part of this rite of passage. These gentlemen took their experiences home, where they used their wealth and influence to patronize the Neoclassical movement.

Since it was first excavated in the 1700s, Pompeii has given us thousands of finds, some of which changed our understanding of ancient Roman culture. While this helped us understand the Romans like never before, the discovery of shockingly explicit frescoes and statues offended the sensibilities of the people of the Enlightenment.

They hid many of them away in private collections. These more controversial facets of Pompeii (and Roman culture in general) are still glossed over in classrooms today, but their archaeological importance cannot be denied.

Pompeii has consistently been a source of finds that fundamentally shape our understanding of the Roman world. In 2018 alone, two new discoveries helped to shed light on the daily lives of the Pompeiians. In this list, we’re investigating 10 of the most amazing archaeological discoveries found in Pompeii.

10 Ancient Graffiti

We forget that the Romans produced a lot of writing, especially in comparison to other societies. Most of these texts have sadly been lost now.

But at the time, most public figures would have produced some writing which they hoped would boost their political standing back home. It was this that inspired Julius Caesar to produce a multivolume account of his Conquest of Gaul, which featured many embellishments to make him more appealing as a political leader.

Even among the uneducated classes, politics was a highly emotive issue. Political graffiti was as common as any other type of graffiti on the walls of Roman towns.

In perfectly preserved Pompeii, however, we get to see a much rarer form of Roman street art: the kind that was painted onto walls instead of scratched in with a rock or knife. This kind of graffiti is much more perishable but has survived in Pompeii under meters of ash.

Some political graffiti may have been paid for by the candidates themselves as some of them are very simple: “I ask that you elect [name] as [position]” was a common form of graffiti in Pompeii. Others, though, were more advanced, and one appears to be an attack ad: “All the deadbeats and Macerius ask for Vatia as aedile.”^[1]

Of course, the Romans were more sexually open than many other people in history and their graffiti could be extremely graphic. “I don’t care about your pregnancy, Salvilla; I despise it” and “Romula sucks her man here and everywhere” are two of the less explicit examples of lewd graffiti discovered at Pompeii.

9 The Villa Of The Mysteries

The Villa of the Mysteries (Villa dei Misteri) is a well-preserved old Roman villa that was likely the home of a powerful family. Like most expensive homes of the time, the villa is not located within Pompeii but lies on the road just outside it.

Despite being covered with ash during the Vesuvius eruption, it remains remarkably intact. The majority of its walls and ceilings survived with only minor damage. Most importantly, though, its stunning frescoes are still almost whole, making them some of the best-known examples of Roman painting we have today.

Experts disagree over what the frescoes actually depict. But the most common assumption is that they show a young woman going through the rites of induction to a special secret cult of Dionysus, the god of wine.

Incidentally, a Roman wine press was also discovered at the site. This would have made it easy for the family to make its own alcohol. The rest of the house, which was more than 200 years old by the time of the eruption, featured baths, gardens, shrines, and several large kitchens which, along with the farm outside, would have made it largely self-sustaining.^[2]

When the site was first uncovered in 1909, it was extraordinarily vulnerable to the elements. Within months, the walls and paintings had sustained water damage and the paint was starting to fade.

Early attempts to use wax to protect the surface gave the frescoes an unwanted glossy appearance and, over time, darkened and yellowed the paint. In 2013, however, an extensive program was started with the ambition of restoring and preserving the site. Study and conservation are much less intrusive than they were in the past, and the site is now in much better shape.

8 A Horse Wearing A Harness

In 2018, excavations taking place in some stables outside the Villa of The Mysteries uncovered at least three horses which had been buried by ash from the eruption. A tragic occurrence, but it was also incredibly useful for historians because two of the horses were wearing harnesses. One also wore a saddle.

They may have been harnessed as part of a failed last-minute attempt to flee the volcanic eruptions. Harnesses from Roman times are incredibly rare finds.

As they are so unusual and evidence is generally lacking, discussions continue over how exactly Romans rode horses in both peace and wartime. While the remains are in poor shape, they may in the future help shed some light on precisely what horse-related equipment was available to the average Roman rider at the time and how it was used.^[3]

Interestingly, the horses were discovered as part of a law enforcement investigation led by the Italian police. Operation Artemis was launched in 2014 after thieves stole a Roman fresco. By 2015, the operation had resulted in the arrest of more than 140 suspects across 22 Italian provinces and the recovery of over 2,000 illegally acquired artifacts.

7 Lupanare

The Romans were much more open about sex than we are today. Phallic symbols frequently appeared in both religious and everyday imagery and could be found everywhere from the walls of temples to the city streets.

Brothels were completely legal in ancient Rome. The use of prostitutes was not criticized if people conducted themselves with self-control and were not seen as being overly desperate or addicted to sex. Perhaps most shockingly to us, though, a particular brothel in Pompeii seems to have used lewd frescoes on its main room as a way of advertising what services were available to visitors.^[4]

In much the same way as we can stare at the rotating menu board in McDonald’s as we wait for our order today, those guests who were waiting for a prostitute or a room could view a wide assortment of different sexual services and positions.

The brothel itself, called the Lupanare (“Wolf’s Den”), was a two-story building with 10 rooms and a lavatory which had been built just years before the eruption. It seems to have been the only building in Pompeii that was intended to be a brothel from the start.

In typical Roman fashion, the walls are adorned with over 100 graffiti messages.

6 A Roman Launderette

Many of the poorer urban Romans lived in multistory apartment blocks, the likes of which would not look entirely out of place in our cities today. And just like modern people, the Romans needed a place to wash their clothes.

These places of accommodation were often too small to host the full range of equipment needed for washing clothes back then. As a result, many of these urbanites would have taken their clothes to the local launderette instead.

Archaeologists have restored and opened an old Roman building which was the place where your average Roman brought their clothes to be washed and dried back in the day. The facility, which is now open to the public, featured large baths for washing and a press which would have been used for ironing. The building also contained several stone basins which would have been used for dyeing.

The Romans used urine to clean their clothes because it was both readily available and fairly acidic. As such, the launderette would almost certainly have maintained a large supply of urine collected from the city’s various public toilets. Once the clothes had been washed, they were left on the roof to dry, which no doubt would have created a nasty smell.^[5]

5 A Perfectly Preserved Shrine

Another 2018 discovery, this perfectly preserved shrine was found in one of the previously unexcavated parts of the city. The ash which buried Pompeii protected it from water, air, and sun erosion, keeping the paintings vibrant and fresh.

It’s likely that most of the frescoes across Pompeii looked like this when the city was rediscovered in the 18th century. But the amateur archaeologists of the 1700s didn’t have the knowledge or the tools to prevent the frescoes from weathering over time.

Now, however, we have a chance to look upon a beautiful fresco in all its original glory. The small room features several different paintings, including a shrine flanked by guardian snakes, a hunting scene on a vivid red background, and a man with a dog’s head who might be a Roman interpretation of the Egyptian god Anubis. Elsewhere, the room also contained a pool, marking the house as one of Pompeii’s more expensive properties.^[6]

Perhaps most impressive, though, is the painting of a lifelike peacock which is framed to look as though it’s walking in another part of the shrine’s garden. Since medieval artwork was highly symbolic and rarely resembled the real world, it is often assumed that art as we know it today came about during the Renaissance. Finds like this help to dispel that myth and remind people that the Romans were perfectly capable of producing lifelike art.

4 Varied Food

It is commonly believed that the Roman elite ate a wide range of exotic delicacies while the average man or woman lived on boring bread or grains. Most of us have heard the myth that the “Vomitorium” was a room where the rich Romans would make themselves sick so they could carry on eating.

A wide-ranging survey of 20 shops near one of Pompeii’s gates has revealed a host of new information about the diets of average urban Romans. It seems that wealthier Romans could indeed afford strange, varied foods, the likes of which we would flat out refuse to eat today.

The drain of an eatery contained the remains of imported shellfish, sea urchin, and a giraffe’s bone. The drain also contained traces of spices and other flavorings from places as far away as Indonesia.

However, the study revealed that the diets of everyday Romans could be surprisingly varied, too—at least for those who lived in the city. The average resident of Pompeii lived on a diet somewhat like the Mediterranean diet of today. They consumed mainly lentils, olives, nuts, and fish alongside the occasional portion of salted meat.^[7]

3 The Bread Fresco

While many of the Pompeiian frescoes depict grand events such as religious festivals or great historic battles, some are concerned with more mundane affairs. One of the greatest “everyday” frescoes is called The Sale Of Bread.

Its name is a misnomer because the fresco actually shows a politician in a toga distributing bread to citizens for free. Many Roman sources tell us that politicians would provide gifts to build political support. But this mostly came in the form of hosting gladiator games, which were often politically funded and free for the average person to enter.^[8]

This fresco, though, shows us how political campaigning worked in the Roman world. Much like how politicians will host surgeries and meetings with their constituents today, it was not uncommon for a Roman who aspired to high office to take to the streets with gifts and ideas in an effort to drum up support.

It is also important because it depicts Roman furniture. In the fresco, we can see a wicker basket, a countertop, and some shelves. All these things would never survive into the modern day because they’re made from perishable materials. Such paintings are therefore essential to our understanding of what everyday urban environments looked like for most Romans.

2 The Stabian Baths

The Stabian baths are the oldest baths in Pompeii and some of the earliest Roman baths still standing. First built in 120 BC, they cover over 900 meters (3,000 ft) of ground and contain two different sections—one for men and one for women.

Each section contained several rooms, including cold, warm, and hot bathing rooms. There was also a courtyard, a gymnasium, and a central pool. A block of lavatories was added much later. The women’s section even contained a room full of bronze baths for individual bathing in case a visitor didn’t want to share someone else’s water.

As some of the oldest baths in the Roman Empire, the Stabian baths had few windows and were more poorly lit than the other bathing facilities in the city. Even so, it seems that the baths were still in use when the eruption occurred. By that time, they would have been almost two centuries old.

They are still standing today and, in some places, even retain their original Roman plaster, decorations, and roof. Visitors can still walk their halls today and see everything from the advanced central heating system to the holes in the plaster where renovations were ongoing when the city was destroyed.^[9]

1 The Secret Erotica Museum

Some Roman practices are disturbing to our modern sensibilities and were even more alarming to the Victorian and medieval people who sometimes encountered them. It is rumored that when Count Muzzio Tuttavilla accidentally discovered the ruins of Pompeii in the 1590s, he found sexually explicit frescoes and purposely reburied them, leaving them undiscovered for another century.

Whether or not that is true, shortly after excavation of Pompeii began in earnest in the 1800s, the diggers uncovered frescoes and statues which they believed were indecent, if not outright immoral. Before long, the king of Naples established a secret museum which could only be viewed by men of an upright moral standing.

Many of Pompeii’s more erotic artworks were removed from the site and taken to Naples to be hidden away in this special museum, which quickly became infamous. It was opened for a brief time in the 1860s after Italy was united by Garibaldi and then again in the 1960s.

But it wasn’t permanently opened to the public until 2000. It contains some finds which people would deem questionable even today. These include a whole collection of uncircumcised stone penises and a satyr (half-goat, half-man) mating with a female goat.^[10]

Human skeletons can be strange, even in the most normal of positions. Ancient bones have a particular knack for dropping jaws and not just their own. Societies who lived long ago sometimes buried their dead in strange ways for reasons that defy even what the experts know of their culture. But enigmatic skeletons are not the only ones found at odd angles. Victims of feuds, murder, and failed rebellions make a tragic return, while double graves reveal people with unexpected gestures and placements.

10 Hand Holding Men

The bubonic plague that swept through London was something out of a nightmare. The 1348 wave slaughtered more than half of the population. Nearly 50,000 victims received hasty burials in Smithfield.

One grave held two men holding hands; their heads turned to look to the right. Another skull was also found with the pair. The men were aged in their 40s and arranged in identical positions, with one man’s left hand holding the right of his companion. They died sometime in the early 15th century, meaning they were born after the horrors of 1348, but since they were interred in a plague field, it appears they did not survive the later waves that continued to cull London’s citizens.

While the grave had been dug with care, no remnants of coffins or burial cloth were found. If they were placed directly in the ground, it is possible that the hand holding might be accidental. Who they were, why they faced the same way or how the older man received a defensive arm fracture remains a mystery. The extra skull appears to be from an older grave disturbed by gravediggers.

9The Gender Bender

The Corded Ware culture was a Stone Age people who buried their dead according to gender. When men died, the grave was filled with weapons and tools, and the body was placed facing west. Women went into the afterlife with domestic ware while looking into the opposite direction.

In 2011, researchers found a Corded Ware man outside of Prague. When he died about 5,000 years ago, his community arranged the grave, and him, as a woman. Resting on his left side, the caveman faced east, and household jugs and pots kept him company. Considering that his people, who lived from 2,800-2,500 B.C., were very strict about funeral rites, this is unlikely to be a blunder on their part.

The archaeologists who discovered the strange skeleton believe it could signify the earliest discovery in the Czech Republic of somebody with a different sexual orientation and that it was accepted by the community. Skeptic scholars say that identification of a skeleton’s gender (by looking at pelvic differences) is about 90 percent accurate but not infallible.

8Feuds In The Desert

Over the course of 20 years, archaeologists studied 170 bodies in the Sonoran Desert. They were all laid to rest between 2100 B.C. and A.D. 50. Throughout the ages, burial customs in the Sonoran changed little. The dead were respectfully placed on their side in a curled-up position. The final resting place was then decorated with shells, crystals, bone tools, and pipes of stone.

Eight of the graves, found near the Mexican-US border, did not fit any known tradition. The skeletons were in awkward poses, almost looking disrespectfully discarded. Some died violently. There were broken bones, and one woman’s head had been set alight. A younger man was found with four apparent arrowheads inside him.

There were no ritual or preventative measures such as heavy stones or dismemberment that might have explained the corpses as victims of witch hunts or sacrifices. The way that the brutal treatment continued after death indicated the funeral was not a happy one. Researchers believe the desecration was reserved for victims of blood feuds.

7Beshtasheni

Recently, an ancient cemetery called Beshtasheni turned up two headless corpses and a head without a body. The graveyard consisted of 16 graves left behind by Late Bronze Age and early Iron Age tribes in southeastern Georgia. A young couple occupied a double tomb. The man was aged between 19-25, and the woman was around 23-25 years old. Their headless skeletons were in the fetal position. Resting on her right side, similar to her partner, the probable cause of the woman’s death came in the painful form of two bronze arrowheads. One had struck her in the leg and the other lodged close to the heart.

Their heads were never found, but another showed up in its own grave. The girl it once belonged to was around 17-25 when she died. Her skull was displayed on a plate and surrounded by offerings of ceramics, beads, and metal objects. Nearly all the tombs contained such a wealth of artifacts that it surprised even the experts. It remains unclear whether the missing body parts were intentionally removed before burial, or somehow not available due to some misfortune.

6 Cylon’s Men

When developers began digging outside of Athens, the idea was to start clearing the land for new cultural centers. Instead, some human bones rose to the surface. After all were dusted and cleared, a tragic sight met the living. Eighty men, nearly half of them shackled, were sitting in neat rows. The majority were healthy, young individuals in the prime of their lives. Two vases unearthed from the mass grave allowed researchers to date the site to 650-625 B.C. The date range placed the group in a volatile era for Athens.

One notable event occurred in 632 B.C. An Olympic champion called Cylon dreamed of taking over the city. To accomplish this, he raised an army, but when the people of Athens failed to join his rebellion, Cylon and his men were trapped inside a temple and massacred. There is no better evidence that these were Cylon’s followers, other than the time bracket being right and the shackles. The creepy, unearthly collection of skeletons is rare, though. Not many remains from the lower social classes have ever been found, and these make for a rich haul to study.

5 The Murdered Pict

Excavations in Scotland delivered an unexpected skeleton in a cave. The man was on his back and cross-legged. Beach stones weighed down his limbs. Found in the Black Isle, Ross-shire, the presence of human remains was surprising. They also found fireplaces and rubble from iron-working dating back to the time when he died.

Finding a burial inside what was probably a smithing workshop is a mystery to archaeologists. When forensic anthropologists took over, they made a grisly discovery. The 1,400-year-old man was murdered sometime between A.D. 430-630, also known as Scotland’s Pictish era. The attack he suffered was methodical and vicious. An object with a circular cross section was smashed into the right side of his face, shattering the teeth. A second swing, bearing traces of the same weapon, broke his jaw from the left. As he toppled down, a brutal blow was delivered to the back of his head. Once on the ground, a final thrust pierced his skull from one side to the other. It is unknown why he was killed, but he was buried with care, inside a dark alcove. A recent reconstruction of his face showed that he was young and handsome.

4Dark Side Of The Etruscans

The Etruscan civilization remains one of the most fascinating cultures. Peaking around 900 B.C., they were advanced and artistic. From them, the French learned about wine making and the Romans how to built roads. Their grave goods and art revealed an eclectic, good-natured people who respected their women. One skeleton brings a little-known aspect about the Etruscans to the fore—that they also had a cruel side.

In Tuscany, archaeologists found an Etruscan burial with a 20-30-year-old man inside. He was still in the chains he had died in 2,500 years ago, leaving one arm awkwardly twisted. Iron around his neck and ankles weighed almost five pounds. The shackles were a complex system designed to prevent normal walking. The metal collar was once attached to a wooden object (now gone) that ran behind the neck. Also long since degraded, were leather or material cords that connected the punishing device from his neck to the feet. This first-ever Etruscan grave with a shackled person was unexpectedly found in a necropolis containing normal burials.

3The Yamal Four

When scientists opened medieval graves in the Yamal peninsula, they found something odd. The archaeological site Yur-Yakha III is an 11th-century cemetery where four graves defied the norm. Unique for the time, the skeletons were crouching in a fetal-like fold. There are no similar graves on the peninsula. Other sites produced bodies in extended positions, which was normal for Yamal’s medieval period.

Between the man and three women existed an abnormal amount of serious physical ailments. Just some of the conditions included shoulder dislocation, dental abnormalities, sinusitis, and lower spinal trauma caused by giving birth. The women were young, in their late teens or early twenties and the man around 50. His state was particularly diseased—and scorched. He had hyperostosis, a condition where bone tissue cannot stop growing, and as a child, he experienced more illness and starvation. After death, his body had been briefly set on fire. Enough to burn soft tissue but not the bones. There is no record of such a ritual or sacrifice from the region, which deepens the puzzle even more.

2Sacrificial Twist

Along Peru’s north coast, ancient prisoners-of-war could look forward to one fate. During gory ceremonies, such men were sacrificed. Recently, researchers encountered a different version when they found six skeletons near the city of Chiclayo. Found at a temple in Pucalá, they had clearly been sacrificed.

Surprisingly, the remains belonged to healthy young women. They were killed around A.D. 850, and their bodies arranged in odd positions. Four were piled into one grave. The other two were on sloping platforms, feet in the air. Also breaking with tradition is that it appears to have been a private event held within the temple. Sacrifice was often public, but the women apparently died behind high walls obscuring the ritual. They were buried beneath the floor of the mud-brick complex, but unlike other north-south Moche burials, they were aligned in an east-west line. The only thing they had in common with their male counterparts was that the bodies lacked several ribs. This fits with a known purification ritual of sacrificed individuals being left outside so vultures could consume their organs.

1The Mesolithic Half-Burial

During the Mesolithic, hunter-gatherers never remained in one location for long. When nine skeletons were found just 50 miles north of Berlin, archaeologists excitedly realized they were looking at one of the earliest permanent cemeteries in Europe. It was used between 6400-500 B.C., and the oddest resident was a man who had been buried upright. Not only does he stand in a vertical grave but he was only partially covered up.

After the young man died, about 7,000 years ago, he was placed in a standing position with his back against the wall of the five-foot pit. To steady the body, the hole was filled with sand to above knee level. The most bizarre behavior was that his community left him there, half exposed, until the upper body disintegrated from decay, and predators had a good nibble on his arms. Only then was the tomb completed. The strange sight was filled up and sealed by lighting a fire on top. Since the skeleton was respectfully surrounded with grave goods, researchers believe the unique funeral was not a form of punishment.

Too many times, the idea floats that commerce in the past wasn’t as interesting as it is today. Archaeologists beg to differ. There’s nothing like stumbling upon an ancient business and seeing the tools a surgeon held, how wine was made, or even ancient customers who took shelter. Even better, newly discovered workshops reveal mysterious products, enigmatic peoples, and technology more advanced than anything seen before.

10 The Pompeii Shop

A group of customers went shopping in AD 79 and never made it out of the shop alive. The infamous volcanic eruption of nearby Mount Vesuvius hit the shop near the outskirts of Pompeii and overwhelmed them. In 2016, a mixed team of French and Italian archaeologists rediscovered the unlucky patrons, among them a teenage girl, while excavating the Herculaneum port. The other people who died there were also young. In addition to their remains, the diggers found gold coins and a gold necklace pendant that somehow got overlooked by looters.

While investigating the shop, researchers found telltale signs that somebody ransacked the business during the disaster, looking for things to steal. What product or service was sold at the shop is not entirely clear. However, it appeared to have been some sort of workshop with an oven, possibly to forge objects made of bronze. The same dig uncovered a second shop with a well and a spiral staircase, but researchers are presently at a loss about what type of business was conducted at the site.

9 The Flint Factory

In 2016, archaeologists were shoveling beneath an abandoned kindergarten in Bulgaria. When they found flint, it didn’t take them long to realize that the different-sized pieces meant a lot of tool-shaping once occurred there in antiquity. The more they looked, the more the scope of the factory became apparent. This wasn’t just a hearth around which a few people had gathered and chipped some tools for themselves. It was literally a production line manned by individuals specialized in different aspects of product creation.

Ancient employees toiled 6,500 years ago and mass-produced items such as flint knives. Moreover, experts believe that this was a prehistoric exporting business. No completed tools were found. The only signs of stone were flint cores, chips, and weapons in different stages of production—but none that were finished. This supports the idea that as soon as a knife or ax was done (or a whole batch of them), they were moved elsewhere to be sold. Another interesting discovery at the factory was a grave dating back to the same time it was still in use. Inside was a man clasping a stone ax scepter.

8 Nonstick Frying Pans

A first-century Roman cookbook called De Re Coquinaria mentioned cookware that nobody could find. Called Cumanae testae or Cumanae patellae, these nonstick wonders were described by the author as best suited for cooking chicken stew. In 1975, archaeologist Giuseppe Pucci suggested that a brand of ceramics called Pompeian Red Ware was the Cumanae described in the ancient cookbook.

Backup for his theory arrived in 2016, when a trash site near Naples produced 2,000-year-old pottery fragments. Nearly 50,000 pieces of pots, lids, and frying pans were recovered. Just like Pompeian Red Ware, most were coated with a red-slip layer on the inside to prevent food from burning to the bottom. The fragments at the dump site were likely freshly made wares that didn’t make the cut or broke during production. What supports Pucci’s claim is the fact that the city of Cumae, which gave the mysterious kitchen utensils their name, was located just 19 kilometers (12 mi) from Naples. The city once mass-produced and exported pottery to places as far-flung as Africa as well as across Europe and the Mediterranean.

7 The Naxos Mine

A prehistoric workshop was discovered in 2013 on the Greek island of Naxos. The extraordinary thing was that it appeared to have been in use for thousands of years. Also, it wasn’t owned by modern humans. Earlier hominids had passed something on to each successive generation, something critical for survival: the location of a seemingly endless supply of chert. The valuable stone was necessary for the creation of tools and weapons. On Naxos was essentially a 118-meter-high (387 ft) hill consisting almost entirely of the sought-after raw material. Called Stelida, the site was first discovered in 1981 by a survey on the northwestern coast of the island.

The 2013 excavations found the rubble left behind by toolmakers who mined the hill from the Paleolithic era right through to the Mesolithic. There was also ample evidence that tools and weapons were created at the site, although none have been found so far. The discovery could also change how researchers piece together human migration. This area of Greece is now being studied as previously unknown route that early humans took to spread from Asia to Europe.

6 The Galilee Kiln

The ancient world needed places to manufacture ceramic, and Galilee was no different. However, one pot workshop found in the modern-day town of Shlomi is unique. Found in 2016, what made it so special was its industrial oven. Unlike other kilns made of stone or even mud, this one was cut straight into the bedrock. Archaeologists found that the geology of the area likely accounted for this unusual firing pit. The region had a chalky type of bedrock that was soft enough to be shaped into the desired form while resistant enough to endure the heat of the pottery-making process.

The shop was active around 1,600 years ago, during Roman times. By studying the ceramic remains in the double-chambered kiln, it was determined that the owners focused mainly on storage jars and containers designed to hold oil and wine. One box was used to feed a fire with branches and tinder, while the other chamber was used to harden the clay.

5 Foundry Complex

A happy accident occurred in 2016 when a group of people headed toward a sightseeing area on Lake Baikal in Siberia. Many tourists had trampled this route before, but these weren’t just any visitors. Noticing the slag and clay on the path, the trained eyes of the archaeology party quickly realized that something was up—or more like down. Soon, a medieval foundry was unearthed. Used to make weapons, the complex was highly advanced and professional. A pair of rare, ancient stone furnaces were once part of a skilled metallurgic operation that churned out weapons, metal parts for horse tack, clothing, and even sickles.

The Baikal region has a rich history of working with metal and exporting the excess. However, the new foundry, which dates to around AD 1000, shows a level of technology that’s a step above anything the experts have ever seen before. The location was well-chosen, high on a hill, in order to harness the wind to help with the combustion process. The ancient blacksmiths may have been the Kurykan people, who were known for their expert metallurgic abilities.

4 The Glass Community

In prehistoric Poland, an isolated community left behind a fascinating part of their identity. Apart from a few houses, artifacts found on Mount Grojec in 2017 showed that they were glassmakers. There were no completed items that might have placed them instead as glass buyers, but there were artistic blunders, slag (melted waste glass), and half-glass, ready to be heated and shaped. The only finished product found were small beads.

The discovery of the 2,000-year-old factory is an important one for Polish history. Not only is this probably the oldest glass workshop found in the country, but it’s also the only proof that glass processing occurred in Poland much earlier than the Middle Ages, which is when conventional thought believes the craft blossomed. There are numerous furnaces at the small village, and some were for forging metal as well. The pieces of raw glass were of particular interest. The half-processed material was acquired from somewhere, but researchers aren’t sure who the suppliers were. It’s not even certain who the villagers were.

3 Christian Winery

In 2013, a Byzantine-era wine factory was discovered in Israel. Located near the archaeological site of Hamei Yo’av, the ruins covered enough area to indicate that the residents of the settlement produced wine on a large scale. Spanning over 100 square meters (1,100 ft²), the complex consisted of sections where grapes were dumped after being delivered to the factory. The fruit was probably also left to ferment in these compartments. In the middle was a vast floor constructed at a sloping angle to allow the juice from pressed grapes to flow into holding vats.

Archaeologists believe that besides producing the best wine they could, the workers turned grape waste into secondary products, such as vinegar and a less refined “pauper’s wine.” The owner might also have been Christian. One of the artifacts found at the wine press was a small ceramic lamp fashioned in the shape of a church. The hollow artifact was carved with crosses that would glow once a flame was lit on the inside.

2 The Surgeon’s Room

When archaeologists cleared away ancient earthquake rubble in Cyprus in 2017, they found what they believe to be a doctor’s office. Found near the city square of Nea Paphos, it had several rooms. In one of them, the team found a glass unguentarium in mint condition. Such bottles were used to store liquids like oils, perfumes, and medicines. But the best discovery was a surgeon’s 2,000-year-old tools.

The surgical instruments were all made from metal. One was iron, and the other five were bronze. They included a long, narrow spoon, pliers, and devices most likely used to set a patient’s broken bones. Like the bottle, the set was well-preserved. Coins found in a second room roughly date to the time when a big earthquake hit Nea Paphos in AD 126, collapsing the building that housed the doctor’s office as well as other businesses. The debris was never cleared away or replaced with anything else, which helped to seal the artifacts away safely.

1 Revenue Office

Nicopolis ad Istrum was a city founded by Roman emperor Trajan in what is modern-day Bulgaria. Raised around AD 102, it was sacked by several different barbarian hordes throughout its long history and was eventually settled by the Bulgarian Empire between the tenth and 14th centuries. Like any well-run Roman city, commerce was tightly governed by the powers that be. After its ruins were found in 2016 near Veliko Tarnovo, the city proved to be huge.

One fascinating building was a public place that appeared to have been the office of that eternal unfavorite: the tax man. Inside, archaeologists found stone weights and measuring devices in large numbers. Called egzagia, they were compulsory for anyone selling goods anywhere in the city so that buyers would not be deceived. The team that investigated the site believe that the building was a tax agency and government center where trade in Nicopolis ad Istrum was strictly controlled.

Have you ever wondered how somebody came up with an idea? For example, how did somebody ever think of making an X-ray machine or a microwave oven? By accident, that’s how!

Many of mankind’s most useful devices and contraptions were invented completely by mistake. For centuries, scientists have been tasked with finding the solution to a particular problem, only to discover something totally different. Here is a list of some of the most important and useful inventions that were discovered or invented by mistake.

10 Fireworks

Some 2,000 years ago in a Chinese kitchen, a cook made one of the oldest accidental discoveries known to man when he mixed sulfur, saltpeter (potassium nitrile), and charcoal over a fire. Let’s just say combustion ensued. What the cook was thinking, or whether or not he made it to work the next day, is not known, but the he’d just made a discovery that would change the history of the world forever. The ancient Chinese called it “fire chemical” and quickly learned that when they compressed the concoction, such as inside a piece of bamboo, it exploded. Thus, the firecracker was born.

Firecrackers became very common and were used during important events, such as weddings and funerals, all over the country. The Chinese believed that the retort, or bang, from the firecracker, kept evil spirits away from the ceremony. They would eventually learn through experimentation that they could produce thrust that would propel the bamboo container through the air, instead of exploding instantly, and soon, the solid-fuel rocket was invented. They put the two together, firecrackers and rockets, and fireworks were born.

Historians tell us that Marco Polo brought fireworks from China and introduced them to people in regions of the Middle East. From there, they made it to England, where interest in fireworks was strictly to weaponize them. Although the English are credited for devising the standard recipe for black powder still in use today, it was the Italians who turned the making of fireworks into an art form, with the use of multiple colors and choreographed firework displays. Needless to say, the Italians’ celebrations got louder and more colorful as they experimented with different chemical combinations that would produce different colors when burned. However, none of it would have been possible if not for the accidental discovery of “fire chemical” by a 2,000-year-old Chinese cook.^[1] (What the heck was he making, anyway?)

9 Laughing Gas (Nitrous Oxide)

In 1799, Humphry Davy, a young English inventor and chemist who would eventually be elected president of the Royal Society in London, decided to use himself as a Guinea pig to find out the effects of inhaling artificially produced gases, all in the name of science. Along with an assistant, Dr. Kinglake, they discovered that heat-treating ammonium nitrate crystals produced a gas that they could collect in special oil-treated silk bags. They then could run the gas through water vapors, which would purify it.

After attaching a makeshift mouthpiece, Humphry inhaled a bag of the gas and was euphorically amazed and more than pleasantly surprised with the results. He had discovered nitrous oxide, or laughing gas, and probably the very origin of the saying, “They were gassed!” Humphry reported that he felt “giddiness, flushed cheeks, intense pleasure, and sublime emotion connected with highly vivid ideas.” He soon started experimenting with the gas more and more until he was inhaling laughing gas away from the lab and after drinking alcohol when at home. Although he did keep detailed notes on his observations while breathing laughing gas, the amount he was consuming rose dramatically.

Davy would let his patients and colleagues try the gas, as long as they also recorded their experiences for science.^[2] Some of them were quite famous, such as the heir to the famous Wedgwood pottery company and well-known poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey. Humphry went so far as to construct an airtight box which subjects would get into and breathe pure nitrous oxide. In 1800, Davy wrote Researches, Chemical and Philosophical, chiefly concerning Nitrous Oxide and its Respiration, which are 80 very entertaining pages of his experiences while experimenting with laughing gas.

8 Saccharin

Other than lead acetate, which is a known toxin, saccharin is the first artificial sweetener to inexpensively replace cane sugar, and it was discovered completely by accident. Sometime in late 1878 or early 1879, Professor Ira Remsen was running a small laboratory at John Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, when he was approached by an import firm, H.W. Perot, to do some work regarding sugar. The firm wanted Constantin Fahlberg, an expert on the sweet stuff, to use Remsen’s lab to test the purity of a shipment of it.

After successfully completing the tests, Fahlberg stayed on working for the professor on various projects. One day, while eating his dinner, Fahlberg discovered that his roll tasted unusually sweet and decided to find out why. After deducing that the bread hadn’t been sweetened by the baker, the proverbial light bulb lit up, and he assumed that he must have gotten a chemical on his hands while working at the lab, and that substance had been transferred to his roll, making it taste sweet. Since he felt no adverse reactions to this unknown chemical, he decided to find out what it was.

Fahlberg couldn’t remember exactly what substance he’d brought home on his hands, so he simply taste-tested every chemical he had at his workstation the day before, and voila—he found it! He discovered that he had filled a beaker with phosphorus chloride, ammonia, and sulfobenzoic acid, which, in turn, created benzoic sulfimide, which was a compound he knew of but never had any reason to eat. He had discovered saccharin, which really became popular during the sugar shortages of World War I.

Contrary to popular belief, saccharin is perfectly safe to consume, and there are studies on record to prove it. In fact, as recently as 2010, the EPA publicly stated that “saccharin is no longer considered a potential hazard to human health.”^[3]

7 X-Rays

On November 8, 1895, Wilhelm Conrad Rontgen, a German physicist, was working in his lab running tests on cathode rays when, out of his peripheral vision, he spotted a strange glow on a screen that had earlier been treated with chemicals. Wilhelm had been the first person in history to observe X-rays, which is what he dubbed them due to their unknown and mysterious properties.

X-rays are waves of electromagnetic energy that are similar to light, except that they run in wavelengths around 1,000 times shorter, allowing them to pass through soft substances such as skin and muscle but not harder ones such as bone or metal. They would revolutionize the field of diagnostic medicine by affording physicians a non-intrusive means to see inside the human body without surgery. It wasn’t long before this important diagnostic tool made headlines around the globe when it was used on the battlefield during the Balkan War to locate bullets and diagnose broken limbs.

Although the scientists of the day took no time at all in finding the benefits of X-rays, it took much longer for them to discover the harmful qualities of these magical rays. It was believed that X-rays passed through the human body harmlessly just as light does, but after several years, reports of strange skin damage and burns started piling up. In 1904 Clarence Dally, a scientist working with X-rays for Thomas Edison, died of skin cancer from overexposure to X-rays. This caused some scientists working in the field to start being more careful, but it still took quite some time before the harmful effects of radiation would really sink in.

For example, starting in the 1930s, shoe stores in the United States used fluoroscopes to draw people in. These machines would amaze customers by letting them actually see the bones in their feet, and it wasn’t until the 1950s that the danger of this novelty item was realized, and they were banned from use completely. Today, X-rays are still widely used in the fields of medicine, security, and material analysis.^[4]

6 Silly Putty

With no moving parts or electronics to fail, Silly Putty remains one of the most prolific toys ever produced. In its first five years, over 32 million units were bought worldwide. Today, it is guesstimated that almost a third of a billion have been sold around the globe! This was obviously a good thing for its inventor; General Electric (GE) engineer Dr. James Wright, who discovered the gooey stuff in 1943.

During the height of World War II, the good doctor had been tasked by his employers to concoct a synthetic form of rubber. But instead of delivering misery in the form of war machines rolling on synthetic rubber tires, he brought joy and happiness in the form of a cheap and simple way to entertain millions of all ages. While trying different chemical combinations to produce synthetic rubber, Dr. Wright mixed silicone oil and boric acid together, and he managed to invent a sticky mass of goop that would eventually be dubbed “Silly Putty.” (Note that Earl Warrick has also been credited with Silly Putty’s invention.)

The stuff did have a few properties that were rather unusual. For instance, it would keep its ability to bounce even better than rubber throughout a wide range of temperatures, yet when hit with a hammer, it shattered. Scientists at GE experimented with the stuff but couldn’t find any practical use for it. Not wanting to give up on the material, they sent samples to engineers around the globe in the hopes that someone might find a viable use for it.

There are multiple versions of what happened next, but the following is considered to be the most credible: Fittingly, all it took was a party to get Silly Putty going. It was a good thing for advertising agent Paul Hodgson, too. He was trying to get a toy catalog together and attended a party where he watched adults having a blast with a ball of some kind of putty. They were having so much fun sticking it to things and stretching it around the room that he decided to include the stuff in his catalog as “Nutty Putty.” Hodgson was surprised when it outsold everything in the catalog, so he decided to buy more. After finding out where it came from, he bought some from GE, filled a bunch of plastic eggs with an ounce of the stuff, renamed it “Silly Putty,” and sold over 250,000 of them in three days, at $1 each!

Over the years, fans have found many uses for Silly Putty, including squeezing it for exercise, fixing a wobbly table leg, picking lint off things, and lifting pictures off comic books and newspapers. Silly Putty made it to space in 1968 with the astronauts of Apollo 8, who used it to hold their tools in place during the mission.^[5]

5 Microwave Ovens

You push “2” on the keypad. A box lights up, and you see a plate rotating with a small, brown packet on it. Soon, a machine-gun rattle fills your kitchen air with the familiar, tantalizing odor of your favorite buttery snack. You have in front of you not only steaming hot and buttery popcorn but one of most prolific machines ever invented in history, and it was discovered by accident! It is the microwave.

Today, there is one of these miraculous contraptions in over 90 percent of American households, providing hundreds of millions with any food from A to Z, and everything in between, in seconds. In 1946, an engineer working for Raytheon named Percy Spencer was working with a magnetron, the main component of a radar system, when he found that a candy bar he was carrying in his shirt pocket had melted into a gooey mess while he was in close proximity to the device. His interest piqued, he placed an egg in the path of the magnetron’s rays and got a face full of egg for his trouble. He then got the idea to put some corn kernels on a plate, and he got them to pop all over the lab!

The rest, as they say, was history. Percy Spencer is also credited with the invention of the proximity fuse, which allows bombs to explode above their targets for a much better effect.^[6]

4 Scotchgard

Fluorochemical technology, which involves products made from chemical compounds containing fluorine, is 3M’s bread and butter, so to speak. They have been global leaders in the industry for well over half a century, yet there was a time when their scientists were greatly challenged by the task of creating useful products using this technology. A young chemist named Patsy Sherman accepted that challenge when she was hired by 3M in 1952 and soon agreed to meet it in 1953. Sherman was then given the assignment to come up with a rubber-like material that would resist jet fuel and, as so often happens, discovered something totally different instead.

It started with an accident when one of her assistants spilled some of a compound they’d been experimenting with on her new sneakers. She was really irritated by the fact that she couldn’t get the stuff off of them no matter what kind of solvent she tried. This intrigued Sherman, who was excited by the tenacity of the experimental product, so she joined forces with Sam Smith, another 3M chemist, in an effort to develop a badly needed and inexpensive fluorochemical waterproofing agent for clothing, something unimaginable at the time.

After a few years spent refining their compound, the team of Sherman and Smith unveiled their brand-new product to the world, and in 1956, the brand name “Scotchgard” was born. 3M had stumbled onto their first big seller. When asked about the company’s good fortune for constantly coming up with innovative and successful products in this manner, Richard Carlton, a 3M executive, astutely replied, “You can’t stumble if you’re not in motion.”^[7]

3 Pacemakers

It was 1956. Wilson Greatbatch was working on a device to monitor and record the sounds of the human heart when he inserted a transistor into his device that was 100 times as powerful as he would normally use. His mistake caused the instrument to create electrical impulses that were perfectly emulating the beat of the heart. So, instead of ruining the thing, which could easily have happened, the device wasn’t monitoring the heartbeat; it was creating one! He was amazed when he quickly realized that his invention could be used as an internal pacemaker, an instrument which, at the time, had to be worn like a necklace, with the thing shocking the patient to keep their heart beating.

The very first pacemakers looked like a television that the patient was tethered to, and since battery power was insufficient at the time, they had to be plugged in as well. A patient who needed a pacemaker then was much like a person on dialysis; they couldn’t leave the machine, and they couldn’t carry it around. An internal pacemaker would allow millions of these people to live completely normal lives. So, a bit bigger than a hockey puck, Greatbatch’s first prototype was implanted into a dog in 1958 and controlled its heartbeat successfully and without difficulty. The first human patient to receive one was a 77-year-old man who lived 18 months, while a young recipient lived 30 years with his.

They did have their problems, though. Body fluids would permeate the device, ruining the circuitry, and batteries would last only about two years, so Greatbatch started looking for better ways to power them. In 1970, he started his own company, Greatbatch Inc., and developed lithium batteries that lasted ten years and would eventually be used in over 90 percent of pacemakers on the planet. The brilliant inventor ended up with 350 patents in his name and was inducted into the National Inventor’s Hall of Fame in 1986. Today, over three million people benefit from Greatbatch’s inventions, and 600,000 of his pacemakers are implanted every year. Wilson Greatbatch passed away in 2011.^[8]

2 Post-It Notes

In 1968, a scientist working for the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Corporation (also known as 3M) named Spencer Silver was given the job of inventing a super adhesive designed exclusively to be used in the aerospace industry, a very tough industry to design for. His initial attempt was a flop. He was looking for strength but got something strong enough to maybe hold a sheet of paper to a bulletin board, giving them the idea to fashion some notepad prototypes, even though they didn’t have much faith in the concept. Art Fry, another employee of 3M, had the idea to use one of these prototypes as bookmarks in his choir hymn book because he kept losing his place while singing. With this practical use, he realized that the prototype notes worked perfectly by sticking really well while leaving no glue and not damaging the pages.

Silver, Fry, and several others who worked on perfecting the notes had mistakenly invented an entire brand-new hit product line. It was tough going at first, but after four failed marketing attempts in as many big cities, 3M managed to get free samples into the hands of people in Boise, Idaho, where “Post-its” finally took off. It had been 12 years, but it was worth the struggle in the end.^[9]

An interesting story about Post-it notes surrounds the familiar yellow color they chose to initially market them in. The official story is that the yellow “made a good emotional connection with users” and that it also “contrasts well when stuck on white paper.” But according to an insider, the lab next door to the Post-it team’s had a surplus of scrap yellow paper, and that’s how the color was decided. In fact, after their neighbors ran out of it, they went out and bought more. Spencer Silver, who started his education in a one-room schoolhouse, is the owner of 22 patents, including the patent for a “low-tack, reusable, pressure sensitive adhesive” or, more commonly, “stickless glue.”

1 Self-Igniting Matches

Humans have had fire for eons, and we’ve always looked for easy ways to start fires. The modern-day match transformed our world and enriched our way of life in ways their inventors could never have imagined, but early matches weren’t strikable or self-igniting and needed some other means to light. For example, early Chinese matches were coated with sulfur that burned very bright and were used to enlarge an existing fire quickly, but they never evolved beyond that ability.

A Parisian named Jean Chancel opened the door to self-igniting matches in 1805 when he mixed sugar, rubber, potassium chlorate, and sulfur together and coated wooden sticks with the concoction. He then would dip the sticks into a sulfuric acid solution to get them to light. The problem with this invention was the toxic and volatile clouds of chlorine dioxide gas they produced. These clouds were explosive, making them rather dangerous.

The real breakthrough came in 1826, when an English chemist named John Walker invented the first “friction match”—you guessed it—by accident. While working in his lab, Walker noticed that a glob of chemicals he’d been working with earlier had dried and formed a lump on the end of his stir stick. Not wanting to mix the chemicals into his present experiment, he started scraping the stuff off the implement and was both startled and pleased when it burst into flame! Walker used a sulfur-based compound on the matches’ heads and rough paper coated with phosphorus to strike them with. The user would fold the paper over the match and pull it through while applying a bit of pressure to light it. He sold quite a few of these fire sticks, but they had a problem: The sulfur burned so violently that it would burn through the stick, and the flaming head would come off, many times with undesirable results.^[10]

Matches these days are made from a red phosphorus concoction, first employed by Johan Edvard Lundstrom, which is completely nontoxic. Safety matches, which are familiar to most today, were first produced and sold in the United States by the Diamond Match Company, which gave up their rights to patent them so that any company could produce and market safety matches.

I live in Northwestern Pennsylvania in the United States of America, in “one of the Original 13” I like to say, where I grew up with a fascination for collectibles like baseball cards, coins, stamps, and old bottles, just to name a few. Always a self-starter, I’ve taught myself many different things and have ended up with a large variety of skills and hobbies in both the old and new and have recently started putting them to use on the Internet. I have been writing in several capacities for decades.