The Mind Jolt

The Pope Who Put a Dead Pope on Trial

Description:
In 897, Pope Stephen VI ordered the body of his predecessor, Pope Formosus, to be dug up and put on trial.

Formosus had been dead for about nine months. His co**se was dressed in papal robes, seated before a church council, and assigned a deacon to answer for him.

The dead pope was found guilty. His papacy was declared invalid. His acts were cancelled.

But the spectacle backfired. Within months, Stephen VI was overthrown, imprisoned, and probably strangled. Formosus' body was recovered and reburied. Later church councils reversed the sentence.

This was the Cadaver Synod.

The Wrong Turn That Started World War I

Description:
On the morning of June 28, 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife Sophie left Sarajevo's Town Hall. They had less than an hour to live.

A bomb thrown at their car earlier that morning had bounced off and wounded sixteen people. The man who threw it swallowed cyanide that had gone bad and jumped into a river thirteen centimetres deep. He was captured.

After the Town Hall reception, the Archduke decided to visit the wounded in hospital. No one told the driver about the change of route. He turned the wrong way, tried to reverse, and the car stalled — directly in front of a man named Gavrilo Princip, one of the conspirators who had already given up. Two shots. Both were dead inside an hour.

Within five weeks, four empires were at war. More than fifteen million people died in the war that followed.

The Tallest Wave Ever Recorded Hit Three Fishing Boats

Description:
On the night of July 9, 1958, an earthquake in Alaska shook about 90 million tons of rock off a mountainside and into the head of Lituya Bay, a narrow fjord on the coast.

The rockslide threw the water up the opposite mountainside to about 1,720 feet, taller than the Empire State Building, stripping the forest to bare rock. It is still the tallest wave ever recorded.

Three fishing boats were anchored in the bay. Two rode the wave out and survived. The third boat, and the couple aboard it, were never found. Sixty years on, you can still see the line on the mountains where the trees stop.

The Blind Man Whose Brain Could Still See

Description:
A man known in the research only as TN suffered two strokes that destroyed his visual cortex. He was completely blind.

In 2008, scientists placed him at one end of a corridor cluttered with boxes and chairs and asked him to walk it, with no cane and no guide. He navigated the whole course without touching one obstacle, even stepping around a bin, and had no idea he was doing it.

This is blindsight. Sight does not travel only through the visual cortex. Older, deeper pathways carry it into the brain below conscious awareness. They are working in your brain right now, taking in far more than you will ever consciously see.

The Ship Found Sailing Itself Across the Atlantic

Description:
In 1872, the merchant ship Mary Celeste was found drifting alone in the Atlantic Ocean. She had left New York bound for Italy with ten people aboard: her captain, his wife, their two-year-old daughter, and seven crew.

When she was found she was still seaworthy. Six months of food and water sat untouched. The crew's belongings were still in their cabins. Only the lifeboat, and every person aboard, were gone.

The famous details, meals still warm on the table and tea still in the cups, are myth. They grew from a story Arthur Conan Doyle wrote in 1884. The real record is stranger. The ship never sank. She sailed for thirteen more years. The ten people were never found.

The Summer Hundreds of People Couldn't Stop Dancing

Description:
In July 1518, a woman named Frau Troffea began to dance in a street in Strasbourg, and could not stop for days.

Within a week more than thirty people had joined her. By August, as many as four hundred people were dancing in the streets. The city's physicians decided the cure was to dance it out, so the authorities built a stage and hired musicians. It only made things worse.

Many dancers collapsed from exhaustion. Historians now believe it was a kind of mass psychological illness, set off by famine, disease, and fear. More than five hundred years later, the dancing plague has never been fully explained.

The Cosmic Cold Spot: The Strange Patch in the Oldest Light

Description:
The Cosmic Microwave Background is the oldest light we can observe. In that ancient light, NASA's WMAP mission found a strange cold patch. ESA's Planck mission looked again, and the anomaly did not vanish.

One explanation is a giant supervoid between us and the CMB. But the evidence does not fully close the case. The Cosmic Cold Spot remains one of cosmology's strangest unresolved marks.

The Man Who Invented Movies and Then Vanished

Description:
In 1888, French inventor Louis Le Prince filmed people walking in a garden in Leeds, England. That two-second clip, the Roundhay Garden Scene, is the oldest surviving film in the world. He was years ahead of Thomas Edison and the Lumiere brothers.

In September 1890, Le Prince boarded a train from Dijon to Paris. When it arrived, he was gone. His luggage was gone. No body was ever found.

The disappearance has never been solved. Edison went on to claim the invention of motion pictures, and the history books credited him for decades.

The 600 Year Old Book No One Can Read

Description:
The Voynich Manuscript is a 240-page handwritten book in a script that no one has ever been able to read. Carbon dating places the parchment between 1404 and 1438. It contains illustrations of plants that don't exist, astrological diagrams, and bathing women in interconnected pools.

In 1912 a rare book dealer named Wilfrid Voynich bought it from a Jesuit library in Italy. The NSA cryptographer who broke Japan's wartime codes spent decades trying to decipher it. He failed. Modern computer analyses have come and gone. Nothing has held up.

Today the manuscript sits in a vault at Yale.

The Year 1816 Had No Summer

Description:
In 1816, summer didn't arrive in the Northern Hemisphere. Frost killed crops in June. Snow fell in July. Across Europe, harvests failed and famine spread for months.

The cause was on the other side of the world. In April 1815, Mount Tambora in Indonesia erupted with a force unlike anything in recorded history. Sulfate aerosols stayed in the upper atmosphere for over a year, dropping global temperatures.

That summer at Lake Geneva, Mary Shelley conceived Frankenstein. Lord Byron wrote a poem called Darkness. The connection to the volcano wouldn't be made for over a century.