The average person throws away about 3 kilograms (7 lb) of trash a day. While most of us moan and groan about taking out the garbage on Tuesday mornings, some people have found opportunity and even fortune in the trash we discard every day. Have you ever considered looking through your trash—or anyone else’s—for treasure?

Not every fantastic creature comes from fairy tales. Some of the strangest are ones that, 2,000 years ago, explorers insisted were real. When the first natural scientists were trying to catalog every tribe and creature that existed on this Earth, they wrote down some strange things. If you traveled far enough away from civilization, they

On May 5, people around the world will celebrate Cinco de Mayo. People will flood into the bars and the streets with sombreros on their heads and mariachi bands at their sides, showing their deep respect for Mexican culture by getting as drunk as humanly possible. None of which is part of the holiday. As

They say you should never meet your heroes. They’re probably right. We all have ways we like to imagine the people we admire, especially the famous ones. We create personalities for them in our minds, no matter how little we know about them. We even get attached to them—and then get upset when we find

Keeping up with the news is hard. So hard, in fact, that we’ve decided to save you the hassle by rounding up the most significant, unusual, or just plain old mind-blowing stories each week. While much of the world was enjoying the May Day holiday, the gigantic story spinning wheel that is modern-day Washington, DC,

The history of lost libraries inevitably mentions the disappearance of the Great Library of Alexandria, which also remains one of the most frequently debated due to the mystery surrounding its downfall. Multiple conflicting accounts of how the library was destroyed have circulated over the years, ranging from allegations of fire set by Julius Caesar during