history
-
Here’s What People Thought Of Amazon When It First Launched In The Mid-1990s
Amazon was founded on July 5, 1994, and launched its online store in 1995, letting people buy books from the comfort of their homes. Twenty-five years after its inception, Amazon now sells everything from taco holders shaped like dinosaurs to tongue brushes that humans can use to lick their cats. And you’d have to be…
-
People Inhaled Cannabis To Get High At Funerals 2,500 Years Ago, New Evidence Suggests
Humans have been smoking, eating, and wearing cannabis for millennia, and a new study out Wednesday presents some pretty strong evidence of people using it explicitly to get high back in the first century BCE in Central Asia. The paper suggests that the plant could have been cultivated to be more mind-altering and used for…
-
Scientists Sequenced The Genes Of Ancient Plague Bacteria That Spread The ‘First Pandemic’
Scientists have gained some insight into one of the first known calamities to visit mankind: a two century-long pandemic caused by the bacterial disease plague. Studying the remains of plague victims, the researchers say they were able to sequence the genomes of plague strains that devastated the Roman Empire starting in the 6th century. They…
-
Medicinal Plants Used During The U.S. Civil War Are Surprisingly Good At Fighting Bacteria
With conventional medicines in short supply during the Civil War, the Confederacy turned to plant-based alternatives in desperation. New research suggests some of these remedies were actually quite good at fighting off infections—a finding that could lead to effective new drugs.