Daily news on world events, sports, celebrities and AI tools — every story in simple English that anyone can follow.
In late 1971, engineer Ray Tomlinson sent the first message ever to travel from one computer to another, and chose the @ symbol that still sits in every email address. The strangest part? He could never remember what that first message said.
In 1971 a playful program called Creeper began hopping between computers on the early ARPANET, printing a cheeky taunt wherever it landed. It harmed nothing, yet it started a chase that has never really ended.
Alan Shepard was America's first man in space, then an ear disease grounded him for years. He fought his way back to command Apollo 14 in 1971 — and marked the comeback by playing golf on the Moon.
South Africa is the only country in the world with three capital cities. Join a road trip through Pretoria, Cape Town and Bloemfontein, and find out about the 1910 compromise that split one government across three cities.
In 1900, the city of Chicago did something no city had ever dared: it dug a canal deeper than its own river and forced the Chicago River to flow away from Lake Michigan. More than a century later, the river still runs backwards.
Most of us see the world through three kinds of color sensors in the eye. A rare few people carry a fourth one, and at least one woman has proved in a laboratory that she sees shades the rest of us cannot.
On 8 August 1963, a gang used a false red signal to stop a Royal Mail train and steal about £2.6 million. The plan worked for one night, then a farm, a board game, and fingerprints gave them away.
A batch of boiled wheat left too long at the Battle Creek Sanitarium became flakes, then corn flakes, then a painful family fight over sugar, a famous name, and the future of breakfast.
John D. Rockefeller built Standard Oil into a company that handled nearly all of America's oil, and a single barrel of Pennsylvania crude can carry us through the whole tale: the lamps it lit, the empire it built, the court order that split it apart, and the strange twist that made him richer than ever.
Malala Yousafzai was seventeen when she received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014, the youngest winner the prize has ever had. Her story begins on ordinary school mornings in Pakistan's Swat Valley, where a girl who loved her books refused to accept that girls should stop learning.