Bristlecone pines are a species of pine tree renowned for their resilience to harsh conditions and their unrivaled longevity. The world's oldest bristlecone pine is more than 5,000 years old, making it the most ancient living organism on earth.
Mr. Mudgett's Corpse Factory
Herman Mudgett, better known as H. H. Holmes, was an American serial killer, con artist, and bigamist in the 19th century. He confessed to 27 murders, but is commonly said to have killed as many as 200 people.
A graduate of the University of Michigan’s medical school, Dr. H.H. Holmes moved to Chicago to pursue a career in pharmaceuticals. While in Chicago during the summer of 1886, Holmes came across Dr. E.S. Holton’s drugstore at the corner of S. Wallace and W. 63rd Street, in the neighborhood of Englewood. Holton was suffering from cancer while his wife minded the store. Through his charm, Holmes got a job there and then manipulated her into selling him the store. They agreed she could still live in the upstairs apartment even after Holton died. Once Holton died, Mrs. Holton mysteriously disappeared and Holmes told people she was visiting relatives in California. As people started asking questions about her return, he told them she enjoyed California so much that she decided to live there.
Holmes purchased a lot across from the drugstore, where he built his three-story, block-long “Castle"—as it was dubbed by those in the neighborhood. It was opened as a hotel for the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893, with part of the structure used as commercial space. The ground floor of the Castle contained Holmes’s own relocated drugstore and various shops, while the upper two floors contained his personal office and a maze of over one hundred windowless rooms with doorways opening to brick walls, oddly angled hallways, stairways to nowhere, doors openable only from the outside, and a host of other strange and labyrinthine constructions. Holmes repeatedly changed builders during the construction of the Castle so only he fully understood the design of the house, thus decreasing the chance of being reported to the police.
After the completion of the hotel, Holmes selected mostly female victims from among his employees (many of whom were required as a condition of employment to take out life insurance policies for which Holmes would pay the premiums but also be the beneficiary), lovers and hotel guests, torturing and killing them. Some were locked in soundproof bedrooms fitted with gas lines that let him asphyxiate them at any time. Some victims were locked in a huge soundproof bank vault near his office where they were left to suffocate. The victims’ bodies were dropped by secret chute to the basement, where some were meticulously dissected, stripped of flesh, crafted into skeleton models, and then sold to medical schools. Holmes also cremated some of the bodies or placed them in lime pits for destruction. Holmes had two giant furnaces as well as pits of acid, bottles of various poisons, and even a stretching rack. Through the connections he had gained in medical school, he sold skeletons and organs with little difficulty.
Following the World’s Fair, with creditors closing in and the economy in a general slump, Holmes left Chicago. He reappeared in Fort Worth, Texas, where he had inherited property from two railroad heiress sisters, to one of whom he had promised marriage and both of whom he murdered. There he sought to construct another castle along the lines of his Chicago operation. However, he soon abandoned this project, finding the law enforcement climate in Texas inhospitable. In July 1894, Holmes was arrested and briefly incarcerated for the first time, for a horse swindle that ended in St. Louis. He was promptly bailed out, but while in jail, he struck up a conversation with a convicted train robber named Marion Hedgepeth, who put him in touch with a con-artist associate named Benjamin Pitezel.
Holmes and Pitezel concocted a plan to bilk an insurance company out of $10,000 by taking out a policy on Pitezel and then faking his death. The scheme, which was to take place in Philadelphia, was that Pitezel should set himself up as an inventor, under the name B. F. Perry, and then be killed and disfigured in a lab explosion. Holmes was to find an appropriate cadaver to play the role of Pitezel. Holmes then killed Pitezel. Forensic evidence presented at Holmes’s later trial showed that chloroform was administered after Pitezel’s death, presumably to fake suicide.
Holmes proceeded to collect on the policy on the basis of the genuine Pitezel corpse. He then went on to manipulate Pitezel’s wife into allowing three of her five children (Alice, Nellie and Howard) to stay in his custody. He traveled with the children through the northern United States and into Canada, eventually killing all three of them.
In 1894, the police were tipped off by his former cellmate, Marion Hedgepeth, whom Holmes had neglected to pay off as promised for his help setting up the insurance scheme. Holmes’s murder spree finally ended when he was arrested in Boston on November 17, 1894, after being tracked there from Philadelphia. He was held on an outstanding warrant for horse theft in Texas, as the authorities had little more than suspicions at this point and Holmes appeared poised to flee the country, in the company of his unsuspecting third wife. After the custodian for the Castle informed police that he was never allowed to clean the upper floors, police began a thorough investigation over the course of the next month, uncovering Holmes’ efficient methods of committing murders and then disposing of the corpses.
The number of his victims has been estimated to be between 100 and 200, based upon missing persons reports of the time as well as the testimony of Holmes’s neighbors who reported seeing him accompany unidentified young women into his hotel—young women whom they never saw exit. The discrepancy in numbers can perhaps best be attributed to the fact that a great many people came to Chicago to see the World’s Fair but, for one reason or another, never returned home.
H. H. Holmes was executed on May 7, 1896, nine days before his 35th birthday.
The World's Largest Church
The Basilica of Our Lady of Peace of Yamoussoukro is a Roman Catholic church located in the West African country of Côte d'Ivoire (Ivory Coast). The basilica was constructed between 1985 and 1989 at a cost of $600 million (adjusted for inflation). Upon its completion it was declared as the largest church in the world, surpassing the previous record holder, St. Peter’s Basilica. It has an area of 322,917 square feet and is 518 feet high (roughly the height of a 40 story skyscraper).
The basilica is constructed with marble imported from Italy and is furnished with 75,000 square feet of contemporary stained glass from France. Columns are plentiful throughout the basilica but are not uniform in style; the smaller columns are there for structural reasons, while the bigger ones are decoration and contain elevators and pipes for rainwater. There is enough space to seat 7,000 people inside the dome, with standing room for an additional 11,000 people. Apart from the basilica there are two identical buildings, serving as a rectory and private papal villa, respectively. The villa is reserved for papal visits, of which only one has occurred: when the basilica was consecrated by Pope John Paul II on September 10, 1990.
Rather than place the monument in the country’s metropolitan center, Abidijan, Côte d'Ivoire President Félix Houphouët-Boigny chose his birthplace of Yamoussoukro to be the site of the church. As construction was nearly completed, the president commissioned a stained glass window of his image to be placed beside a gallery of stained glass of Jesus and the apostles. This image depicts him as one of the three Biblical Magi, kneeling as he offers a gift to Jesus.
The basilica has been met with global controversy since its conception. The lavishly built basilica sits in the middle of the African bush in an impoverished town where only a small number of homes have running water and adequate sanitation. The cost of the basilica doubled the national debt of Côte d'Ivoire, which overtime, would lead the country down a path toward political violence and social unrest.
Swimming Laps in the Universe
Grains of sand come in all shapes and sizes, but the most common size is about a half millimeter across. You could put 20 grains of sand packed in side-by-side to make a centimeter, 400 grains would make one square centimeter, and 8,000 grains could fit into one cubic centimeter. By extension, this means that an astounding 1,888,000 grains of sand would fit into a single cup - which is definitely more than I would have guessed.
If our sun and all the other stars in our universe were the size of a grain of sand, all the stars in our galaxy would fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool.
If our galaxy were a grain of sand, the galaxies would fill several olympic-sized swimming pools.
We know there are 100 to 400 billion stars in the Milky Way and more than 100 billion galaxies in the Universe — maybe as many as 500 billion. If you multiply stars by galaxies, at the low end, you get 10 billion billion stars, or 10 sextillion stars in the Universe. At the high end, it’s 200 sextillion.
Slow, Poisonous, Toothless
The slow loris is the world’s only poisonous primate. Its venom is stored in an elbow patch: the loris will suck in the poison from the patch, then mix it around in its mouth before delivering a toxic bite. So, when illegal traders catch them and sell them on, they usually remove the hapless creatures’ teeth - with wire cutters.
If they are lucky enough to be returned to the wild, most lorises will survive on a subsistence diet of tree sap. Occasionally, they do attempt to hunt geckos and birds, but it can be a challenge without their teeth. The standard technique is to sneak up on a bird, grab them and then strangle them with their hands and feet. The only difficulty in this strategy is actually eating their prey, a phase of the hunt that is often abandoned.