In September 1991 two hikers spotted a body in the melting ice of the Ötztal Alps. He turned out to be 5,300 years old, and he had been murdered.

For nearly 50 years the US military used the Hawaiian island of Kahoʻolawe as a target. In 1976, nine people landed on its beach and started the fight to win it back.

In the summer of 1518, dozens of people in Strasbourg could not stop dancing. The city’s records tell a stranger, quieter story than the legend.

On May 22, 1960, a magnitude 9.5 earthquake struck southern Chile, the strongest ever recorded. Its tsunami crossed the Pacific, and a landslide lake nearly drowned Valdivia.

A new interactive 3D globe puts every Aglena history story on the map. Spin it, slide through time, and tap a pin to read the story.

Left behind on a remote Channel Island in 1835, a Nicoleño woman lived alone for 18 years. Here are the records, the rescue and the cave behind the novel.

During World War II, B. F. Skinner trained pigeons to steer a glide bomb by pecking at an image of the target. The military said no, but the birds changed psychology.

How a Mexican garrison on a remote French-claimed atoll was cut off by revolution, ruled by a murderous lighthouse keeper, and rescued by USS Yorktown in July 1917, and what pigs, boobies, crabs and rats did to Clipperton after.

In 1904 Clever Hans tapped out sums for Berlin crowds and stumped a panel of experts. Oskar Pfungst found the horse was reading questioners’ tiny head movements, and the Clever Hans effect still shapes dog research and AI.

Rats from a 1918 shipwreck wiped out Lord Howe Island’s giant stick insect. In 2001 climbers found a few survivors on Ball’s Pyramid, and Melbourne Zoo has since hatched more than 14,000. Now the island is rat-free and deciding whether to bring them home.

A viral post called a patch of ocean the Area 51 of the sea. It isn’t. But some Pacific islands really are off-limits, for reasons from unexploded bombs to rare stick insects.

For four decades, Piltdown Man sat in Britain’s story of human evolution. It was an orangutan jaw and human skull pieces, stained and filed to deceive. Here is how the fake was made, why experts believed it, and how science caught the forger.