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Cage for reviving canary, with oxygen cylinder, made by Siebe Gorman & Co. Ltd, London.

These days the phrase "canary in the coal mine" is used to refer to any early warning sign of trouble or danger, but it's based in the real history of canaries being used in coal mining. Miners would carry the songbirds into the mine with them as a makeshift carbon monoxide alarm, as the bird's small body would be impacted by the odorless gas first, giving miners time to evacuate before it built to deadly levels.

Many if not most of us probably assume the canaries used for this purpose gave up their lives to save the coal miners. As it turns out, that was not always the case.

In fact, the man who created the canary in the coal mine system went out of his way to make sure the birds could do their job safely.

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Education

Voice recordings of people who were enslaved offer incredible first-person accounts of U.S. history

"The results of these digitally enhanced recordings are arresting, almost unbelievable. The idea of hearing the voices of actual slaves from the plantations of the Old South is as powerful—as startling, really—as if you could hear Abraham Lincoln or Robert E. Lee speak." - Ted Koppel

Library of Congress

When we think about the era of American slavery, many of us tend to think of it as the far distant past. While slavery doesn't exist as a formal institution today, there are people living who knew formerly enslaved black Americans first-hand. In the wide arc of history, the legal enslavement of people on U.S. soil is a recent occurrence—so recent, in fact, that we have voice recordings of interviews with people who lived it.

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Image from Wikimedia Commons.

Van Gogh’s Starry Night.

Van Gogh never got to enjoy his own historic success as an artist (even though we've been able to imagine what that moment might have looked like). But it turns out that those of us who have appreciated his work have been missing out on some critical details for more than 100 years.

I'm not easily impressed, OK?

I know Van Gogh was a genius. If the point of this were "Van Gogh was a mad genius," I would not be sharing this with you.
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Education

How one goat herder started humanity's centuries-long coffee craze

The world's favorite drink has a rich, robust history.

Representative Image from Canva

Goats are the GOAT for discovering coffee.

Had a cup of coffee today? If yes, you are part of the world’s 4.83 billion coffee drinkers. That’s approximately 60% of our entire adult population.

Coffee is virtually everywhere, in various different forms. A dark roast americano at the press of a button at home. Fancy lattes at the nearest coffee shop, of which there are two more across the street. The cheap, diluted stuff from the gas station. The possibilities are endless.

Coffee is so commonplace now that it’s almost hard to fathom a time before it…a time when people had to either take a nap or surrender to being tired all day (those were the real dark times).

But just like every modern day convenience, coffee has an origin story. And a pretty interesting one at that.
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