It is said that when the great Italian artist Raphael was painting one of his frescoes in the Vatican, two church cardinals were watching and criticizing his work. One said that the face of the apostle Paul was too red, to which Raphael is said to have replied, "He blushes to see into whose hands the church has fallen." Now the ...

It's rare to find a mistake in the movies. They are well researched. But some moviegoers have made a hobby of finding those mistakes. In Indiana Jones, the leading character flies across the Atlantic in an airplane a year before planes began carrying passengers across the Atlantic and starts back by airship a year after the end of...

When David Wallechinsky and Amy Wallace wrote the 90's edition of the Book of Lists (published by Little Brown and Company, 1993) they included of course, the Ten Commandments. But in which of the book's several categories did the Ten Commandments belong? Certainly not under the category of People, or Family, or Crime, or...

Hans Christian Andersen, whose stories have thrilled millions of children, suffered from dyslexia. Winston Churchill, noted for his oratory, had a problem with stuttering. He wrote his speeches carefully, leaving out words that ended in s and he rehearsed them several times. Thomas Edison, the great inventor, was thought...

Many doctors have shown the faith they had in their discoveries by first trying them on themselves. Jonas Salk, whose polio vaccine virtually wiped out that disease, often tested serums on himself. The German surgeon Forssman, who developed the procedure of heart catheterization, did it first on himself. Who would go to a...