Against his wishes, Albert Einstein's brain was removed before his cremation, and the pathologist responsible stored it for decades in mason jars within a beer cooler.

Against his wishes, Albert Einstein's brain was removed before his cremation, and the pathologist responsible stored it for decades in mason jars within a beer cooler.

Searching for Albert Einstein's stolen brain

Within moments of Einstein's 1955 death, someone reportedly ferreted away the 76-year-old genius's brain. Decades later, a reporter's editor told them to solve the case. This 64-minute podcast episode follows the work of Steven Levy, the reporter who ultimately tracked down Einstein's brain, which had been sliced and stored in slides, goo, and a cardboard box in a scientist's office.

Patient H.M. revealed that the hippocampus was responsible for memory formation

Henry Molaison became a landmark case in psychology after surgery removed large portions of his hippocampus, leaving him unable to form new memories. Upon his death, Molaison's brain was sliced into 2,401 sections and digitized for research.

Did a Smithsonian anthropologist steal people's brains?

This comic examines "racial brain collection" of Ales Hrdlicka, the Smithsonian's head of physical anthropology during the early 1900s. Hrdlicka was a white supremacist who sought physical evidence for his theories on anatomical differences between...

The ideas of Einstein and Freud combined in 'The Persistence of Memory'

The Persistence of Memory was painted on a canvas roughly the size of a sheet of paper, depicting a desolate landscape with melting clocks, ants, and a distorted figure. The piece incorporates Freud and Einstein's ideas, resulting in a haunting composition symbolizing time's fluidity and Dalí's personal anxieties.

Albert Einstein taught courses in Davos

This silent video from the 1920s shows footage of Einstein at Davos. The famous scientist spent time there, delivering public lectures on his theory of relativity as part of the town’s university courses.

Explore Albert Einstein's Zürich notebook and review his notes on relativity

Within the pages are calculations, sketches and his first attempts at deriving what would be the field equations for gravity. It also documents some dead ends and the difficulties Einstein encountered as he describes part of the mathematics of what would become general relativity, describing it as "too involved."

What did Ötzi the Iceman have with him when he died?

Ötzi the Iceman and his belongings were remarkably well-preserved by the mountainous ice that usually covered the area near the Italy-Austria border where he was found. This article by the Italian museum that houses Ötzi's body details some of the...

Einstein warned the president that splitting atoms could lead to powerful bombs

In a 1939 letter to Franklin D. Roosevelt, Albert Einstein explained that nuclear fission could produce immense energy—and devastating weapons. The warning helped spur the Manhattan Project, a role Einstein later deeply regretted.

Why a Nobel Prize winner was awarded 30 years of free beer

Niels Bohr, the Danish physicist who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1922, moved into the Carlsberg Honorary Residence in 1932 and was entitled to free delivery of Carlsberg beer for as long as he lived there. He did so until he died in 1962.

Everything you know about Phineas Gage is wrong

A stray spark sent a 3.5-foot-long, 1.25-inch thick iron rod through the brain of foreman Phineas Gage in 1848, creating a scientific case that has attracted onlookers for nearly two centuries. His life reportedly soon spiraled out of control, with his behavior tending toward selfishness and chaos. Evidence of these changes is far less common, with Gage's story bloated by fabrication, scientific prejudice, and artistic license.

Brain death is a top source of organ donation

Brain death is a significant source of organ donations—approximately 40% of organs in the US and the UK are recovered from people who experience brain death. Patients declared brain dead and hooked up to intensive care unit machines will still have oxygen flowing to organs like the heart, lungs, and kidneys—preserving those organs.

Mummification in Ancient Egypt transformed a body into a divine statue

Rather than for preservation, the ritual was a means of turning the biological body into an eternal vessel for the top percent of society. With no way to preserve eyes that would shrivel during dehydration, eye sockets were filled with onions or black and white stones.

Alzheimer's can lead to brain shrinkage, with an average of around 2% of volume reduction per year

Marie Curie's work with radioactive materials left traces on her furniture and notes

Some of Marie Curie's family heirlooms were radioactive and destroyed. Marie and Pierre Curie are entombed in lead coffins to block radiation.

Salvador Dalí’s remains were exhumed for a paternity test

Years after Dalí’s death in 1989, fortune teller Pilar Abel filed a suit claiming she was the child of an affair Dalí had with her mother. In 2017, Dalí’s body was exhumed for testing. Dalí was not the father, but the artist’s mustache remained intact decades after his passing.

Budweiser stores yeast derived from the original 1800s strain in a secret bunker, which only the Head of Yeast Management can access—not even the CEO

How a modern 'beer archaeologist' crafts ancient ales

The short documentary follows Travis Rupp, a University of Colorado classics professor who also works with Avery Brewing to produce Ancient Egyptian, Roman, and Peruvian beer.

One US psychiatrist at Nuremberg viewed top Nazis like Göring as normal

The surviving leaders of the Nazi movement had overseen a catastrophic war and the cruel extermination of millions. US psychiatrist Douglas Kelley evaluated the 22 men ahead of their infamous trials, viewing them as intelligent, cultured men without a moral compass. Kelley would later die by suicide.

Holocaust History

Born in Berlin in 1924, to a Catholic father and Jewish mother, Wolfgang Haney survived the Holocaust, though many in his family did not. He spent a large part of his life collecting more than 15,000 objects related to the history of anti-Semitism, before dying in 2017. Recently, the German Historical Museum acquired his collection, as detailed in this article

Salvador Dalí believed he was his own dead brother, who had died nine months before he was born

Scientists can determine Earth's past climate conditions by analyzing air trapped in microscopic bubbles within ice cores—columns of compressed snow layers that build up over hundreds of thousands of years.

At the beginning of the 20th century, a group of young men ate standard American food—replete with food additives like borax and formaldehyde—as part of government research to better understand food safety.

In 2025, UK scientists began studying climate data from a 1.5-million-year-old ice core

The Antarctica sample will be melted and analyzed in Cambridge to learn about prehistoric environmental conditions. Researchers hope the ice core reveals how Earth's glacial cycles shifted dramatically around 800,000 years ago.

Why helium helped preserve the US' founding documents, but was later replaced

In 1951, the Charters of Freedom were stored in glass and metal cases filled with helium, which would not chemically react with the documents. After microscopic cracks were identified in the glass through which helium could leak out of and—experts feared—pollutants could infiltrate, new encasements made of aluminum, titanium, and argon replaced the old system in 2003.

In 1939, baseball star Lou Gehrig delivered his 'Luckiest Man' speech after retiring due to a health condition

Gehrig's diagnosis of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a disease that now bears his name, forced him to retire early. Weeks later, he spoke with gratitude and stated, "For the past two weeks, you have been reading about a bad break. Yet today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth." Gehrig died at the age of 37, about two years later.

Clever Hans was a 1900s horse that was believed to be able to solve math equations, tell time, and read and comprehend German, until a psychology student discovered how he got his answers.

Sartre's 1980 funeral attracted a massive crowd

The legendary existentialist died April 15, 1980. A week later, mourners packed the streets of Paris to pay tribute. Estimates suggest that between 20,000 and 50,000 people were in attendance. In the Associated Press footage below, you can watch them following the hearse from the hospital where the thinker died to his resting place in Montparnasse Cemetery.

During World War II, turbulence was used to make ice cream

Before a mission, bomber crews packed buckets of ice cream mix into the rear gunner's compartment. Once airborne, freezing air solidified it, and turbulence churned it smooth, so that pilots had a fresh ice cream after landing.

The Bone Wars turned paleontology into a rivalry fraught with public scandal

Othniel Charles Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope were friends-turned-enemies competing for the glory of discovering dinosaurs. It became so intense that when Cope died, he donated his body to science to prove he had a bigger brain than Marsh.

Thomas Edison, eager to communicate with ghosts, tinkered with an apparatus called the 'spirit phone'

The inventor was interested in developing a scientific method for communicating with the dead. He was not interested, though, in the occult figures who believed the dead could be reached through Spiritualism, which he found childish. He believed those kinds of people "permit themselves to become, in a sense, hypnotized into thinking that their imaginings are actualities."

Images of quantum computers often depict dilution refrigerators

While quantum computers themselves can have a microchip of silicon spin qubits or other trapped particles that make up quantum computing's basic unit, these components are too small to see on their own. However, such chips are located at the base of chandelier-shaped machines that keep temperatures near absolute zero.

The first line of 'immortal' human cells, which can divide indefinitely and are used in scientific research, was nonconsensually taken from a Black woman.

The history of many kitchen appliances involves unexpected discoveries and applications, including wartime radar turned hamster defroster and replacing an 'ice king' with heat-stealing boxes.

In 1939, baseball star Lou Gehrig delivered his inspirational 'Luckiest Man' speech after retiring due to the health condition that now bears his name.

Apollo astronauts left items in the moon's 'toss zone,' including golf balls, family photos, and bags of human waste, to make room for lunar rocks.

The animatronic shark from Steven Spielberg's 'Jaws,' the first modern blockbuster, was a complex underwater apparatus called 'Bruce.'

Larger animals like giraffes, elephants, and blue whales have developed a unique defense against cancer, a phenomenon known as Peto's Paradox

In 1984, Operation Smash Hit intentionally crashed a 239-ton train into a nuclear waste canister at 100 miles per hour to prove the canister's safety, which remained completely intact and lost just 0.29 of its 100 pounds of pressure.

While atoms are normally made of protons, neutrons, and electrons, exotic ones have been built with antimatter—alternate versions of normal matter that live for fractions of a second and are about a billion times as rare.

Learn how your body is, scientifically, like a firework with its own slow, controlled burn.

American dance legend Martha Graham, sometimes called 'the Picasso of dance,' refused to perform at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin and conceived the piece 'Chronicle' in response to the experience.

The Mona Lisa's celebrity status and repeated restorations have obscured what made the painting so revolutionary for its time

Apeirophobia is an overwhelming fear of living forever, perhaps stemming from the brain's inability to conceptualize an infinite life.

Objects can be 3D printed with light by projecting 2D computerized tomography (CT) scans onto rotating cylinders of resin, which solidify upon exposure.

Many legends about George Washington, including his supposed wooden teeth and the story of cutting down the cherry tree, lack evidence.

Legendary architect Frank Lloyd Wright designed the SC Johnson headquarters in Wisconsin, aiming to make a cathedral-like workplace

Warren Buffett's former professor Benjamin Graham is known as the 'father of value investing,' a strategy in which investors seek to buy stocks trading below their intrinsic worth.

Search a massive database of over 4 decades of clues from the TV quiz show 'Jeopardy!'

NBA superstar Victor Wembanyama spent the 2025 summer training with monks in central China to enhance his body and mind.