Estep was an American Baptist historian, author, and professor of church history. He was considered one of the world’s leading authorities on the Anabaptist movement, a Christian sect that rejects infant baptism and practices the ritual of believer’s baptism only after a person has made a declaration of faith. Estep wrote numerous works, including books [...]

Santiago is the capital and the largest city of Chile. Just months after it was founded on the banks of the Mapocho River by Spanish conquistadors, the settlement was nearly wiped out by the indigenous Mapuche peoples. Today, it is one of the largest cities in South America, having survived the 1647 earthquake that leveled [...]

Earth’s land masses are constantly shifting due to tectonic activity, and while their day-to-day movements are so minute as to be imperceptible to the average person, the world map will change drastically over the next 50 to 200 million years. According to geologists at Yale University, it is in that time period that the Americas, [...]

The uraeus is the stylized upright form of an Egyptian spitting cobra that often adorned the headdresses of the pharaohs as a symbol of divine authority. It represented one of the earliest Egyptian deities, Wadjet, and was believed to protect the pharaohs by spitting her fire at their enemies. According to myth, Isis made the [...]

Many theories exist to explain the striped coat of the zebra—that it helps the animals recognize one another, that it camouflages them in tall grass and confuses predators—but the results of a new study seem to suggest that it evolved for another reason entirely. It appears that the zebra’s black-and-white stripes are unattractive to blood-sucking [...]

The Red Badge of Courage is a war novel by American author Stephen Crane. Taking place during the American Civil War, the story is about a young private of the Union Army, Henry Fleming, who flees from the field of battle. Overcome with shame, he longs for a wound—a “red badge of courage”—to counteract his [...]

In 1969, Jennifer Aniston was born on this date in Sherman Oaks, California, USA

In 1936, Burt Reynolds was born on this date in Waycross, Georgia, USA

In 1992, Taylor Lautner was born on this date in Grand Rapids, Michigan, USA

Szilard was a Hungarian-American nuclear physicist who, after immigrating to America from Nazi Germany, was instrumental in the development of nuclear weapons. Working with Enrico Fermi, he developed the first self-sustained nuclear reactor based on uranium fission. He was one of the first to realize that nuclear chain reactions could be used in bombs and, [...]