Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

Possible expeditions from Eurasia and Africa to the Americas before Christopher Columbus. Although Columbus has long been celebrated in popular imagination as the discoverer of the New World, historians now recognize that he was only one, and not necessarily the first, of many early explorers of the Western Hemisphere. Columbus who insisted throughout his life…

A dense, semi-plastic form of water found on surfaces on which water has condensed; also known as anomalous water or orthowater. As its name implies, it is water in an extraordinary form. Claims to have discovered water with unusual properties were first made by scientists in the Soviet Union in 1968. Water condensed from vapor…

Noisy or mischievous spirit. The term poltergeist comes from the German words poltern (“to knock”) and geist (“spirit”) and refers to unexplained incidences of noises and knocks and moved, thrown, spilled, and broken objects. Unlike Ghosts and hauntings, poltergeist incidents usually do not involve sites of tragic, violent, or emotionally charged events or the spirits…

The motion of Earth’s magnetic poles, through geological time, over the surface of Earth. It has been standard fare in physics textbooks for scores of years to describe a movement of Earth’s magnetic poles around Earth’s axis of rotation. For example, S. G. Starling in Electricity and Magnetism (1912) explains that the magnetic North Pole…

Roman encyclopedic writer whose extant writing lies on the boundary between the science and the pseudoscience of his times. He was born into a wealthy equestrian family and died during the eruption of Vesuvius by breathing in sulfurous fumes while making scientific observations at too-close quarters. Pliny was a man of great industry and thirst…

An open cluster of stars in our galaxy, the Milky Way, that is supposed to be the source of spirit messages that are being channeled through mediums. It is a group of about 500 stars on the border of the constellations Taurus and Perseus, 410 light years away; only about 10 of them are visible…

An instrument created in 1853 for communication with supposed spirit entities. It was named for its inventor M. Planchette, a French spiritualist, and was used by his fellow believers for the next 15 years. The planchette consisted of a simple heart-shaped piece of wood mounted on two wheel-castors, with a sharpened pencil serving as a…

A map discovered in 1929 by historians in the Palace of Topkapi, Istanbul. It shows, in remarkably accurate detail, the coastlines of North and South America and the geography of Greenland and Antarctica below their ice sheets. The mapmaker also had accurate knowledge of relative longitudes. The legend of this map’s production is as follows:…