Poison can be a curse, a killer, and even a medicine—an alchemical substance that appears in everything from myth to literature. You might not think of poison as being this multifaceted, but that’s exactly what the American Museum of Natural History’s new exhibit—The Power of Poison—delightfully urges you to do.
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Scientists recently discovered a new type of botulinum toxin (a.k.a. botox) that they believe is the deadliest substance known to man. Because they’ve yet to discover an antitoxin, researchers won’t publish the details of gene sequence due to security concerns—a first for the scientific community. Thank God.
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Should you have happened to find yourself dining with Bulgarian royalty 700 years ago and the wine tasted a bit off, you would have been smart to put the goblet down. Bulgarian archaeologists have just discovered a medieval bronze ring explicitly designed to poison political foes—in the most discreet way possible.
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There are plenty of reasons to be thankful that you don’t live in the early 1900s (child labor laws, air conditioning, what have you), but just in case you’ve been feeling nostalgic for simpler times, new research from the University of Detroit Mercy should put those wistful fantasies to rest. After chemically analyzing several dozen patent medicines from around the dawn of the 20th century, chemist Mark Benvenuto found that many of these completely unfounded “miracle cures” contained toxins such as lead, mercury, and even arsenic. More »
Guam has a problem with brown tree snakes. Specifically, it has two million brown tree snakes, and they’re slowly decimating other native species. So scientists have come up with a solution, the only logical one really: fill a bunch of dead mice with painkillers, give each corpse a tiny parachute, and throw them all out of helicopters into the jungle. No but really. More »
North Korea hates Park Sang-hak, a former citizen and now South Korea resident and activist against the brutal regime of the Kim Jongs. They hate him so much that they sent a killer agent to eliminate him using these James Bond-ish weapons. More »
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