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Random Facts About... The Eiffel Tower

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Whether you're lucky enough to have visited Paris or have only ever dreamed of going there, there’s no doubt you could all recognize the iconic Parisian symbol: The Eiffel Tower. These random facts will prove to you this poor construction has been through all sort of things …and some of them are quite weird. 1. The Eiffel Tower was built for the 1889 Paris Exposition and was not intended to be permanent. 2. The Eiffel Tower was going to be demolished in 1909, but was saved because it was repurposed as a giant radio antenna. And in 1913, the tower transmitted a signal all the way to Washington DC. The Tower is also a huge lightning rod. 3. Gustave Eiffel used latticed wrought iron to construct the tower to demonstrate that the metal could be as strong as stone while being lighter. 4. Con artist Victor Lustig "sold" the Eiffel Tower to a scrap metal dealer. Victor was a notorious scammer who “sold” the Tower even twice.  5. The Eiffel Tower was

Urban Legends - Did Unicorns Ever Exist?

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Unicorns are such pure, beautiful and mysterious creatures. These mythical horses with a single spiraling horn protruding from the forehead have continuously populated legends and magical myths all over the world. Everything has been said about them. Somebody says there’s a strange healing power enclosed in the horn, others say they can actually fly without having wings. Everybody says they’re immortal. When the cultural beliefs about the magical creature were exploding , a “unicorn horn” was literally worth 10 times its weight in gold. Pharmacies in London sold powdered unicorn horn as late as 1741. The unicorn of the Lascaux Caves, France But despite being very well known, nobody has actually seen a living one grazing on the neighbors’ lawn. These magical horses have been discussed in religious texts, travel observations, and even ancient academic papers. But the real question is: Did unicorns, at one point in time, actually exist? And If they didn’t, where did the l

Did you know the Origin of the Male and Female Symbols?

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Males and females are completely different, that’s for sure! But have you ever wondered why the classical symbols the genders are drawn like they are. These two little symbols, despite being very simple and recognizable, have a lot of meaning and correlations with planets and metals. Both these associations started at the beginning of civilization. The ancients, after observing how planets and stars, like the Sun, were moving across the universe,  they found out there was a causal relationship between those movements and corresponding changes in events on our planet. Venus (on the left) and Mars (on the right) Logically, then, ancient scholars began to study heavenly bodies in order to predict future. They also started to associate different planets with their gods. The most common are Mercury, Venus, Mars, Zeus (Jupiter) and Cronus (Saturn). Each planet, along with the respective god, was also associated with a particular metal. For example, the Sun (Helios) was associated