Many people are fascinated by the Amish community. A big part of the fascination comes from the people who look and live as if they’ve been frozen in time. It turns out, the reason it appears that Amish people are stuck in the past is not that complicated.

People travel from all over the country to visit “Amish Country,” to get a glimpse into the Amish way of life. The community is located in south-central Pennsylvania, in Lancaster County, where they keep to themselves. In 2026, the religious sect still gets around on horse and buggy.

Most great archaeological discoveries involve years of fieldwork, dense jungle, and a lot of digging. This one involved a guy clicking through page after page of Google results, the kind of Internet rabbit hole most of us only tumble into when we’re bored at home.

Luke Auld-Thomas, a PhD student at Tulane University, was deep in a search when he found it. “I was on something like page 16 of Google search and found a laser survey done by a Mexican organization for environmental monitoring,” he told the BBC in 2024.

That laser survey turned out to contain an entire ancient Mayan city, hidden under forest cover for centuries.

Have you ever wondered why there is a small pocket riveted or sewn above the normal pocket on the right-hand side of your jeans? Is it so you have a cool place to rest your thumb when leaning on a wall? Is it a safe place to keep a lucky charm or your quarters for a trip to the laundromat?

In 1873, tailor Jacob Davis and businessman Levi Strauss patented the tiny pocket as an element of the Levi’s jeans that would become mainstays of American, and then world, fashion. The pants were first popular with working people, including miners, carpenters, and railroad workers, because they were comfortable and rugged enough to withstand rough conditions without falling apart.

Few bug encounters give people the ick as quickly as seeing a tick embedded in someone’s skin. Yeah, bee stings hurt. Mosquito bites itch. Spider bites do both. But a tick bite—a creature burrowing its nasty little mouth into you for hours, slowly inflating itself with your blood—is worse. It just is.

It’s especially worse considering how common Lyme disease has become, making it oh-so-important to know how to properly remove a tick. Many of us learned from our parents or grandparents how to get a tick to back out on its own. Holding a hot sewing needle up to its butt, smothering it with Vaseline, suffocating it with alcohol or nail polish remover, and other methods may technically “work,” but they also increase the risk of the tick transferring any disease it might be carrying.