Any literate person could write in with questions on subjects ranging from the philosophical to the scientific to the personal. One man asked where the wind came from. Another asked for advice concerning the drunkenness of his wife. In one memorable submission, a man asked why a horse’s “fundament” was round yet it emitted an “oblong excrement.” Below is an edited collection of 10 intriguing submissions to this advice column as well as the answers received by the writers....

10Levanevsky’s Flight In 1937, the famed Soviet pilot Sigizmund Levanevsky took charge of what was intended to be the first cargo-passenger flight over the North Pole from Moscow to Fairbanks, Alaska. The distance was enormous, and experts thought that a full year of preparation would be needed. In a bid to impress Stalin, the officials in charge decided to do it in three months. The risks were so obvious that the aircraft’s radio officer even joked that the crew members were flying to their deaths....

Even the exact date of the library’s destruction remains unknown. However, there are a number of other notable libraries which have also been lost over time, leaving many unanswered questions about their contents and the ways in which they disappeared. The following list will take a chronological look at 10 such lost book collections of the past and the uncertainties which surround their various fates. 10 The Library Of Aristotle In 335 BC, Aristotle moved to Athens where he founded a school at the Lyceum....

This story has no supernatural element, but still works within the program’s ‘world’. Set in a gentleman’s club, it tells the tale of a young man who cannot stop talking. One of the elder members, Franchot Tone in a great performance, exhausted by the young man’s constant chatter, bets him a large sum of money to remain silent for a year. Look out for the scene where he visits the young man in his glass room and tries to force him to speak by suggesting his wife is being unfaithful to him....

Although to speak of the whole ‘caboodle’ refers already to the entire lot, the phrase kit and caboodle makes it even more embracing. Kit is a shortened form of the kitbag, a knapsack in which soldiers packed and carried their essentials. It is said to have evolved from the Dutch kitte, a box made of wooden staves in which workmen kept their tools. Caboodle also seems to have come from the Dutch, bodel, used for ‘property’ and ‘movable goods’....

10 The Atlanta Ripper Over 20 years after Jack the Ripper terrorized London, the city of Atlanta was terrorized by their own unknown serial killer, who murdered what is estimated to be between 15 and 21 African-American women throughout 1911-12. Rosa Trice was believed to be his first victim after she was found murdered on the morning of January 22. Her head was crushed by a blunt instrument and she had been stabbed in the jaw and had her throat slit....

Why is the universe the way it is? As they learned more about celestial mechanics through research, astronomers in the 20th century became increasingly fascinated with the fine-tuning of the universe. All physical constants colluded to create the perfect conditions for life on Earth, so much so that the perfect calibration seemed beyond coincidence. If the laws of chemical bonding or gravity had been even slightly different to their actual values, the Earth would spiral into the sun or worse, would never have formed at all....

10White Temple Of Uruk3200 BC A long way from the quiet shires that house Stonehenge stands a building that is yet more ancient. Perched at the top of the oldest existing ziggurat, in what is modern-day Warka, Iraq, is the weather-worn White Temple. Less known than the complexes on the ziggurat at Ur, the White Temple is only 20 meters (60 ft) in length. The name, added in modern times, comes from its whitewashed, mud-brick walls, whose sides still stand sentinel over the sands of the long-gone Sumerian empire....

10 Hagia Sophia’s Hidden Angel An image of a six-winged angel has been revealed in Istanbul’s Hagia Sophia. The mosaic depicts a seraph, a member of the angelic choir, the highest order of angel hierarchy. For 160 years, the image was hidden under a metal mask and seven layers of paint. The image appears on pendetives (curving triangular surfaces) on the central dome and is believed to be 700 years old....

10Aalwites One in 12 Syrians is an Alawite, practitioners of a secretive sect of Islam dating to the ninth century. These Shiites worship Mohammed’s son-in-law Ali as a god, deny women have souls, and believe in reincarnation. The Ottomans despised them. Sunni do not believe they are Muslim. Alawites are accused of using a veil of Islam to hide their radical beliefs. “Fasting” means keeping secrets. And a “pilgrimage” is a visit to their sheiks....

10Pandora’s BoxGreek One of the most popular myths surrounding the reason for disease and strife, the ancient Greek myth of Pandora tells the tale of the creation of the first woman and the subsequent release of evil into the world. Created by Zeus to punish humanity for receiving fire from Prometheus, Pandora received special gifts from each of the gods, gifts that would aid her and her descendants in their torture of men....

10 Manly P. Hall Ronald Reagan captivated America with his lofty, almost mystical rhetoric. But much of it was lifted almost verbatim from the works of occultist Manly P. Hall. In 1944, Hall wrote The Secret Destiny of America, a book that described a hidden philosophical order that was guiding the US toward a great destiny. According to Hall, the delegates were hesitating to sign the American Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, when a mysterious man entered the Philadelphia statehouse through a locked door....

SEE ALSO: 10 Surprisingly Awesome Things From History That We Somehow Lost 10 The Fairylogue and Radio-Plays Starring: L. Frank Baum Conceived by L. Frank Baum as a travelogue of sorts, designed to take you to the Land of Oz, The Fairylogue and Radio-Plays debuted on September 24, 1908. As a whole, it could be best described as a mixture of a live-action play, a slideshow, a lecture and a film presentation....

Archaeologists and anthropologists have had a busy week. They talked about old reptiles and even older footprints as well as the mysterious moai of Easter Island. Meanwhile, astronomers were given a good scare when they found an asteroid speeding toward Earth. Did it crash into our planet and end all life as we know it? Read on to find out. 10 Falling Poo Over Canada The city of Kelowna in British Columbia has an unusual problem on its hands—poo is raining from the skies....

These days, even respected physicists like Stephen Hawking are being forced to admit that time travel may be possible. But has it already happened? These people say it has. 10 A Visit To Mars With Barack Obama Seattle attorney Andrew Basiago says that when he was a child, he and William Stillings were “chrononauts” in a secret United States government time travel program called Project Pegasus. The purpose of the program was threefold—to protect Earth from threats from space, to establish territorial sovereignty over Mars, and to acclimate Martian humanoids and animals to our presence....

Some say that Freud may have been right after all, and the foundations of fetishes are indeed laid by childhood experiences and stimuli, though not necessarily trauma. The answer for the fetishes per se may be elusive, but studies on particular sexual fetishes have brought up a few interesting theories. While they may not apply to everyone who professes to a particular sexual fantasy, they are fascinating explorations of human sexual psychology....

10Sarum Ordinal Page When a librarian at England’s University of Reading found a page of writing hidden in an archive, she immediately knew it was something extraordinary. Both sides of the paper bore red paragraph marks and black-letter typeface. This identified the incredibly rare page as belonging to a book printed by William Caxton,[1] who started the first printing press in England. Printed between 1476 and 1477, the “Sarum Ordinal” or “Sarum Pye” was a handbook written in Latin by St....

10Clark Kent (Superman)Harold Lloyd The origin of Superman was a long and lengthy process. As we’ve already noted, the Man of Steel first appeared as a telepathic villain (and just as bald as Lex Luthor) in the January 1933 issue of the fanzine Science Fiction: The Advance Guard of Future Civilization. Jerry Siegel, 18, was a sci-fi fan inspired by Friedrich Nietzsche’s idealized man of the future, the Ubermensch, which is variously translated as “Overman” or “Superman....

10Special Air Service Christopher Lee was just becoming a young man when World War II began in earnest. Like many of his generation, he went off to fight in the war. However, his story is much more fascinating than most and is shrouded in mystery. During the beginning of the war, Lee was living for a time in Finland and volunteered to help fight but was not placed in any particularly dangerous assignments....

Or is it? Turns out the Ebola threat to the West has been overstated to a ridiculous degree. It has been dangerous and destructive on the African continent, but it isn’t the worldwide Armageddon the media is making it sound like. 10It’s Almost Impossible To Catch When Spanish flu hit in 1918, it infected over one-third of the world’s population. Thanks to a scarily efficient transmission rate, the virus swept through the human race like the infection in a zombie movie....