You've just been chosen as a contestant for "Survivor: Andamans." But instead of immunity idols, there are red buckets. Instead of elimination challenges, there's smallpox. And instead of Parvati, Hatch and Vecepia, there are British imperialists and Indian bureaucrats trying to wipe you out. What do you do? Kill them first. Welcome to Sentinel Island! The Sentinelese occupy North Sentinel ...

Socks -- simple tubes of cloth to keep your feet warm or rampaging instruments of death? The answer is "simple tubes of cloth" -- really, were you going to fall for that? -- but sometimes it's a little more complicated. Like shirt fasteners for mercenaries. Or Imperial anti-snot devices. Or hermaphrodite head coverings. Read on for more in the secret history of what you wear every day ...

Any monkey can run an equation through a graphing calculator, call it "Icosahedron 12" and sell a "giclée image" for $300 to a gullible sophomore. But it takes actual smarts (or a serious bronze foundry) to make so-called "science art." Below are five of our favorite artists or groups who have produced work based on math and science -- and not some air-quote science, either, like ...

Three-thousand miles east of Moscow, out beyond what's left of the Aral Sea, deep in the heart of the ancient Asian steppe, there's a place that, for 60 years, wasn't officially a place at all. In the beginning it was Tyuratam, nothing more than a station on the Moscow-Tashkent railroad, a whistle-stop so remote it was where Siberians went to get away from it all. But all that empty land was ...

Who knew New York had a soccer team, let alone fans so crazy they bum-rush the field to jump on their favorite player? On Saturday, the New York Red Bulls played the Houston Dynamo. During the second half of the match, two guys who must really love the Red Bulls' Thierry Henry, ran onto the field and double-teamed him with hugs. The jackass pictured in blue fled security and ran back to the ...

Cthulhu, eater of souls, awakens from sunken R'lyeh for a day at the beach. A giant marlin destroys the Brooklyn Bridge. A centaur emerges from the earth. And the dish runs away with the spoon. Welcome to Coney Island's 20th Annual Sand Art Competition. Although the egg-frying heat on Saturday deterred some potential audience members (most of whom were clustered closer to the water than to the ...

Some people stick fruit into Jell-O. Others inject it with Asian-spiced pork consommé, mold it into the shape of a pig's head, mount it on a plaque like a hunting trophy, and enter it in a Jell-O Mold Competition -- like the one held at the Gowanus Studio Space in Brooklyn on Sunday. For the second year in a row, GSS has done to Jell-O what the Tea Party has done to American politics -- ...

You've already gotten it. You know what we mean. The e-mail that starts: "Hello and God bless you, I am the widow Gloria Abacha of Former President Sani Abacha, your help requesting ..." Or maybe it starts, "We have most attractive work offer in international corporation ..." Or: "I saw you profile and am instantly in love of you, I am Marie, of 24 years and God-fearing Christian ..." ...

Last month, we brought you Alamut, the Secret (and very real, if very crumbly) City of the Assassins. This month, we move from implied violence to implied sex. We're going to ... the Secret City of Official Hotness. Not L.A. Not Paris. Not even Rio. No, only one city in the world has ever had an actual, official Committee of Beauty. Come with us now, to that exciting land of glamour queens ...

Iron Fist has K'un-Lun. Doctor Strange has the Palace of the Ancient One. Hell, even Aqua Man has Atlantis. But secret cities of badassedness - that's just for comic books. Right? Wrong. We tracked down a very real and nearly forgotten fortress of assassins in what is today northern Iran. A thousand years ago, Hassan-i Sabbah and his followers infiltrated the fortress of Alamut, turning it ...