A massive 19th-century storm on the Pacific coast of the US opened up a 300-mile-long sea that stretched through much of the central part of California.

And it looks like the state is due for another mega flood.

For 45 days, from late 1861 to early 1862, it rained almost nonstop in central California. Rivers running down the Sierra Nevada mountains turned into torrents that swept entire towns away.

The storm was caused by an atmospheric river, a large concentration of water vapor that can cause devastating storms.

These storms "have the potential of hurricanes — or even more so because they go on for weeks," Lucy Jones of the US Geological Survey told NPR.

Atmospheric rivers carry concentrated channels of water vapor out of the tropics.

A famous example is the Pineapple Express, which, propelled by the jet stream, carries vapor from the waters near Hawaii all the way to the American Pacific coast, where it causes heavy storms.

The Italian government has released documents outlining fascist and Nazi war crimes committed in the country during World War II. Some of the papers are part of a "cabinet of shame" which concealed the crimes for decades.

Declassified by a parliamentary commission, the papers detail war crimes ranging from anti-Jewish persecution to massacres of civilians. In total, the crimes resulted in 15,000 deaths.

They include 695 files from the so-called "cabinet of shame," which for decades hid away original documents of war crimes inside a storeroom of the military prosecutor's headquarters, bearing the stamp "provisionally archived." Originally discovered in 1994, the cabinet kept files from the secret services, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Interior Ministry, and other offices.

A Mesolithic site in Germany has revealed the 7,000-year-old remains of a young man buried there in a strange upright position.

Placed in a vertical pit, the body was fixed upright by filling the grave with sand up to the knees. The upper body was left to decay and was likely picked at by scavengers.

The unique burial was found near the village of Groß Fredenwalde, on top of a rocky hill in northeastern Germany, about 50 miles north of Berlin.

Dating back 8,500 years, the site belongs to the Mesolithic era when Europe was inhabited by hunter-gatherers who rarely stayed in one place.

Nine skeletons have been excavated so far, including five children younger than 6 years and the 8,400-year-old skeleton of a 6-month-old infant, with arms still folded across the chest.

According to Thomas Terberger, the excavation director at the Lower Saxony Department of Historic Preservation, the site was one of the first true cemeteries in Europe, used by native central European hunter-gatherers and fisherman from about 6400 B.C. to 500 B.C.

"It is evidence for a more stable way of life some 8,000 years ago," Terberger said.

In many ways, DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) is the engine of the military-industrial complex, the heart at the center of the Pentagon that keeps America in constant state of weapons innovation and defense spending. Even before the attacks of September 11, 2001, DARPA kept defense contractors lining their pockets; in our post 9/11 surveillance state, DARPA sits at the nexus of corporate war profits, national security, and military innovation.

Cloaked in clandestine secrecy, DARPA has been called the "Oh God Why" branch of the Department of Defense. In the fiscal year of 2015, their requested budget was $2.91 billion, which doesn't include classified and black budgets. Even still, through Freedom of Information Act requests and intrepid journalism, some of the historical truths and future plans of this nebulous government agency have come to light in recent years.

Diminutive humans who died out on an Indonesian island some 15,000 years ago were not Homo sapiens but a different species, according to a study that dives into a fierce anthropological debate.

Fossils of Homo floresiensis, dubbed "the hobbits" due to their tiny stature, were discovered on the island of Flores in 2003.

Controversy has raged ever since as to whether they were an unknown branch of early humans or specimens of modern man deformed by disease.

The study, based on an analysis of the skull bones, shows once and for all that the pint-sized people were not Homo sapiens, according to the researchers.

Until now, academic studies have pointed in one direction or another and scientific discourse has sometimes tipped over into acrimony.

One school of thought holds that so-called Flores Man descended from the larger Homo erectus and became smaller over hundreds of generations.

The proposed process for this is called "insular dwarfing". Animals, after migrating across land bridges during periods of low sea level, wind up marooned on islands as oceans rise and their size progressively diminishes if the supply of food declines.

An adult hobbit stood one metre tall and weighed about 25 kilograms.

Similarly, Flores Island was also home to a miniature race of extinct, elephant-like creatures called Stegodon.

But other researchers argue that Homo floresiensis was in fact a modern human whose tiny size and small brain, no bigger than a grapefruit, was caused by a genetic disorder.

One suspect was dwarf cretinism, sometimes brought on by a lack of iodine. Another potential culprit was microcephaly, which shrivels not just the brain but its bony envelope. Weighing in with a new approach, published in the Journal of Human Evolution, a pair of scientists in France used high-tech tools to re-examine the layers of the "hobbit" skull.

More precisely, they looked at the remains of Liang Bua 1 (nicknamed LB1), whose cranium is the most intact of nine known specimens.

Some might know Fletcher Prouty through his involvement with Oliver Stone's JFK. Others may know his book on The Secret Team. Still others might know of his insights into subjects as diverse as the Gary Powers U2 incident, MKULTRA, and the Origins of Oil. Today we explore the life, the experiences and the secrets spilled by Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty.

NOTE: This is a visualization of Episode 229 of The Corbett Report podcast, first released on May 7, 2012.

For every finger to receive a ring, another finger must pull a trigger."

We all know the story.

The man gets down on one knee, grabs hold of the girl's hand and she covers her mouth as she is overtaken by emotions. The man pulls out a tiny box and opens it up to show off the sparkling diamond engagement ring before asking the question, "Will You Marry Me?"

The classic love story which peaks when the man asks for the woman's hand in marriage. They are officially engaged once he props a diamond ring on her finger.

However, there is another side to this story that never gets covered in the media. It is the dark side of the diamond, where if the public knew about the horrors and atrocities that take place to produce this mineral - perhaps we would re-think the way we celebrate "love."

It is a contentious issue in many modern cities as they struggle to accommodate new arrivals, but it seems even Ancient Rome was a magnet for foreigners seeking their fortune.

A new study has suggested Rome was attracting immigrants from the furthest reaches of its empire and beyond 2,000 years ago.

Analysis of skeletons found buried in two ancient cemeteries of the city dating from the first to the third centuries AD showed eight of them were from as far away as North Africa and the Alps.

The migrants, who were mostly children and men, were buried in simple graves and appear to have been poor, suggesting they could have come to the city hoping to find success.

However, it is also possible they were slaves who had been brought to the city by their Imperial masters.

From brutal torture devices to bizarre medical treatments, these terrifying contraptions reveal a darker side to innovation.
They show how inventors throughout history have put their skills and intellects to use in horrifying ways, creating contraptions that have caused unimaginable suffering.

The feature, first published in How It Works magazine, highlights some heinous inventions used in torture, war and medicine.
In the past, a punishment much worse than a long prison sentence awaited criminals.

From boiling people alive to sawing them in half, execution methods were often developed to be as cruel as possible and these gruesome events were usually carried out in public to deter others from following in the footsteps of the accused.

Even if people weren't sentenced to death, there were plenty of ghastly implements that could be used to torture them. Typically used to extract a confession or information about accomplices, torture was popular in medieval times, with the screams of victims echoing from castle dungeons across Europe.

War has also inspired a wide selection of horrific innovations. While guns and bombs were designed to kill instantly, chemical weapons could draw out death for several agonising days - thankfully, this form of warfare is now prohibited.

We are also lucky that some medical devices from history are no longer used. Despite being designed with good intentions, many medieval procedures were truly stomach-churning, making a trip to the doctor quite the ordeal.

Cruel Methods Of Execution

One of the most brutal methods of execution ever created took the form of a hollow bull statue.Invented in ancient Greece by Perillus, a bronze worker in Athens, it was given as a gift to a cruel tyrant named Phalaris of Agrigentum.As well as roasting criminals alive, the device also doubled as a musical instrument, converting the victim's desperate cries into what Perillus described as 'the tenderest, most pathetic, most melodious of bellowings'.

The Phoenix Program in Vietnam in many ways provides a blue print for our own times. Assassinations and torture are the essence of the war on terror. As are death squads and false flag terror attacks. As are mass surveillance of the populace.

Thanks to the work of Douglas Valentine in his classic book "The Phoenix Program" we have an extremely detailed account of the Phoenix Program exposing a classic example of the brutality of the CIA's counter insurgency wars. By studying the Phoenix program one can gain a great deal of insight into the wars in Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq.

How the book came to be written is an interesting story in it's own right. Doug Valentine had written a novel about his fathers experiences in a prisoner of war camp during World War 2 called "Hotel Tacloban."

He decided his next book would be on Vietnam and he decided to focus on the CIA role since little had been written on the topic. He approached former CIA Director William Colby for help. He sent him a copy of his book and the former CIA director decided that Valentine was a man who understood the harsh realities of war and agreed to meet with him. Valentine cut his hair, bought a suit and tie met with Colby and managed to gain his confidence. Colby believed Valentine would write a sympathetic account. After all the CIA is used to working with journalists who censor the truth in exchange for inside information. Colby arranged for him to meet hundreds of former agents.