California's two largest cities by area, Los Angeles and San Diego, have beautiful beaches and boast more than a million residents.

California City, which sits in the tumbleweed and dust-filled Mojave desert, is the unexpected third.

Just 14,000 people live in the 203-square-mile city northeast of Los Angeles, as a video from YouTube personality Tom Scott reveals.

A ghostly patch of land, California City signifies the unrealistic ambitions of post-WWII development.

In the late 1940s, California experienced a population boom. Looking to get rich quick, many real estate developers looked West to build new suburbs. Clearing California City's land for development ironically led to more dust storms, and the suburbs never quite caught on.

"They built it, and no one came," Scott says in the video.

California City's street names, Cadillac Boulevard, Volvo Drive, and Dodge Street, pay homage to car manufacturers. The city's center was supposed to be a 160-acre "Central Park," modeled after Manhattan's famous green space, according to CityLab.

Mendelson sold tens of thousands of plots, but few buyers actually developed their properties. Some who did develop stopped paying their property taxes, and the local government attempted to sell the land to make up for the lost revenue. The imitation "Central Park" was eventually completed and filled with a few golf courses.

By the 1970s, only around 7,000 people lived in the city.

Today, barely 14,000 people live in California City, most of them housed around Central Park next to unpaved cul-de-sacs. For comparison, around 1.3 million live in California's second largest city, San Diego.

Over 118,000 acres in California City are undeveloped, according to the Los Angeles Times. The city is one of the state's smallest by population.

The value of California City land, cursed by a 50-year drought, has stayed down.

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Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam are five of the biggest religions in the world. Over the last few thousand years, these religious groups have shaped the course of history and had a profound influence on the trajectory of the human race. Through countless conflicts, conquests, missions abroad, and simple word of mouth, these religions spread around the globe and forever molded the huge geographic regions in their paths.

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Throughout history, a number of conflicts, due to the quirky nature of international diplomacy, never officially ended. 

Of course, these "extended wars" have never actually had any bearing on international relations.

Instead, the ongoing de facto peace overrode any technicalities on the world stage. However, the patching up of these diplomatic irregularities has been used by countries still technically at war to boost their current ties and gain media attention. 

We have listed nine such examples of extended wars below. 

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Greece and Persia

Declaration of war: Greco-Persian Wars, 499 B.C.

De facto peace: 449 B.C.

De jure peace: 1902

In 499 B.C., the Persian Empire attempted to conquer the various city-states of Ancient Greece. Ultimately, the Persian efforts were unsuccessful, and the two civilizations remained at war with some intensity until the Persians called off their invasion attempts in 449 B.C. 

However, despite the war having ended centuries ago, Greece and Persia never officially mended their relationship until 1902. At that point, after 2,393 years of conflict, Persia (having not yet renamed itself Iran), appointed its first Greek diplomat. 

Rome and Carthage

Declaration of war: Punic Wars, 264 B.C.

De facto peace: 146 B.C.

De jure peace: 1985

The conflict between Rome and Carthage was one of the defining moments of the creation of the Roman Empire. Between 264 B.C. and 146 B.C., the two empires fought a series of three wars known as the Punic Wars, which culminated in the Roman conquest of Carthage. 

As Rome seized and destroyed Carthage, there was no need for the two countries to formally sign a peace treaty. However, that did not stop the mayors of Rome and Carthage from signing a treaty of symbolic friendship and collaboration in 1985. The sign of goodwill had been consistently floated until that point by both Tunisian and Italian governments. 

Isles of Scilly and the Dutch Republic

Declaration of war: First Anglo-Dutch War, 1651

De facto peace: 1654

De jure peace: 1986

In 1651, the Dutch Republic declared war on the Council of the Isles of Scilly, a small island archipelago under the British crown. The islands were harboring pirates who interfered with Dutch shipping. However, the conflict between the Isles of Scilly and the Dutch Republic quickly was subsumed into the wider First Anglo-Dutch war.

Although the Dutch and British concluded their conflict in 1654, the Council of the Isles of Scilly were technically not included in the peace process. As such, the small islands and the Dutch remained at war until a Dutch ambassador visited the islands and formally concluded a peace settlement in 1986. 

The period between 1920 and 1933 lives on in our collective memory as a misguided experiment in social control, colorfully defied by flappers, artists, and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

But historian Lisa McGirr argues in her new book The War on Alcohol: Prohibition and the Rise of the American State that Prohibition was anything but a historical outlier.

The period, she writes, should be regarded as crucial to the development of law enforcement, the penal system, and the grassroots American right wing.

Prohibition, McGirr argues, carried within it the germ of a now-familiar kind of federal government: “a state that has been interventionist yet weak, heavy on coercion yet light on social welfare.”

And in describing the toll the Prohibition years took on marginalized communities, McGirr uncovers a new vision of a Jazz Age that was anything but fun.  

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The bison is a majestic, if smelly, creature that has called North America home since prehistoric times. Today, the animal thrives in all 50 states.

Earlier this month, the US Senate passed a bill that would elect the country's largest land mammal, the bison, as our national mammal.

We recently published a list naming the reasons this formidable beast deserves the recognition. However, there was one image of the bison we just couldn't shake:

Centuries ago, the US massacred the species.

The bison, which once maintained a population size as high as 60 million, sustained indigenous people. It provided food, clothing, shelter, and fuel. Many Native American tribes still consider the bison a sacred and spiritual symbol of their history.

Sadly, westward expansion nearly wiped bison from the Great Plains during the 19th century. Settlers slaughtered some 50 million for food and sport.

The genocide also served to cut Native Americans off from their supplies. Their near-extinction all but ended the fight for native independence.

Thankfully, the bison returned from the brink of extinction thanks to a concerted effort by ranchers, conservationists, tribes, and politicians.

Here's what these awesome beasts look like today:

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An archaeologist said Sunday that Maia, Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamun's wet nurse, may have actually been his sister Meritaten, reviving speculation about the identity of the mother of the boy king.

DNA tests have proved that the pharaoh Akhenaten was the father of Tutankhamun, but the identity of his mother has long been a mystery.

On Sunday, Egyptian officials and French archaeologist Alain Zivie unveiled Maia's tomb to journalists ahead of its opening to the public next month.

The tomb was discovered by Egyptologist Zivie in 1996 in Saqqara, a necropolis about 20 kilometres (12 miles) south of Cairo.

Maia was the wet nurse of Tutankhamun, whose mummy was found in 1922 by renowned British Egyptologist Howard Carter in the Valley of Kings in Luxor along with a treasure trove of thousands of objects.

"Maia is none other than princess Meritaten, the sister or half-sister of Tutankhamun and the daughter of Akhenaten and Nefertiti," Zivie told AFP.

He said his conclusion was based on the carvings of Tutankhamun and Maia on the walls of Maia's tomb.

"The extraordinary thing is that they are very similar. They have the same chin, the eyes, the family traits," he said.

"The carvings show Maia sitting on the royal throne and he is sitting on her" lap, said Zivie, director of the French Archaeological Mission of Bubasteion.

Similar carvings were in Akhenaten's tomb at the Tel el-Amarna archaeological site in modern-day Minya province where the pharaoh had his capital city, he said.

A DNA analysis in 2010 revealed that Tutankhamun was the son of Akhenaten, who temporarily converted ancient Egypt to monotheism by imposing the cult of sun god Aton.

The tomb of Akhenaten has carvings showing the death of princess Maketaten -- the second daughter of Akhenaten and Nefertiti, Zivie said.

"In these scenes there is a woman who is breast-feeding a baby, and this woman shown as a wet nurse is princess Meritaten, the eldest daughter of Akhenaten," he said.

The mummy of Meritaten has not been found, but Antiquities Minister Mamduh al-Damati said on Sunday it could be in a secret chamber in Tutankhamun's tomb.

Archaeologists are currently scanning Tutankhamun's tomb in the Valley of Kings after British archaeologist Nicholas Reeves claimed that it has a secret chamber.

Reeves says the chamber could be the burial site of Nefertiti, whose mummy also has not been found.

"All these possibilities exist. Step by step we will be able to better understand the time of king Tutankhamun," Damati said.

Tutankhamun died more than 3,000 years ago aged 19 in 1324 BC after reigning for nine years.

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In the years leading up to World War II, Adolf Hitler didn't just see Berlin as the capital of Germany — he envisioned it as the capital of the world. 

But according to historian Roger Moorhouse, Berlin was poorly organized and hardly the menacing giant the Nazi leader thought it should be.

So, in 1937, plans surfaced for "Welthauptstadt Germania," or World Capital Germania, an awe-inspiring metropolis inspired by ancient Roman architecture. 

Rooted in a spirit of intimidation, the designs were about as grandiose as urban planning gets.

According to Moorhouse, Berlin's lack of order and its many winding streets made it like most European cities at the time: big, random, and illogical.

Hitler recognized this, so in 1937 he called on architect Albert Speer — pictured on the far right — to help design a Nazi utopia fit for world domination.

The two became incredibly close, Moorehouse says. Speer and Hitler were professional colleagues, but also shared the same politics. They were almost friends.

A chilling 59-year-old document containing an exhaustive list of targets for US nuclear strikes in the event of war with the Soviet Union has been released by the National Security Archive in Washington.

The 800-page document, labeled "Top Secret", lists more than 1,100 airfields in the Soviet bloc, along with urban-industrial targets in 1,200 cities such as Berlin, Warsaw, Moscow and Beijing for "systematic destruction". Over 100 targets in Moscow and Leningrad, including heavily-populated areas, are listed as "designated ground zeroes".

A senior US analyst said the explicit targeting of civilian populations was "disturbing". The document, titled the Strategic Air Command (SAC) Atomic Weapons Requirements Study, was produced in June 1956, when relations between the US and the USSR were tense due to profound economic and political differences.

Both sides built up a huge stockpile of nuclear weapons as deterrence against an attack by the other side, in the belief that such an attack would lead to the complete annihilation of both the aggressor and the defender. The Cold War ended with the formal dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, leaving the US as the world's only superpower.

'Grim and appalling'

The Soviet bomber force was assigned the highest priority for nuclear targeting to prevent a retaliatory attack on the US homeland.

The SAC suggested targeting airfields with atomic bombs ranging from 1.7 to 1.9 megatons and also recommended the building of a 60 megaton weapon, which it believed would deliver "significant results" in the event of a surprise Soviet attack.

A one megaton weapon's yield is 70 times higher than the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima in World War II. The document does not divulge the reasoning behind targeting civilians, which was prohibited by the international norms of the day.

"It's disturbing, for sure, to see the population centers targeted," William Burr, a senior analyst at the National Security Archive, told the New York Times.

Stephen Schwartz, an independent consultant on nuclear weapons policy, called the target list "grim and frankly appalling".

"We've known the general contours of nuclear war planning for a few decades," he told the Times.

"But it's great that the details are coming out. These are extraordinary weapons, capable of incredible destruction.

"And this document may be history, but unfortunately the weapons are not yet history."

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Christmas is one of the most celebrated holidays on earth. But that doesn't mean that conflicts simply freeze every December 25th. 

Here's a look at some of the major military events that have fallen on Christmas, a date with a surprisingly rich history.

1776 — George Washington Crosses The Delaware River

Important events in both of America's most formative wars — the Revolutionary War and the Civil War — took place on Christmas.

Washington led his troops across a 300-yard stretch of the Delaware River in the dead of night between December 25 and 26, 1776. The surprise move would put Washington's men a 19-mile march away from a garrison of Hessians (German mercenaries hired by the British to help them in their effort to retain a hold on the rebelling colonies) that the Continental Army took completely by surprise.

The Hessians' quick surrender at the Battle of Trenton would be the first of two rebel victories in New Jersey (the other being the Battle of Princeton a week later) as the Continental Army regained control of the colony. This effectively reversed the British drive that had pushed the rebels across New Jersey in the previous months. The daring crossing of the Delaware ended up being one of the turning points of the war.

1868 — US President Andrew Johnson pardons former Confederate soldiers

Nearly a century later, on Christmas Day of 1868, US president Andrew Johnson extended a full pardon and amnesty"to all and to every person who, directly or indirectly, participated in the late insurrection or rebellion".

The internecine war had ended more than three years earlier, taking more American lives than any other conflict in history. But Union general Ulysses S. Grant's scorched earth tactics late in the war left much of the south in ruins, and the country emerged from the war in a state of deep division.

Johnson had been a Tennessee congressman, senator, and governor before joining Lincoln's presidential ticket.  He was tipped in part to attract southern votes. Yet at war's end he seemed bent on imposing harsh conditions on the defeated half of the country.

The day after being sworn in as the nation's president, he asserted that "treason must be made infamous, and traitors must be impoverished."

But according to the History Department at North Carolina State University, Attorney General James Speed tempered Johnson's punitive intentions: "Mercy must be largely extended. Some of the great leaders and offenders only must be made to feel the extreme rigor of the law," Speed advised.

Southerners enjoyed only conditional and limited pardoning (depending on their station during the war) — at least until this blanket amnesty on "the 25th day of December, A. D. 1868."

1914 — German, British, and French soldiers make temporary peace to celebrate Christmas together

On Christmas Day in 1914, the first Christmas of World War I, soldiers left their trenches to observe the holiday in peace.

In the midst of war, soldiers laid down their arms to sing Christmas carols, play soccer, and barter with the cigarettes and sweets they'd received in care packages from the nations they served.

In some places, the truce was limited to an occasion for each side to bury their dead strewn in no man's land, the stretch of earth between opposing trenches that too often served as a killing field. In others, the skirmishing continued.

But some made the Christmas Truce of 1914 what it was: An odd yet heartening case study in how people react to the pressures of war.

1941 — Japan seizes control of Hong Kong at the expense of the United Kingdom.

Japan's aggression during World War II began well before the attack on Pearl Harbor. In 1931, Imperial Japan invaded Manchuria, a vast coastal region in northeast China. In 1937, it made advances on the rest of the country as well.

But it wasn't until 1941 that Tokyo confronted the West with its imperial ambitions.

And though American involvement started with the Pearl Harbor attack, the surprise assault was immediately followed by Japan's invasion of Hong Kong, a British holding, in late 1941.

Hundreds died in the eighteen-day battle for Hong Kong, and more were wounded or incarcerated in POW camps. Some would never return.

Japan announced the surrender of the colony by radio broadcast on Christmas Day, 1941.

1941 — Admiral Émile Muselier captures Saint Pierre and Miquelon, an archipelago near Canada, for the Free French Forces

The North American continent does not feature as a hot spot in the events of World War II.

But soon after France's fall to the Nazis, the colonial governor of a few small islands off the coast of Newfoundland started working with the resistance.

Writing back to the Vichy government — the Nazi's puppet regime in France — Baron Gilbert de Bournat wrote of "British pressure to rally to the British or de Gaullist causes."

That pressure would have found sympathizers on the islands. Its population was originally mobilized, in 1939, to help defend France's mainland, and some ship-owners docked there refused to return to Vichy France.

On Christmas Eve, 1941, a small task force under Admiral Émile Muselier stormed the island under the cover of night. They met no resistance and the island's administrative centers were taken within an hour, eliminating what otherwise could have served as a Nazi outpost deep among Allied nations while giving the Free French cause legitimacy.

"By five minutes past midnight on December 25 the story of the invasion was telegraphed to Canadian and American newspapers,"according to Douglas Anglin's "Free French Invasion: The St. Pierre and Miquelon Affaire of 1941".

Pierre Bienaimé originally wrote this post.

SEE ALSO: US troops have been at war on Christmas since the nation's founding

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On Christmas Day in 1914, German, British, and French soldiers left their trenches along the western front of World War I to observe the holiday in peace.

In the midst of war, soldiers laid down their arms to sing Christmas carols, play soccer, and barter with the cigarettes and sweets they'd received in care packages from the nations they served.

The event would later be treated in numerous films, documentaries, and books — although often with rose-colored glasses.

British Army Captain Edward Hulse captured some of the now-famous halt in hostilities — which he called "the most extraordinary Christmas in the trenches you could possibly imagine"— in letters to his mother.

At 8:30 that morning, four unarmed German soldiers left their trenches to approach their British enemies, only to be intercepted by a few suspicious British soldiers. One of the Germans "started off by saying that he thought it only right to come over and wish us a happy Christmas, and trusted us implicitly to keep the truce," Hulse wrote.

The soldiers make small talk — "their spokesman" had left a girlfriend and a three-horsepower motorbike in England — but their interactions still fell within the context of the ongoing war. "[The Germans] praised our aeroplanes up to the skies," Hulse wrote, "and said that they hated them and could not get away from them."

The motion for peace came on German initiative. On Christmas Eve, decorated trees began to pop up from their trenches, followed by signs reading "You No Fight, We No Fight."

To various degrees across the front, German and British troops put down their weapons and fraternized. In some places, the truce was just an opportunity for each side to bury the dead strewn in no man's land, the stretch of earth between opposing trenches. In other places along the front, the fighting continued.

Overall, the truce was a heartening case study in the nature of human beings and their capacity to wage war on one another.

"By midday," the narrator of a BBC documentary on the event explains, "nearly half the British frontline army is involved in the truce," though how widespread the suspension of the war really was on December 25, 1914 remains in dispute.

Historians explain that the Truce came during a period in the fighting when a "‘live and let live’ attitude developed in certain areas of the trench system," the BBC reports.

"So much interchange had occurred across the line by early December" that a general "issued a directive unequivocally forbidding fraternization,"writes Stanley Weintraub in Silent Night: The Story of the World War I Christmas Truce.

The general's concern was that bonding "discourages initiative in commanders, and destroys the offensive spirit in all ranks ... Friendly intercourse with the enemy, unofficial armistices and the exchange of tobacco and other comforts, however tempting and occasionally amusing they may be, are absolutely prohibited."

It went on nonetheless, as the Truce itself shows. This might have been because of existing rifts between the rank and file and their leadership. Indeed, the Truce was a push by lowly privates, many of them shipped to the frontline against their will and fighting the war out of resignation rather than nationalistic fervor.

"Many on both sides focused more on trying to stay warm and dry, securing food, and avoiding death than pursuing the aims of their generals," according to The Encyclopedia of World War I's entry on the Christmas Truce.

The "dangers" of peace may not have been purely imagined for the political and military leadership that believed in the necessity of fighting the Great War. As Weintraub writes, past truces in military history did not have the same scale, duration, or "potential to become more than a temporary respite," as that of the Great War's first Christmas. It was "seemingly impossible to have happened without consequences for the outcome of the war."

But that wasn't to be. World War I would only end in 1918, leaving 16 million dead across Europe and the Middle East. Mustard gas and the machine gun would become the hallmarks of a protracted war so brutal that many expected it to be history's last major conflict, a cataclysm that would make war appear too mutually destructive to merit a place in the modern world.

Even the history of the Christmas Truce itself shows that this was a vain hope. A weak attempt at repeating the truce was made in 1915, but a tradition would not take hold due to "the high numbers of dead and hardened attitudes on both sides but also because of actions of senior commanders."

In December 1915, the British command even ordered artillery fire to mark every daylight hour, "and threats to court martial fraternizers and shoot deserters [had] put the final block on any contact," according to the BBC's documentary.

But 100 years later, the Christmas Truce remains a bright spot in an otherwise bleak conflict that ushered in many aspects of modern war.

This post was originally written by Pierre Bienaimé.

SEE ALSO: The myths of the 1914 Christmas Truce

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Today's traders are spoiled by their Bloomberg terminals.

Back in the day, before broadband fired live quotes and analysis straight to our smartphones, people used to read bid-ask spreads off of chalkboards and historical data off of miles of ticker tape.

We decided to go back in time to see how trading was done in the pre-Bloomberg terminal era. Even before ticker tape was a thing.

With the help of images from the Museum of American Finance in New York, we put together a brief visual history of trading technology, from ticker tape to the present. 

Editor's Note: Former Business Insider writer Rob Wile contributed to the original version of this feature.

Brokers used to call the main trading room in downtown New York "The Curb Exchange." This was before it became the American Stock Exchange.

Photo from 1915.

Most of the time, deals would be conducted out of windows to traders on curbs via hand signals.

The traders were hardcore. Here they are on the Curb Exchange in the middle of a snowstorm.

When they aren't digging up ancient graves or unearthing the body parts of early human ancestors, archaeologists are combing the Earth for clues about how the people who came before us worked, played, and died.

This year, researchers across the globe have found evidence of everything from the earliest humans to walk the planet to the lavish tomb of an ancient Greek warrior  — and even a set of mysterious, giant earthworks only visible from space.

Here's a look at some of the most monumental findings of 2015:

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Signs of a new tomb hidden deep inside the Great Pyramid of Giza.

As part of a larger project using drones to analyze the ancient Egyptian pyramids, scientists working in November uncovered surprising "thermal anomalies" along the eastern side of the Great Pyramid of Giza.

While scanning the lower level of the pyramid, researchers noticed a temperature variance that hinted that instead of a solid row of limestone blocks, they were looking at a gap of air (air doesn't hold heat as well as solid rock). The team isn't sure what the gap is yet, but they've theorized that it could be a passage, a tomb, or simply a gash in the rock.

The house where Jesus may have grown up.

Archaeologists working in Nazareth in modern-day Israel uncovered a house dating to the first century that they believe may have belonged to Mary and Joseph, who allegedly raised Jesus.

The structure was first discovered in the 1880s, but wasn't dated or identified as Jesus' potential home until 2006, and a feature story in the Biblical Archaeology Review in March 2015 brought the most recent work on the site to light.

A massive underground ritual arena where the predecessors of Stonehenge likely feasted.

During a cursory underground radar scan of the infamous Stonehenge site, researchers suddenly noticed the signs of huge, rigid, underground features.

Looking more closely, the researchers found that the features — which they now suspect to be the perimeter of a 4,500-year old ritual arena — formed a rough C-shape. The site is 2 miles northeast of Stonehenge, buried beneath the already-famous site Durrington Walls.

A team of researchers from Trinity College Dublin and Queen's University Belfast has sequenced the first genomes from ancient Irish people, providing insights into questions about the origins and culture of the region.

Results of the study were published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

The researchers sequenced the genome of an early farmer woman who lived near Belfast some 5,200 years ago and the genomes of three men from a later period, around 4,000 years ago in the Bronze Age, after the introduction of metalworking, according to a statement on the Trinity College Dublin website.

"There was a great wave of genome change that swept into Europe from above the Black Sea into Bronze Age Europe and we now know it washed all the way to the shores of its most westerly island," Professor Dan Bradley of Trinity College Dublin, who led the study, said.

The study revealed that the Neolithic woman farmer's ancestry originated in the Middle East, where agriculture was invented. The woman was similar to modern people from Spain and the Mediterranean island of Sardinia, and had black hair and brown eyes.

In contrast, the three Bronze Age men from Rathlin Island had at least a third of their ancestry from the Pontic Steppe, a region north of the Black Sea now spread across present-day Russia and Ukraine. They had a gene component that is responsible for blue eyes and an important chromosome variant that causes the genetic disease haemochromatosis, which causes the body to retain a higher content of iron than normal.

"It is clear that this project has demonstrated what a powerful tool ancient DNA analysis can provide in answering questions that have long perplexed academics regarding the origins of the Irish," said Eileen Murphy, senior lecturer at Queen's University Belfast, who was also involved in the study.

With this study, researchers have found clues to the origins of the Irish people and identified some reasons for certain intriguing genetic traits among them, such as a higher incidence of haemochromatosis and an increased lactose tolerance well into adulthood.

Researchers now hope this study will spur further research on the subject. "This degree of genetic change invites the possibility of other associated changes, perhaps even the introduction of language ancestral to western Celtic tongues," Professor Bradley said.

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The world isn't perfect, but a recent list shows how much progress has been made in the past 100 years.

The list, originally compiled by a theater troupe in Del Tura, a community in Florida, has been going viral on Facebook and Twitter. While its exact accuracy has been questioned, many of the facts — such as those about life expectancy and salaries — check out.

It highlights that the life expectancy for a male born in 1915 was just 47, compared with 71 today. Heroin was sold in pharmacies, and the vast majority of Americans didn't graduate from high school.

Here's the list being passed around after being uploaded to content-sharing site SlideShare.

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The dropping of the New Year's Eve ball in Times Square has been a tradition for over 100 years. We spoke with the agent for the ball itself, Jeffrey Straus, and climbed to the top of One Times Square to find out why millions join together on December 31st to watch a lighted ball drop down a pole. 

Produced by Justin Gmoser and Arielle Berger. 

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Popping the corks and toasting with a fizzy glass of champagne is a New Year's tradition.

Champagne has a lavish history dating back to the 16th century. Long before we started drinking bubbly to ring in the new year, European aristocrats were popping bottles at their royal parties. 

Only the elite drank champagne at the time because it was so expensive, historian Kolleen Guywrote in her book about the wine's history. It was even the drink of choice for Louis XIV.

Drinking champagne as celebratory tradition has endured for centuries, as New Year's evolved from a religious holiday to a secular one.

"After the French Revolution, it became a part of the secular rituals that replaced formerly religious rituals," Guy told LiveScience. "You could 'christen a ship' without a priest, for example, by using the 'holy water' of champagne."

Eventually, winemakers started developing the technology to bottle carbonated wine. Dom Perignon added two safety features to its wines to avoid bottle explosions: thicker glass bottles to withstand the pressure and a rope snare to keep corks in place. The bottles became perfect for popping on New Year's Eve.

The price of champagne declined, and producers started marketing it to common folk in the 1800s. Since the wine was long associated with nobility, ads triumphed it as an aspirational drink.

These new customers couldn't afford to drink champagne as a table wine, but they could afford it for special occasions. Champagne's production skyrocketed from 300,000 to 20 million bottles per year between 1800 and 1850, as the world started ordering it more and more for ship christenings and new year celebrations (The French established legal exclusivity to call their wines champagne in 1891, so any other bubbly is now called sparkling wine).

Today, champagne still marks the joy of the new year. "Champagne does this symbolically, but also visually, since it overflows in abundance and joy," Guy said.

Cheers to that.

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Perhaps you've seen that viral list of facts about what life was like in 1915, which was printed in the latest issue of The Tower (a monthly publication of a gated community in Florida).

Or maybe you saw the very same list of of facts years ago, when it said it was about 1906, or 1902, or 1900.

The origin and sources of the original list are unknown, but the idea is provacative: What was life actually like 100 years ago?

Not all of the data we found references 1915 precisely, but we got as close as we could with accurate and trustworthy sources — all of which are linked below:

• In 1915, cocaine had only been illegal for a year; marijuana was still perfectly legal, available for purchase in pharmacies; and doctors still regularly prescribed heroin to patients.
• In 1915, the word "teenager" was not yet in use.
• In 1915, the constitutional amendment granting American women the right to vote had not yet passed.
• In 1910, there were just over 14,000 people incarcerated in the US for first- or second-degree murder.
• The population of Las Vegas was 22 in 1900, 800 in 1910, and 2,304 in 1920.
• In 1900, the average life expectancy for an American man was 48.3. The average life expectancy for a woman was 51.1.
• In 1913, the first dedicated gas station in the US opened in Pittsburgh. Before that, selling gas was a side business for various stores.
• In 1940 (just 75 years ago), when the Census collected information on the plumbing in American homes, almost half lacked the trifecta of hot/cold water, a tub or shower, and a flush toilet.
• In 1901, Connecticut passed a law that included the country's first speed limit: 15 mph on general roads and 12 mph within city limits.
• In 1915, the Eiffel Tower was the tallest structure in the world— a status it had held since its completion in 1889 and that it maintained until 1930.
• In 1938, the US set its first minimum wage: 25 cents an hour.
• In 1910, the average annual per capita income in the US was estimated at $332, or about $7,800 in current-day dollars. But that was decades before truly representative income samples were available.
• In 1910, less than half of the US population lived in urban areas. (Today, it's 80%.)

• In 1915, many practicing doctors in the US had been educated haphazardly since, according to the National Library of Medicine, "medical schools had become mostly diploma mills." That slowly began to change when the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, considered the first modern medical school, opened in 1893.
• In 1915, a dozen eggs cost 34 cents; a gallon of milk cost 18 cents; and a pound of coffee cost 30 cents.
• In 1910, agriculture was the most common industry Americans worked in. (By 1920, it had been surpassed by manufacturing; today, it's service jobs.)
• In 1915, the three leading causes of death in the US were heart disease, pneumonia/influenza, and tuberculosis.
• In 1915, canned beer, modernsupermarkets, and Barbie dolls had not yet been invented.
• In 1915, the US did not have an official national anthem.
• In 1910, 7.7% of Americans said that they couldn't read or write, a sharp decline from 1870, when 20% said they were illiterate. (True rates of illiteracy may have been higher, since these were self-reported.)
• In 1900, only about half of American children between five and 19-years-old were enrolled in school. Ending formal education after eighth grade was typical.

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Kathryn Hunt was recently awarded a TED fellowship for her work as a paleo-oncologist, studying the history of cancer. She explained to us why looking to the past is so important in the fight against cancer now.

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Marriage has always been a gamble, but the modern game is harder and with higher stakes than ever before.

Research has revealed, for example, that people in a healthy marriage are some of the happiest couples in history.

Whereas those who are struggling in their marriage are more unhappy today than in the past.

When social psychologist Eli Finkel sought to understand why marriage is more extreme at both ends today than in the past, he discovered something intriguing and disturbing:

Marriages in the US are more challenging today than at any other time in our country's history.

The suffocation of marriage

Finkel is a professor of social psychology at Northwestern University and is known for developing a surprisingly simple marriage-saving procedure, which takes 21 minutes a year.

Together with his colleagues of the Relationships and Motivation LAB at Northwestern, Finkel and his team have gone on to publish several papers on what they call "the suffocation model of marriage in America."

In one of their latest papers on this front, they explain why — compared to previous generations — some of the defining qualities of today's marriages make it harder for couples to cultivate a flourishing relationship.

The simple answer is that people today expect more out of their marriage. If these higher expectations are not met, it can suffocate a marriage to the point of destroying it.

The 3 models of marriage

Finkel, in an opinion article in The New York Times summarizing their latest paper on this model, discusses the three distinct models of marriage that relationship psychologists refer to:

• institutional marriage (from the nation's founding until 1850)
• companionate marriage (from 1851 to 1965)
• self-expressive marriage (from 1965 onward)

Before 1850, people were hardly walking down the aisle for love — the point of marriage was mostly for food production, shelter, and protection from violence.

People were often satisfied if they felt any emotional connection to their spouse at all, Finkel wrote.

By the turn of the 20th century, however, those norms changed quickly when an increasing number of people left the farm to live and work in the city for higher pay and fewer hours.

With the luxury of more free time, Americans focused on what they wanted in a lifelong partner, namely companionship and love. But the counter-cultural attitude of the 1960s led Americans to think of marriage as an option instead of an essential step in life.

Marriage today

This leads us to today's model, self-expressive marriage, wherein the average modern, married American is looking not only for love from their spouse but for a sense of personal fulfillment.

Finkel writes that this era's marriage ideal can be expressed in the simple quote "You make me want to be a better man," from James L. Brooks' 1997 film "As Good as It Gets."

These changes to marital expectations have been a mixed bag, Finkel argues.

"As Americans have increasingly looked to their marriage to help them meet idiosyncratic, self-expressive needs, the proportion of marriages that fall short of their expectations has grown, which has increased rates of marital dissatisfaction,"Finkel's team writes, in their latest paper.

On the other hand, "those marriages that succeed in meeting these needs are particularly fulfilling, more so than the best marriages in earlier eras."

The key to a successful marriage

So, what's the key to a successful, flourishing marriage?

Finkel and his colleagues describe three general options:

• Don't look to your marriage alone for personal fulfillment. In addition to your spouse, use all resources available to you including friends, hobbies, and work.
• If you want a lot from your marriage, then you have to give a lot, meaning that to meet their high expectations, couples must invest more time and psychological resources into their marriage.
• And if neither of those options sound good, perhaps it's time to ask less of the marriage and adjust high expectations for personal fulfillment and self discovery.

Other researchers, like sociologist Jeffrey Dew, support the notion that time is a crucial factor in sustaining a successful marriage.

Dew, who is a professor at the University of Virginia, found that Americans in 1975 spent, on average, 35 hours a week alone with their spouse while couples in 2003 spent 26 hours together.

Child-rearing couples in 1975 spent 13 hours a week together, alone, compared to couples in 2003 who spent 9 hours a week together. The divorce rate in America was 32.8% in 1970 and rose to 49.1% by 2000.

While that doesn't necessarily mean less time together led to divorce — or that the people who stayed together were happy — Finkel's research suggests that higher expectations and less investment in the relationship may be a toxic brew.

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