Battle of Caporetto

Temperature map of the cosmic microwave background measured by the Planck spacecraft

Figure 1. The arrangement of hydrogen atoms (black circles) about oxygen atoms (open circles) in ice. Two hydrogen atoms (bottom ones) are close to the central oxygen atom while two of them (top ones) are far and closer to the two other…

General Tomoyuki Yamashita

Battle of Caporetto

Italy collapsed so completely at Caporetto in 1917 that 300,000 soldiers were taken prisoner in one week. A 29-year-old Lieutenant Erwin Rommel, with fewer than 200 men, personally accepted the surrender of 9,000 Italians.

Tonya Harding

Jeff Gillooly paid $6,500 to have a metal baton driven into Nancy Kerrigan's right knee in a Detroit corridor, weeks before the 1994 Olympics. Harding became the first American woman to land a triple Axel in competition.

Cosmic microwave background

The faint hiss on an analog TV is partly photons from 380,000 years after the Big Bang — the CMB, discovered accidentally in 1965 by Penzias and Wilson while trying to eliminate 'noise.'

Bertelsmann

Bertelsmann printed millions of Nazi-era devotional books and Wehrmacht field hymnals during World War II, then commissioned a self-exonerating history in 1998. An independent commission contradicted it in full by 2002.

Piero Manzoni

In 1961 Manzoni sealed his own excrement into 90 numbered tins, priced each at its weight in gold, and signed them. Tin No. 18 sold at Sotheby's in 2016 for £182,500.

Joe Gallo

Joey Gallo was shot four times at Umberto's Clam House in Little Italy at 4 a.m. on April 7, 1972 — his own 43rd birthday dinner, his new wife and daughter at the table.

Marina Abramović

In 'Rhythm 0,' Abramović lay passive for six hours while strangers chose from 72 objects — including a loaded gun and rose thorns — to do whatever they wished to her body. She was cut, kissed, and aimed at.

Spin ice

In dysprosium titanate crystals cooled near absolute zero, magnetic charges separate and move independently — behaving exactly like isolated north-only monopoles that physics said could not exist as free particles.

Yamashita's gold

Rogelio Roxas claimed to have found General Yamashita's buried hoard and showed a golden Buddha to prove it; he was then arrested, tortured, and died in custody. The gold has never appeared.