Doom (1993 video game)

"Queens" of Mysore : left, Krishnaraja Wadiyar III 's first wife, Devajammani has a discoloration around the mouth, thought to be due to the blowing of variolation dust in the nose ("nasal insufflation"). Right, his second wife shows the…

Pyrocumulonimbus cloud formed by the firestorm following the atomic bombing of Hiroshima , 1945. Nuclear winter effects are triggered by at least a hundred such city firestorms.

01The paper coined the term 'nuclear winter'; Sagan published it simultaneously in Science and in Parade magazine, reaching 17 million readers at once.
02Soviet climatologist Vladimir Alexandrov independently produced near-identical temperature-drop models in Moscow the same year.
03The 35°C cooling estimate meant most temperate-zone crops would fail within weeks of a detonation, before fallout reached them.

Doom (1993 video game)

By 1995, Doom ran on more machines than Windows 95 — spread across corporate networks and floppy disks, a game that became its own planetary infrastructure before the internet made that ordinary.

Drexel Burnham Lambert

Drexel Burnham Lambert collapsed in February 1990, wiping out in days the firm that had financed the entire decade of hostile takeovers. It left a $650 million crater and 5,000 unemployed bankers before a single competitor blinked.

Viva Piñata

Microsoft's rated-E garden game lets piñatas reproduce, eat each other's eggs, and drive rival species to permanent in-game extinction — all with candy gore. It was marketed exclusively at children.

Variolation

Ottoman physicians rubbed smallpox scabs into children's skin scratches centuries before Jenner's vaccine. The practice cut mortality from roughly 30% to under 2%, yet Europe called it barbarism until the death tolls reversed.

Killing of Osama bin Laden

A stealth Black Hawk — technology so classified it didn't officially exist — crashed in bin Laden's courtyard. SEALs blew it apart with thermite charges, but the tail section survived, photographed by the world.

Quinta da Regaleira

A Portuguese millionaire built an inverted tower tunneling 30 meters straight down into bedrock, lit by a single shaft of light, for Rosicrucian and Masonic initiation rituals. The estate has no church, only crypts.

Manic Miner

Matthew Smith coded Manic Miner alone at 17, released it in 1983, earned enough to vanish from society entirely — disappearing to Amsterdam for years before resurfacing at a 2002 retro convention, visibly rattled.

Nuclear winter

Carl Sagan and four co-authors published calculations in 1983 showing that even a 'limited' nuclear exchange of 100 warheads could throw enough soot into the stratosphere to drop global temperatures by 35°C — killing more people than the bombs.

Bosco Ramos

Bosco, a black Labrador–rottweiler mix, was elected mayor of Sunol, California in 1981 over two human candidates — and held the role until his death in 1994, becoming the town's most beloved public figure.