Prey (2017 video game)

Enemies being killed and roasted in South America – engraving by Theodor de Bry (1592)

Medieval English split tally stick ( front and reverse view). The stick is notched and inscribed to record a debt owed to the rural dean of Preston Candover , Hampshire, of a tithe of 20 d each on 32 sheep, amounting to a total sum of £2…

Original Soviet space dog environmentally controlled safety module used on sub-orbital and orbital spaceflights

Prey (2017 video game)

Every object aboard Talos I — coffee mugs, chairs, potted plants — could be a Mimic alien holding its shape until you step close. The station's 300+ rooms become a sustained meditation on trust, perception, and the architecture of dread.

Hansie Cronje

South Africa's most beloved cricket captain Hansie Cronje confessed he fixed matches partly for a leather jacket. The man who led his country's post-apartheid sporting resurrection died in a plane crash two years later.

Human cannibalism

The Fore people of Papua New Guinea ate their dead as mourning rite; it transmitted kuru, a fatal prion disease, killing thousands. Women and children died faster — they ate the brain.

Peregrine falcon

At 240 mph, the peregrine falcon folds into a teardrop and becomes the fastest thing alive — its specially baffled nostrils managing airflow a jet engineer would envy. No animal on Earth has ever been clocked faster.

Jeanne Calment

At 13, Jeanne Calment sold colored pencils to Vincent van Gogh in her father's shop. She died 122 years later — the oldest verified human — having outlived him by a full century.

Iamblichus

He rose ten cubits off the ground — glowing gold — while his students watched twice. A Syrian Neoplatonist who made ritual magic philosophically respectable. What do you do with a man who keeps floating?

Tally stick

For 700 years, the English Exchequer split hazel sticks to record royal debts — the king kept one half, the creditor the other. In 1834, Parliament burned the old sticks and accidentally set Westminster on fire.

Spacewar!

MIT students in 1962 built the first true multiplayer game on a PDP-1 they were forbidden to use unsupervised — a $120,000 machine whose gravity physics were debugged by future computing legends at 3 a.m.

Soviet space dogs

The USSR launched at least 57 dogs into space between 1951 and 1966; strays from Moscow streets were preferred because they were deemed psychologically tougher, and most early flights were explicitly one-way.