Spec Ops: The Line

Parthian-era bronze statue believed by some scholars to represent General Surena.

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…

Smoke plumes from a few of the Kuwaiti Oil Fires on April 7, 1991, as seen from Space Shuttle Atlantis during STS-37 .

Spec Ops: The Line

Halfway through a military shooter, the player learns the white phosphorus airstrike they just executed killed 47 civilians in a refugee camp — and the game made them do it. No other ending is available.

Flying Horse of Gansu

Cast in bronze around 200 AD, a Gansu horse balances its entire weight on one hoof atop a flying swallow. Found in a tomb in 1969, it became China's national tourism symbol by government decree.

Michel Foucault

Foucault spent his last years cruising San Francisco bathhouses while dying of AIDS — a fact he reportedly knew. The man who said power invented sexuality lived the argument to its end.

Surena

Surena annihilated seven Roman legions at Carrhae in 53 BC — 20,000 dead, 10,000 captured — then was executed by the Parthian king within the year, fame deemed more dangerous than Rome itself.

Bloomberg L.P.

The Bloomberg Terminal — a single black keyboard and dual-screen workstation renting for $24,000 a year — is leased by 330,000 finance professionals worldwide and generates enough revenue to have funded two New York City mayoral campaigns.

Murder of Zebb Quinn

Zebb Quinn, 18, vanished after a late-night work errand in January 2000. His car turned up days later with a live puppy inside and a lipstick kiss on the rear window. His coworker Robert Jason Owens was convicted 17 years later.

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.

Kuwaiti oil fires

Retreating Iraqi forces torched 730 Kuwaiti oil wells in early 1991; the fires burned for eight months, turning noon into black night across hundreds of miles. Red Adair's crews took until November to kill the last flame.

Vermin Supreme

Vermin Supreme has campaigned in every U.S. presidential race since 1992 wearing a rubber boot as a hat, promising mandatory tooth-brushing laws and one free government pony for every American citizen.