Bre-X

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…

The phrase banana republic was coined in 1904 by American writer O. Henry .

A Jake and Dinos Chapman fused mannequin piece from the exhibition Come and See at the Serpentine Gallery

An illustration of Cantor's diagonal argument (in base 2) for the existence of uncountable sets . The sequence at the bottom cannot occur anywhere in the enumeration of sequences above.

Bre-X geologist Michael de Guzman salted core samples with gold shavings from his own jewelry to fake the world's largest gold deposit — 200 million ounces. He fell from a helicopter over the Borneo jungle before investigators arrived.

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.

Banana republic

United Fruit Company owned 42% of Guatemala's land by 1950, paid zero taxes, and orchestrated a CIA-backed coup when a president dared to tax unused fields. The term was coined in 1901.

Jake and Dinos Chapman

The Chapmans bought a complete set of Goya's 'Disasters of War' etchings — 80 prints of dismembered soldiers — and painted Ronald McDonald and clown faces over the victims' heads. They called it 'rectification.'

Cantor's diagonal argument

Cantor showed in 1891 that the infinity of real numbers cannot be listed — proving it by constructing one number guaranteed to be missing from any list. Infinity has a size hierarchy; most people never heard it.

Henrietta Lacks

In 1951, a surgeon at Johns Hopkins took a biopsy from Henrietta Lacks's cervix without telling her; her cells, labeled HeLa, became the first immortal human cell line, now totaling over 20 metric tons grown worldwide.

Plague (disease)

Unit 731 maintained plague-flea breeding facilities producing 3 kilograms of fleas per week — roughly 45 million fleas — enough to seed an epidemic across a mid-sized city in a single sortie.

Heaven's Gate (religious group)

Thirty-nine people castrated themselves, donned identical black tracksuits and Nike Decades, and drank phenobarbital pudding to board the Hale-Bopp comet. Their bunk beds were made, bags packed, and hands folded across their chests.

Liu Ziye

Liu Ziye forced his own aunts into his imperial harem, declared them imperial concubines, then was stabbed to death by a palace servant at sixteen — his ministers had arranged the blade.