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The quokka, Australia's smiling marsupial, ejects its pouch joey directly into a predator's path — a muscular contraction, not a choice — then flees while the infant screams.

The LHC accelerates protons to 99.9999991% of light speed inside a 27 km ring cooled to −271°C — colder than deep space — to smash them into the Higgs boson's first confirmed appearance.

Inscribed on a sheet of copper rolled up with the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Copper Scroll lists 64 treasure locations holding tons of gold and silver. Scholars dispute whether any of it was real.

Byzantine warships sprayed Greek fire through bronze siphons — it burned on water and could not be extinguished. The formula died with the empire in 1453, and no chemist has fully reconstructed it since.

In 1951, an entire French village — Pont-Saint-Esprit — simultaneously hallucinated, convulsed, and attempted flight from windows after eating contaminated bread. A fungus called Claviceps purpurea may have fueled the Salem witch trials, too.

Wii Sports shipped inside every Wii console sold — 82.9 million units — making it the best-selling sports game ever made, played by grandmothers who had never held a controller and eight-year-olds competing at the same level.

Albert Fish mailed Grace Budd's mother a letter explaining, in clinical detail, how he butchered and ate her ten-year-old daughter over nine days in 1928. He was 58 when he abducted her; he called human buttocks 'the best part.'

Bokassa fed political prisoners to his private crocodiles and lions, then had himself crowned emperor in a ceremony copying Napoleon's — in a country where per-capita income was under $400 a year.

Soviet engineers gave Laika a one-way ticket in Sputnik 2, 1957 — her cabin had no re-entry capsule. She died within hours of launch from overheating, not the planned euthanasia. The USSR announced her alive for days.