Aerogel

A block of silica aerogel in a hand.

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

Front page cover of the newspaper L'Aurore for Thursday 13 January 1898, with the letter J'Accuse...! , written by Émile Zola about the Dreyfus affair . The headline reads I Accuse...! Letter to the President of the Republic .

Aerogel is 99.8% air by volume, yet a thumbnail-sized block supports a 2.5 kg brick. NASA's Mars Pathfinder used it as insulation; the same material can be made from silica, carbon, or even frozen fruit juice.

Djamolidine Abdoujaparov

Abdoujaparov was metres from a Paris stage win, green jersey on his back, when he hit a Coca-Cola advertising barrier on the Champs-Élysées and somersaulted into the tarmac. He still finished — and kept the jersey.

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.

J'Accuse...!

Zola's open letter, published across the front page of L'Aurore on 13 January 1898, named eleven army and government officials by name. The editor printed 300,000 copies; Paris sold out before noon.

John Paul Getty III

J. Paul Getty — then the world's richest man — refused his grandson's ransom until a severed ear arrived by post. He negotiated the $17 million demand down to $2.2 million, the maximum he could deduct on taxes.

Emperor Xian of Han

Emperor Xian reigned for thirty-one years as Cao Cao's hostage. He watched Cao Cao personally drag Empress Fu from her chambers and execute her inside the palace walls in 214 CE.

Dik-dik

The dik-dik marks territory by pressing a preorbital gland — located millimetres from its eyeball — directly onto twigs, essentially staking claim with its own face, one poke at a time.

Titanfall 2

One level drops players into a factory mid-demolition, then hands them a device that rewinds time — walls rebuild, catwalks reappear, fire retreats — letting a player walk across a collapsing structure by running backward through its own destruction.

Skanderbeg

Taken from Albania as a child hostage, raised as an Ottoman janissary, Skanderbeg defected at 38 with three hundred men and held off the full Ottoman army 25 times over 25 years.