Buckminsterfullerene

1920 advertisement for the Thor electric washing machine.

Pyrocumulonimbus cloud formed by the firestorm following the atomic bombing of Hiroshima , 1945. Nuclear winter effects are triggered by at least a hundred such city firestorms.

01The paper coined the term 'nuclear winter'; Sagan published it simultaneously in Science and in Parade magazine, reaching 17 million readers at once.
02Soviet climatologist Vladimir Alexandrov independently produced near-identical temperature-drop models in Moscow the same year.
03The 35°C cooling estimate meant most temperate-zone crops would fail within weeks of a detonation, before fallout reached them.

Buckminsterfullerene

Sixty carbon atoms arranged as a perfect truncated icosahedron — identical to a FIFA football — were discovered in 1985 by Harry Kroto inside the soot of a carbon arc, winning a Nobel Prize eleven years later.

Iraqi invasion of Kuwait

Iraq invaded Kuwait at 2 a.m. on August 2, 1990, partly because Kuwait was drilling at a slant into the Rumaila oil field beneath their shared border — stealing, Baghdad claimed, $2.4 billion in Iraqi oil.

Pingfang, Harbin

Pingfang was a self-contained city — barracks, airstrip, crematorium, and 150 buildings — built by 15,000 conscripted Chinese laborers, most of whom were executed afterward to preserve secrecy.

Thor washing machine

The 1908 Thor washing machine married bare copper wiring to a full tub of water and called it progress. Its inventor, Alva Fisher, left the ground wire out entirely. It sold briskly.

Presidency of Rodrigo Duterte

A sitting president joked, live on stage, that he should have 'gone first' before soldiers raped and killed Australian missionary Jacqueline Hamill in 1989. The crowd laughed. He won the election anyway.

Nuclear winter

Carl Sagan and four co-authors published calculations in 1983 showing that even a 'limited' nuclear exchange of 100 warheads could throw enough soot into the stratosphere to drop global temperatures by 35°C — killing more people than the bombs.

Fabio Casartelli

An Olympic gold medalist struck his unprotected skull on a stone culvert at 88 km/h on Stage 15, 1995. Teammates crossed the finish line the next day holding his bicycle above their heads.

The hand of God

Maradona punched the ball into England's net with his left fist in the 1986 World Cup quarterfinal, then told reporters God's hand had done it. Argentina won 2–1 and went on to lift the trophy.

Shizuya Hayashi

Shizuya Hayashi killed 19 enemy soldiers in a single engagement in Italy, 1945, armed with a rifle and grenades. The Army awarded him a Distinguished Service Cross. The Medal of Honor took 55 more years and a congressional mandate.