Dilatant

Plot of shear rate as a function of the shear stress. Dilatants in green.

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.

Cornstarch stirred into water becomes a dilatant: press slowly and your finger sinks; punch it and the fluid hardens to concrete. BAE Systems built flexible armour panels from it that stop a knife in 8 milliseconds.

Lekë Dukagjini

Lekë Dukagjini, a 15th-century Albanian lord, allegedly codified bride-kidnapping, murder ransoms, and the blood-feud chain into a single oral law — a legal system that outlasted the Ottoman Empire by five centuries.

Houston Astros sign stealing scandal

Houston Astros players watched a live camera feed of the catcher's signals and banged a trash can once or twice to tell batters what pitch was coming. They won the World Series doing it.

Operation Frankton

Ten canoeists paddled in pairs into Bordeaux harbour at night and limpet-mined six ships. Eight were captured or drowned; the two survivors walked 100 miles to Spain. Hitler's Commando Order had the eight shot.

Guy Hocquenghem

Hocquenghem's 1972 'Homosexual Desire' declared the anus — not the phallus — the true seat of revolutionary politics. He died of AIDS in 1988, at 41, unrecanted.

Bill W.

Bill Wilson co-founded AA on the principle of complete abstinence, then took LSD with Aldous Huxley in 1956 and spent years lobbying AA's board to adopt it as a sobriety tool. The board said no. He kept taking it.

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.

Jorunna parva

The sea bunny's fluffy white 'ears' are rhinophores chemically reading seawater molecules; its spotted coat broadcasts toxin harvested from the sponges it eats — softness as a warning label.

Screaming Lord Sutch

Screaming Lord Sutch lost 40 consecutive British elections across 35 years, founding the Official Monster Raving Loony Party — yet outlasted so many rivals that he became the longest-serving party leader in UK history.