gnostek1 / 8A thermite mixture using iron(III) oxide
01Thermite burns at 2,500 °C — hotter than the surface of most lava flows.
02Water poured on burning thermite causes a steam explosion, making it actively worse to fight.
03U.S. military M14 incendiary grenades use thermite specifically to destroy field artillery beyond enemy recovery.
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01Cerberus paid $7.4 billion for Chrysler in May 2007; Chrysler filed for bankruptcy by April 2009.
02Daimler paid Cerberus $650 million to take Chrysler off its hands — a negative sale price.
03The U.S. government ultimately injected $12.5 billion to rescue the company Cerberus had just bought.
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01The dev team made multiple research trips inside the 30 km Chernobyl Exclusion Zone to photograph locations.
02The Zone's anomalies — invisible fields that tear flesh or cook matter — are drawn from Soviet-era folklore.
03After 15 years, a modding community still releases annual overhauls treating the game as a living archive.
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01The Old Norse word 'berserkr' likely means 'bear-shirt' — the warrior wore the animal's hide and its soul.
02King Harald Fairhair used berserkers as a personal shock unit at the Battle of Hafrsfjord, c. 872 AD.
03Later Norse law explicitly outlawed berserk behavior — it was treated as a crime once the state no longer needed it.
gnostek1 / 8Chapel interior
01František Rint bleached and arranged the bones of roughly 40,000 people between 1870 and 1872.
02The chandelier contains at least one of every bone in the human body — 206 types, repeated thousands of times.
03The ossuary was created after a 13th-century abbot scattered soil from Jerusalem across the cemetery, making burial there the most coveted in Bohemia.
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01She rendered three women into soap bars and teacakes, feeding the cakes to visiting neighbors.
02Her stated motive was a fortune-teller's prophecy that one of her children would die in WWII.
03Sentenced to 30 years plus 3 in a criminal asylum; her soap-making pot is on display in a Rome museum.
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01The explosion created a crater 170 feet long, 60 feet wide, and 30 feet deep on July 30, 1864.
02Generals ordered troops into the crater itself rather than around it; Confederate fire from the rim was uncontested.
03Union losses: 3,798 men in under four hours. Grant called it 'the saddest affair I have witnessed in the war.'
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01It was Flavor Aid, not Kool-Aid, laced with cyanide, Valium, and Phenergan in the vat.
02Aerial photography revealed the 918 corpses laid in deliberate concentric circles around Jones's throne-like chair.
03A tape recording of the death ceremony runs 44 minutes; children screaming are audible throughout.
gnostek1 / 8The Zimmermann telegram as it was sent from Washington, D.C. , to Ambassador Heinrich von Eckardt , the German ambassador to Mexico .
01The telegram was decoded by British Naval Intelligence's Room 40, which had cracked German ciphers.
02Germany offered Mexico its 'lost territory' — Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona — as a wartime inducement.
03Zimmermann publicly confirmed the telegram's authenticity, making denial impossible and enraging American public opinion.