Joel-Peter Witkin

Chapel interior

The Wow! signal represented as "6EQUJ5". The original printout with Ehman's handwritten exclamation is preserved by Ohio History Connection .

An electric steam iron

Figure 1. The arrangement of hydrogen atoms (black circles) about oxygen atoms (open circles) in ice. Two hydrogen atoms (bottom ones) are close to the central oxygen atom while two of them (top ones) are far and closer to the two other…

Joel-Peter Witkin

Joel-Peter Witkin sources severed heads and amputated limbs from morgues, arranges them with live models into Caravaggio-style compositions, and photographs them. Mexican authorities gave him unclaimed cadavers. The prints sell for $10,000 each.

Wii Sports

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.

Sedlec Ossuary

A 13th-century Czech chapel holds chandeliers, coats of arms, and garland decorations made entirely from approximately 40,000 human skeletons. A woodcarver named František Rint signed his name in the corner — in bones.

Wow! signal

On August 15, 1977, a 72-second signal hit Big Ear radio telescope matching every alien-broadcast prediction. Astronomer Jerry Ehman circled it, wrote 'Wow!' — and it never came again.

Clothes iron

Named from the Old English 'sæd,' meaning solid — not sorrowful — the sad iron was a 6-pound cast-iron slab heated directly on the stove. Women rotated three irons to maintain one usable temperature.

Spin ice

In dysprosium titanate crystals cooled near absolute zero, magnetic charges separate and move independently — behaving exactly like isolated north-only monopoles that physics said could not exist as free particles.

Daniel Inouye

After a German bullet severed his right arm, Daniel Inouye pried a live grenade from its dead fingers with his left hand and threw it. He later became a U.S. Senator. The arm was thrown away.

Tesem

The Tesem, a sleek prick-eared hound depicted on pre-dynastic pottery circa 4000 BCE, was buried in pharaonic tombs with its own name-stele and food offerings. Amenhotep II had four interred with him at death.

R. Budd Dwyer

Treasurer Budd Dwyer called a press conference, handed out envelopes to reporters, then pulled a .357 Magnum from a manila folder and fired it through the roof of his mouth — live, on Pennsylvania state television, January 22, 1987.