Angela Davis

A tulip, known as "the Viceroy" ( viseroij ), displayed in the 1637 Dutch catalogue Verzameling van een Meenigte Tulipaanen ("Collection of a Crowd of Tulips"). Its bulb was offered for sale for between 3,000 and 4,200 guilders (florins)…

Temperature map of the cosmic microwave background measured by the Planck spacecraft

01The pigeons roosting inside the horn antenna were trapped and relocated twice before the engineers accepted the hiss was cosmic.
02Penzias and Wilson won the 1978 Nobel Prize in Physics — accidentally, while testing satellite communication equipment.
03Princeton cosmologist Robert Dicke had been building a detector specifically to find this radiation; Penzias called him first, and Dicke told his team: 'We've been scooped.'

Temperature map of the cosmic microwave background measured by the Planck spacecraft

Angela Davis, in 'Women, Race & Class' (1981), argued that rape of Black women by white men during slavery was a calculated instrument of racial terror — and that the law's blindness to it was the policy.

Tulip mania

In 1637 Amsterdam, a single Semper Augustus tulip bulb sold for 10,000 guilders — enough to buy a canal house. Within three months the market collapsed; bulbs sold for the price of onions.

Anwar al-Awlaki

Anwar al-Awlaki, born in New Mexico, was placed on a presidential kill list, denied due process in U.S. courts, and killed by CIA drone in Yemen in September 2011. His lawyers were told they needed a license to represent him.

Voltaire

Voltaire scrawled 'absurd' across his personal Bible hundreds of times, then predicted Christianity would be extinct within a century. His Geneva house became a Bible Society depot 50 years after his death.

Scipionyx

One baby Scipionyx, dead 113 million years ago, still holds its liver, intestines, and windpipe in anatomical position. It is the only dinosaur fossil with soft organs visible to the naked eye.

Operation Quartz

On election night in February 1980, Rhodesian military commanders had aircraft targeted at Mugabe's and Nkomo's locations, ready to assassinate both men if ordered — the plan was aborted only hours before results were announced.

Cosmic microwave background

In 1964, Bell Labs engineers Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson kept finding a 3.5K microwave hiss in their antenna; after scrubbing out pigeon droppings, they realized they were hearing radiation left over from the Big Bang, 13.8 billion years ago.

Cornelius Vanderbilt

When New York's legislature sided against him in an 1867 rail dispute, Cornelius Vanderbilt cut all rail connections into Manhattan in January — mid-winter — strangling the city's supply lines until Albany capitulated.

Cosmic microwave background

The faint hiss on an analog TV is partly photons from 380,000 years after the Big Bang — the CMB, discovered accidentally in 1965 by Penzias and Wilson while trying to eliminate 'noise.'