01Custer refused a Gatling gun battery before the march, fearing it would slow him down.
02His column of 210 men was wiped out in under an hour on June 25, 1876.
03Sitting Bull had predicted the exact outcome in a Sun Dance vision days before the battle.
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01The outer walls of Babylon measured roughly 90 feet thick at the base, per excavations by Robert Koldewey beginning in 1899.
02Herodotus described the walls encircling a square city, 14 miles on each side, with 250 towers along the circuit.
03The Ishtar Gate, clad in blue-glazed brick with golden dragons, stood at the northern entrance to this walled city.
gnostek1 / 5The Wow! signal represented as "6EQUJ5". The original printout with Ehman's handwritten exclamation is preserved by Ohio History Connection .
01Jerry Ehman wrote 'Wow!' in red pen on the Ohio State Big Ear printout on August 15, 1977.
02The signal hit exactly the 1420 MHz hydrogen frequency SETI researchers had predicted aliens would use.
03Forty-seven years of follow-up observations have produced zero repetitions or explanations.
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01Melanosomes in the preserved skin allowed researchers to reconstruct a dark-backed, pale-bellied striped pattern in 2016.
02Countershading suggests Psittacosaurus lived in a forest environment with overhead light — a habitat conclusion from skin pigment alone.
03The same specimen reveals a cloaca, confirming for the first time what a non-avian dinosaur's vent actually looked like.
gnostek1 / 4A slab of pykrete
01Pykrete is 86% ice and 14% sawdust, yet it deflects rifle bullets without shattering.
02Project Habbakuk's planned carrier weighed 2 million tons — dwarfing every steel warship ever built.
03A small Pykrete block was demonstrated to Allied chiefs in a Quebec hotel bathtub in 1943.
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01Sputnik 2 had no re-entry mechanism; Laika was always going to die — the lie was about when.
02Her body orbited Earth 2,570 times before the craft burned up in April 1958.
03One of her mission engineers, Oleg Gazenko, publicly apologized for her death decades later.
gnostek1 / 2A Jake and Dinos Chapman fused mannequin piece from the exhibition Come and See at the Serpentine Gallery
01The original Goya plates date from 1810–1820; the Chapmans overpainted them in 2003.
02They titled the defaced series 'Insult to Injury,' inverting Goya's humanitarian intent entirely.
03Jake Chapman said ruining the Goyas was more creative than making new work from scratch.
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01The mission 'Death from Above' is unwinnable by design; the player's character dies regardless of input.
02The level was set in an unnamed Middle Eastern city destroyed by a 10-kiloton nuclear detonation.
03Call of Duty 4 sold over 14 million copies — its unwinnable death scene played by more people than any prior war film audience.
gnostek
01116 people died in the blast and subsequent fire; Abu Sayyaf was paid roughly $400 to execute the attack.
02The bomb was concealed inside a television set stored in the vessel's cargo hold.
03It remains the single deadliest terrorist attack on a civilian vessel in peacetime, worldwide.