Cosmic microwave background

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.'

Close-up of a barbed wire

Illustrated Jonah from the 15th-century Kennicott Bible

The Severan Tondo , c. 199 AD tondo of the Severan family , with portraits of Septimius Severus , Julia Domna , and their sons Caracalla and Geta . The face of one of Severus' and Julia's sons has been erased; it may be Geta's, as a result…

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.

Death of Tom Simpson

'Put me back on my bike' — Simpson's last request on Mont Ventoux, 1967. Amphetamines and brandy were found in his jersey pocket. The Tour rode past his corpse to finish.

Barbed wire

Joseph Glidden's 1874 barbed-wire patent — filed after sketching the design on a coffee grinder — closed the American open range within a decade and then reappeared at the Somme, herding men into machine-gun fire.

Nigersaurus

Nigersaurus ran 500 teeth in stacked conveyor-belt rows that cycled out every 14 days. Its skull was so thin and window-riddled it could not be removed from the ground in one piece.

Wang Zhaojun

Wang Zhaojun refused to bribe her portrait painter at the Han court; he gave her an ugly likeness; the emperor never summoned her — so she was handed to a Xiongnu khan instead.

Parmalat

Parmalat's CFO produced a Bank of America account statement confirming €4 billion — it was a photocopied forgery. The dairy company behind your supermarket milk had a $14 billion hole in its books. Europe's Enron, assembled with a scanner.

Book of Jonah

Jonah, swallowed by a fish, sulks when God spares the city he hated — and then weeps over a dead plant. Scholars now classify it as deliberate comic fiction targeting 5th-century Jewish nationalism.

Damnatio memoriae

Rome could condemn a man to nonexistence: his face chiseled off statues, his name gouged from inscriptions, his coins melted down. Domitian's name was erased from 31 separate official monuments after his death.

Nixon shock

On a Sunday night in August 1971, Nixon told the world — and blindsided every allied government — that dollars were no longer redeemable for gold. The Bretton Woods system died in a 15-minute TV address.