Nuclear winter

Pyrocumulonimbus cloud formed by the firestorm following the atomic bombing of Hiroshima , 1945. Nuclear winter effects are triggered by at least a hundred such city firestorms.

01The paper coined the term 'nuclear winter'; Sagan published it simultaneously in Science and in Parade magazine, reaching 17 million readers at once.
02Soviet climatologist Vladimir Alexandrov independently produced near-identical temperature-drop models in Moscow the same year.
03The 35°C cooling estimate meant most temperate-zone crops would fail within weeks of a detonation, before fallout reached them.

Tupac Shakur (right) and The Notorious B.I.G. (left), the two main figures of the East Coast–West Coast hip-hop rivalry, prior to the conflict in 1993 in Los Angeles. The image was also used in the 2002 feature-length documentary film…

Carl Sagan and four co-authors published calculations in 1983 showing that even a 'limited' nuclear exchange of 100 warheads could throw enough soot into the stratosphere to drop global temperatures by 35°C — killing more people than the bombs.

Viva Piñata

Microsoft's rated-E garden game lets piñatas reproduce, eat each other's eggs, and drive rival species to permanent in-game extinction — all with candy gore. It was marketed exclusively at children.

Paul Pelliot

Paul Pelliot read 6,000 manuscripts by candlelight in the Dunhuang cave over three weeks in 1908, selecting the best 10,000 pages for France. The monk who sold them was paid £130.

2023 Tour de France

Over seven decades, press motorcycles weaving through the peloton have shattered collarbone, kneecap, and career — one cameraman's vehicle knocked Joseba Beloki into a fracture pattern that ended his season in 2003.

Thomson's lamp

Switch a lamp on and off — once per second, then half a second, then a quarter — completing infinite switches in two minutes flat. Mathematics gives no answer to whether it's on or off at minute two.

No Gun Ri massacre

In July 1950, U.S. soldiers opened fire on hundreds of South Korean refugees sheltering beneath the double arch of the No Gun Ri railroad bridge. Survivors described three days of killing. Survivors existed.

Mellified man

Elderly Arab men, per medieval accounts, volunteered to subsist entirely on honey until their flesh was saturated — then, after death and 100 years of submersion in honey, their preserved corpses were sold as medicine.

East Coast–West Coast hip-hop rivalry

By 1997, two of rap's biggest figures were dead and their labels were in ruin. What began as promotional rivalry between Death Row and Bad Boy became geography that determined whose side you were on at gunpoint.

Kaspar Hauser

A boy stumbled into Nuremberg in 1828 able to write one name — Kaspar Hauser — and say one sentence. He claimed a dungeon, a single jailer, and no sunlight, ever. He was stabbed to death five years later.