gnostek1 / 9Kurt Debus (front row, third from the left), a former V-2 rocket scientist and SS officer who became a NASA director, sitting between US president John F. Kennedy and US vice president Lyndon B. Johnson in 1962 at a briefing at Blockhouse…
01Wernher von Braun, architect of the Saturn V moon rocket, had been an SS officer who used slave labor at Mittelwerk.
02The State Department and DOJ were deliberately kept out of early recruitment to bypass immigration law.
03Operation Paperclip files were classified until 1999; some scientists died with full U.S. military pensions.
gnostek1 / 4
01Buhen's outer wall featured loopholes angled to allow bowmen to cover the moat floor without exposure — 3,800 years ago.
02The fortress enclosed an area of roughly 150 by 170 metres on the west bank of the Nile at the Second Cataract.
03When the Aswan High Dam was built in the 1960s, Buhen was submerged beneath Lake Nasser, permanently.
gnostek1 / 9Trump's tweet activity from his first tweet in May 2009 until June 2020
01Trump's tweet on August 22, 2018, named Secretary of State Mike Pompeo as directed to 'closely study' the situation.
02South Africa's rand dropped 1.4% against the dollar within two hours of the tweet.
03The Fox News segment that prompted it aired only hours before Trump posted; no briefing was involved.
gnostek1 / 9Temperature 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.'
gnostek1 / 10
01Gould secretly recruited President Grant's brother-in-law to block Treasury gold sales, enabling the corner.
02Gold prices plunged 20% in minutes on September 24, 1869, wiping out brokers across the country.
03Gould had already sold his gold position before the crash he engineered; his partner Fisk simply repudiated his contracts.
gnostek1 / 17
01Septimius Severus was born in Leptis Magna, modern Libya, becoming Rome's first African-born emperor.
02He died in Eboracum — modern York — while planning a deeper invasion of Caledonia.
03His deathbed advice to his sons: 'Enrich the soldiers; ignore everyone else.'
gnostek1 / 5
01Boon programmed fatalities as a hidden, uncredited feature so Midway management could not veto them.
02The spine-rip fatality required capturing actor Daniel Pesina's moves frame-by-frame on video equipment.
03The Senate hearings triggered by MK directly forced Sega and Nintendo to create content ratings by 1994.
gnostek1 / 12
01The Palace of the Parliament is the world's heaviest building at roughly 4,098,500 tonnes.
02Ceaușescu demolished 19 Orthodox churches and 6 synagogues to clear the construction site.
03So much of Romania's national budget was consumed that winters in the 1980s brought nationwide blackouts and food rationing.
gnostek1 / 16Close-up of a barbed wire
01Glidden sold his patent share to Washburn & Moen for $60,000 plus royalties in 1876.
02By 1890, the open-range cattle industry was effectively dead — killed by wire, not weather.
03WWI trenches on the Western Front used an estimated 1,200 miles of barbed wire by 1917.