Wang Zhaojun

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.'

The Kwakwaka'wakw continue the practice of potlatch. Illustrated here is Wawadit'la in Thunderbird Park , Victoria, B.C. , a big house built by Chief Mungo Martin in 1953. Wealthy, prominent hosts would have a Big House specifically for…

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.

LIGO

LIGO's mirrors must hold still to one-ten-thousandth the width of a proton. That precision, costing $1.1 billion, caught the first gravitational wave in September 2015 — a collision 1.3 billion years old.

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.

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.

Potlatch

Pacific Northwest chiefs burned blankets, smashed canoes, and gave away slaves to humiliate rivals — the more you destroyed, the higher your rank. Canada banned the ceremony in 1885.

Wall Street crash of 1929

On October 24, 1929 — Black Thursday — 12.9 million shares changed hands before noon. The suicide of ruined investors became so expected that hotel clerks asked guests: 'For sleeping or jumping?'

Francisco Macías Nguema

Francisco Macías Nguema killed or exiled roughly one-third of Equatorial Guinea's 300,000 citizens, banned the word 'intellectual,' and had the country's last lubricating oil poured into the ocean to prevent escape by boat.

Travis (chimpanzee)

Travis, a 200-pound chimpanzee raised as a human child in Stamford, Connecticut, mauled neighbor Charla Nash in 2009, leaving her without a face or hands. His owner called 911 mid-attack, saying: 'He's eating her.'

Tim Donaghy

NBA referee Tim Donaghy bet on 57 games he personally officiated, then admitted to adjusting foul calls to manipulate the spread. He served 15 months in federal prison and alleged the league itself manipulated playoff series.