01Newton initially made £7,000 profit from South Sea shares, then bought back in near the top.
02His total loss of £20,000 equals roughly $3–4 million in today's purchasing power.
03The South Sea Company's supposed trade monopoly covered a route where Spain controlled all the ports.
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01He brought a sacred black conical stone from Emesa to Rome, housing it above Jupiter on the Capitoline Hill.
02He married Aquilia Severa, a Vestal Virgin — a capital offense under Roman law — calling it a holy union.
03Assassinated at 18 by the Praetorian Guard; his body was stuffed into a drain after the Tiber rejected it.
gnostek1 / 48A typical crossbow
01Pope Innocent II's 1139 ban called the crossbow 'hateful to God and unfit for Christians.'
02Richard I of England, who loved the crossbow, died in 1199 from a crossbow bolt at Châlus-Chabrol.
03A trained crossbowman needed no years of muscle-building — a peasant could kill a knight on day one.
gnostek1 / 2Skydiver Bill Booth 's second rule states that "The safer skydiving gear becomes, the more chances skydivers will take, in order to keep the fatality rate constant."
01Peltzman's 1975 paper found US seatbelt laws produced no net reduction in traffic fatalities.
02He argued drivers treated safety gear as a 'risk budget' — spend it on faster driving.
03The effect has since been observed in helmets, airbags, and even surgical safety checklists.
gnostek1 / 13Cosmic flux versus particle energy at the top of Earth's atmosphere
01The 'Oh-My-God particle' had energy 3×10^20 eV — 40 million times more than CERN's LHC can produce.
02Above ~5×10^19 eV, the GZK limit predicts particles should be shredded by CMB photons en route — yet it arrived.
03Its source remains unknown; no known astrophysical accelerator within 160 million light-years can explain it.
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01HeLa cells were mailed to labs globally within a year of harvest; Lacks died of the same cancer eight months after the biopsy.
02Her family learned the cells existed in 1973 — from a researcher who called asking for their DNA.
03A single gram of HeLa cells was sold commercially for around $25 in the 1950s; her estate received nothing.
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01Sejanus had eliminated Tiberius's son Drusus — likely by poison — to clear his own path to power.
02His children were executed; his daughter, still a virgin, was first assaulted by the executioner because Roman law forbade killing virgins.
03After his fall, the Senate ordered every statue, inscription, and monument bearing his name destroyed — a full damnatio memoriae.
gnostek
01The Arabic term 'mellified man' translates literally as 'the one soaked in honey,' documented in Li Shizhen's 1596 Chinese pharmacopoeia.
02The candidate's sweat, tears, and excrement were said to turn to honey before death — the whole body crystallized.
03No physical specimen has ever been confirmed; historians debate whether the practice was myth, metaphor, or literal trade good.
gnostek
01Hostages included foreign nationals seized in earlier raids, used as shields inside an active hospital.
02Local officials were later investigated for allegedly allowing Abu Sayyaf fighters to escape the cordon.
03A Congressional inquiry found evidence that military officers may have negotiated a passage out for the gunmen.