East Coast–West Coast hip-hop rivalry

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…

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.

A barrel-type butter churn

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.

Nuclear winter

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.

Chagai-I

On May 28, 1998, Pakistan detonated five nuclear warheads inside Koh Kambaran mountain; the granite turned white, then grey. A nation that had denied the bomb for two decades announced it in a single afternoon.

Irritator

Paleontologists named it 'Irritator' — formally, in the scientific literature — because a fossil smuggler had packed car body filler into the skull to counterfeit a complete specimen.

Fallout 3

Megaton, a settlement of innocent NPCs, can be detonated with a nuclear bomb the player plants in its center. The explosion has a custom orchestral score. The quest giver hands you a penthouse overlooking the crater.

Butter churn

A wooden dasher plunged up and down by hand for forty unbroken minutes to produce one pound of butter. The task fell to whoever was smallest — usually the children.

Neutron star merger

When two neutron stars collide — GW170817, August 2017 — the explosion forged gold, platinum, and uranium in seconds. Every piece of jewelry on Earth traces back to a dead-star crash.

Jim Jones

Jim Jones rehearsed mass suicide with fake poison for years before making it real. On November 18, 1978, 918 died — 276 of them children. A gun was found in Jones's hand.

Siege of Marawi

In 2017, Hapilon's ISIS-aligned Abu Sayyaf faction and the Maute group held Marawi — a Philippine city of 200,000 — for 154 days. The military retook it building by building; most of the city was leveled in the process.