Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry

The Anatomical Zodiac Man

Figure 1. The arrangement of hydrogen atoms (black circles) about oxygen atoms (open circles) in ice. Two hydrogen atoms (bottom ones) are close to the central oxygen atom while two of them (top ones) are far and closer to the two other…

Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry

Painted between 1412 and 1416 for the Duke of Berry, the February calendar page of the Très Riches Heures shows a peasant warming bare legs by a fire — the oldest surviving painted snow scene, accurate enough that meteorologists have studied it.

Patti Smith

Patti Smith spent years photographing Robert Mapplethorpe's hands — obsessively, serially — because, she wrote, she couldn't stop seeing them. Her 2010 memoir 'Just Kids' won the National Book Award and was written, she said, to keep a promise to a dying man.

Gustav Landauer

Gustav Landauer, Germany's foremost anarchist philosopher, was stomped and shot by soldiers in a Munich prison courtyard on May 2, 1919. His last book on Shakespeare was still unfinished. Philosophy ended with a boot.

Taichang Emperor

The Taichang Emperor reigned 29 days before dying — reportedly after swallowing red pills supplied by a court official named Li Kezhuo, whose formula was never fully disclosed.

Berserker

Norse berserkers bit their shields and charged wearing bear pelts, impervious to iron. Saga accounts describe them foaming at the mouth; one killed 11 men before being pinned to the earth with a pitchfork.

Spin ice

In dysprosium titanate crystals cooled near absolute zero, magnetic charges separate and move independently — behaving exactly like isolated north-only monopoles that physics said could not exist as free particles.

Piero Manzoni

In 1961 Manzoni sealed his own excrement into 90 numbered tins, priced each at its weight in gold, and signed them. Tin No. 18 sold at Sotheby's in 2016 for £182,500.

WannaCry ransomware attack

NSA's stolen EternalBlue exploit encrypted 80,000 NHS devices in May 2017, forcing British hospitals to turn away ambulances. The kill switch was found by a 22-year-old researcher who registered a $10.69 domain.

The Story of Adidon

Pusha T named Drake's hidden son Adonis and placed his image inside Drake's own Adidas campaign artwork — a diss track that used corporate branding as a delivery mechanism for a secret.