01Gein crafted a full 'woman suit' from skin to wear while dancing under the moonlight.
02Police found ten skulls — some sawn open, some used as bowls — at his farmhouse in 1957.
03He killed only two confirmed people; his most disturbing trophies came from exhumed graves.
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01Parkhurst voted in the 1868 U.S. presidential election in Santa Cruz County, the first known trans man to do so in America.
02Described by contemporaries as among the finest stagecoach drivers on the California-Oregon run, handling six-horse teams in mountain snow.
03At death in 1879, a coroner's examination revealed Parkhurst's birth sex — news that reached newspapers across the country within days.
gnostek1 / 11A block of silica aerogel in a hand.
01Silica aerogel holds 15 Guinness World Records, including lowest-density solid ever produced at 1.9 mg/cm³.
02NASA used aerogel blankets to insulate the Mars Pathfinder rover against temperatures of −80 °C.
03Aerogel can support up to 4,000 times its own weight before the nano-silica structure collapses.
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01The border between Belgium and the Netherlands runs through houses, restaurants, and shops in Baarle-Hertog — marked by crosses on the floor.
02The municipality consists of 22 Belgian parcels inside the Netherlands, with 8 Dutch counter-enclaves inside those Belgian parcels.
03During WWII, the border's precise location determined which shops could stay open under German occupation — residents shifted furniture to the Belgian side.
gnostek1 / 4Red Bird – watercolour on paper
01Giuliani threatened to cut $7 million in city funding to the Brooklyn Museum over the painting.
02Ofili, a Catholic, said the dung was a reverent material — he used it in nearly every painting.
03A man entered the museum and smeared white paint over the canvas; he was arrested on-site.
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0112th-century geographers ranked Merv the world's largest city, with a population possibly exceeding 500,000.
02Mongol soldiers were each reportedly assigned quotas of civilians to execute personally at Merv in 1221.
03The irrigation canals (qanats) destroyed during the sack were never fully rebuilt; the surrounding farmland became permanent desert.
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01Benedetto Madonia's body was stuffed into a sugar barrel and abandoned on East 11th Street, Manhattan, April 14, 1903.
02Detective Joseph Petrosino traced the killers by matching barrel wood shavings to a specific Brooklyn cooperage.
03The case exposed a transatlantic Sicilian extortion network operating in New York — five years before the NYPD had a word for it.
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01The Dacian haul of 165 tonnes of gold was the largest single treasure seizure in Roman history.
02Trajan celebrated the victory with 123 days of games involving 11,000 animals and 10,000 gladiators.
03Dacia's king Decebalus cut his own throat rather than be paraded through Rome in Trajan's triumph.
gnostek1 / 2A fortified tower ( kullë ) used as a safe haven for men involved in a blood feud. Theth , northern Albania.
01Entire male family lines are confined indoors; children miss school for years, fearing lawful execution outside.
02By 2008, an estimated 1,500 Albanian families were living in self-imposed lockdown due to active blood feuds.
03The feud obligation passes to sons if fathers die — a debt that compounds across generations.