Timothy Wilson Spencer

U.S. representative Michael Myers , second from left, holds an envelope containing $50,000 that he just received from undercover FBI agents

The "Xiaohe Mummy", exhibited in Xinjiang Museum, is one of the oldest Tarim mummies, dating more than 3800 years ago. Another mummy from the same place is the " Princess of Xiaohe ".

Smoke plumes from a few of the Kuwaiti Oil Fires on April 7, 1991, as seen from Space Shuttle Atlantis during STS-37 .

Timothy Wilson Spencer

Timothy Spencer was executed in Virginia in 1994 as the first person in U.S. history put to death on DNA evidence alone — evidence that also exonerated David Vasquez, who had already confessed and pled guilty to one of Spencer's murders.

Viva Piñata

Microsoft's rated-E garden game lets piñatas reproduce, eat each other's eggs, and drive rival species to permanent in-game extinction — all with candy gore. It was marketed exclusively at children.

Abscam

FBI agents dressed as Arab oil sheikhs invited seven U.S. congressmen to a fake Washington townhouse and filmed them pocketing cash bribes — one congressman stuffed $25,000 into his suit pockets on camera and said, 'I'm gonna keep this.'

Cassini–Huygens

After 13 years orbiting Saturn, the $3.9 billion Cassini was steered into the planet's atmosphere on purpose — a controlled suicide to avoid contaminating moons that might harbor life.

Tarim mummies

Xinjiang's Tarim Basin gave up Bronze Age mummies with red and blonde hair, plaid textiles, and features no one expected in 2nd-millennium-BCE China — their genetic origin is still genuinely contested.

Judas Iscariot

Thirty silver coins, a prearranged kiss in a moonlit garden, and a civilization's entire moral vocabulary for treachery was set. Judas Iscariot handed over one man and poisoned his own name for two thousand years.

Kuwaiti oil fires

Retreating Iraqi forces torched 730 Kuwaiti oil wells in early 1991; the fires burned for eight months, turning noon into black night across hundreds of miles. Red Adair's crews took until November to kill the last flame.

GoldenEye 007

Rare's 1997 Nintendo 64 cartridge shipped a four-player split-screen world that hadn't existed in any home console before it — the dam, the facility, the cradle — turning a Bond film into a geography that an entire generation memorized.

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.