Lili Elbe

01Gerda Wegener's paintings of 'Lili' were exhibited and celebrated in Paris art circles in the 1920s before Einar's transition.
02Einar underwent at least four surgeries in Dresden and Berlin between 1930 and 1931 — among the earliest such procedures on record.
03The Danish government annulled Einar and Gerda's marriage in 1930, one of the first such legal acts related to gender transition in Europe.

Chapel interior

Anti-immigrant protesters in Calais hold a sign in French reading "Diversity is a code word for white genocide", above a banner calling for remigration (8 November 2015).

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…

Einar Wegener spent years modeling for his wife Gerda's paintings — posed as a woman named Lili — and gradually understood that Lili was not a costume. The story became 'The Danish Girl,' but the real life ended in 1931 in a Dresden hospital, aged forty-eight.

Placenta cake

A segment of new parents encapsulate and swallow their own placenta, citing hormonal benefits; no peer-reviewed evidence supports the claim. One Oregon infant contracted group B streptococcus from a contaminated capsule.

Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository

$15 billion and 25 years tunneled a nuclear tomb 300 meters into Nevada rock — then Congress locked the door forever. 77,000 tons of radioactive waste still has nowhere to go.

Cornelius Vanderbilt

When New York's legislature sided against him in an 1867 rail dispute, Cornelius Vanderbilt cut all rail connections into Manhattan in January — mid-winter — strangling the city's supply lines until Albany capitulated.

Sedlec Ossuary

A woodcarver named František Rint arranged 40,000 human bones into chandeliers, coats of arms, and garlands inside a Czech church — a medieval memento mori that still holds Sunday mass.

Common swift

The common swift lives its entire adult life in the air — sleeping, mating, and moulting on the wing — touching ground only to nest. It may fly two million kilometres in a lifetime without once choosing to land.

White genocide conspiracy theory

A claim of white genocide in South Africa — built on disputed murder statistics from Afrikaner advocacy sites — migrated from Boer forums to Brenton Tarrant's manifesto, cited by name before the Christchurch massacre.

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.

Cassander

Cassander starved Alexander's mother Olympias to death in a sealed tomb, then had her son and Alexander's own son executed — methodically erasing the bloodline. He reportedly never met Alexander's eyes willingly.