Dolly Parton

gnostek

1 / 15

gnostek

1 / 2

gnostek

1 / 6

Fengdu Ghost City

gnostek

1 / 38

gnostek

1 / 10

gnostek

1 / 3

gnostek

1 / 23

gnostek

1 / 3

Side and top view of A-, B-, and Z-DNA conformations.

gnostek

1 / 21

Flick ↓ for more

Dolly Parton quietly donated $1 million to Vanderbilt University's COVID research — helping fund the Moderna vaccine — then turned down a Tennessee statue in her own honor because she felt she hadn't "earned that right yet."

NotPetya wore a ransomware mask but had no decryption key — ever. It cost Maersk $300 million, wiped Merck's drug production, and erased FedEx's European arm in hours.

In 1971, a Soviet drilling rig collapsed into a natural gas pocket in Turkmenistan's Karakum Desert. Engineers lit it to burn off the gas. It has not gone out in over 50 years.

Taken from Albania as a child hostage, raised as an Ottoman janissary, Skanderbeg defected at 38 with three hundred men and held off the full Ottoman army 25 times over 25 years.

Union engineers dug 511 feet of tunnel, packed it with 8,000 pounds of powder, and blew a perfect 170-foot crater in Confederate lines — then sent infantry into the hole, where they were slaughtered like livestock in a pit.

One descent on the Col de Portet d'Aspet killed Casartelli and a stone memorial marks the exact concrete block that ended him. Riders cross it every Tour, sometimes placing a hand on the monument.

Khotan's founding myth says a Chinese princess hid silkworm eggs in her elaborate headdress to smuggle them past border guards — because she refused to live without silk in a land that had none.

In 1952, Rosalind Franklin produced Photo 51 — the clearest X-ray of DNA's helix ever taken; her colleague Maurice Wilkins showed it to James Watson without her knowledge, and Watson and Crick won the 1962 Nobel.

D. B. Cooper hijacked Northwest Orient Flight 305 on November 24, 1971, demanded $200,000 and four parachutes, then jumped into a Pacific Northwest storm at night. Only $5,800 of the ransom ever surfaced — buried in a riverbank.