Berserker

gnostek

1 / 19

gnostek

1 / 7

gnostek

1 / 26

gnostek

gnostek

1 / 15

gnostek

1 / 12

gnostek

1 / 8

gnostek

1 / 6

Plot of shear rate as a function of the shear stress. Dilatants in green.

gnostek

1 / 2

Flick ↓ for more

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.

General Kobayakawa Hideaki sat motionless on a hillside for hours, uncommitted, while both sides screamed for him. When he finally defected mid-battle, 30,000 men shifted sides instantly. The winner ruled Japan for 265 years.

In 305 AD, Diocletian became the first Roman emperor to voluntarily abdicate — then rejected offers to return and spent his final years at his Split palace growing cabbages, apparently content.

Abdoujaparov was metres from a Paris stage win, green jersey on his back, when he hit a Coca-Cola advertising barrier on the Champs-Élysées and somersaulted into the tarmac. He still finished — and kept the jersey.

The pronghorn runs at 55 mph with an endurance no living predator can match — because it evolved to outrun the American cheetah, extinct for 10,000 years. It is the fastest land animal on a continent that no longer threatens it.

Jim Jones rehearsed mass suicide with fake poison for years before making it real. On November 18, 1978, 918 died — 276 of them children. A gun was found in Jones's hand.

Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam ran Ethiopia's Red Terror from 1977 to 1978, killing between 30,000 and 750,000 citizens; families of the executed were billed for the bullets used in the executions.

Cornstarch stirred into water becomes a dilatant: press slowly and your finger sinks; punch it and the fluid hardens to concrete. BAE Systems built flexible armour panels from it that stop a knife in 8 milliseconds.

In March 1922, someone slaughtered six members of the Gruber family at Hinterkaifeck farm with a mattock. Neighbors found the livestock fed, the stove warm, and fresh food cooked — the killer had lived there for days.