Aquae Sulis

The Great Bath. The Roman bath itself is substantially intact but everything above the level of the pillar bases is of a later date.

An illustration of Cantor's diagonal argument (in base 2) for the existence of uncountable sets . The sequence at the bottom cannot occur anywhere in the enumeration of sequences above.

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

01Juba's general Saburra lured Curio's 10,000-man army into a valley in 49 BC; almost none escaped; Curio refused evacuation and died there.
02After Thapsus, Juba found no town willing to shelter him; he dined with the Roman commander Petreius, then the two men fought a duel to the death — Juba killed Petreius, then had a slave finish him.
03Years earlier, Caesar had proposed a bill to annex Numidia; Juba's hatred of Caesar was therefore partly personal legislative grudge.

At the sacred spring of Sulis Minerva in Bath, worshippers scratched curses onto lead sheets, rolled them tight, and threw them into the 46°C water. One reads: 'May he who stole my gloves rot before he names them.'

Jane Goodall

Jane Goodall spent months sitting motionless in Tanzania's Gombe forest until a chimpanzee she named David Greybeard allowed her to approach — the first time a wild chimp accepted a human. She was twenty-six, had no university degree, and had been in Africa five months.

Cantor's diagonal argument

Cantor showed in 1891 that the infinity of real numbers cannot be listed — proving it by constructing one number guaranteed to be missing from any list. Infinity has a size hierarchy; most people never heard it.

Dilatant

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.

Juba I of Numidia

Juba I grabbed Caesar's deputy Curio by the beard in single combat metaphor — then destroyed his army of 10,000 in ambush, leaving Curio to die on the field rather than flee. Years later, Juba dueled his last ally to the death.

Mongol invasions of Japan

Kublai Khan's fleets were wrecked twice — in 1274 and again in 1281 — by typhoons striking the same Japanese coastline. The Japanese named the storms kamikaze: divine wind.

Spartacus

A slave who nearly broke Rome crucified 6,000 captured soldiers along 132 miles of the Appian Way — one body per telephone-pole interval. His own body was never found.

Killing of Abdulrahman al-Awlaki

Sixteen-year-old Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen eating dinner in Yemen, was killed by a drone two weeks after his father. The Obama administration later said it was a mistake. His grandfather asked why.

Peter Arnett

Peter Arnett broadcast live from Baghdad's Al-Rashid Hotel as US cruise missiles detonated outside his window — the first real-time war broadcast in history. The Pentagon called it treason; his ratings were enormous.