Gallic Wars

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The Anatomical Zodiac Man

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Spanish bullfight in Las Ventas in Madrid

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Caesar's eight-year campaign through Gaul killed an estimated one million people and enslaved another million — roughly one in five Gauls — and he wrote about it in third person as if describing someone else's war.

Ronald Bracewell proposed in 1960 that the cheapest way to make contact is to park a probe in a target star's solar system and wait. Something may already be parked in ours.

In 1951, a surgeon at Johns Hopkins took a biopsy from Henrietta Lacks's cervix without telling her; her cells, labeled HeLa, became the first immortal human cell line, now totaling over 20 metric tons grown worldwide.

The LHC accelerates protons to 99.9999991% of light speed inside a 27 km ring cooled to −271°C — colder than deep space — to smash them into the Higgs boson's first confirmed appearance.

Cyril Radcliffe had never set foot in India when he drew the border dividing 14 million people in five weeks. He left before the violence began and never returned — reportedly burning his papers.

Painted between 1412 and 1416 for the Duke of Berry, the February calendar page of the Très Riches Heures shows a peasant warming bare legs by a fire — the oldest surviving painted snow scene, accurate enough that meteorologists have studied it.

Minoan frescoes show unarmed athletes vaulting over charging bulls in rituals that predate the Spanish corrida by 3,000 years. The matador's suit of lights is Bronze Age costume with a modern tailor.

Mirin Dajo let an assistant plunge a steel rapier clean through his torso in front of audiences — organs intact, no anesthetic. He died swallowing a steel needle, not a blade.

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.