01Nero had his mother Agrippina stabbed after a rigged collapsing boat failed to drown her.
02He married the castrated freedman Sporus in a formal wedding ceremony attended by the court.
03Poppaea's body was embalmed with spices rather than cremated — an un-Roman royal honor.
gnostek
01Spencer's DNA conviction in 1994 was the first execution in U.S. history based solely on genetic evidence.
02His DNA simultaneously exonerated David Vasquez, who had falsely confessed and served five years for one murder.
03Spencer killed four women in the Richmond area between 1987 and 1988; he was called 'The Southside Strangler.'
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01Soldiers stripped Landauer, beat him with rifle butts, then shot him in the Stadelheim prison yard.
02Landauer had served as Commissioner of Enlightenment in the short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic for just weeks.
03His friend Martin Buber collected and published his unfinished writings as an act of mourning.
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01At 18 days, the duck embryo has cartilage, a beak, and partially formed wings visible when cracked open.
02Balut is sold from street carts in Manila after dark, marketed as an aphrodisiac for around 15–20 Philippine pesos.
03Vietnamese balut (hot vit lon) is typically incubated longer — up to 21 days — producing a more developed fetus.
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01Dworkin told the Meese Commission in 1986 that pornography was not speech but the act of violation itself.
02Her 1974 book 'Woman Hating' argued fairy tales functioned as binding instructions for female self-destruction.
03She co-authored an ordinance with Catharine MacKinnon allowing women to sue pornographers for civil rights damages; it was vetoed by Minneapolis's mayor twice.
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01Japanese troops cycled 700 miles down the Malay Peninsula in 70 days — faster than British planners thought possible.
02Churchill called the fall of Singapore on February 15, 1942 'the worst disaster and largest capitulation in British history.'
0380,000 British, Indian, and Australian troops surrendered to a Japanese force of roughly 30,000.
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01Smith was 17 when he wrote Manic Miner; it sold over 30,000 copies on the ZX Spectrum.
02He disappeared from the UK games industry entirely in the mid-1980s, rumored to be living in a commune.
03He resurfaced at the 2002 Classic Gaming Expo, his first confirmed public appearance in roughly 15 years.
gnostek1 / 9Temperature map of the cosmic microwave background measured by the Planck spacecraft
01The pigeons roosting inside the horn antenna were trapped and relocated twice before the engineers accepted the hiss was cosmic.
02Penzias and Wilson won the 1978 Nobel Prize in Physics — accidentally, while testing satellite communication equipment.
03Princeton cosmologist Robert Dicke had been building a detector specifically to find this radiation; Penzias called him first, and Dicke told his team: 'We've been scooped.'
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01Kuwait's slant-drilling into the Rumaila field, shared with Iraq, gave Saddam his stated casus belli.
02100,000 Iraqi troops and 700 tanks crossed the border in the pre-dawn hours of August 2, 1990.
03US Ambassador April Glaspie told Saddam days before that America had 'no opinion' on Arab border disputes.