Siege of Jerusalem (70 CE)

A mangle being used in a domestic science course during World War II

Pyrocumulonimbus cloud formed by the firestorm following the atomic bombing of Hiroshima , 1945. Nuclear winter effects are triggered by at least a hundred such city firestorms.

01The paper coined the term 'nuclear winter'; Sagan published it simultaneously in Science and in Parade magazine, reaching 17 million readers at once.
02Soviet climatologist Vladimir Alexandrov independently produced near-identical temperature-drop models in Moscow the same year.
03The 35°C cooling estimate meant most temperate-zone crops would fail within weeks of a detonation, before fallout reached them.

Siege of Jerusalem (70 CE)

Titus's legions breached Jerusalem in 70 CE and burned the Second Temple — a structure housing the Menorah and the Ark's last relics — despite orders to preserve it. One million people died in the siege.

Mangle (machine)

Two steel rollers squeezed laundry dry — and de-gloved hands at the wrist without stopping. Hospitals tracked the injuries by decade. The machine outlasted every safety campaign aimed at it.

Nuclear winter

Carl Sagan and four co-authors published calculations in 1983 showing that even a 'limited' nuclear exchange of 100 warheads could throw enough soot into the stratosphere to drop global temperatures by 35°C — killing more people than the bombs.

Andres Serrano

Serrano sank a plastic crucifix in a tank of his own urine, photographed it glowing amber, and received a $15,000 National Endowment for the Arts grant. Congress spent months trying to defund the NEA.

Biosphere 2

Eight people sealed inside a $200 million glass terrarium in Arizona lost 16% of their body weight when the crops failed. The oxygen dropped so low they struggled to climb stairs.

Eisriesenwelt

Eisriesenwelt stretches 42 kilometres into the Austrian Alps — the world's largest accessible ice cave — where wind racing through the entrance freezes meltwater into towers and archways that survive year-round despite mild summers above.

Servius Tullius

A slave child slept in the royal hall as a flame played around his head without burning him; interpreted as divine omen, he was raised as a prince and became Rome's sixth king — then was murdered by his daughter's chariot.

Siege of Lamitan

In 2000, Abu Sayyaf barricaded hostages inside Lamitan's Our Lady of the Mount Hospital, Basilan, using patients and captives as shields. Philippine soldiers held the perimeter for days while the gunmen held the wards.

Cargill

The Cargill-MacMillan family, with roughly 14 members among the world's wealthiest individuals, owns the largest private company on Earth — a grain-and-commodity empire moving food across every ocean, entirely off public markets.