Gabriel's horn

3D illustration of Gabriel's horn

Skydiver Bill Booth 's second rule states that "The safer skydiving gear becomes, the more chances skydivers will take, in order to keep the fatality rate constant."

01Parkhurst voted in the 1868 U.S. presidential election in Santa Cruz County, the first known trans man to do so in America.
02Described by contemporaries as among the finest stagecoach drivers on the California-Oregon run, handling six-horse teams in mountain snow.
03At death in 1879, a coroner's examination revealed Parkhurst's birth sex — news that reached newspapers across the country within days.

Gabriel's Horn — the surface generated by rotating y=1/x — holds exactly π cubic units of paint, yet its inner wall has infinite area. Pour the paint in; it fills. Try to coat the walls; you never finish.

MV SuperFerry 14

A single bomb hidden in a SuperFerry's cargo hold on August 2, 2004 killed 116 people in Manila Bay — the deadliest peacetime maritime attack in recorded history. Abu Sayyaf planted it for $400.

Risk compensation

After seatbelt laws passed, Sam Peltzman measured the data: drivers sped up and followed closer, killing roughly the same number of car occupants — but significantly more pedestrians and cyclists.

Majungasaurus

Majungasaurus ate its own kind — we know because its teeth left marks on its own species' bones. A cannibal confirmed not by behavior but by the wound it signed.

Garry Turner

Garry Turner stretched his stomach skin 15.8 cm — nearly six inches — away from his body in a tent-like pull, caused by Ehlers-Danlos syndrome dissolving the collagen that holds skin down.

Charley Parkhurst

Charley Parkhurst drove stagecoaches through the Sierra Nevada for decades — one-eyed, weathered, legendarily skilled — and cast a ballot in California in 1868, fifty-two years before women were legally permitted to vote there.

Dnepropetrovsk maniacs

In 2007, two teenagers in Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine filmed themselves beating a homeless man to death with hammers and a pipe over several minutes. The video, called '3 Guys 1 Hammer,' leaked online and became one of the most viewed snuff films in history.

Large Hadron Collider

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.

Pebble Island raid

45 SAS men landed on Pebble Island in the Falklands dark, placed demolition charges on eleven Argentine aircraft, and were back at sea in 30 minutes — before the garrison knew they'd arrived.