Things Worth Noting
Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell, a British astrophysicist, made history in 1967 as a graduate student when she discovered pulsars—rapidly rotating neutron stars that emit precise radio wave beams, confirming long-theorized stellar remnants and opening new frontiers in testing general relativity and detecting gravitational waves. Despite her pivotal role in spotting and verifying these signals, the […]
Project West Ford, a bold U.S. military experiment during the Cold War, aimed to create an artificial orbital ring by launching nearly 480 million tiny copper needles into medium Earth orbit to serve as passive reflectors for secure transatlantic radio communications when undersea cables or the natural ionosphere might fail. Developed by MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory […]
The Tuskegee Syphilis Study, also known as the Tuskegee Experiment, remains one of the most egregious ethical failures in U.S. medical history. From 1932 to 1972, the Public Health Service recruited 600 African American men in Macon County, Alabama, promising free healthcare for “bad blood” while deliberately withholding treatment—even after penicillin became widely available—to observe […]
Mary Bateman, known as the Yorkshire Witch, was a shrewd early 19th-century con artist from northern England who masterfully exploited superstition and vulnerability for profit. Born in 1768, she evolved from petty thefts in her youth to elaborate frauds in Leeds, posing as a mystic under aliases to sell fake prophecies, charms, and remedies while […]
The 1956 film The Conqueror, starring John Wayne as Genghis Khan and Susan Hayward as his love interest, gained notoriety for a tragic aftermath: an unusually high cancer incidence among its 220 cast and crew members, with 91 diagnosed and 46 fatalities by 1981, including Wayne and Hayward. Filmed in Snow Canyon, Utah, near the […]
Miter gates, invented by Leonardo da Vinci in 1497, are angled lock gates that revolutionized canal locks and hydraulic engineering. They form a V-shape when closed, using water pressure for a tight, self-sealing fit that requires little energy to operate. Small bottom flaps allow controlled water flow to equalize levels, making boat elevation safe and […]
The Moscow Signal was low-intensity microwave radiation beamed by the Soviets at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow from 1953 to 1976. Detected at very low power levels (around 5 microwatts per square centimeter), it sparked Cold War fears of espionage—likely to activate hidden listening bugs—or even mind control and behavioral disruption through non-thermal effects. In […]
De Beers’ 1947 “A Diamond is Forever” campaign, created with ad agency N.W. Ayer, invented the modern diamond engagement ring tradition. Before this, diamond rings weren’t a common symbol of love. Facing a supply glut after the Great Depression, De Beers—founded by Cecil Rhodes and later controlled by the Oppenheimer family—hoarded diamonds to create artificial […]
Georgia Tann (1891–1950) ran a notorious black-market baby business through the Tennessee Children’s Home Society in Memphis, stealing and selling over 5,000 children from poor families to wealthy clients across the U.S. from 1924 to 1950. Operating an unlicensed adoption agency, she used coercion, outright kidnapping, falsified records, and sealed birth certificates to hide her […]
December 21 marks the winter solstice in the Northern Hemisphere, the shortest day and longest night of the year, signaling the start of astronomical winter as days begin to lengthen. Key historical events include the Pilgrims landing at Plymouth Rock in 1620, James Naismith inventing basketball in 1891, the first crossword puzzle published in 1913, […]