| 1264 | King Henry III is captured by his brother-in-law, Simon de Montfort, at the Battle of Lewes. | |
| 1509 | At the Battle of Agnadello, the French defeat the Venitians in Northern Italy. | |
| 1610 | French King Henri IV (Henri de Navarre) is assassinated by François Ravillac, a fanatical monk. | |
| 1796 | English physician Edward Jenner gives the first successful smallpox vaccination. | |
| 1804 | Explorer William Clark sets off from St. Louis, Missouri. | |
| 1853 | Gail Borden applies for a patent for condensed milk. | |
| 1863 | Union General Nathanial Banks heads towards Port Hudson along the Mississippi River. | |
| 1897 | Guglielmo Marconi sends first communication by wireless telegraph. | |
| 1897 | "Stars and Stripes Forever" by John Phillip Sousa is performed for the first time in Philadelphia. | |
| 1935 | A plebiscite in the Philippines ratifies an independence agreement. | |
| 1940 | Holland surrenders to Germany. | |
| 1942 | The British Army, in retreat from Burma, reach India. | |
| 1948 | Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion establishes the State of Israel. | |
| 1961 | A bus carrying black and white civil rights activists is bombed and burned in Alabama. | |
| 1969 | Three companies of the 101st Airborne Division fail to push North Vietnamese forces off Hill 937 in South Vietnam. | |
| 1973 | The U.S. space station Skylab is launched. | |
| 1991 | In South Africa, Winnie Mandela is sentenced to six years in prison for her part in the kidnapping and beating of three black youths and the death of a fourth. |
These bizarre locations may seem like a series of elaborate movie sets, but they are real destinations that you might want to see for yourself.
The ancient woodlands of Kyrgyzstan - and of the four neighboring former
Soviet republics of Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and
Uzbekistan - are home to more than 300 wild fruit and nut trees. One of
these threatened species, Malus sieversii, is one of the key ancestors
of all cultivated apples grown and eaten around the world.
The journal Nature announced a diamond discovery that helped settle a dispute about the Earth’s composition. The dispute concerned whether there is water in the transition zone — the portion of the Earth’s mantle 250 to 410 miles underground. Skeptics have argued that water cannot exist at that depth...At around 310 miles underground, wadsleyite is pressed into ringwoodite. Both substances can hold water. Now, geophysicists working in Brazil have uncovered a diamond containing ringwoodite that came steaming out of a volcano...The paper emphasized the volume of water likely to be present in the transition zone — possibly more than all of the oceans combined. But it’s at least 250 miles underground, and we’ve never drilled deeper than seven.
Plate tectonics recycles Earth's crust by pushing and pulling slabs of oceanic crust into subduction zones, where it sinks into the mantle. This crust, soaked by the ocean, ferries water into the mantle. Many of these slabs end up stuck in the mantle transition zone. "We think that a significant portion of the water in the mantle transition zone is from the emplacement of these slabs," Pearson said. "The transition zone seems to be a graveyard of subducted slabs."
