| 1520 | Montezuma II is murdered as Spanish conquistadors flee the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan during the night. | |
| 1857 | Charles Dickens reads from A Christmas Carol at St. Martin’s Hall in London–his first public reading. | |
| 1859 | Jean Francois Gravelet aka Emile Blondin, a French daredevil, becomes the first man to walk across Niagara Falls on a tightrope. | |
| 1908 | A mysterious explosion, possibly the result of a meteorite, levels thousands of trees in the Tunguska region of Siberia with a force approaching twenty megatons. | |
| 1934 | Adolf Hitler orders the purge of his own party in the “Night of the Long Knives.” | |
| 1936 | Margaret Mitchell’s novel, Gone With the Wind, is published. | |
| 1948 | John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley demonstrate their invention, the transistor, for the first time. | |
| 1960 | Alfred Hitchcock’s film, Psycho, opens. | |
| 1971 | Three Soviet cosmonauts die when their spacecraft depressurizes during reentry. |
Microscopic analysis of the bone revealed that the markings were created by stone tools, probably a short time after the skulls' owners died. Gresky and her colleagues suggest two possible explanations for the modifications: Ancestor veneration, or "branding" of perceived enemies for display. The grooves may have acted as "a track for a cord" to mount the skull, she said, and the drilled hole on the top of the cranium may have been used to suspend the skull like a mobile.Read more about Göbekli Tepe and the skulls found there at Motherboard.
"Maybe they put feathers on the skull to make it more impressive and then presented it somewhere in the structures," Gresky said. "It's all speculation at the moment, but hopefully we'll find some more fragments or maybe also primary burials, so it will be more clear what happened in these monumental buildings."
Though this is the first evidence for skull cults at Göbekli Tepe etched in bone, the structure is filled with artistic representations of headless people, so it's not too much of a stretch to imagine these folks may have been cranially obsessed.
A wingnut senator has asked that maternity care not be cut from
the Obamacare repeal effort because both men and women are affected by
pregnancy.
Police report
that a 44-year-old disabled LGBT man was attacked by a man shouting
anti-gay slurs at him in the Chelsea neighborhood of New York City
Monday. 
To Foraging Bees, That’s the Question
| 1236 | Ferdinand III of Castile and Leon take Cordoba in Spain. | |
| 1652 | Massachusetts declares itself an independent commonwealth. | |
| 1767 | The British parliament passes the Townshend Revenue Act, levying taxes on America. | |
| 1862 | Union forces, falling back from Richmond, fight at the Battle of Savage’s Station. | |
| 1880 | France annexes Tahiti. | |
| 1888 | Professor Frederick Treves performs the first appendectomy in England. | |
| 1903 | The British government officially protests Belgian atrocities in the Congo. | |
| 1905 | Russian troops intervene as riots erupt in ports all over the country, leaving many ships looted. | |
| 1917 | The Ukraine proclaims independence from Russia. | |
| 1925 | An earthquake ravages Santa Barbara, California. | |
| 1926 | Fascists in Rome add an hour to the work day in an economic efficiency measure. | |
| 1932 | Siam’s army seizes Bangkok and announces an end to the absolute monarchy. | |
| 1938 | Mesa Verde National Park, Colorado, and Olympic National Park, Washington, are founded. | |
| 1950 | President Harry S. Truman authorizes a sea blockade of Korea. | |
| 1951 | The United States invites the Soviet Union to the Korean peace talks on a ship in Wonsan Harbor. | |
| 1955 | The Soviet Union sends tanks to Poznan, Poland, to put down anti-Communist demonstrations. | |
| 1966 | The U.S. Air Force bombs fuel storage facilities near Hanoi, North Vietnam. | |
| 1967 | Israel removes barricades, re-unifying Jerusalem. | |
| 1970 | U.S. troops pull out of Cambodia. | |
| 1982 | Israel invades Lebanon. |
As books became more available to everyday people, they gathered to share them with each other, and even to discuss them, in bars and public houses as well as libraries. Of course, when people get together to talk, the subject cannot be limited to one subject, and a social gathering needs refreshments, right? Read about those early, rowdy book clubs at Atlas Obscura.These libraries weren’t just places to find books, but social institutions as well. One famous library also had a billiard room, a public exhibition room, and a music library. “They were not the hushed environments that we now associated with libraries, but, at their best, elegant spaces full of people to converse with,” Williams writes. Libraries even had a touch of controversy, as they gave people of different social classes access to books and offered women a place to congregate outside the home.
First, the hot dogs would be cooked on a gas grill until well browned.If you ask my opinion, any hot dog is great when it's cooked on a grill outdoors in summertime, served with mustard and some potato salad (or even just chips) while you eat outside. I guess that's why they didn't ask me to be a judge. Read the results of the taste-test here.
Next, each would be tasted plain to evaluate the intrinsic qualities of the hot dog: seasoning, beefiness, snap, texture.
Last, each would be eaten in a bun with the judge’s preordained condiments — the same for each dog, to keep the flavor profile consistent.
This important final step would allow us to assess the melding of meat and bread, sweetness and spice, salt and juice that makes up a perfect hot dog. The bun should hug the hot dog closely; there should be enough juice in the hot dog to keep the whole package together; condiments should complement the hot dog, not overwhelm it.
8. The so-called "banana tree" is not a tree at all. In fact, it is the world's largest herb.That's just a small taste of the bananas …I mean, banana facts. Check out all 29 banana facts in a list that's just plain bananas at Buzzfeed.
9. Walmart sells more bananas than any other item.
10. Banana fibers can be used to purify water.
Individuals may have had some success defending themselves, but official hunters had none. In February 1765, the d’Ennevals, a father-son hunter duo from Normandy, announced they would travel to Gévaudan to eliminate the beast. Jean-Charles, the father, boasted he’d already killed 1,200 wolves, relevant information assuming the predator was, in fact, a wolf. But no one was sure of that. “It is much bigger than a wolf,” wrote Lafont in an early report. “It has a snout somewhat like a calf’s and very long hair, which would seem to indicate a hyena.”While the animal could have been a lion or other escaped exotic creature, many modern-day researchers believe the Beast of Gévaudan was an particularly large wolf, or wolves. After the newspaper accounts died down, the beast attacks continued until 1767, although normal wolf encounters remained. Read the saga of Beast of Gévaudan at Smithsonian.
Duhamel described the animal as even more fantastical. In his words, it had a “breast as wide as a horse,” “a body as long as a leopard’s,” and fur that’s that was “red with a black stripe.” Duhamel concluded, “You will undoubtedly think, like I do, that this is a monster [hybrid], the father of which is a lion. What its mother was remains to be seen.”
Other witnesses claimed the beast had supernatural abilities. “It could walk on its hind feet and its hide could repel bullets and it had fire in its eyes and it came back from the dead more than once and had amazing leaping ability,” Smith says.
The earlier ancestors of today’s domestic cats spread from southwest Asia and into Europe as early as 4400 B.C. The cats likely started hanging around farming communities in the Fertile Crescent about 8,000 years ago, where they settled into a mutually beneficial relationship as humans’ rodent patrol.
Mice and rats were attracted to crops and other agricultural byproducts being produced by human civilizations. Cats likely followed the rodent populations and, in turn, frequently approached the human settlements.
“This is probably how the first encounter between humans and cats occurred,” says study coauthor Claudio Ottoni of the University of Leuven. “It’s not that humans took some cats and put them inside cages,” he says. Instead, people more or less allowed cats to domesticate themselves.
A second lineage, consisting of African cats that dominated Egypt, spread into the Mediterranean and most of the Old World beginning around 1500 B.C. This Egyptian cat probably had behaviors that made it attractive to humans, such as sociability and tameness.
The results suggest that prehistoric human populations probably began carrying their cats along ancient land and sea trade routes to control rodents.
