| 904 | Arabs capture Thessalonica. | |
| 1703 | English novelist Daniel Defoe is made to stand in the pillory as punishment for offending the government and church with his satire The Shortest Way With Dissenters. | |
| 1760 | Ferdinand, Duke of Brunswick, drives the French army back to the Rhine River. | |
| 1790 | The U.S. Patent Office opens. | |
| 1882 | Belle and Sam Starr are charged with horse stealing in the Indian territory. | |
| 1875 | Former president Andrew Johnson dies at the age of 66. | |
| 1891 | Great Britain declares territories in Southern Africa up to the Congo to be within its sphere of influence. | |
| 1904 | The Trans-Siberian railroad connecting the Ural mountains with Russia’s Pacific coast, is completed. | |
| 1917 | The third Battle of Ypres commences as the British attack the German lines. | |
| 1932 | Adolf Hitler‘s Nationalist Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nazis) doubles its strength in legislative elections. | |
| 1944 | The Soviet army takes Kovno, the capital of Lithuania. | |
| 1962 | Federation of Malaysia formally proposed. | |
| 1971 | Apollo 15 astronauts take a drive on the moon in their land rover. | |
| 1987 | An F4 tornado in Edmonton, Alberta kills 27 and causes $330 million in damages; the day is remembered as “Black Friday.” | |
| 1988 | Bridge collapse at Sultan Abdul Halim ferry terminal in Butterworth, Malaysia, kills 32 and injures more than 1,600. | |
| 1990 | Bosnia-Herzegovina declares independence from Yugoslavia. | |
| 1991 | The US and the USSR sign a long-range nuclear weapons reduction pact. | |
| 1999 | NASA purposely crashes its Discovery Program’s Lunar Prospector into the moon, ending the agency’s mission to detect frozen water on Earth’s moon. | |
| 2006 | Fidel Castro temporarily hands over power to his brother Raul Castro. | |
| 2007 | The British Army’s longest continual operation, Operation Banner (1969-2007), ends as British troops withdraw from Northern Ireland. |
Thomas
Morris is working on a book about the history of heart surgery, and
keeps a blog of the most curious and hard-to-believe stories in medical
literature that he has encountered in his research (motto: Making you
grateful for modern medicine). It is not a site for the squeamish, but
it doesn't rely on photographs. A gruesome case from 1874 Virginia may
make you cringe, yet it has a happy ending. Dr. A.W. Fontaine wrote of
the case,J.T., a Welsh quarryman, aged about twenty-five years, of sound constitution, but somewhat “addicted to spirits,” whilst in a state of intoxication, fell from a four-horse slate wagon, in rapid motion, and loaded with five or six other persons. The vehicle thus loaded, ran over him and across the middle of his body; it broke the neck off a large glass bottle, the stump of which, it seems, penetrated his abdomen, emptying his bowels, which were crushed into the sand by the rolling wheels.The good news was that the intestines that spilled out were bruised but not cut, and the puncture wound in his abdomen was small. The bad news was that there was plenty of broken glass and dirt on the entrails that needed to be removed before they were stuffed back in. Surprisingly to everyone involved, the patient survived. Read Dr. Fontaine's account of the procedure at Thomas Morris.
In Short Creek, just two surnames dominate the local records – Jessop and Barlow. According to local historian Benjamin Bistline, who spoke to news agency Reuters back in 2007, 75 to 80% of people in Short Creek are blood relatives of the community’s founding patriarchs, Joseph Jessop and John Barlow.Read how the isolation of a community can lead to an explosion of genetic disorders in an article at BBC Future.
This is all very well, but we now know that most people are walking around with at least one lethal recessive mutation (one that would kill us before we reach reproductive age) in their genome, around the same number as in fruit flies. Humans haven’t gone extinct because, being recessive, they’re only unmasked if we have children with someone who also just so happens to carry a copy of that exact same mutation too.
Addressing a report showing gun thefts are up in the deep south, an NRA
spokesperson said any attempt to criminalize gun owners for not locking
up their weapons would be the same as “shaming rape survivors.” 
Dog
owners hope for the best when they hire a sitter, so if the dog seems
to genuinely like their sitter that's usually a good sign since dogs
don't hide their feelings about humans.But if your dog straight
up loves hanging out with their sitter then you might want to watch the
two of them in action, because there's probably something adorable going
on there.
Look
at this goat. Just look at it! Redditor arnathor met this goat and had
to take a picture to share. According to commenters, the goat has the
hair of Gandalf or Tom Petty (personally, I thought of Leon Russell),
the smirk of McKayla Maroney or Natalie Dormer, and the general look of Owen Wilson, Jeff Bridges, or Ron Perlman. I can't see Ron Perlman, unless you are thinking of his character in Beauty and the Beast, but he is a ridiculously photogenic goat.
| 1619 | The House of Burgesses convenes for the first time at Jamestown, Va. | |
| 1787 | The French parliament refuses to approve a more equitable land tax. | |
| 1799 | The French garrison at Mantua, Italy, surrenders to the Austrians. | |
| 1864 | In an effort to penetrate the Confederate lines around Petersburg, Va. Union troops explode a mine underneath the Confederate trenches but fail to break through. The ensuing action is known as the Battle of the Crater. | |
| 1919 | Federal troops are called out to put down Chicago race riots. | |
| 1938 | George Eastman demonstrates his color motion picture process. | |
| 1940 | A bombing lull ends the first phase of the Battle of Britain. | |
| 1960 | Over 60,000 Buddhists march in protest against the Diem government in South Vietnam. | |
| 1965 | President Lyndon Johnson signs the Medicare Bill into law. | |
| 1967 | General William Westmoreland claims that he is winning the war in Vietnam, but needs more men. | |
| 1975 | Teamster leader Jimmy Hoffa disappears, last seen coming out of a restaurant in Bloomingfield Hills, Michigan. | |
| 1988 | King Hussein dissolves Jordan’s Parliament, surrenders Jordan’s claims to the West Bank to the Palestinian Liberation Organization. | |
| 1990 | Baseball Commissioner Fay Vincent forces George Steinbrenner to resign as principal partner of the New York Yankees. | |
| 2003 | The last of the uniquely shaped “old style” Volkswagen Beetles rolls off the assembly line in Mexico. | |
| 2012 | Blackout in India as power grid failure leaves 300 million+ without power. |
The fast-food industry may not be heralded for Michelin-rated
fare, but chains can earn loyalty through the customer service they
offer, ensuring consumers keep coming back for their burgers, tacos, and
pizzas.
| 1588 | The Spanish Armada is sighted off the coast of England. | |
| 1602 | The Duke of Biron is executed in Paris for conspiring with Spain and Savoy against King Henry IV of France. | |
| 1603 | Bartholomew Gilbert is killed in Virginia by Indians, during a search for the missing Roanoke colonists. | |
| 1693 | The Army of the Grand Alliance is destroyed by the French at the Battle of Neerwinden. | |
| 1830 | Liberals led by the Marquis de Lafayette seize Paris in opposition to the king’s restrictions on citizens’ rights. | |
| 1848 | A rebellion against British rule is put down in Tipperary, Ireland. | |
| 1858 | Japan signs a treaty of commerce and friendship with the United States. | |
| 1862 | Confederates are routed by Union guerrillas at Moore’s Mill, Missouri. | |
| 1875 | Peasants in Bosnia and Herzegovina rebel against the Ottoman army. | |
| 1915 | U.S. Marines land at Port-au-Prince to protect American interests in Haiti. | |
| 1921 | Adolf Hitler becomes the president of the Nationalist Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nazis). | |
| 1945 | After delivering parts of the first atomic bomb to the island of Tinian, the U.S.S. Indianapolis is sunk by a Japanese submarine. The survivors are adrift for two days before help arrives. | |
| 1981 | Prince Charles marries Lady Diana. | |
| 1990 | The Boston Red Sox hit 12 doubles in a game, setting a major league record. | |
| 1996 | A US federal court strikes down the child protection portion of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, calling it too broad. | |
| 2005 | Astronomers announce the discovery of dwarf planet Eris, leading the International Astronomic Union to clarify the definition of a planet. |
However, the path from "Eureka!" to iconic toy is a story full of ups and downs. Read that story at Thrillist.He graduated with degrees in mechanical and nuclear engineering from Tuskegee University, joined the Air Force as the acting chief of the Space Nuclear Power Safety Section at the Air Force Weapons Laboratory, then moved to NASA's Jet Propulsion lab in 1979 where he was working as a systems engineer for the Galileo mission to Jupiter. It was then, in 1982, already having several patents to his name, that he had his Eureka moment.
One of his pet projects was an environmentally friendly heat pump that used water instead of Freon. One day, tinkering as he often did, Johnson hooked up a nozzle to the bathroom faucet. When he turned on the water, it sprayed clear across the room. "The stream of water was so powerful that it set up air currents in the bathroom," he told CNBC. "I thought to myself, 'This would make a neat water gun.'" It doesn't take a rocket scientist to build a toy, but it certainly doesn't hurt, either.
Hospital viewing windows became a popular spot for not just relatives, but anyone who wanted to take a look. Today, the pendulum has moved the other way. Babies are normally kept in the mother's room, where family visits take place, and they are sent home the next day (or even the same day). But the public still wants to see new babies through a window. Read about the rise and fall of the nursery viewing window at Smithsonian.The stated purpose for the viewing window was twofold: first, the window allows relatives to “see the infants,” and second, the window serves as a barrier to prevent contact between relatives and the newborns they have come to see. But while hospitals justified the construction of these windows as sanitary barriers between newborns and the general hospital community, it’s unlikely that infection prevention was a primary motivator. If windows served mainly as antibacterial barriers, the hospitals would have had no reason to install them in the first place; standard windowless walls surrounding nurseries would have been less trouble to build, and would have eliminated the potential for compromising the barrier between the nursery and the corridor via cracks between the window and the wall. Thus, the ubiquitous nursery window served a primarily social function.
