| 756 | Abd-al-Rahman is proclaimed emir of Cordoba, Spain. | |
| 1213 | King John submits to the Pope, offering to make England and Ireland papal fiefs. Pope Innocent III lifts the interdict of 1208. | |
| 1602 | English navigator Bartholomew Gosnold discovers Cape Cod. | |
| 1614 | An aristocratic uprising in France ends with the Treaty of St. Menehould. | |
| 1618 | Johannes Kepler discovers his harmonics law. | |
| 1702 | The War of Spanish Succession begins. | |
| 1730 | Following the resignation of Lord Townshend, Robert Walpole becomes the sole minister in the English cabinet. | |
| 1768 | By the Treaty of Versailles, France purchases Corsica from Genoa. | |
| 1795 | Napoleon enters the Lombardian capital of Milan in triumph. | |
| 1820 | The U.S. Congress designates the slave trade a form of piracy. | |
| 1849 | Neapolitan troops enter Palermo, Sicily. | |
| 1862 | The Union ironclad Monitor and the gunboat Galena fire on Confederate troops at the Battle of Drewry’s Bluff, Virginia. | |
| 1864 | At the Battle of New Market, Virginia Military Institute cadets repel a Union attack. | |
| 1886 | Emily Dickinson dies in Amherst, Mass., where she had lived in seclusion for the previous 24 years. | |
| 1916 | U.S. Marines land in Santo Domingo to quell civil disorder. | |
| 1918 | Pfc. Henry Johnson and Pfc. Needham Roberts receive the Croix de Guerre for their services in World War I. They are the first Americans to win France’s highest military medal. | |
| 1930 | Ellen Church becomes the first airline stewardess. | |
| 1942 | The United States begins rationing gasoline. | |
| 1958 | Sputnik III is launched by the Soviet Union. | |
| 1963 | The last Project Mercury space flight, carrying Gordon Cooper, is launched. | |
| 1968 | U.S. Marines relieve army troops in Nhi Ha, South Vietnam after a fourteen-day battle. | |
| 1972 | Gov. George Wallace is shot by Arthur Bremer in Laurel, Maryland. | |
| 1975 | The merchant ship Mayaguez is recaptured from Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge. | |
| 1988 | Soviets forces begin their withdrawal from Afghanistan. |
Kelsey was first introduced to the dangers of mass marketed unsafe pharmaceuticals in 1937, when the FDA enlisted Geiling to solve the mystery of Elixir of Sulfanilamide. Sulfanilamide effectively combated infections, but it came in a large and bitter pill that needed to be taken in large dosages. To make the drug more appealing, especially to children, manufacturers added it to a solvent with artificial raspberry flavor.Kelsey went to medical school and joined the FDA in 1960. Read her story, and how her research on Thalidomide saved American babies, at Smithsonian.
The problem was that the solvent they chose was diethylene glycol—commonly known as antifreeze. Between September and October, the drug killed 107 people.
Geiling and his lab of graduate students, including Kelsey, set out to determine what exactly in the elixir was killing people: the solvent, the flavor or the sulfanilamide. Through a series of animal studies—which at the time were not required by federal law for a drug to go to market—Geiling and his lab were able to determine that it was the diethylene glycol that was the cause of death.
In the medieval world, toads were charter members of the cabal of slimy, devilish creatures imbued with powers and beloved of witches—tormentors of the sinful mind. In one medieval cult sculpture motif, the femme aux serpents, the embodiment of sinful lust, toads sometimes sub in for the snakes that writhe around a woman’s body and occasionally bite her breasts. But toads weren’t as purely evil as snakes; they could be humorous, too. In one German story, a woman loses her vagina and it “is mistaken for a toad as it roams the streets,” writes Blumenfeld-Kosinski. (Eventually, the woman gets her detachable vagina back.) Toads were also thought to have the power of spontaneous generation and resurrection.Even weirder is the association of the toad votives with toad votive, who is more of a legend than a saint. Read how a miracle saved Wilgefortis from an unwanted marriage at Atlas Obscura. That she became a patron saint of the marital bed is just more weirdness.
Removing such a large intact specimen was no easy task, and the fossil broke in half as it was removed from the rock around it. But six years later, we are able to see the nodosaur, and further research may reveal what color it was and even what it ate for its last meal. Read the story, and see lots of pictures at National Geographic.The remarkable fossil is a newfound species (and genus) of nodosaur, a type of ankylosaur often overshadowed by its cereal box–famous cousins in the subgroup Ankylosauridae. Unlike ankylosaurs, nodosaurs had no shin-splitting tail clubs, but they too wielded thorny armor to deter predators. As it lumbered across the landscape between 110 million and 112 million years ago, almost midway through the Cretaceous period, the 18-foot-long, nearly 3,000-pound behemoth was the rhinoceros of its day, a grumpy herbivore that largely kept to itself. And if something did come calling—perhaps the fearsome Acrocanthosaurus—the nodosaur had just the trick: two 20-inch-long spikes jutting out of its shoulders like a misplaced pair of bull’s horns.
