| 28 BC | The Temple of Apollo is dedicated on the Palatine Hill in Rome. | |
| 1470 | Henry VI of England is restored to the throne. | |
| 1708 |  |
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| 1760 | Austrian and Russian troops enter Berlin and begin burning structures and looting. | |
| 1779 | The Luddite riots begin in Manchester, England in reaction to machinery for spinning cotton being installed. | |
| 1781 | Americans begin shelling the British surrounded at Yorktown. | |
| 1863 | Confederate cavalry raiders return to Chattanooga after attacking Union General William Rosecrans‘ supply and communication lines all around east Tennessee. | |
| 1888 | The Washington Monument, designed by Robert Mills, opens to the public. | |
| 1914 | The Germans take Antwerp, Belgium, after 12-day siege. | |
| 1934 | In Marseilles, a Macedonian revolutionary associated with Croat terrorists in Hungary assassinates King Alexander of Yugoslavia and French Foreign Minister Louis Barthou. The two had been on a tour of European capitals in quest of an alliance against Nazi Germany. The assassinations bring the threat of war between Yugoslavia and Hungary, but confrontation is prevented by the League of Nations. | |
| 1941 | President Franklin D. Roosevelt requests congressional approval for arming U.S. merchant ships. | |
| 1950 | U.N. forces, led by the First Cavalry Division, cross the 38th parallel in South Korea and begin attacking northward towards the North Korean capital of Pyongyang. | |
| 1983 | The president of South Korea, Doo Hwan Chun, with his cabinet and other top officials are scheduled to lay a wreath on a monument in Rangoon, Burma, when a bomb explodes. Hwan had not yet arrived and so escaped injury, but 17 Koreans–including the deputy prime minister and two other cabinet members–and two Burmese are killed. North Korea is blamed. | |
| 1999 | Last flight of the Lockheed SR-71 “Blackbird” stealth reconnaissance aircraft takes place. | |
| 2006 | North Korea reportedly tests its first nuclear device. |
The
shortest regularly-scheduled commercial flight in the world is operated
by Scottish airline Loganair. It runs between the islands of Westray
and Papa Westray in the Orkney Islands. The entire flight takes 80
seconds to cross less than two miles. This video is three times as long
as the flight. Passengers don't even have time to get scared. But then
again, the plane doesn't climb all that high and it doesn't go very
fast, either, for an airline.
The
area around Lake Minnewanka in Alberta has been settled continuously
for at least 13,000 years. One of those settlements was Minnewanka
Landing, which thrived in the summer with tourists and campers. There
were hotels, restaurants, tour guides, and boating. But it's all gone
now. Well, the people are all gone. The town itself survives at
the bottom of Lake Minnewanka. Dams were built there three times: in
1895, 1912, and 1941. It was the 1941 dam that finally flooded
Minnewanka Landing.Today the reservoir hides a secret that many people will never get the chance to experience—unless they're scuba divers, that is. Thanks to Lake Minnewanka’s glacier-fed, ice-cold waters, many structures of the former resort town still remain intact, including house and hotel foundations, wharves, an oven, a chimney, a cellar, bridge pilings and sidewalks. (A full list of sites is available here.) Even the footings from the town’s original dam, built by the federal government in 1895, along with the footings from the dam built in 1912, remain visible.Even if you're not a scuba diver, you can take a tour of Minnewanka Landing in a video at Smithsonian.
As the events unfolded, suspects were tortured before being killed, and their confessions implicated others, and scandals among the nobility were uncovered. There was definitely some rotten things going on underneath all that wealth and power. You can read an account of the Affair of the Poisons at Atlas Obscura.The “Affair of the Poisons,” as it came to be known, is a misleading name for one of the largest witch trials in modern history. Over just five years, from 1677 to 1682, 319 subpoenas were issued, 194 individuals arrested, and 36 executed (with perhaps dozens more dead from suicide, or in prison or exile). In total, it claimed between two and three times as many lives as the Salem witch trials across the Atlantic, 10 years later. It began with what appeared to be an isolated case, but then door after door after door opened, eventually implicating rich and poor alike.
In 19th-century Britain, human skeletons were often taken from
criminals, who were either executed or died in prison. If you purchased a
skeleton, it could have been the leftovers of a medical school
dissection, and might originally have belonged to a petty thief, a
murderer, or someone who was mentally deranged. In the mid-19th century William Hicks, the mayor of Bodmin, in Cornwall, hosted a dinner party. As the story goes, rather than entertaining his guests with music or poetry, he chose to prank his guests with a fake seance. He brought in the skeletal remains of a purported witch and encouraged his guests to ask it yes or no questions. In response, the spirit of the witch would supposedly rap its responses with the extra bones placed in front of the witch’s remains. What he didn’t tell them was that the person doing knocking was a friend who was hidden nearby.The bones were traced back to Joan Wytte, who was called the "Fighting Fairy Woman" because she was short and had a bad temper. Did that bad temper carry on after death? Read about Joan Wytte and the eventual disposition of her remains at Strange Remains
Everything that night was going to plan until the host and party goers encountered actual paranormal activity. According to Cecil Williamson, the founder of The Museum of Witchcraft, the bones used for the rapping were “seized by the poltergeist force on that fateful night of the spoof seance organized by William Hicks and with which the assembled party guests were beaten about the head and shoulders.”
The way that you walk is a very natural one. You put the ball of the foot onto the ground first. …the reason for this is pretty simple because… you sense your way, you feel your way. So like when I walk through grass I do it the same when I’m barefoot, if there’s a wasp or a slug or whatever, you sense it before your whole body weight is on falling onto it, as opposed to walking heel first.
No, we shouldn't assume anything is common about a culture from a sample size of one. However, the new genome shows that modern humans carry a few more Neanderthal genes than we previously thought, and that Homo sapiens and Neanderthals crossbred as far back as 100,000 years ago. Read more about Vindija 33.19 and the new findings at Gizmodo.Based on previous archaeological and genetic evidence, archaeologists and anthropologists suspected that Neanderthals were thinly dispersed across Europe and Asia. The lack of genetic diversity (low heterozygosity) in the Vindija 33.19 specimen affirms these earlier findings, showing that Neanderthals “lived in small and isolated populations” and “with an effective population size of around 3,000 individuals,” the researchers write in their study.
The earlier genomic analysis of the female Altai Neanderthal showed that her parents were half-siblings, which got scientists thinking that Neanderthals made it a habit of breeding with immediate family members. But the Vindija 33.19 genome is different; her parents were not as closely related, so we can no longer say that extreme inbreeding is a common fixture of the Neanderthals. That said, the Croatian Neanderthal shared a maternal ancestor with three other individuals found in the Vindija Cave (whose genomes aren’t nearly as complete).
