Horde of Rabbits

After the oxygen tank explosion on Apollo 13, the three astronauts had to shelter in the lunar module—designed for two people for two days. The carbon dioxide was building up to lethal levels. The command module had spare filters, but they were square. The lunar module's sockets were round. Engineers on Earth had to figure out how to fit a square peg in a round hole using only materials on the spa...

In 1856, during the Easter holidays from London's Royal College of Chemistry, 18-year-old William Henry Perkin was attempting to synthesise quinine — the antimalarial drug derived from cinchona tree bark — from coal tar. He failed. But when he cleaned out his flask with alcohol, a vivid purple solution formed. Perkin recognised something extraordinary. He sent a sample to a dyer in Perth, who conf...

In 1906, a scholar discovered that a 13th-century prayer book in a Constantinople monastery had been made by scraping off and overwriting a much older text — a 10th-century copy of works by Archimedes. The palimpsest contained seven treatises, including "The Method of Mechanical Theorems," which was otherwise completely lost. In this work, Archimedes described techniques remarkably similar to inte...

In 1897, a German Jewish doctor named Magnus Hirschfeld founded the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee — the world's first organisation dedicated to LGBTQ+ rights. By 1919, he had opened the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft in Berlin: a clinic, research centre, archive, and refuge that housed the world's most extensive collection of material on human sexuality. It offered gender-affirming care decad...

The Weapon Salve (or Powder of Sympathy) was a widespread medical practice from the 16th to 18th centuries. Instead of treating a wound directly, physicians would apply a special ointment or powder to the weapon that caused the injury—the sword, knife, or arrow. The treatment was based on sympathetic magic: the belief that things once connected remain connected. Remarkably, patients often did reco...

After WWI, Australian veterans were given farmland in Western Australia. Then 20,000 emus migrated through, destroying crops. The government sent soldiers with machine guns to kill the emus. The emus proved surprisingly difficult to kill—they scattered when attacked, could run at 30 mph, and seemed to have tactical awareness. After weeks of fighting and thousands of rounds of ammunition, the milit...

In 1928, Radclyffe Hall published The Well of Loneliness, a novel about a lesbian woman. It was not explicit — the most controversial line was 'and that night, they were not divided.' The Sunday Express demanded it be banned: 'I would rather give a healthy boy or a healthy girl a phial of prussic acid than this novel.' The Home Secretary agreed. The book was prosecuted for obscenity. At the trial,...

Rigoberta Menchú was born in 1959 in Laj Chimel, a remote highland village in Guatemala's Quiché department. She was K'iche' Maya, one of the Indigenous peoples who make up 60 per cent of Guatemala's population but have been systematically dispossessed and persecuted since the Spanish conquest. In 1980, her father Vicente was killed when the Guatemalan army stormed the Spanish Embassy in Guatemala...

The idea of "nothing" as a number seems obvious today, but it took millennia to develop. While the Babylonians and Maya used zero as a placeholder, it was Indian mathematician Brahmagupta who first treated zero as a number in its own right around 628 CE, defining rules for arithmetic with zero. The concept traveled to the Islamic world via al-Khwarizmi and eventually to Europe through Fibonacci in...

On 28 June 1969, police raided the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village, New York — a routine harassment of queer people that happened to go spectacularly wrong. Marsha P. Johnson, a Black transgender woman and street activist, was among those who fought back. Eyewitnesses place her at the front of the resistance, throwing a shot glass at a mirror in defiance — the 'shot glass heard round the world....

Leprosy had tormented humanity for millennia. The only treatment — chaulmoogra oil — was so thick and bitter that patients vomited it up, and injecting it caused painful pustules. Alice Ball, the first woman and first Black American to earn a chemistry master's degree from the University of Hawaii, was approached in 1915 by Dr Harry Hollmann of the Leprosy Investigation Station. She was 23. Within...

On 18 April 1521, Martin Luther stood before Emperor Charles V at the Diet of Worms and refused to take back a single word of his writings. The Church had already excommunicated him. The Emperor could declare him an outlaw — which would mean anyone could kill him without legal consequence. Luther had been warned. He came anyway. When pressed for a simple yes-or-no answer, he delivered one of the m...

Shen Kuo had been one of the most powerful officials in the Northern Song Dynasty — diplomat, astronomer, mathematician, engineer, geologist, and military strategist. In 1081, he was blamed for a military defeat and stripped of his position. Exiled to his private estate near Zhenjiang, he had nothing but his brush and ink slab. He wrote down everything. The result was the Dream Pool Essays (Meng X...

Margaret Hamilton led the team at MIT that wrote the onboard flight software for NASA's Apollo program. During the Apollo 11 lunar descent, the computer was overloaded with data from a mistakenly left-on radar switch. Hamilton's priority-based error handling — which she had insisted on over objections that astronauts would never make mistakes — allowed the computer to shed low-priority tasks and f...

Hedy Lamarr was born Hedwig Kiesler in Vienna in 1914. Her first husband was an Austrian arms dealer with ties to Mussolini and Hitler, whose dinner parties she attended while listening carefully to the weapons discussions. She fled him in 1937, escaped to London, and signed a contract with MGM. By 1940 she was the most famous actress in Hollywood, known as 'the most beautiful woman in film.' She...

Everyone knows the legend of King Arthur pulling a sword from a stone. But in Tuscany, there's a real sword in a stone—and it's been there since 1180. Galgano Guidotti was a violent knight who had a vision of Saint Michael telling him to give up warfare. To prove his commitment, he drove his sword into a rock, turning it into a cross. The sword is still there, protruding from the stone floor of th...

In 1325, the Italian cities of Bologna and Modena went to war over territorial disputes, part of the larger Guelph-Ghibelline conflict between supporters of the Pope and the Holy Roman Emperor. When Modena captured Bologna's fortress of Monteveglio, war erupted. At the Battle of Zappolino, Modena's 7,000 soldiers defeated Bologna's 32,000. After victory, Modenese soldiers took a wooden bucket from...

In the 1840s, four Americans — Crawford Long, Horace Wells, William Morton, and Charles Jackson — each claimed to have discovered surgical anesthesia. Long used ether in 1842 but didn't publish until 1849. Wells demonstrated nitrous oxide in 1845 but the demonstration failed when the patient cried out. Morton held the famous 1846 public demonstration at Massachusetts General Hospital. Jackson clai...

After signing the Treaties of Tilsit, Napoleon attended a grand rabbit hunt to celebrate. His chief of staff procured thousands of rabbits for the event. But when released, the rabbits didn't flee — they charged straight at Napoleon and his party. The rabbits were tame, not wild, and mistook the hunters for their feeders. Napoleon's men were overwhelmed and had to retreat to their carriages. Hoste...