One of the earliest known instances of wild carnivores being held in captivity in Mesoamerica dates to around the second century in Teotihuacán; excavations starting in the late 1990s uncovered the remains of almost two hundred animals—including wolves, eagles, and jaguars—in the Pyramids of the Sun and the Moon. The skeletons showed bone breaks, bone fusion, and abnormal growths, as well as indications of a human-controlled diet.
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William Petty’s device for “double writing” made it possible, he claimed, that “any man, even at the first sight and handling, may write two resembling copies of the same thing at once.” Petty wrote one of the first-known English claims for patent rights, in his 1648 “Brief Declaration Concerning Double Writing.” “Should I have given it away for nothing?” he asked. “The thing...would have been condemned as of no use, because of no price.”
Looking at the records of 35,000 Union Army veterans who had served between 1861 and 1865, a 2010 study found that soldiers whose military units lacked a sense of camaraderie were six times more likely to have had heart attacks or strokes by their late fifties or early sixties than counterparts from units with strong esprit de corps. “Somehow being armed with close social bonds in the extremely stressful situation of battlefield combat,” said one of the researchers, “has a protective effect that continues long after the fighting has ended.”
A 2001 study in Science magazine found that matriarchal African elephants are essential to the well-being of elephant social groups because they possess social memories that enable them to recognize if outsiders are friendly to the herd. “Elephants can certainly build up a memory over the years and hold on to it,” said the study’s lead author.
“When Simonides or someone offered to teach him the art of memory,” Cicero noted in his De Finibus, the Athenian politician Themistocles “replied that he would prefer the art of forgetting. ‘For I remember,’ said he, ‘even things I do not wish to remember, but I cannot forget things I wish to forget.’ ”
On Halloween 1981, a Los Angeles punk band called Fear was the musical guest on Saturday Night Live. Comedian John Belushi, who had invited Fear to play, brought in punks to watch the performance. Chaos ensued; SNL’s stage manager was hit in the chest with a pumpkin. “The real audience at Saturday Night Live was scared to death,” Fear’s lead singer later said. The band was banned from appearing again.
In 2014 surgeons in the U.S. performed at least 26,175 gynecomastia corrections—breast reductions—on male patients.
“Branwell—Emily—Anne are gone like dreams—gone as Maria and Elizabeth went twenty years ago. One by one I have watched them fall asleep on my arm—and closed their glazed eyes—I have seen them buried one by one—and—thus far—God has upheld me,” Charlotte Brontë at the age of thirty-three wrote on June 13, 1849.
Admiral Horatio Nelson was shot on the deck of the HMS Victory by a French sniper during the Battle of Trafalgar. “I do believe they have done it at last,” Nelson told his flag captain. “My backbone is shot through.” On that day, October 21, 1805, the English fleet had taken fifteen enemy ships. A state funeral was held for him in London on January 8, his body having been preserved for nearly two months in a cask of brandy aboard the ship.
In the so-called Screw Plot—a supposed conspiracy to assassinate Queen Anne during a Thanksgiving service in 1710—iron bolts were removed from the roof timbers of St. Paul’s Cathedral in order for the roof to collapse during the service. “The new cathedral was not then quite finished,” wrote John Noorthouck in 1773, “and it appeared upon inquiry that the missing of these iron pins was owing to the neglect of the workmen, who supposed the timbers were sufficiently fastened without them.”
François-Auguste-René de Chateaubriand complained late in life that he was going deaf. When someone mentioned the malady to Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand, he remarked, “He only thinks he is deaf because he can no longer hear anyone talking about him.”
A British law dictates that any whale, porpoise, or sturgeon caught near the coast or cast ashore is a “royal fish” and belongs to the Crown. Specifics were refined in a 1610 parliamentary debate over the ownership of the salmon population in the Irish River Bann. “Though they are great fish,” said Lord Robert Hale, who argued these salmon should be considered part of the commons, “they are not royal fish.”
The head female of a paper-wasp nest allows others to occupy space in her home—so long as they help raise her offspring. The labor market is, however, elastic: if other nests nearby have childcare needs, she maintains a lower work requirement from her “helper” wasps.
Before Sally Ride spent a week aboard the Challenger shuttle in 1983 and became the first American woman in space, NASA engineers asked her if she wanted a hundred tampons in her flight kit. “No,” she later recalled responding, “that would not be the right number.” They said they wanted to be safe. “Well,” she assured them, “you can cut that in half with no problem at all.”
In his third-century Interpretation of Dreams, Artemidorus lauded the soothsaying accuracy of Aristander, to whom Alexander the Great, while besieging the city of Tyre, Tyros in Greek, reported that he had dreamed of a satyr dancing on his shield. Aristander said that “satyr,” satyros in Greek, could be broken into “sa” and “Tyros,” meaning “Tyros is yours,” and encouraged Alexander to redouble his attacks. The Macedonian did, and he took the city.