In 1904, the London Daily Mirror newspaper challenged Houdini to escape from special handcuffs that it claimed had taken Nathaniel Hart, a locksmith from Birmingham, five years to make. Houdini accepted the challenge for March 17 during a matinée performance at London's Hippodrome theater. It was reported that 4000 people and more than 100 journalists turned out for the much-hyped event. The escape attempt dragged on for over an hour, during which Houdini emerged from his "ghost house" (a small screen used to conceal the method of his escape) several times. On one occasion he asked if the cuffs could be removed so he could take off his coat. The Mirror representative, Frank Parker, refused, saying Houdini could gain an advantage if he saw how the cuffs were unlocked. Houdini promptly took out a pen-knife and, holding the knife in his teeth, used it to cut his coat from his body. Some 56 minutes later, Houdini's wife appeared on stage and gave him a kiss. It is believed that in her mouth was the key to unlock the special handcuffs. Houdini then went back behind the curtain. After an hour and ten minutes, Houdini emerged free. As he was paraded on the shoulders of the cheering crowd, he broke down and wept. Houdini later said it was the most difficult escape of his career.

Pareidolia is a psychological phenomenon involving a vague and random stimulus (often an image or sound) being perceived as significant, a form of apophenia. Common examples include seeing images of animals or faces in clouds, the man in the moon or the Moon rabbit, and hearing hidden messages on records when played in reverse. The word comes from the Greek words para (παρά, "beside, alongside, instead") in this context meaning something faulty, wrong, instead of; and the noun eidōlon (εἴδωλον "image, form, shape") the diminutive of eidos. Pareidolia is a type of apophenia, seeing patterns in random data.

Google is a computer software and a web search engine company that has been acquiring, on average, more than one company per week since 2010. The table below is an incomplete list of acquisitions, with each acquisition listed being for the respective company in its entirety, unless otherwise specified.

Lieutenant Colonel John Malcolm Thorpe Fleming "Jack" Churchill was a British soldier who fought throughout the Second World War armed with a longbow, and a Scottish sword. He is known for the motto "any officer who goes into action without his sword is improperly dressed." Churchill also carried out the last recorded bow and arrow killing in action, shooting a German officer in 1940 in a French village.

The Bloop is the name given to an ultra-low-frequency and extremely powerful underwater sound detected by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in 1997. The sound is consistent with the noises generated by icequakes in large icebergs, or large icebergs scraping the ocean floor. The sound's source was roughly triangulated to 50°S 100°W Coordinates: 50°S 100°W (a remote point in the south Pacific Ocean west of the southern tip of South America), and the sound was detected several times by the Equatorial Pacific Ocean autonomous hydrophone array. According to the NOAA description, it "rises rapidly in frequency over about one minute and was of sufficient amplitude to be heard on multiple sensors, at a range of over 5,000 km." The NOAA's Dr. Christopher Fox did not believe its origin was man-made, such as a submarine or bomb, nor familiar geological events such as volcanoes or earthquakes. While the audio profile of Bloop does resemble that of a living creature,^[2] the source was a mystery both because it was different from known sounds and because it was several times louder than the loudest recorded animal, the blue whale.

Home to 40,000 people at its height, Kowloon Walled City was by far the most densely populated place on earth. On a site measuring roughly 200 by 100 metres were squeezed some 350 buildings, rising 14 storeys or more and so tightly packed there was rarely space between them. Every available nook and cranny was inhabited, while the connecting alleys, stairways and corridors were reduced to an absolute minimum. From the 1950s to the 1970s, it was controlled by Triads and had high rates of prostitution, gambling, and drug use.

Als Rattenkönig werden mehrere an den Schwänzen verknotete oder verklebte Ratten bezeichnet. Dieses seltene Phänomen soll vor allem unter Hausratten auftreten. Als Ursache für die Entstehung geben manche Quellen an, dass sich die Schwänze einer ganzen Anzahl von Tieren verknoten und die Tiere anschließend durch Blut, Schmutz und Exkremente zusätzlich an Beinen und Flanken verkleben. In der Folge sollen die Tiere untrennbar an den Schwänzen verwachsen, die vielfach gebrochen sind.

The 300 million yen robbery (三億円事件 San Oku En Jiken?), also known as the 300 million yen affair or incident, was the single largest heist in Japanese history at the time. It occurred on the morning of December 10, 1968 in Tokyo, Japan. It remains unsolved.

Herman Webster Mudgett, better known under the alias of Dr. Henry Howard Holmes, was one of the first documented American serial killers in the modern sense of the term. In Chicago at the time of the 1893 World's Fair, Holmes opened a hotel which he had designed and built for himself specifically with murder in mind (the upper two floors contained his personal office and a maze of over 100 windowless rooms with doorways opening to brick walls, oddly-angled hallways, stairways to nowhere, doors openable only from the outside, and a host of other strange and labyrinthine constructions). While he confessed to 27 murders, of which four were confirmed, his actual body count could be as high as 200. He took an unknown number of his victims from the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, which was less than two miles away, to his "World's Fair" hotel.

The English-language Wikipedia alone had about 750,000 entries by late 2005, when a boom in media coverage and a spike in participation pushed the project across the line from Internet oddity to part of everyday life. Around that time, Wikipedians achieved their most impressive feat of leaderless collective organization—one, it turns out, that set in motion the decline in participation that troubles their project today. At some time in 2006, the established editors began to feel control of the site slipping from their grasp. As the number of new contributions—well-meaning and otherwise—was growing, the task of policing them all for quality began to feel impossible. Because of Wikipedia’s higher public profile and commitment to letting anyone contribute even anonymously, many updates were pure vandalism. Today the English Wikipedia has 4.4 million articles; there are 23.1 million more in 286 other languages. But those tougher rules and the more suspicious atmosphere that came along with them had an unintended consequence. Newcomers to Wikipedia making their first, tentative edits—and the inevitable mistakes—became less likely to stick around. Being steamrollered by the newly efficient, impersonal editing machine was no fun. The number of active editors on the English-language Wikipedia peaked in 2007 at more than 51,000 and has been declining ever since as the supply of new ones got choked off. This past summer only 31,000 people could be considered active editors.

This is a list of problems that have been solved by MacGyver. Demonstrating resourcefulness, he employs his knowledge of science, technology and outdoorsmanship to resolve what are often life or death crises. His ingenuity is normally put to the test under dire circumstances with little time or specialized resources with which to work.

Pink Panthers is the name given by Interpol to an international jewel thief network, named after The Pink Panther series of crime comedy films, which is responsible for some of the most audacious thefts in criminal history. They are responsible for what have been termed some of the most glamorous heists ever, and one criminologist even described their crimes as "artistry".They have targeted several countries and continents, and include Japan's most successful robbery ever amongst their thefts. Some law enforcement agencies suspect that the group is responsible for over US$500 million in bold robberies in Dubai, Switzerland, Japan, France, Liechenstein, Germany, Luxembourg, Spain and Monaco. Law enforcement suspect their involvement in the robbery of the jewellery store Harry Winston in Paris, on December 9, 2008. The thieves escaped with more than €80 million worth of jewellery.

LANSA Flight 508 crashed in a thunderstorm en route from Lima, Peru to Pucallpa, Peru, on December 24, 1971, killing 91 people – all 6 of its crew and 85 of its 86 passengers. The sole survivor was a 17-year-old girl who fell 2 miles (3 km) down into the Amazon rainforest strapped to her seat and remarkably survived the fall, and was then able to walk through the jungle for 10 days until she was rescued by local lumbermen.

Stéphane Breitwieser is a Frenchman notorious for his art thefts between 1995 and 2001. He admitted to stealing 239 artworks and other exhibits, worth an estimated US$1.4 billion (£960m), from 172 museums while travelling around Europe and working as a waiter, an average of one theft every 15 days. The Guardian called him "arguably the world's most consistent art thief."

Pigeon photography is an aerial photography technique invented in 1907 by the German apothecary Julius Neubronner, who also used pigeons to deliver medications. A homing pigeon was fitted with an aluminium breast harness to which a lightweight time-delayed miniature camera could be attached.

Hindsight bias – sometimes called the "I-knew-it-all-along" effect, the tendency to see past events as being predictable at the time those events happened.

The Derweze area is rich in natural gas. While drilling in 1971, Soviet geologists tapped into a cavern filled with natural gas. The ground beneath the drilling rig collapsed, leaving a large hole with a diameter of 70 metres [...]. To avoid poisonous gas discharge, it was decided to burn it off. Geologists had hoped the fire would use all the fuel in a matter of days, but the gas is still burning today. Locals have dubbed the cavern "The Door to Hell".

The Borg are a fictional pseudo-race of cybernetic organisms depicted in the Star Trek universe associated with Star Trek. The Borg use abduction and "assimilation" (enforced cybernetic enhancement, connection to the hive mind) as a means of "achieving perfection". Aside from being the main threat in Star Trek: First Contact, the Borg play major roles in The Next Generation and Voyager television series, primarily as an invasion threat to the United Federation of Planets, and serve as the way home to the Alpha Quadrant for isolated Federation starship Voyager. The Borg have become a symbol in popular culture for any juggernaut against which "resistance is futile".

Metropolitan [ˌmɛtɹəˈpɒlɪtn̩] – eigentlich Metropolitan Express Train, offizielle Schreibweise: MetropolitaN, häufig auch einfach nur abgekürzt bzw. als Akronym MET genannt – ist eine frühere deutsche Zuggattung. Sie existierte vom 1. August 1999 bis zum 11. Dezember 2004 und verkehrte nur auf der Strecke Köln–Hamburg.

Vostok is the World Pole of Cold. During the long winter, temperatures average about −65 °C (−85 °F) in the brief summer, about −30 °C (−22 °F). The lowest reliably measured temperature on Earth of −89.2 °C (−128.6 °F) was in Vostok on 21 July 1983. The warmest recorded temperature at Vostok is −12.2 °C (10.0 °F), which occurred on 11 January 2002.

This is a list of inventors whose deaths were in some manner caused by or related to a product, process, procedure, or other innovation that they invented or designed.

From 1963 to 1969 as part of Project Shipboard Hazard and Defense (SHAD), the U.S. Army performed tests which involved spraying several U.S. ships with various biological and chemical warfare agents, while thousands of U.S. military personnel were aboard the ships. The personnel were not notified of the tests, and were not given any protective clothing. Chemicals tested on the U.S. military personnel included the nerve gases VX and Sarin, toxic chemicals such as zinc cadmium sulfide and sulfur dioxide, and a variety of biological agents.

The Neptunes are a two member producing group featuring Pharrell Williams and Chad Hugo, this is their complete Production List.

The term bottle episode is used in episodic television to refer to episodes which are produced using the least money, and restricted in their scope to use as few new - or no - non-regular cast members, effects and sets as possible. Most bottle episodes are shot on sets already built for other episodes, frequently the main interior sets for a series, and they consist largely of dialogue or scenes for which no special preparations are needed.