If I say the most magical day of a woman's life is the day she became a mother, most of you will agree. Being a mother is tough and it is a package of responsibilities and joys of motherhood. A woman does not necessarily have to give birth to a child to be a "mother". And then there are women who gave birth to children and let them rot to death.

Thomas J. Beale, a leader of a group of thirty men from Virginia stumbled upon a mine of gold and silver in early 1800s while hunting buffaloes in New Mexico. They spent 18 months mining thousands of pounds of gold and silver and Beale was incharge of transporting them to Virginia and burying it in a safe location which is now believed to be in Bedford County, Virginia.

When the Netherlands was invaded during the WW2 Dutch Princess Juliana and her family had to flee. In 1940 princess Juliana and her two daughters safely arrived to Canada which was an allied country and a safe place for them. They were given a warm welcome in Ottawa where they continued to live during the war. In 1943 Princess Juliana gave birth to Princess Margriet and Canadian government temporarily declared the maternity ward of Ottawa Civic Hospital to be extra-territorial. Therefore it was unaffiliated with any jurisdiction and an international territory. It was done to ensure the newborn would derive her citizenship only from her mother, thus making her solely Dutch. It was an important decision in case the baby was a boy. The newborn baby girl was named after Marguerite, a flower worn during the war as a symbol of resistance to Nazi Germany.

Workers who were removing the shelves and coolers in the No frills supermarket in Council Bluffs, Iowa came across the gruesome sight of a trapped human corpse behind one of its coolers. The year was 2019 and supermarket closed its doors for customers back in 2016. The body was unidentifiable and using a DNA test it was found out to be a missing employee of the supermarket. 10 years ago in November 2009 Larry Ely Muriilo Moncada was reported missing from his home. His parents said he got upset and ran outside without his shoes, socks, keys or his car in the midst of a snowstorm. Police believes that he went to the supermarket and climbed on top of the 3.7 meter high cooler and fell into a 46 cm gap between the cooler and the wall. According to the other employees, they often climb there to get unofficial breaks and unfortunately Larry had fallen and stuck there until he died. Due to the noise of the coolers his cries for help went unnoticed according to police and they have closed

In 1920s rising number of car owners lead to an increase in the necessity of parking space to which the car lifting machine was a perfect solution. It saved a lot of space by parking vehicles vertically and hence it was convenient. The machine operated like a ferris wheel and powered by electric motors or hydraulic pumps. Cars were parked in suspended cages attached to a belt and it rotated.

  This photograph was taken in Vaxjo, Sweden on 13 April 1985 by a photojournalist named Hans Runesson. In this photo a 38 years old lady named Danuta Danielsson is hitting a neo nazi with her handbag.

Approximately 50000 Horseshoe crabs die annually in blood harvesting. Their blue colour blood has a price tag of 15000$ a quart. The blue colour in blood is caused by copper present in blood as Hemocyanin which carries oxygen throughout the crabs body (analogues to hemoglobin in our bodies). But that is not what makes the blood this expensive. Amebocytes in horseshoe blood quickly clots in the presence of exdotoxins which provides a perfect natural test to examine purity. Therefore in medicine horseshoe crabs blood is used to ensure vaccines and implants are not contaminated. In 2018 nearly 500,000 crabs have been used to harvest blood and after draining 1/3 of the blood, they were released into their original habitats. However more than 50,000 crabs die in this process. Not only it threatens the horseshoe crab population but also it has become a threat to the survival of migratory birds such as threatened red knot who depends on horseshoe crab eggs.

In early 1980s it was proposed that microlith technologies alongside bone technologies and ochre use was in Sri Lanka way earlier than they did in Europe. According to a research published yesterday by a group of international archeologists in the Science Advances journal, they have found out the oldest evidence of bow and arrow use by prehistoric humans outside of Africa from a cave named Fa Hien lena cave in Sri Lanka.

  In 1929 Professor Ernest Glen Wever and his research assistant Charles William Bray conducted a series of experiments using a live cat. They first sedated the cat and opened the skull to access the auditory nerve in order to attach it to a telephone wire that was connected to a telephone receiver. One scientist spoke to the cats ears while the other one listened through the receiver which was 50 feet was away in a soundproof room. They did various experiments using this poor cat which led them to win the first Howard Crosby Warren Medal of Society by the Society of Experimental Psychologists in 1936.

                                During the WW1 aerial bombarding was not precise because planes were not equipped with radar. In fact pilots had to solely depend on their sight. When they see what they believed to be the target they deployed bombs. Using this opportunity of human error Parisians at the time thought of saving their town. They built a fake Paris so that the pilots will bomb it instead of the actual one. It even had a faux Arc di Tromphe and Goud du Nord among the landmarks.

 " Mary had a little lamb  Its fleece as white as snow  And everywhere that Mary went The lamb was sure to go " The famous nursery rhyme was published in 1830 in "Poems for our children" by Sarah Hale. Did you know that Mary actually had a lamb? Mary Elizabeth Sawyer from Sterling, a 9 years old girl in 1815, discovered a sick lamb abandoned by his mother. After pleading with her father, she managed to keep the lamb as a pet and miraculously the lamb survived. He became a member of the family and often tagged along with Mary and her brother when they were going to Redstone school. Mary secretly petted him under the desk covering the lamb with a blanket. Oneday unfortunately Mary was called to the front and lamb jumped out of his hiding place.Children were delighted and had a good time with this pet lamb that day. Few days later John Roulstone, a student in the same school hands over a poem to Mary about her lamb.

PC: Wikimedia Commons An impressive mustache was a must for a man in the 19th century and often mustache wax was used to keep it stiff. But drinking hot liquid such as tea, was difficult with the mustache because the steam from the drink would melt the wax and also caused stains. In 1860 an English potter Harvey Adams found a brilliant solution, a cup with a semicircular ledge which has a half moon shaped opening. Soon the cups started selling in large quantities. This masculine tableware was soon spread to Europe and then the American continent. These cups were manufactured in different quantities and materials such as silver, porcelain etc.  PC: CharmaineZoe's Marvelous Melange However in early 20th century mustache began to go out of fashion so did the mustache cups. Today we can only witness these Victorian pieces of male elegance only in museums and private collections.

            I'm sure you all at least once listened to the Virtual Barber shop audio clip. If not, you should immediately. As a child it fascinated me. It is a binaural audio clip originally created in 1996. It gave me chills when the barber started cutting hair. Not even for a moment I felt it's not real. But how does it work? It is due to binaural hearing. It helps our brain to detect the direction of a sound. When making binaural recordings a two track digital recording device is attached to two microphones that are mounted on a dummy head equivalent to a human head. The recordings are so realistic that some people even claimed they smell sulfur if someone strikes a match in an audio clip. If you haven't listened to a binaural audio clip now is the time to enjoy. And if you are a fan of these clips let me know the best one you listened to so far.

In the late 1940s  researchers in the Soviet Union used five political prisoners as subjects in an experiment where they used a gas stimulant that kept the subjects awake for 15 days straight. According to the urban legend the room had 5 inch thick glass pothole size windows, microphones to contact the subjects, enough books to read, a toilet and enough food to survive a month. During the first couple of days they were having normal conversations with each other but as the time passes their conversations were mostly about traumatic incidents they had to face. After 5 days things got really dark and they demonstrated paranoia. They stopped having conversations with eachother and started whispering to microphones. 

Until January 1987 scientists believed that different groups of humans evolved in different regions separately. A groundbreaking study done by Rebecca Cann, Mark Stoneking, and Allan Wilson revealed that we all have a common ancestor. In other words we all have the same great great great great great.......................................... great grandmother who lived in Africa about 200,000 years ago and she is named as the "Mitochondrial Eve". But unlike her biblical namesake she was not the only woman in the world back then. There were other women but only her lineage survived. But what exactly is Mitochondrial eve and how do scientists claim that we all are related?