In Ancient Egypt, the hamadryas baboon was one of the animals that represented Thoth, the god of the Moon, wisdom, knowledge, writing, hieroglyphs, science, magic, art and judgment.
Besides its remoteness, Easter Island is, of course, famous for its massive stone sculptures or "Moais." The largest of these is "El Gigante," located near the Rano Raraku Quarry, which stands some 72 feet tall (well, 71.93 to be exact).
In 1929, the German physicist Hermann Oberth developed plans for a space station from which a 100 metre-wide concave mirror could be used to reflect sunlight onto a concentrated point on the earth.
Rhaphanidosis is the act of inserting the root of a plant of the raphanus genus (commonly known as a radish) into the anus. It is reported to have been a punishment for adultery in ancient Athens of the 5th and 4th centuries BC.
The Alþingi (anglicised as Althing or Althingi) is the national parliament (literally: "[the] all-thing", or general assembly) of Iceland. It is one of the oldest extant parliamentary institutions in the world.
The unfinished obelisk is the largest known ancient obelisk and is located in the northern region of the stone quarries of ancient Egypt in Aswan (Assuan)
Project Habakkuk or Habbakuk (spelling varies; see below) was a plan by the British in World War II to construct an aircraft carrier out of pykrete (a mixture of wood pulp and ice), for use against German U-boats in the mid-Atlantic, which were beyond the flight range of land-based planes at that time. The idea came from Geoffrey Pyke who worked for Combined Operations Headquarters.
The earliest use of adhesives was discovered in Italy. At this site, two stone flakes partially covered with birch-bark-tar and a third uncovered stone from the Middle Pleistocene era (circa 200,000 years ago) were found. This is thought to be the oldest discovered human use of tar hafted stones.
Plague was used during the Second Sino-Japanese War as a bacteriological weapon by the Imperial Japanese Army. These weapons were provided by Shirō Ishii's units and used in experiments on humans before being used on the field.
This machine has the oldest known complex gear mechanism and is sometimes called the first known analog computer, although the quality of its manufacture suggests that it may have had undiscovered predecessors during the Hellenistic Period. It appears to be constructed upon theories of astronomy and mathematics developed by Greek astronomers and is estimated to have been made around 100 BC.
Ancient Greek lead sling bullets with a winged thunderbolt engraved on one side and the inscription "ΔΕΞΑΙ" (Dexai) meaning "take that" or "catch" on the other side, 4th century BC, from Athens, British Museum.