LSD is accidentally discovered. The drug (lysergic acid diethylamide) is a potent, semi-synthetic hallucinogenic drug derived from fungus. It is known for inducing intense sensory alterations, emotional shifts, and perceptual changes ("trips") lasting 8–12 hours.
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Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility. | Sigmund Freud
There are more possible games of chess than atoms in the observable universe.
1457 BC Egypt defeats a large Canaanite coalition at the Battle of Megiddo. It is the first battle recorded with reliable accuracy.
73 AD The mountain fortress of Masada falls to Rome. Masada’s 960 Jewish inhabitants commit suicide rather than surrender.
1850 Anna Maria Tussaud, the woman behind one of London’s most famous tourist attractions, Madame Tussauds, dies aged 89. She spent a lifetime creating lifelike waxworks of the famous. A friend of the royal court, she was jailed during the French Revolution and was almost executed, but was saved and put to work making death masks of guillotined nobles, including the king and queen. She also had to make a cast of the severed and bloodied head of her friend, Princess de Lamballe, who had been hacked to pieces by a mob.
1943 Scientist Albert Hofmann accidentally discovers the hallucinogenic effects of LSD.
1946 The 21-carat Eureka diamond, found by farm children near Hopetown in the Northern Cape and given to a visitor, sells in London for £5,700.
1947 An explosion on a freighter kills about 600 people in Texas City.
1950 Future founding president of Botswana Seretse Khama is reunited with his wife in England. Their marriage across the colour bar was scandalous at the time and saw Khama ostracised and forced to give up royal claims.
1964 Nine men are jailed for Britain’s £2.6 million “Great Train Robbery”.
1990 England’s “Doctor Death”, Jack Kevorkian, participates in his first assisted suicide.
1992 The Katina P oil tanker runs aground off Maputo, spilling 60,000 tons of crude oil.
2014 The South Korean ferry MV Sewol capsizes and sinks, killing 304 people.
2025 A juvenile colossal squid (30cm long) is filmed in its natural environment in the South Atlantic at a depth of 600m for the first time since its 1925 discovery. The reason it took so long to find in the wild is because so much of the world’s ocean – 70% of Earth – remains unexplored. With hundreds of thousands to possibly over a million species still undiscovered, less is known about the oceans than about space, despite their average depth of about 3.7km.
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