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139 illustrations
At the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, British sprinter Derek Redmond was considered a medal contender in the 400-meter semifinal. He had spent years clawing back from...
In the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, British sprinter Derek Redmond lined up for the 400-meter semi-final. He had spent four years recovering from injuries, and this...
In the summer of 1924, the fastest man in Britain faced an impossible choice. Eric Liddell, Scotland's star sprinter and heavy favorite for Olympic gold...
In the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, British sprinter Derek Redmond lined up for the 400-meter semifinal as one of the favorites. He had trained his entire...
In 1939, Marian Anderson was one of the greatest contraltos the world had ever heard. Conductor Arturo Toscanini declared she possessed "a voice heard once...
By 1802, Ludwig van Beethoven was losing the one thing that defined him — his hearing. The composer who had dazzled Vienna was going deaf....
In 1822, a young Englishwoman named Charlotte Elliott sat across from the evangelist César Malan at a dinner party in Geneva. She was restless, battling...
Every smartphone carries a hidden number called an IMEI — a fifteen-digit code burned into the device's hardware at the moment of manufacture. You can...
In 1829, Felix Mendelssohn traveled to Berlin to conduct a performance of Johann Sebastian Bach's St. Matthew Passion — a masterwork that had been virtually...
In 1772, John Newton sat down to write a hymn for a New Year's prayer service in the small English village of Olney. The words...
At the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, British sprinter Derek Redmond had one goal: a 400-meter medal. He'd trained for this moment his entire life, battling through...
In 2005, stem cell biologist Jonas Frisén at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm made a remarkable discovery. Using carbon-14 traces left in the atmosphere by...
In 2005, stem cell biologist Jonas Frisen at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm made a remarkable discovery. By measuring traces of carbon-14 left over from...
Fanny Crosby lost her sight at six weeks old when a mustard poultice, applied by a man posing as a doctor, destroyed her eyes. She...
In 1892, Sir Francis Galton published his landmark study on fingerprints, demonstrating what no one had proven before: no two human beings share the same...
For decades, geneticists dismissed roughly 98 percent of human DNA as "junk" — vast stretches of code that seemed to serve no purpose at all....
In 2003, scientists completed the Human Genome Project — a thirteen-year effort to map every gene in human DNA. One of the most stunning discoveries...
In 1501, a twenty-six-year-old Michelangelo stood before a massive block of Carrara marble that no one else wanted. The slab had been quarried nearly forty...
In 2001, Allen Iverson stood before the media after carrying the Philadelphia 76ers to the NBA Finals almost single-handedly. He was five feet eleven inches...
In 1501, Michelangelo accepted a commission that other sculptors had refused. The block of marble was enormous — seventeen feet tall — but it had...
In Victor Hugo's *Les Misérables*, Jean Valjean is released from nineteen years in prison carrying a yellow passport that marks him as a convict. Every...
In Victor Hugo's *Les Misérables*, Jean Valjean spends nineteen years in prison, reduced to a number: 24601. When he's finally released, he carries that number...
In 1820, six-week-old Fanny Crosby was blinded when a man posing as a doctor applied a mustard poultice to her inflamed eyes. The world would...
In 1993, mathematician John Daugman at Cambridge University confirmed something remarkable about the human iris. Each one contains over two hundred unique features — ridges,...