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🔗 Biography 🔗 History 🔗 Death 🔗 Lists

This is a list of unusual deaths. This list includes only unique or extremely rare circumstances of death recorded throughout history, noted as being unusual by multiple sources. Oxford Dictionaries defines the word unusual as "not habitually or commonly occurring or done" and "remarkable or interesting because different from or better than others".

🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/Military science, technology, and theory 🔗 Military history/Weaponry

Improvised firearms (sometimes called zip guns or pipe guns) are firearms manufactured other than by a firearms manufacturer or a gunsmith, and are typically constructed by adapting existing materials to the purpose. They range in quality from crude weapons that are as much a danger to the user as the target to high-quality arms produced by cottage industries using salvaged and repurposed materials.

Improvised firearms are commonly used as tools by criminals and insurgents and are often associated with such groups; other uses include self-defense in lawless areas and hunting game in poor rural areas.

🔗 Psychology

The half-life of knowledge or half-life of facts is the amount of time that has to elapse before half of the knowledge or facts in a particular area is superseded or shown to be untrue. These coined terms belong to the field of quantitative analysis of science known as scientometrics.

These ideas of half-life applied to different fields differ from the concept of half-life in physics in that there is no guarantee that the knowledge or facts in areas of study are declining exponentially. It is unclear that there is any way to establish what constitutes "knowledge" in a particular area, as opposed to mere opinion or theory.

An engineering degree went from having a half life of 35 years in ca. 1930 to about 10 years in 1960.

A Delphi Poll showed that the half life of psychology as measured in 2016 ranged from 3.3 to 19 years depending on the specialty, with an average of a little over 7 years.

It has also been used in Christian missiology to increase the effectiveness of their teachings.

🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/Military science, technology, and theory 🔗 Military history/World War I 🔗 Military history/German military history 🔗 Birds 🔗 Photography 🔗 Photography/History of photography 🔗 Military history/European military history

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. Neubronner's German patent application was initially rejected, but was granted in December 1908 after he produced authenticated photographs taken by his pigeons. He publicized the technique at the 1909 Dresden International Photographic Exhibition, and sold some images as postcards at the Frankfurt International Aviation Exhibition and at the 1910 and 1911 Paris Air Shows.

Initially, the military potential of pigeon photography for aerial reconnaissance appeared interesting. Battlefield tests in World War I provided encouraging results, but the ancillary technology of mobile dovecotes for messenger pigeons had the greatest impact. Owing to the rapid perfection of aviation during the war, military interest in pigeon photography faded and Neubronner abandoned his experiments. The idea was briefly resurrected in the 1930s by a Swiss clockmaker, and reportedly also by the German and French militaries. Although war pigeons were deployed extensively during World War II, it is unclear to what extent, if any, birds were involved in aerial reconnaissance. The United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) later developed a battery-powered camera designed for espionage pigeon photography; details of its use remain classified.

The construction of sufficiently small and light cameras with a timer mechanism, and the training and handling of the birds to carry the necessary loads, presented major challenges, as did the limited control over the pigeons' position, orientation and speed when the photographs were being taken. In 2004, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) used miniature television cameras attached to falcons and goshawks to obtain live footage, and today some researchers, enthusiasts and artists similarly deploy crittercams with various species of animals.

🔗 Sailing

The Vestas Sailrocket was built to capture the sailing speed record competing in the B-class for 150 to 235 square feet of sail. It is piloted by the project leader Paul Larsen and sponsored by Danish wind turbines manufacturer Vestas. In 2008 the first version reached a reported unofficial speed of 52.22 knots (96.71 km/h), before crashing.

After being upgraded to a second version, the Vestas Sailrocket 2 began a campaign to break speed records in November 2012 off Walvis Bay, Namibia. On 12 November, it made a 54.08 knots (100.16 km/h) run over a 500 metres (1,600 ft) distance, then 59.23 knots (109.69 km/h) on the 16th. It attained 55.32 knots (102.45 km/h) on a one-mile run on the 18th and simultaneously 59.38 knots (109.97 km/h) on 500m. On 24 November, with wind speeds at roughly 25 knots (46 km/h), it ran the 500m course at 65.45 knots (121.21 km/h) with a 68.01 knots (125.95 km/h) peak. Both records are ratified by the World Sailing Speed Record Council (WSSRC) for the 500m and the mile.

A Swiss team of École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne university students and engineers, including members involved in the development of previous record-holder Hydroptère, formed in October 2019 to develop a new hydrofoil boat, SP80, to exceed the Vestas Sailrocket 2 record in 2022, with a target speed of 80 knots. As of April 2023, the speed record attempts were pushed back to 2024 and are scheduled to take place in Leucate.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Systems 🔗 Biography/arts and entertainment

John Gall (September 18, 1925 – December 15, 2014) was an American author and retired pediatrician. Gall is known for his 1975 book General systemantics: an essay on how systems work, and especially how they fail..., a critique of systems theory. One of the statements from this book has become known as Gall's law.

🔗 Food and drink 🔗 Birds

A chicken can be hypnotized, or put into a trance, by holding its head down against the ground, and drawing a line along the ground with a stick or a finger, starting at the beak and extending straight outward in front of the chicken. If the chicken is hypnotized in this manner, it will continue to stare at the line, remaining immobile for as long as 30 minutes. Other methods of inducing this state are also known. Ethologists refer to this state as 'tonic immobility' i.e. a natural state of semi-paralysis that some animals enter when presented with a threat, which is probably a defensive mechanism intended to feign death, albeit rather poorly.

The first known written reference for this method came in 1646, in Mirabele Experimentum de Imaginatione Gallinae by Athanasius Kircher in Rome.

🔗 Palaeontology 🔗 Marine life 🔗 Indigenous peoples of the Americas 🔗 Bivalves

Spondylus is a genus of bivalve molluscs, the only genus in the family Spondylidae. They are known in English as spiny oysters or thorny oysters (though they are not, in fact, true oysters).

🔗 Religion 🔗 Skepticism 🔗 Bible 🔗 Islam 🔗 Judaism 🔗 Iraq 🔗 Turkey 🔗 Mythology

Searches for Noah's Ark have been reported since antiquity, as ancient scholars sought to affirm the historicity of the Genesis flood narrative by citing accounts of relics recovered from the Ark.^: 43–47 With the emergence of biblical archaeology in the 19th century, the potential of a formal search attracted interest in alleged discoveries and hoaxes. By the 1940s, expeditions were being organized to follow up on these apparent leads.^: 8–9 This modern search movement has been informally called "arkeology".

In 2020, the young Earth creationist group the Institute for Creation Research acknowledged that, despite many expeditions, Noah's Ark had not been found and is unlikely to be found. Many of the supposed findings and methods used in the search are regarded as pseudoscience and pseudoarchaeology by geologists and archaeologists.^{: 581–582 : 72–75}

🔗 Environment 🔗 Geology 🔗 Extinction

The Holocene extinction, otherwise referred to as the sixth mass extinction or Anthropocene extinction, is an ongoing extinction event of species during the present Holocene epoch (with the more recent time sometimes called Anthropocene) as a result of human activity. The included extinctions span numerous families of plants and animals, including mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles and arthropods. With widespread degradation of highly biodiverse habitats such as coral reefs and rainforests, as well as other areas, the vast majority of these extinctions are thought to be undocumented, as the species are undiscovered at the time of their extinction, or no one has yet discovered their extinction. The current rate of extinction of species is estimated at 100 to 1,000 times higher than natural background rates.

The Holocene extinction includes the disappearance of large land animals known as megafauna, starting at the end of the last glacial period. Megafauna outside of the African mainland (thus excluding Madagascar), which did not evolve alongside humans, proved highly sensitive to the introduction of new predation, and many died out shortly after early humans began spreading and hunting across the Earth (many African species have also gone extinct in the Holocene, but – with few exceptions – megafauna of the mainland was largely unaffected until a few hundred years ago). These extinctions, occurring near the Pleistocene–Holocene boundary, are sometimes referred to as the Quaternary extinction event.

The most popular theory is that human overhunting of species added to existing stress conditions as the extinction coincides with human emergence. Although there is debate regarding how much human predation affected their decline, certain population declines have been directly correlated with human activity, such as the extinction events of New Zealand and Hawaii. Aside from humans, climate change may have been a driving factor in the megafaunal extinctions, especially at the end of the Pleistocene.

Ecologically, humanity has been noted as an unprecedented "global superpredator" that consistently preys on the adults of other apex predators, and has worldwide effects on food webs. There have been extinctions of species on every land mass and in every ocean: there are many famous examples within Africa, Asia, Europe, Australia, North and South America, and on smaller islands. Overall, the Holocene extinction can be linked to the human impact on the environment. The Holocene extinction continues into the 21st century, with meat consumption, overfishing, and ocean acidification and the decline in amphibian populations being a few broader examples of a cosmopolitan decline in biodiversity. Human population growth and increasing per capita consumption are considered to be the primary drivers of this decline.

The 2019 Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, published by the United Nations' Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, posits that roughly one million species of plants and animals face extinction within decades as the result of human actions.