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On the morning of July 14, 2018, 18-year-old Aldi Novel Adilang sat alone on a small wooden platform far off the coast of North Sulawesi, Indonesia.

The platform was a rompong, a floating fish trap anchored to the seabed about 125 kilometres from shore. His job was to keep lamps burning at night so fish would gather. Someone came out once a week with food, water, fuel, and to take the catch. He had already been adrift twice before, for a week and for two days. Both times, the owner found him.

That morning strong winds and high waves worked the anchor rope until it parted. For about a week, he could still reach friends on another trap by radio. Then he was alone.

He had whatever supplies the last delivery had left. When those ran out, he caught fish and cooked them over a fire made from wood taken off the platform. He collected rainwater. More than 10 ships passed. He waved. None stopped.

On August 31, the Panamanian bulk carrier MV Arpeggio picked him up in waters near Guam. The ship was bound for Japan. He reached Tokuyama on September 6 and was flown home a few days later. Indonesian officials said he was in good health.

In 1206, Ismail al-Jazari finished a manuscript for the Artuqid ruler Nasir al-Din Mahmud, at whose court in Diyarbakır he had served as an engineer for about 25 years.

The book is known in English as "The Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices" (Kitāb fī maʿrifat al-ḥiyal al-handasiyya). It describes 50 machines, with drawings and instructions for building them: water clocks, candle clocks, fountains, musical automata, a hand-washing device, and machines for raising water.

The best known is the elephant clock. A float in a hidden tank drove a sequence of figures. Every half hour a bird whistled, a man dropped a ball into the mouth of a dragon, and the elephant driver struck the animal’s head. The figures drew on several traditions — an Indian elephant, Chinese dragons, an Egyptian phoenix — and the clock was designed to mark the unequal hours of the day as they changed through the year.

Among the practical machines is a twin-cylinder pump driven by a waterwheel. Its crank and connecting-rod arrangement converted rotary motion into a back-and-forth stroke, an early form of the crankshaft later central to engines. Al-Jazari did not invent the crank itself; earlier writers, including the Banu Musa in the ninth century, had described related mechanisms. What his book supplies is a worked design, with proportions a craftsman could follow.

He died in 1206, the year the book was completed. Copies survive, including one in the Topkapı Palace library. Modern writers sometimes call him the father of robotics. The manuscript itself makes a narrower claim: a court engineer setting down, in drawings and measurements, the machines he had built.

Catherine Conteh was 18, newly married, and at Princess Christian Maternity Hospital in Sierra Leone. The country was in civil war. She and her husband, Augustine, could not pay for the surgery the hospital said she needed. Staff told a visiting nurse that both mother and baby would die.

The nurse was Aly Hall, from New Zealand, volunteering with Mercy Ships. The ship Anastasis was docked in Freetown. Aly and a British anaesthetist, Dr Keith Thomson, were touring the ward when Aly heard Catherine. Thomson paid for the caesarean. Reports put the cost at about £70, or $100.

Both Catherine and the baby came through. The girl was named Regina, after an American volunteer nurse who also visited the ward. Aly and Gina brought medicine and came back in the days after. Catherine later called Aly sister.

The family eventually settled in Australia. Catherine trained as a nurse. Regina did too, and at 18 volunteered on a Mercy Ship. Catherine has said that one yes saved a whole family: her life, her daughter’s, and a future they had not expected.

On 1 October 2023, they met again on the dock beside the Global Mercy in Freetown, 30 years after the hospital room. Catherine had come from Australia to volunteer in the ship’s dining room. Aly was back on board. It was the first time they had seen each other since the recovery ward.

“Sometimes the smallest acts of love say the most. This is so pure and heartbreaking at the same time. ❤️”

On the night of January 25, 1894, in Auburn, New York, Emil Keller, his wife Mary, and their infant daughter Anna were shot inside their home at 10 Burt Avenue.

Emil was 30. Mary, also recorded as Marie, was 29. Anna was about nine months old. The couple had come to the United States from Switzerland a few years earlier. Emil had worked as a gardener in Philadelphia and Washington before the family settled in Auburn. They had already lost at least one infant.

Contemporary reports said Mary shot her husband and the child, then herself. Emil and Mary died that night. Anna was taken to the city hospital. She died the following evening, January 26. The Auburn Bulletin reported that the three would be buried in one casket. The funeral was held at the Universalist church, and they were interred at Fort Hill Cemetery.

The stone later placed over them reads, in German, that Emil, Maria and Anna rest there, and that their fate was decided by the mother’s hand. It gives the date as 25 January 1894.

Ferid Spahić was 29 and from the Višegrad area. On 15 June 1992, he was among about 50 Bosniak men taken to the Paklenik pit, in the woods between Sokolac, Rogatica and Višegrad. Their hands were bound with wire. Men were shot at the edge of the ravine.

Spahić was last in line and not tied to anyone else. He started running. The Serb forces fired at him. The bullets missed, and he got away. He crossed forest and rock and reached the village of Mrčići that afternoon, badly beaten and covered in blood. An older man he met would not take him farther.

He made it to a neighbor’s garden in the same state. The neighbor went to Mina Jahić. Mina told her to bring him to the house after dark, so no one would see.

Mina knew the risk. Armed men were searching for him. One Serb neighbor even came to the door and said he was looking for a lost sheep. She hid Ferid in the attic. He had to stay completely still and silent. People downstairs could hear movement above them.

Mina lived there with her husband and four sons. If the man was found, the family could be in danger too. She dressed his wounds, crushed black onion for compresses, and later said she nursed him “like a baby.” He could not move for 10 or 12 days. She brought him food. She kept him hidden for about a month, until he could leave. He later reached Goražde with others, and later his wife.

Years later, asked why she did it, Mina said he was a human being and he needed to live.

In 2011, on the 60th anniversary of the UN refugee convention, the US State Department formally recognized her for personal courage.

In February 1983, Phoolan Devi walked out of the Chambal ravines and surrendered to the Madhya Pradesh police at Bhind.

She was in her early twenties. She had spent several years with armed gangs in the ravines of India's Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh, a stretch of country long used by dacoits. Police had a reward on her. Dozens of cases were registered against her, including the killings of about 20 men in the village of Behmai on 14 February 1981. She later said the attack was revenge for an assault she had suffered there. Courts never tried her for Behmai.

The surrender was negotiated. She would give herself up only in Madhya Pradesh, not in Uttar Pradesh, and only before portraits of Gandhi and the goddess Durga. On 12 February 1983, she laid down her rifle in front of a large crowd. The terms included a limit on her time in jail. She was held for 11 years, much of it without trial, and released in 1994.

In 1996, she was elected to the Lok Sabha from Mirzapur on a Samajwadi Party ticket. She served a term, lost the next election, and won the seat again in 1999. On 25 July 2001, she was shot outside her house in New Delhi and died the same day. She was 37. Three men were later convicted of the murder.

Her own account of the years before the ravines — a child marriage, disputes over land, and time in police custody — became widely known after her release, through interviews and a dictated autobiography. The public record is uneven. What is fixed is the sequence: a village killing in 1981, a negotiated surrender in 1983, a decade in jail, two terms in parliament, and a murder in Delhi that closed the file.

Marvin Winston kayak-fishes Lake Lanier in Georgia and records the trips for people who cannot get on the water themselves.

On February 19, 2026, a windy day, he was near the Clarks Bridge ramp and the Olympic rowing venue. Before he started fishing, he heard what he first thought might be an animal over the wind. He paddled toward the sound. On a remote stretch of shore he saw a person lying down. He got out of the kayak and called out. A woman answered. She was crying, gasping, and not fully coherent.

Winston stayed with with the woman, called 911, and gave dispatchers his location and what he could see of her condition. Hall County responders used that to find the spot. He kept talking to the woman until they arrived.

The U.S. Coast Guard Auxiliary later gave him a letter of commendation. The citation said his call shortened the response time. A Texas paramedic who watched the video wrote that the woman had been treated as a severe trauma patient and was released alive from the hospital. He said she likely would have died on that beach without getting care.

For more than 20 years in Dubai, Julieta Solas worked as a nurse—and spent her free time caring for other Filipino migrants.

Julieta arrived in the UAE in 1984 and began working as a staff nurse at Rashid Hospital.

Over the years, she moved through several departments and eventually became the unit-in-charge of the pediatric department at Latifa Hospital.

But her work didn't stop when her shift ended.

For two decades, Julieta also led the St. Mary’s Filipino Community in Dubai, organizing activities and leadership programs and volunteering whenever medical teams were needed.

She understood that migrant workers needed more than medical care.

Many were far from their families, dealing with loneliness, stress and difficult working conditions. Julieta organized community gatherings and recollections to give them somewhere to turn.

She was also involved in medical missions that brought care to people who needed it.

Western Union recognized her in 2015 as one of its Heroes for Better, honoring Filipino migrants who used their time, skills and resources to help others.

On 19 May 1845, Sir John Franklin sailed from Britain with HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, 129 officers and men, and orders to complete the Northwest Passage.

Both ships had already served in polar waters. They were reinforced for ice and fitted with steam engines and screw propellers. Franklin, 59, had commanded earlier Arctic expeditions. Francis Crozier captained Terror; James Fitzjames was second-in-command of Erebus. The ships took on supplies in Greenland. In late July, two whalers saw them in Baffin Bay. That was the last confirmed sighting by Europeans.

What happened next is known mainly from a single paper, Inuit accounts, and later finds. The expedition wintered at Beechey Island in 1845–46. Three men died and were buried there. In September 1846 both ships were beset in ice off the northwest coast of King William Island and did not get free.

A note left in a cairn, found in 1859, carries two messages. The first, dated 28 May 1847, said all was well. The second, written in the margins and dated 25 April 1848, said Franklin had died on 11 June 1847, that 24 men were already dead, and that the remaining 105 had abandoned the ships on 22 April 1848 and were starting for the Back River on the mainland. No one from that march reached a settlement.

Search parties through the 1850s found graves, camps, boats on sledges, and scattered bones on King William Island. Inuit witnesses described groups of starving men and, later, ships that had drifted or been abandoned. The wreck of Erebus was located in 2014 in Queen Maud Gulf; Terror was found in 2016 in Terror Bay, farther north. Both sites are now protected.

The note of April 1848 is the last written record. It places the decision to leave the ships and the direction the survivors intended to walk. It does not say how far they got, or why both vessels ended where they did.

Anke Gowda grew up in a farming family in Mandya district, Karnataka, with almost no books in the house. A college lecturer told his class to pick up a habit. Gowda picked books.

He worked as a bus conductor, then as a timekeeper at a sugar factory in Pandavapura. Reports say he put most of his pay into the collection. He sold land and a house in Mysuru when the piles outgrew the rooms. Retirement money went into books as well.

The books are in Pustaka Mane — House of Books — in Haralahalli, Pandavapura taluk. Hari Khoday paid for the main building. Later, state money added more space. The collection is estimated at more than two million volumes, in more than 20 languages, including rare foreign titles, thousands of dictionaries, and old manuscripts. There is no membership fee. Students, exam candidates, and researchers use it. Gowda and his family live on the site and still find titles from memory. Hundreds of thousands of books remain in sacks outside, unsorted.

He received the Padma Shri award in 2026, in the unsung-heroes category, for the library. He has said he did not want the money for himself. He wanted a place where anyone could read.

Between 1993 and 2009, laboratories in Germany, Austria and France kept recovering the same female DNA profile from crime scenes that had nothing obvious in common.

The trace appeared at roughly 40 sites: murders, robberies and other offences, spread across several German states and into neighbouring countries. The woman was never seen. Mitochondrial analysis of some Austrian samples pointed toward Eastern European ancestry. German police could not match the profile to anyone in their databases. After a police officer was shot in Heilbronn in April 2007, the unknown woman became widely known as the Phantom of Heilbronn, or the Woman Without a Face. A task force worked the cases. By early 2009 the reward stood at €300,000.

Doubts had already been raised inside the investigation. The amounts of DNA were tiny. Bavarian police, who used swabs from a different supplier, never found the profile. In March 2009 the same DNA turned up on fingerprints taken from a male asylum seeker’s body in France. A second check of those prints did not repeat the result.

Investigators compared the collection kits. The swabs at the scenes that produced the profile came from one manufacturer. They were sterile, but not certified as free of human DNA. Testing pointed to a woman who packed the swabs at the factory. Her DNA had been transferred to the cotton before the kits ever reached a crime scene, and then picked up when officers sampled surfaces.

There was no serial offender linking the cases. The shared profile was contamination. The episode later contributed to stricter standards for forensic collection materials, including ISO 18385, published in 2016.

For more than 15 years a factory worker’s trace had been read as the signature of a killer who moved freely across borders and left no other sign of herself.

In August 1835, a New York newspaper started telling its readers that astronomers had discovered life on the Moon.

And people believed it.

The New York Sun claimed that the famous astronomer Sir John Herschel had built a powerful new telescope while working in South Africa and used it to observe the lunar surface.

What he supposedly saw was incredible.

There were forests, oceans, beaches and rivers. Then came the animals: bison, goats, tiny reindeer and strange beaver-like creatures that supposedly walked on two legs.

The reports eventually described something even more extraordinary: winged humanoids living on the Moon.

They were called “man-bats.”

The stories appeared as a series of six articles beginning on August 25. They were written in the language of serious science and attributed to a supposedly authoritative source, which made them sound convincing.

But there was one problem.

The entire thing was made up.

The author was Sun reporter Richard Adams Locke. The supposed scientific journal he cited had already stopped publishing, and the astronomer Sir John Herschel had never made any of these discoveries.

Locke later said the articles were intended as satire. But plenty of readers didn't get the joke.

Other newspapers reprinted the stories, and the supposed discoveries spread far beyond New York.

For a few weeks in 1835, people looked up at the Moon believing it wasn't empty at all. It had forests, strange animals and flying people.

Ros Irwin found an 18-month-old koala named Ember walking across the burned ground after Australia’s Black Summer fires.

It was November 2019 in northern New South Wales. Ember was severely dehydrated, her fur was black with soot and badly singed, and she had serious burns on all four paws and her rump. Vets also found her lungs were congested from smoke inhalation.

Ros, a volunteer with Friends of the Koala, rescued her and got her to a wildlife hospital. Ember was given pain relief, fluids and emergency treatment before beginning a long rehabilitation.

Her burned paws and damaged claws meant she couldn't simply be released. She was moved to a soft-release site where vets could make sure she could climb and forage properly again.

She passed the test.

In April 2020, Ember was released back into the wild. About 18 months later, Ros spotted her again—healthy and carrying a joey.

Franjo Komarica was bishop of Banja Luka when the Bosnian war reached a city that had not seen large open battles but was being emptied along ethnic lines. Most of the Catholics — largely Croats — were driven out. Mosques were destroyed. Churches were burned. He stayed.

His residence held displaced Muslim, Orthodox and Catholic families at the same time, sometimes more than 30 people. Diocesan Caritas distributed food and medicine without a checklist of nationality. He met the Orthodox bishop and the mufti and kept writing letters against expulsion, including to the authorities carrying it out.

He spent much of 1995 under house arrest. Seven priests and a nun from the diocese were killed. He later said the rule they tried to keep was simple: better to suffer wrong than to do it.

In 2008, workers opened the door of an apartment in Zagreb that had been closed for years.

Inside, they found the body of Hedviga Golik, a nurse from Rijeka who had apparently been dead for decades.

Golik lived alone in a tiny 18-square-metre attic at Medveščak 77. Neighbours remembered seeing her in 1967. By 1973, police had recorded her as missing.

Exactly when she died was never established. Forensic doctors could only narrow it down to sometime between 1966 and 1973.

But the strangest part is why nobody opened her door.

In 1981, the building's tenants had jointly helped pay off her apartment loan. Each believed they had a claim to part of the property. Then, in 1998, someone taped a fake City of Zagreb notice to her door saying the apartment could not be touched until the ownership was settled.

So nobody touched it.

Even the electricity kept being paid. The building's architect continued paying the bills until he died, just three months before the apartment was finally opened. The gas company never sent a bill because there was no consumption.

Then, on May 12, 2008, the building was being converted into condominiums. Every owner had been accounted for except Hedviga Golik.

They opened her door.

She was still lying in the bed, wrapped in blankets.

Her cause of death was never determined. The cold, isolated attic and natural mummification helped conceal what had happened.

On the morning of 1 September 1859, the English astronomer Richard Carrington was drawing sunspots at his private observatory in Redhill when two patches of intense white light flared on the Sun’s surface. The outburst lasted only minutes. Seventeen hours later the Earth was hit.

What followed is now called the Carrington Event — the strongest geomagnetic storm in the instrumental record.

Telegraph networks across Europe and North America failed. Operators received electric shocks. Equipment sparked and, in some offices, paper caught fire. A few lines continued to work even after batteries were disconnected, powered by the induced current alone. In Boston and other cities, messages were sent that way for a short time.

Auroras appeared far beyond their usual range. People in the Caribbean, Hawaii, and southern Europe saw the sky glow red, green and violet. In parts of the United States the light was bright enough to read a newspaper at midnight. Miners in the Rocky Mountains woke and started breakfast, thinking dawn had come.

Carrington and another observer, Richard Hodgson, had independently recorded the flare. Their notes, together with magnetometer readings from Kew and elsewhere, later tied the solar outburst to the storm on Earth. No one then understood the physics in modern terms. The connection between sunspots, flares and terrestrial magnetism became much clearer afterward.

A storm of similar strength today would damage satellites, power grids and radio systems on a far larger scale. The 1859 event remains the benchmark: a quiet September morning, a flare on the Sun, and a night when the wires and the sky both behaved as if the world had been plugged into something new.

In 2003, María Luz Córdova Casimiro started APNEYO in Máncora, on Peru’s north coast.

At the time, children with disabilities in the area had very few places where they could learn or receive therapy. For many families, getting specialized support meant traveling to cities such as Piura or Lima — often simply not an option.

Donations eventually helped APNEYO build a campus in Barrio Nicaragua.

Then, in 2011, the private school Divino Niño Jesús opened there.

It was designed around inclusion. Children with and without disabilities learn together, from kindergarten through primary school, alongside a special primary class. Physiotherapy and speech therapy are available on the same campus.

The idea sounds simple: children should be able to learn, receive the support they need, and belong in the same place.

But in a small coastal town where those services had been scarce, making that the default was anything but simple.

The school remains small, supported by a modest staff and volunteers. It hasn't solved Peru's wider challenges around disability and education.

But María Luz Córdova Casimiro and APNEYO changed something much closer to home.

For three years, something hunted people across rural France. Even after a huge wolf was killed and declared to be the beast, the attacks continued.

In June 1764, 14-year-old Jeanne Boulet became the first officially recorded victim of what became known as the Beast of Gévaudan.

Over the next three years, people across the mountainous region of southern France reported attacks by an unusually aggressive animal. Witnesses described something resembling a large wolf, sometimes with reddish fur and a dark stripe along its back.

The exact death toll is disputed, but dozens of people were killed and many more injured. The attacks became so notorious that the French crown eventually sent royal hunters to find the animal.

In September 1765, François Antoine, the king's royal gun-bearer, killed an enormous wolf near the Abbey of Chazes.

He declared it the Beast of Gévaudan. But the attacks continued.

In June 1767, local hunter Jean Chastel shot and killed another large canid. After that, no further deaths were attributed to the Beast.

Was Chastel's animal the creature responsible for the attacks? A wolf, an unusually large canid, several animals — or something else entirely?

The surviving records can't give us a definite answer.

That's how the Beast of Gévaudan became one of France's most enduring historical mysteries.

A café in Greece opened its doors every night to stray dogs

In Mytilene, on the Greek island of Lesbos, there was a café called Hott Spott that had a simple rule after closing time:

The dogs could stay.

During the day, it was an ordinary café. But once the last customers left around 3 a.m., the doors were opened to stray dogs from the city. They were allowed to come inside, curl up on the couches, and sleep somewhere warm instead of spending the night on the streets.

The practice had reportedly been going on since the summer of 2015.

In December that year, University of the Aegean professor Eustratios Papanis photographed several of the dogs sleeping inside and shared the picture online. It quickly spread around the world.

A café employee told reporters that the dogs simply came in when the bar closed, and that having them there wasn't a problem.

There was no elaborate shelter or fundraising campaign. Just a business choosing to leave its doors open for animals that had nowhere else to go.