legal gay marriage, trekkies, secret town

11 countries where gay marriage is legal On June 8, 1901, Elisa Sanchez Loriga, dressed as a man and using a male alias, married her girlfriend Marcela Gracia Ibeas. Once the truth was discovered (and published in two newspapers) the women lost their jobs, were excommunicated, and had to flee the country in order to escape arrest. Despite all this their marriage was never annulled, making theirs the first recorded gay marriage in Spain’s history.


We're Trekkies and we know it


Great set of pictures: In 1942, as part of the Manhattan Project, the U.S. government acquired 70,000 acres of land in Eastern Tennessee and established a secret town called Oak Ridge. More info about the photography from the U.S. Department of Energy: Most of them were taken by Ed Westcott [pictured above], who was the only person allowed to photography the Oak Ridge reservation during the Manhattan Project. Aside from documenting the operations of the project, he spent a lot of time capturing everyday life within the 70,000 acre top secret city. All of the photos with people were meticulously posed.

nazis, exploding spacecraft, and finding a teacher

A stockbroker named Nicholas Winton brought 669 Czechoslovakian Jewish children to England, saving their lives. He refused to take credit for his deed until his wife found a scrapbook of the children that he saved and gave it to the BBC. He turns 103 this year.

To counteract the next item, here's a more happy story about a guy trying to apologize to his teacher 39 years later.

The Challenger astronauts are widely acknowledged by experts and NASA itself to have been alive and likely conscious until the crew cabin hit the water - 2 minutes and 45 seconds after the explosion. (I ended up wanting to read this whole series of articles, so if you'd like to go to chapter 1 I've made it much easier.)