β€œIt basically transformed our entire understanding of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics and thus the history.”

"He was tasked with measuring the amount of lead that was the result of radioactive decay. His measurements were way off due to lead contamination. Eventually, Clair Patterson created the ultra-clean room to collect his samples. He was able to find the age of 4.6 billion years. The first person he told was his mother. While doing this, Clair Patterson learned just how contaminated the environment was with lead. He then advocated and succeeded in the banning of leaded petrol."

"Providing evidence that ultimately led to stopping leaded fuel was orders of magnitude more important, at least for humankind. He's one of the great big three scientists who helped save millions (potentially billions, because of the ramifications) of lives, and you've never heard of him (the others being Norman Borlaug and Jonas Salk)."

"It was so loud it was picked up by sensors over 3,000 miles apart. Because the audio profile looked exactly like a marine animal's vocalisation (but scaled up to an impossible size), conspiracy theorists and internet forums went wild, thinking we had discovered Cthulhu or a massive, undiscovered prehistoric leviathan.Β 

Years later, NOAA finally solved it. It wasn't a biological creature at all. It was the sound of an 'icequake'β€”a massive iceberg cracking and breaking away from an Antarctic glacier. The sound waves just carried perfectly through the ocean's deep sound channel."

"Fun fact: although almost all ulcers are due to H. pylori or NSAIDs, you can get ulcers from stress - but the 'just went through several major surgeries in the last few weeks' type of stress, not the 'reports are due at the end of the quarter' type of stress."

"I watched a documentary on that. They logically narrowed down his likely burial location from a good chunk of Britain to one exact spot. It had been the site of a church he was possibly buried near after dying in battle. They even brainstormed which end of the church he'd likely be near, or under. His body was in the first hole they dug."

Β "Vasco da Gama's crew actually figured out citrus cured it in 1497, and other ship surgeons rediscovered the same fact independently in the late 1500s and early 1600s, but the knowledge kept slipping away between voyages and generations. James Lind then ran one of the first controlled clinical trials in history in 1747, definitively proving citrus worked, and even he couldn't fully escape outdated medical theory enough to champion his own finding.

It took until 1928 for anyone to actually isolate vitamin C itself and understand why citrus worked all along, so the practical fix got found and lost repeatedly for over 400 years before the biology finally caught up with what sailors already knew."

Additional thumbnail credits: A. Martin UW Photography / Getty Images, BBC One, Universal Pictures, 20th Century Fox