Yule or Yuletide ("Yule-time") is a winter festival that was initially celebrated by the historical Germanic people as a pagan religious festival, though it was later absorbed into, and equated with, the Christian festival of Christmas. Read more
There are few who can honestly say they witnessed a truly momentous, world changing event, but 69-year-old John Brewster from Hythe can rightly make that claim. In 1957 John, then serving in the Army, found himself standing on a beach, on an island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, when he saw a sight...
Cyclone Tracy was a tropical cyclone that devastated the city of Darwin, Northern Territory, Australia, from Christmas Eve to Christmas Day, 1974. It is the most compact cyclone or equivalent-strength hurricane on record in the Australian basin, with gale-force winds extending only 48 kilomet...
The 1972 Nicaragua earthquake was an earthquake that occurred at 12:29 a.m. local time (06:29 UTC) on Saturday, December 23, 1972 near Managua, the capital of Nicaragua. It had a magnitude of 6.2 and occurred at a depth of about 5 kilometres beneath the centre of the city. Read more[spoiler][video=...
The Night of the Radishes (Spanish: Noche de rįbanos) is celebrated every year on December 23 and it began in 1897 in the "zócalo" (main plaza) of Oaxaca city. Although it lasts only a few hours, it attracts thousands of people to this plaza each year. Read more
The Rutan Model 76 Voyager was the first aircraft to fly around the world without stopping or refuelling. It was piloted by Dick Rutan and Jeana Yeager. The flight took off from Edwards Air Force Base's 4,600 m runway in the Mojave Desert on December 14, 1986, and ended successfully 9 days, 3 minutes an...
Karl (or Carl) Richard Lepsius (23 December 1810 - 10 July 1884) was a pioneering Prussian Egyptologist and linguist and pioneer of modern archaeology. Read more
Jean-Franēois Champollion (23 December 1790 - 4 March 1832) was a French classical scholar, philologist and orientalist, decipherer of the Egyptian hieroglyphs. Champollion published the first translation of the Rosetta Stone hieroglyphs in 1822, showing that the Egyptian writing system wa...
The original World Trade Centre was a complex with seven buildings featuring landmark twin towers in Lower Manhattan, New York City, United States. The complex opened on April 4, 1973, and was destroyed in 2001 during the September 11 attacks. The topping out ceremony of 1 WTC (North Tower) took pla...
The Roman festival of Larentalia was held on December 23, but was ordered to be observed twice a year by Augustus; by some supposed to be in honour of the Lares, a kind of domestic genii, or divinities, worshipped in houses, and esteemed the guardians and protectors of families, supposed to reside in c...
Astra missile test-fired on 2nd consecutive day from Chandipur A day after a perfect developmental trial of " Astra", India today again successfully test-fired its indigenously developed beyond visual range (BVR) air-to-air missile from the Integrated Test Range at Chandipur, 15 k...
The 190 - 440 metre wide asteroid 2004 JO1 will make a close pass (76.9 lunar distances, 0.1975 AU), travelling at 17.87 km/second, to the Earth-Moon system on the 22nd December, 2012 @ 17:30 UT ±2 days 15:30. See more The Lunar Distance (LD), the distance between Earth and the Moon, equals 384,401 k...
James Burke (born 22 December 1936) is a British broadcaster, science historian, author and television producer known amongst other things for his documentary television series Connections (1978) and its more philosophical oriented companion production, The Day the Universe Changed (1985)...
