On this day in 1984, a gas leak from a Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India, spread over a populated area, resulting ultimately in 15,000 to 20,000 deaths and leaving some half million survivors with chronic medical ailments.

More Events on this day:

1967: Christiaan Barnard of South Africa performed the first human heart transplant, at Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town.

1861: In a battle during the American Civil War, Federal troops ousted the Confederates from Salem, Missouri.

1818: Illinois was admitted as the 21st state of the United States of America.

1721: German composer Johann Sebastian Bach married his second wife, Anna Magdalena Wilcken, daughter of a trumpeter at Weissenfels.

1552: St. Francis Xavier, the leading Roman Catholic missionary of modern times, died of fever off the coast of China.

Gilbert Stuart

American painter Gilbert Stuart, born this day in 1755, was one of his era's great portraitists, renowned for his portrait of George Washington and praised for his brushwork, luminous colouring, and psychological penetration.

• Evolutionary Urges and the One-Night Stand
  For those intimate with the walk of shame, this article in New Scientist explores emerging theories of "sociosexuality," aka why women and men pursue casual sex differently. Times Online gives the UK its bragging rights for having the highest rate of casual sex of any large industrialized country. But, it's societies with higher gender equality and daycare services like Finland that are closing the one-night stand gender gap. Radio Lab gets in the sex-talk spirit, too.
• Psychology Study Shows Obama Won't Be Swayed by Team of Rivals
  Obama's cabinet choices may seem perilously open-minded, but Newsweek's Lab Notes comments on recent findings from Northwestern University that show that powerful people aren't very influenced by those around them, even if they are a Clinton. That means that our commander-in-chief is likely to, says one researcher, "express attitudes that don't necessarily conform to prevailing peer pressure."
• Water Falls Up
  Water drops appear to hover and even fall upwards in this video of a levitating waterfall, evidently taken inside the home of sensory illusionist Al Seckel. The illusion, watch as it's broken by simply poking a finger into the stream, is produced using a strobe light.
• Playing Vegetable-Instrument Music Builds Gray Matter?
  Check out the cucumber saxophone and a coconut-carrot slide trumpet pictures from a recent vegetable-instrument workshop at the American Visionary Art Museum in Santa Fe, and ponder how the gray matter of non-musician brains stacks up against musicians. (via oddinstrument.com)
• Antarctica's Dark Matter Experiment, the Diagram It Deserves
  The New York Times put together this handy, dandy visualization of that landmark Antarctica-based dark matter experiment, involving a balloon the size of football field that detected an excess of high-energy electrons floating 23 miles above the Earth. The experiment made a cameo in Werner Herzog's Encounters at the End of the World, and has been splashed across the Internett since its promising findings were reported in Nature. Now, if only the Times could satisfactorily illustrate the fifth dimension...

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