On September 23, 1957, the Little Rock Central High School was the focal point of the nascent civil rights movement in the United States as nine African-American students tried to enter the newly integrated public school.

The site of the first implementation of the Supreme Court's decision on Brown vs Board of Education, the nine students met consider opposition from over 1,000 white protestors who had been drummed up by then Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus. President Eisenhower had dispatched 1,200 members of the 101st Airborne Division to escort the students into the school. The Little Rock Nine entered the school and made history.

The school now houses a museum dedicated to the event, and continues to function as an educational institution to this day.

Interestingly, the Little Rock Central Band and Flag Line were selected to participate in the 2013 Presidential Inaugural Parade for Barack Obama.

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Legendary comedian, social critic and free speech advocate Lenny Bruce lived at this home until his death here from morphine overdose on August 3, 1966. He was 40 years old.

Bruce's act had increasing challenged the limits of free speech, and he had been arrested for obscenity and banned in several cities for performing his act.

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In northern Ukraine, near the border with Belarus, and adjacent to the former city of Pripyat, are the radioactive remnants of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant.

On April 26, 1986, the #4 reactor had a catastrophic power increase that led to a series of explosions in its core. This dispersed large quantities of radioactive fuel and core materials into the atmosphere, and led to the worst nuclear disaster in history. Chernobyl is one of only two Level 7 events (the maximum rating) on the International Nuclear Event Scale- the other is Fukushima.

While managing the crisis of the Chernobyl meltdown, the #4 reactor was quickly coated with layers of concrete to form "the sarcophagus," a physical barrier to help protect workers against radiation. Even today, radiation levels are so high that the workers responsible for rebuilding the sarcophagus are only allowed to work five hours a day for one month before taking 15 days of rest.

Today, the area 19 miles in all directions is considered the "Chernobyl Exclusion Zone" and will not be habitable for 20,000 years.

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Commissioned in 1971, the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant was the combined effort of General Electric (GE) and the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO). The six boiling water reactors drove electrical generators with a combined power of 4.7 GWe, making Fukushima Daiichi one of the 15 largest nuclear power stations in the world.

On March 11, 2011, a 9.0 earthquake and subsequent tsunami damaged the reactor cooling systems that led to a release of radioactivity. The plant was decommissioned after the accident.

Since April 2011, the 20-km radius around the former plant can only be approached with government supervision.

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Located in the Anatolia region of SE Turkey, this archaeological site is one of the earliest examples of human construction.

The site is a tell (or a mound created from years of human occupation to form a cone truncated with a flat top) that is 49 ft/15 m tall and 984 ft/300 m in diameter. The excavation revealed several rooms and more than 200 massive pillars in 20 different circles, many with ornate carvings.

What boggles the mind about Göbekli Tepe was that it was constructed before the development of agriculture- an estimated 10,000 years BCE. To put that in context, the Pyramids of Giza started construction in 2584 BC.

The neolithic people who constructed this site were hunter-gatherers that used flint-knapped tools to scrape and chisel the construction. As a National Geographic writer put it in an article called "The Birth of Religion":

Discovering that hunter-gatherers had constructed Göbekli Tepe was like finding that someone had built a 747 in a basement with an X-Acto knife.

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