Month: January 2017

Happy Friday the 13th! Why is the number 13 considered unlucky, anyway? Here are 13 possible reasons.

1. THERE WERE 13 PEOPLE AT THE LAST SUPPER.

And tradition has held that the 13th to take their seat was either Judas or Jesus himself.

2. MANY BELIEVE EITHER THE LAST SUPPER OR THE CRUCIFIXION OCCURRED ON THE 13TH.

One of the great controversies surround the Last Supper is whether or not it was a Passover meal. John seems to suggest that the meal was eaten the day before Passover, which has led some scholars to date the Last Supper to the 13th of Nisan (a month on the Jewish calendar), while others say that the crucifixion itself was on the 13th of Nisan.

3. BIBLICAL REFERENCES TO THE NUMBER 13 AREN’T ALL THAT POSITIVE.

According to historian Vincent Foster Hopper, one of the people who really pushed 13 as being unlucky was 16th century numerologist Petrus Bungus. Among his reasons? Hopper says that Bungus “records that the Jews murmured 13 times against God in the exodus from Egypt, that the thirteenth psalm concerns wickedness and corruption, that the circumcision of Israel occurred in the thirteenth year.”

4. TRADITIONALLY, THERE WERE 13 STEPS TO THE GALLOWS.

According to popular lore, there are 13 steps leading up to the gallows. Gallows actually varied wildly, but even then, the number was often brought up to 13. A park ranger at Fort Smith Historic Site once said, “[There were] 13 steps on the gallows—12 up, and one down.”

5. THE MASS ARREST AND EXECUTION OF THE KNIGHTS TEMPLAR BEGAN ON FRIDAY THE 13TH.

The Knights Templar, who were widely believed to be protecting the Holy Grail (the cup Jesus drank from at the Last Supper) as well as other holy objects, also acted as a bank of sorts to European kings. But after French King Philip IV lost a war with England and became heavily indebted to the Knights, he conspired with Pope Clement V to have all members of the Knights Templar arrested, charged with Satanism and other crimes, and massacred. The roundup of the Knights Templar began in earnest on Friday, October 13, 1307.

6. WOMEN MENSTRUATE ROUGHLY 13 TIMES A YEAR.

Some suggest that the association with 13 being unlucky is due to women generally having around 13 menstrual cycles a year (based on a cycle length of 28 days).

7. A WITCHES’ COVEN HAS 13 MEMBERS.

Although a coven is now considered to be any group of witches (or vampires, in some tellings), it was once believed that a coven was made up of exactly 13 members.

8. 13 LETTERS IN A NAME MEANS THE PERSON IS CURSED.

There’s an old superstition that says if you have 13 letters in your name, you’re bound to be cursed. Silly, yes, but slightly more convincing when you consider that a number of notorious murderers’ names (Charles Manson, Jack the Ripper, Jeffrey Dahmer, Theodore Bundy, and Albert De Salvo) all contain 13 letters. And, in case you were wondering: Adolf Hitler’s baptismal name was Adolfus Hitler [PDF].

9. SUPERSTITION HAS MADE FRIDAY THE 13TH TOUGH FOR BUSINESSES.

Friday the 13th is an expensive day for businesses. One analyst claims that around a billion dollars a year are lost as people choose not to do business of any kind on Friday the 13th.

10. 12 IS A PERFECT NUMBER, SO 13 MUST BE UNLUCKY.

In some schools of numerology, the number 12 is considered to be the representation of perfection and completion. It stands to reason, then, that trying to improve upon perfection by adding a digit is a very bad idea indeed—your greed will be rewarded with bad luck.

11. ZOROASTRIAN TRADITION PREDICTS CHAOS IN THE 13TH MILLENNIUM.

The ancient Persians divided history into four chunks of 3000 years. And although the exact timeframes can vary, some scholars feel that at the beginning of the 13,000th year there will be chaos as evil mounts a great battle against good (although good will eventually triumph).

12. SPORTS GREATS WITH JERSEY NUMBER 13 SOMETIMES COME UP SHORT.

Dan Marino is a constant fixture at or near the top of “best quarterbacks to never win a Super Bowl” list. Perhaps his failure to grab the biggest prize in football comes down to his jersey number—13. And he’s not the only example: basketball star Steve Nash was a two-time NBA MVP and is considered one of the all-time great point guards, but he and his #13 jersey never won a championship.

13. SUPER BOWL XIII WAS A HUGE FINANCIAL SETBACK FOR SPORTS BOOKIES.

And keeping with sports, 1979’s Super Bowl XIII was a particularly bad one for bookies. Called “Black Sunday,” it pitted the Dallas Cowboys, the defending champions, against the Pittsburgh Steelers. But as money kept pouring in from Texas and Pennsylvania, the spread kept changing until settling precisely at the game’s actual spread. The losses were legendary.

To counter all of this undue hatred of the poor number 13, here’s one reason to love it: a baker’s dozen. Mmm, extra doughnut.

A version of this story ran in 2010.

In 2005, the European Space Agency’s Huygens probe—which had been sent into space with its mothership, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, to learn more about Saturn and its moons—became the first spacecraft to land on an object in the outer solar system. That object was Titan, a hazy, planet-like moon of Saturn. Now, 12 years after the historic voyage, Mashable reports that NASA has released a video of Huygens’s descent.

Huygens took samples of Titan’s atmosphere and captured hundreds of photos of the moon. These images revealed a new, alien world with rugged mountains, dramatic gorges, and dark drainage channels that were suggestive of liquid methane rivers.

“The Huygens images were everything our images from orbit were not,” planetary scientist Carolyn Porco, who worked as the Cassini imaging team lead at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado, said in a NASA press release. “Instead of hazy, sinuous features that we could only guess were streams and drainage channels, here was incontrovertible evidence that at some point in Titan’s history—perhaps even now—there were flowing liquid hydrocarbons on the surface. Huygens’s images became a Rosetta Stone for helping us interpret our subsequent findings on Titan.”

The Huygens probe only transmitted data during its descent; after it landed on Titan, it went silent. The Cassini spacecraft has continued to explore Titan from above, capturing images of sand dunes and lakes of liquid methane and ethane. Cassini is currently in its final year of exploration; its mission is slated to end in September 2017.

In the video below, you can relive the Huygens probe’s historic descent, from atmospheric entry to touchdown.

[h/t Mashable]

EpiPens, the auto-injectors that reverse severe allergic reactions, have become obscenely expensive in the last decade, with costs rising more than 450 percent since 2004—and you can’t always get the generic version. A set of two EpiPens costs $600, though the devices only cost the UK’s National Health Service (not the consumer) about $69. Even members of the U.S. Congress have demanded an explanation for the rising costs—in part because, since 1997, it has been misclassified as a generic drug.

CVS is now stepping in to give consumers another option, according to Ars Technica. The drug store is debuting a generic epinephrine auto-injector in a partnership with Impax Laboratories. This generic version of Impax’s Adrenaclick will cost only $109.99, and Impax is making coupons available to reduce the price to just $10 for some patients.

Last year, under intense scrutiny over the price of EpiPens, Mylan began selling a generic version, but that still costs $300. Hopefully, competing with the CVS alternative, sold at 9600 pharmacies around the country, will force Mylan to bring down its prices to a more reasonable rate.

[h/t Ars Technica]