Just before George Washington died at Mount Vernon on December 14, 1799, doctors only made things worse by draining 40 percent of his blood.While much is known about the life of America’s first president, far less is understood about George Washington’s death. In December 1799, America’s most famous founding father suddenly fell ill. At first, it seemed to be no cause for alarm. By that point, Washington had already survived an impressive number of diseases, including malaria, smallpox, tuberculosis, dysentery, tonsillitis, and pneumonia.

The "shoot-on-sight" policy at India's Kaziranga national park saw more poachers killed by guards than rhinos killed by poachers in 2015.STRDEL/AFP/Getty ImagesTourists photograph a rhinoceros with her calf at Kaziranga National Park on February 21, 2012. Thanks to the rising cost of rhino horns on the illegal black market, rhino numbers are plummeting throughout Africa and Southeast Asia. However, the rhinos at Kaziranga, a national park in northeastern India, are thriving.

From children being chained up to women being lobotomized, the conditions in these insane asylums were truly harrowing. A patient sits inside Ohio's Cleveland State Mental Hospital in 1946.Mary Delaney Cooke/Corbis via Getty Images A patient sits in a chair with restraints at the West Riding Lunatic Asylum in Wakefield, England in 1869.Wellcome Library, London Child patients sit bound and tied to a radiator inside the psychiatric hospital in Deir el Qamar, Lebanon in 1982.

Maurizio Gucci was gunned down on orders of his embittered ex-wife Patrizia Reggiani on the steps of his Milan office on March 27, 1995.A scion of the Italian fashion empire, Maurizio Gucci had it all. He was raised in luxury only to take charge of the world-renowned brand and marry a fiery socialite. As chronicled in Ridley Scott’s House of Gucci, the ambitious heir would not only lose all control over the company — but be murdered at the behest of his own wife, Patrizia Reggiani.

When the town of Florence tried to dispose of a dead whale that had washed up on its beaches using dynamite, nothing went as planned.On November 9, 1970, the carcass of an eight-ton, 45-foot-long sperm whale washed up on the beach near the small town of Florence, Oregon. For the next several days, the whale sat rotting on the shore. As local KATU news anchor Paul Linnman noted at the time, the Oregon State Highway Department “not only had a whale of a problem on its hands — it had a stinking whale of a problem.