After hallucinogenics researcher Richard Alpert was fired from Harvard for drugging his students, he reinvented himself as a spiritual leader named Ram Dass and became an icon of the counterculture.Robert Altman/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesAmerican spiritual teacher Baba Ram Dass (Richard Alpert) poses for a portrait. Over the course of his life, it would appear that Ram Dass led two vastly different lives. The first, of Richard Alpert, a boy born into an upper-class Jewish family in Newton, Massachusetts, who earned three degrees in psychology and was a respected professor.

The mikveh likely dates back to before World War II, when the Polish town of Chmielnik had a thriving Jewish community.Ofer Adaret/Haaretz The Jewish ritual baths were used for purification before religious ceremonies or holidays. The new owner of a shuttered Polish strip club was in for a big shock when he found a mikveh, or Jewish ritual bath, in the basement of his new property. A few years ago, Marian Zwolski, a businessman from Chmielnik in Poland, purchased the Sphinx, a nightclub that has been out of business for 15 years.

Thanks to modern-day genome sequencing technology, we now know more about Japan's ancient world than ever before — and all because of a tooth. The National Museum of Nature and Science, TokyoThe ‘Jōmon woman,’ as she’s come to be known, was excavated in 1998, but technology had to catch up in order to extract the wealth of information hidden in her DNA. When researchers unearthed a woman in 1998 belonging to the now-extinct Jōmon people of ancient Japan, DNA analysis wasn’t quite advanced enough to put this discovery to full use.

Adventurer and spy Sidney George Reilly did daring espionage work for Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, earning him the moniker "Ace of Spies" — until Stalin put an end to him.Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) Public Archive/Wikimedia CommonsSidney Reilly, once called “the Scarlet Pimpernel of Red Russia.” While the thrilling cloak-and-dagger of classic fictional spies derives from many sources, much of the behind-enemy-lines, false-mustache skulduggery is thought to be traceable to one man.

After Pearl Harbor, Americans took trophy skulls as they viewed the Japanese as inherently evil and less than human.Wikimedia CommonsClockwise from top left: U.S. soldier with the Japanese skull adopted as the “mascot” of Navy Motor Torpedo Boat 341 circa April 1944, U.S. soldiers boiling a Japanese skull for preservation purposes circa 1944, a Japanese soldier’s severed head hangs from a tree in Burma circa 1945, a skull adorns a sign at Peleliu in October 1944.