- 1294 Saint Celestine V abdicates the papacy after only five months, hoping to return to his previous life as an ascetic hermit
- 1355 The greatest traveller of his age, Ibn Battuta of Tangier, completes his work "The Travels," detailing his 29 years spent traveling the Islamic world and beyond, including to India, China, and Indonesia
1577 Francis Drake sets sail from England on an epic three-year circumnavigation of the world aboard the "Pelican," later renamed the "Golden Hind"
- 1759 First music store in America opens in Philadelphia by future Treasurer of the United States, Michael Hillegas
- 1920 Francis G. Pease's interferometer at Mount Wilson Observatory is the first to measure the diameter of a star, Betelgeuse
- 1928 The clip-on tie is designed
- 1976 The longest non-stop passenger airflight, from Sydney to San Francisco, is completed in 13 hours and 14 minutes
- 1988 Three men complete their 29-hour all-466-station subway ride in New York City
McGregor vs. Aldo
2015 Irishman Conor McGregor knocks out Brazilian Jose Aldo in 13 seconds to win his first featherweight title in Las Vegas
- 2017 Online dictionary Merriam-Webster's most searched word of the year is "feminism"
- 2017 Prehistoric bones of a penguin are found on a beach in Otago, New Zealand, indicating the penguin was 1.77 meters tall and weighed around 100 kg, as reported in "Nature Communications"
- 2017 Scientists begin checking interstellar asteroid Oumuamua for signs of alien technology through radio signals; later studies conclude it is a piece of a sliced-off planet
- 2018 China built 88 out of the world's 143 skyscrapers (buildings over 200 meters/656 ft) in 2018, representing 61.5% of all buildings of that height completed worldwide in 2018
- 2022 New Zealand passes world's first tobacco ban, outlawing smoking for those born after 2009 [1]
- 2022 The first nuclear fusion reaction in a laboratory setting, replicating the same energy that powers the sun, is announced by scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, California [1]
- 2023 Researchers pinpoint a possible cause of extreme morning sickness in pregnancy: low levels of the hormone GDF15 [1]
