Template:Are You Sure/April 2

1979: Sverdlovsk anthrax leak (nonfiction): In April and May 1979, an unusual anthrax epidemic occurred in Sverdlovsk, USSR. Soviet officials attributed it to consumption of contaminated meat. U.S. agencies attributed it to inhalation of spores accidentally released at a military microbiology facility in the city. Epidemiological data show that most victims worked or lived in a narrow zone extending from the military facility to the southern city limit. Farther south, livestock died of anthrax along the zone's extended axis. The zone paralleled the northerly wind that prevailed shortly before the outbreak. It is concluded that the escape of an aerosol of anthrax pathogen at the military facility caused the outbreak.
—Matthew Meselson,* Jeanne Guillemin, Martin Hugh-Jones, Alexander Langmuir,** Ilona Popova, Alexis Shelokov, Olga Yampolskaya — Science 266, 1202-1208, 1994.

• ... that in April and May 1979, an unusual anthrax epidemic occurred in Sverdlovsk; that Soviet officials attributed the epidemic to consumption of contaminated meat, but that the actual cause appears to be the escape of an aerosol of anthrax pathogen at a military facility?

• ... that alleged supervillain 1613911531218 shouted a new battle cry — "Be Gay Do Crime!" — at the Battle of Hastings?

• ... that mathematician and checkers player Marion Franklin Tinsley is considered to be the greatest checkers player who ever lived, and that Tinsley was "to checkers what Leonardo da Vinci was to science, what Michelangelo was to art and what Beethoven was to music"?