Throughout history there have been more than a few instances of an article of clothing inciting riots. Mental_Floss has collected some examples.

In 1797, London haberdasher John Hetherington was hauled into court on charges of breaching the King’s peace, found guilty, and ordered to pay a £50 fine. His crime? Wearing a silk top hat, or, as it was described in court, “appearing on the public highway wearing upon his head a tall structure having a shining lustre and calculated to frighten timid people.” According to contemporary reports, people booed, dogs barked, women fainted, and a small boy suffered a broken arm after a crowd formed around the hapless Mr. Hetherington.

The New Scientist takes you on an armchair tour of some of the most important telescopes ever built. 

The exact origin of the telescope is still controversial. The oldest existing documents attribute its invention to the Dutch spectacle maker Hans Lipperhey in the early 17th century. Lipperhey found that placing a convex lens at one end of a tube and a concave lens at the other allowed him to magnify distant objects. 

Though he didn’t invent the telescope, Galileo improved on its design – gradually increasing its magnification power. And he was the first to realise that it could be used to study the heavens rather than just to magnify objects on Earth. 

Before the Nazis sullied the swastika, it was known as a symbol of wisdom and mercy dating back over 3,000 years.

The word swastika is generally believed to be an amalgam of the words “su” and “asati.” Su means “good” and asati means “to exist.” As per Sanskrit grammar, when the two words are amalgamated, they become Swasti. “-ka” is a suffix. If this derivation of the word swastika is correct, then the literal meaning of the word would be “let the good prevail.”

For Western cultures, such as the Greek, Celtic, Finnish, and various indigenous cultures, the swastika was also a very important symbol. It is used mostly in the area of art in clothing, architecture, pottery, and sculpture. Western cultures call it the wheel of light. In Chinese it is known as the “wan” symbol. “Wan” is a homophone for ten thousand, a number often used to encompass all of the universe’s creations.

Archaeologists and volunteers are fanning out over part of New Mexico to study how early Navajos may have used smoke signals to warn against invaders.

The sites in the area where New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado and Utah meet feature the remains of what were once formidable structures made of stacked sandstone. The theory is that Navajos bunkered down inside the pueblitos and possibly used smoke to send warnings across long distances, said Jim Copeland, an archaeologist with the Bureau of Land Management in Farmington.

Copeland said experiments in the early 1990s showed the method of warning could work in general, but scores of new sites have been identified since then and scientists want to know more about how the signals could have been relayed. Improved computer modeling and analysis has refined the idea of an “early warning system.”

The venus figure discovered in Germany recently has very large breasts, bum and genitals, all said to connote fertility. But it also looks extremely fat. Were there obese people 35,000 years ago?

Few, if any. Obesity is defined as having a body mass index higher than 30—the equivalent of being about 5-foot-11 and 220 pounds. The best indicator of body type among prehistoric peoples is present-day societies with a similar lifestyle—that is, hunter-gatherers. From the San people of Botswana to the Pygmies in central Africa to the Batek of Malaysia, groups that fall into this category tend to be small and extremely thin. The Baka of Cameroon, for example, are about 5 feet tall and weigh around 105 pounds, giving them an average BMI of 20. Hunter-gatherers are usually thin because they subsist largely on fruits and vegetables, underground tubers, and, in some regions of Africa, honey. They also get calories from animal meat, and some of their diets are especially fish-heavy. But many tribes insist on distributing the meat evenly among the group, so there’s rarely enough for one person to get fat on. Hunter-gatherer tribes also stay thin, unsurprisingly, due to a generally active way of life.