13 Freaky Things That Happened on Friday the 13th. Dr Mobiles Limited, iPad Repair 0800429429

This date, of course, is associated with bad luck and superstition, which is why it has its own phobia — "Frigg" was a Norse goddess who originally lent her name to the word that became "Friday," and "triskaidekaphobia" is the fear of the number 13. Statistically speaking, the day is not more dangerous than any other. But even people who don't avoid black cats or fear walking under ladders can have a little fun with Friday the 13th.

Read on for some of the strangest, most tragic and simply notorious events that have occurred on Friday the 13ths throughout history.

1. A daredevil's death leap

Perhaps Friday the 13th wasn't the best day to stage a leap into New York's Genesee River. But then again, concern over the date may never have occurred to Sam Patch, an early daredevil who made his name by jumping off a cliff near Niagara Falls on Oct. 17, 1829. Patch, who was born around 1800, lived before Friday the 13th superstitions were prevalent. (They probably emerged closer to the end of the 1800s, or at least that's when folklorists find the first written records.) 

A child mill worker, Patch would get an adrenaline rush by leaping off of mill dams — a talent he eventually spun into public stunt shows for cash. The Niagara leap made him a national name. Less than a month later, however, Patch arrived in Rochester "half drunk," according to "Sam Patch, the Famous Jumper" (Hill and Wang, 2003) by Paul E. Johnson. Some 10,000 people gathered to watch Patch leap from Genesee Falls on Friday, Nov. 13, 1829.

What happened next is lost to history, but an 1883 article in The New York Times reported that Patch "did not retain the position while descending or strike the water as he did on the former occasion," when he had previously made a similar jump. Whatever occurred, the Friday the 13th leap was Patch's last.

2. The "Black Friday" fires

On Jan. 13, 1939, a bushfire tore through Australia's Victoria province, killing 36 people in one day. This "Black Friday" fire was the deadly icing on top of a terrible fire season for the province. According to Australian Emergency Management, a total of 71 people died that January, and 75 percent of the state was affected by the flames.

Drought exacerbated the already-dry Australian summer that year, and amateur attempts to back-burn dry vegetation all too often spread out of control, contributing to the blazes that spread across the state. All told, about 1,300 buildings, including 700 homes, were destroyed in the January blazes. [Top 10 Deadliest Natural Disasters in History]

3. Buckingham Palace bombed

During World War II, Nazi Germany began an intensive bombing campaign against the United Kingdom, targeting London in particular. On 16 occasions, Buckingham Palace itself was hit, according to the City of Westminster Archives Centre.

One of the most destructive of these hits occurred on a Friday the 13th. On Sept. 13, 1940, Queen Elizabeth and King George VI were at tea, according to the Archives. Five bombs struck the palace, one of which destroyed the interior of the Royal Chapel. Another ruptured a water main. Three people were injured, one fatally.

Additional bombings would follow, but the palace survived the war with only slight damage.

4. Kansas floods

July 13, 1951, was an extremely inauspicious day for northeastern Kansas. The rains had been coming down hard and heavy since July 9, bringing up to 16 inches (40 centimeters) of precipitation to the Kansas, Neosho, Verdigris and Marais Des Cygnes rivers. On that Friday the 13th, records were broken. In Topeka, the Kansas River rose to 40.8 feet (12.4 meters), which was 14.8 feet (4.5 m) above flood stage and 6 feet (1.8 m) higher than any flood ever measured to that date, according to the National Weather Service (NWS).

Topeka was swamped, as was Lawrence. In the Manhattan, Kansas, business district, the water stood at 8 feet (2.4 m) deep. It was the single worst day of flood destruction in the Midwest to that date, according to the NWS. Twenty-eight people died, and another 500,000 were displaced until the waters receded. The NWS and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers estimate the damage amounted to $935 million at the time, which is equivalent to $6.4 billion in today's dollars.

5. A Cold War crisis

On Friday, June 13, 1952, the Cold War turned hot when the Soviet Union shot down a Swedish military transport plane. Eight people were on board the plane, which the Swedish government insisted was merely on a training flight. For its part, the Soviet Union declared it had no involvement in shooting down the lost DC-3.

However, a life raft with shrapnel damage was found during the search for the wreckage, according to the Swedish Air Force Museum. And one of the rescue planes (a Catalina) was shot down by Soviet fighters mere days after the DC-3 disappeared.

Both Sweden's and the Soviet Union's stories eventually fell apart. Almost 40 years after the so-called "Catalina Affair," Swedish officials admitted that the plane was a spy plane. Likewise, in 1991, the Soviet Union admitted to shooting the plane down. In 2003, the wreckage of the lost plane was found on the floor of the Baltic Sea. Four crewmembers were identified, but the other four remain missing. The remains of the plane are on display at the Swedish Air Force Museum. [Flying Saucers to Mind Control: 7 Declassified & Military Secrets]

6. A murder goes ignored

One of New York's most brutal and notorious murders occurred on Friday the 13th. On March 13, 1964, bar manager Kitty Genovese was stabbed and raped by a stranger, Winston Moseley. The attack took more than a half-hour, and an early New York Times article reported that 38 people witnessed the attack and failed to call the police. The tragic case became a staple in psychology classes as a way to illustrate the "bystander effect," or "Kitty Genovese syndrome," which occurs when people fail to act in a situation because they assume someone else will step in.

The story appears to be more complicated, however; subsequent journalistic investigations revealed that this initial article inflated the number of witnesses and the number of attacks, and that it mistakenly claimed that Genovese was already dead by the time ambulances arrived. Several witnesses did see parts of the attack and turned away, but most saw only snippets and did not understand the gravity of the situation, or did intervene, albeit not quick enough to save Genovese's life.

7. A deadly cyclone strikes

The deadliest tropical cyclone in history struck on Friday, Nov. 13, 1970, in Bangladesh. Making landfall that Thursday night, the Bhola cyclone killed at least 300,000 people, according to the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research.

The storm was equivalent to a Category 3 hurricane, with sustained winds of 115 mph (185 km/h). Even more devastating was the storm surge. Funneled by the shallow geography of the Bay of Bengal, the ocean pushed onto land. According to a 1970 report from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the surge pushed water up to 16 feet (5 m) high. With nowhere to evacuate to, people climbed trees to escape the rising waters; many were swept away.

"The highest survival rate was that for adult males aged 15 to 49," researchers reported in a 1972 article in the journal The Lancet, "which is consistent with the impression that those too weak to cling to trees — the old, young, sick and malnourished, and females in general — were selectively lost in the storm."

8. An infamous story of survival begins

On Friday the 13th in October 1972, the Uruguayan Old Christians Club rugby team boarded a turboprop plane to travel to a match in Chile. They never made it. Because of a navigational error, the plane careened into an Andean mountain peak, crashing on a high-altitude snowfield.

But the ordeal was only the beginning for 27 of the original 45 passengers who survived the crash and its immediate aftermath. Without cold-weather gear or much food, they were forced to improvise water-melting devices and eventually eat from the bodies of their lost companions — an ordeal memorialized in the 1974 book and 1993 movie "Alive." An avalanche killed eight more survivors at the end of October, and illness took the lives of others.

Incredibly, rescue did not come until the end of December, after two survivors launched a death-defying effort to hike out of the rugged terrain for help. The last of the 16 survivors were rescued on Dec. 23, 1972, after 72 days in the frigid wilderness.

9. A lesser-known plane crash kills 174

According to a statistical analysis by the Aviation Safety Network (ASN), superstitious passengers need not worry about flying on Friday the 13th. The "unlucky" day is no more prone to plane crashes than any other. In fact, the overall rate of fatal crashes on Friday the 13th is lower than the average of all days.

But Oct. 13, 1972, was not a great day to fly. The same day the turboprop plane carrying the rugby team went down in the Andes, a much larger flight crashed near Moscow's Sheremetyevo Airport in Russia, according to the ASN. The Ilyushin-62 airplane was carrying 164 passengers and 10 crewmembers from Paris to Moscow, with a stop in Leningrad. As the plane approached the airport, it flew into the ground at an air speed of 385 mph (620 km/h). Everyone on board was killed.

According to the ASN, the cause of the accident was never determined. Mechanical malfunction is one possibility, or the pilot may have lost control due to a lightning strike.

10. Tupac Shakur dies

Friday, Sept. 13, 1996, was a tragic day for hip-hop, when rapper Tupac Shakur died of gunshot injuries in a Las Vegas hospital. Shakur had been injured on Sept. 7 in a still-unsolved drive-by shooting and died from those injuries on Friday the 13th.

Theories on the ultimate motive for the murder quickly proliferated: business disputes, personal feuds, gang violence. Some die-hard conspiracy theorists refuse to believe that Shakur really died, and insist that he is still alive somewhere, in hiding. [Top 10 Conspiracy Theories]

11. A master of suspense turns 100

Alfred Hitchcock was born on Aug. 13, 1899 — a Sunday. That's two days off of perfect horror-movie-myth kismet, but never fear: The famous filmmaker would have turned 100 on Aug. 13, 1999, which was — you guessed it — a Friday.

Hitchcock's work as a director was dark and often spooky, from the murderous "Psycho" to the creepy "Rear Window" and the obsessive "Vertigo." 

12. Freak blizzard hits Buffalo

Residents of Buffalo, New York, have come to expect a lot of snow in the winter months. But 22 inches (56 cm) in the middle of October?

That was the snowfall total recorded at the Buffalo airport on Oct. 13, 2006, during the "Friday the 13th" blizzard. (The towns of Depew and Alden, New York, got 24 inches, or 61 cm). The storm was so unprecedented that NOAA's history of the blizzard can barely contain itself: "Words cannot do justice to the astounding event which opened the 2006-2007 season," reads the agency's website.

The snow that fell on Buffalo and upstate New York starting that Thursday afternoon and continuing into Friday was heavy and wet, and because the trees had not yet lost their leaves, branches snapped like matchsticks under the combined weight. Almost 1 million people lost power for up to a week because of the storm, according to NOAA.

13. A cruise ship capsizes

On Jan. 13, 2012, a peaceful Friday of cruising off the Tuscan coast turned chaotic as the Costa Concordia cruise ship struck a reef off the Isola del Giglio and began to tilt. At first, passengers were evacuated by lifeboat, according to the Associated Press, but as the ship came to rest on its side in the shallow water, survivors had to be airlifted to shore by helicopter. Thirty-two people died in the wreck.

A massive salvage operation took 19 hours to raise the ship from the reef where it came to rest. The captain of the ship, Francesco Schettino, was arrested for multiple manslaughter and for abandoning the ship instead of directing the evacuation. Perhaps appropriately, the verdict in the case is expected this week, right around yet another Friday the 13th.

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Pi, Anyone? The Secret to Memorizing Tens of Thousands of Digits. Dr Mobiles Limited, Auckland iPhone 6S, iPad Air 2 Repair

Every year, math enthusiasts celebrate Pi Day on March 14, because the date spells the first three digits (3.14) of pi, or π, the mathematical constant that represents the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter. This year, the event is even more special because, for the first time in a century, the date will represent the first five digits of pi: 3.14.15.

Pi is an irrational number, meaning it cannot be expressed as a fraction, and its decimal representation never ends and never repeats.

There are many ways to celebrate Pi Day, including consuming large amounts of its delicious homophone, pie. But a handful of people take their admiration further, by reciting tens of thousands of digits of pi from memory. 

In 1981, an Indian man named Rajan Mahadevan accurately recited 31,811 digits of pi from memory. In 1989, Japan's Hideaki Tomoyori recited 40,000 digits. The current Guinness World Record is held by Lu Chao of China, who, in 2005, recited 67,890 digits of pi.

Despite their impressive achievements, most of these people weren't born with extraordinary memories, studies suggest. They have simply learned techniques for associating strings of digits with imaginary places or scenes in their minds.

For many of these memory champions, the ability "to remember huge numbers of random digits, such as pi, is something they train themselves to do over a long period of time," said Eric Legge, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada.

Enter the mind palace

Expert pi memorizers often use a strategy known as the method of loci, also called the "memory palace" or the "mind palace" technique (like the one used by Benedict Cumberbatch's character in the BBC TV Series "Sherlock"). Applied since the time of the ancient Greeks and Romans, the method involves using spatial visualization to remember information, such as digits, faces or lists of words.

"It's one of the more effective, yet complex, memory strategies out there for remembering large sets of information," Legge told Live Science.

Here's how it works: You place yourself in a familiar environment, such as a house, and walk through that environment placing chunks of the information you wish to remember in various places. For example, you might put the number "717" in the corner by the front door, the number "919" in the kitchen sink, and so on, Legge said.

"In order to recall [the digits] in order, all you simply have to do is walk in the same path as you did when you were storing that information," Legge said. "By doing this, people can remember huge sets of information."

Nurture, not nature

Anders Ericsson, a professor of psychology at Florida State University in Tallahassee, has studied Lu and others who have set records for reciting digits of pi, to find out how they achieved these stunning feats of memorization.

Like most other pi reciters, Lu used visualization techniques to help him remember. He assigned images such as a chair, a king or a horse to two-digit combinations of numbers ranging from "00" to "99." Then he made up a story using these images, which was linked to a physical location, Ericsson said.

A few years ago, Ericsson and his colleagues gave Lu, as well as a group of people of the same age and education level, a test that measured their "digit span" — in other words, how well they could remember a sequence of random digits presented at a rate of one digit per second.

Lu's digit span was 8.83, compared with an average of 9.27 for the rest of the group, according to the study, which was published in 2009 in the Journal of Experimental Psychology. The results suggest that, unlike some other memory experts who have been studied, Lu's skill in memorizing long lists of digits was not the result of an innate skill in encoding information. Rather, it was the result of years of practice, Ericsson said.

So does this mean anyone can learn to remember tens of thousands of digits of pi?

"There have been a lot of demonstrations showing that regular people, given training, can dramatically improve their performance" in memorizing long lists, Ericsson said. "But I have to be honest," he said. "When you make that commitment to memorize pi …we're talking years before you can actually reach record performances."

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Strange Fact: Surviving 42 Minutes Underwater…How Boy Beat the Odds. iPhone 6S Plus repair, cracked screen fix, Dr Mobiles Limited 0800429429

Surviving 42 Minutes Underwater…How Boy Beat the Odds. iPhone 6S Plus repair, cracked screen fix, Dr Mobiles Limited 0800429429

A teenager in Italy recently beat some incredible odds when he survived for 42 minutes underwater, according to news reports.

The 14-year-old boy, identified only as "Michael" by the Italian newspaper Milan Chronicle, reportedly dove off a bridge into a canal with some friends last month and never resurfaced. His foot became caught on something underwater and it took firefighters and other first responders nearly an hour to free him from the depths. Though Michael remained on life support for an entire month, he recently woke up and seems to be doing fine, Time reported.

While Michael's story is certainly unusual, it's not unheard of for people to survive prolonged stints underwater, according to Dr. Zianka Fallil, a neurologist at North Shore-LIJ's Cushing Neuroscience Institute in New York. Fallil, who called the teenager's recovery "quite remarkable," told Live Science that there are two physiological processes that may come into play when a person is submerged underwater for an extended period of time with no oxygen.

The first of these processes is known as the "diving reflex," or bradycardic response, a physiological response that has been observed most strongly in aquatic mammals, but which is also believed to take place in humans. (This is the same reflex that results in newborn babies holding their breath and opening their eyes when submerged in water). When a person's face is submerged in water, blood vessels constrict and the heart slows down considerably, Fallil explained. Blood is then diverted to parts of the body that need it most.

"The body protects the most efficient organs — the brain, the heart, the kidneys — and pulls the blood away from the extremities and other, not-as-essential, organs," Fallil said.

The diving reflex is often cited as the thing that saves people from nearly drowning. However, it's difficult to study this reflex in humans (likely because of the obvious dangers of recreating near-drowning experiences in a lab), said Fallil, who pointed to another, less controversial explanation for how people survive long stretches underwater — the selective brain cooling hypothesis.

"The selective brain cooling hypothesis [states] that, the quicker the brain cools, the more likely it is to survive," she said.

When you're immersed in cold water for a prolonged period of time, your body may carry out several processes that allow cooled blood to enter the brain, according to Fallil. One of these processes, hypercapnic vasodilation, occurs when the body retains carbon dioxide as a result of not breathing. This extra carbon dioxide causes blood vessels in your brain to dilate (become wider), which in turn allows more cool blood to enter the brain.

While the selective brain cooling hypothesis has also not been widely tested in humans, it's considered a more likely explanation for how the brain might be protected during episodes of prolonged submersion than the diving reflex, Fallil said. And there have also been several other studies conducted to see what factors, besides the body's reflexes, can help you survive underwater.

"There are a few studies that have looked at near-drowning victims to see if age, the duration of submersion or the temperature of the water had anything to do with survival," Fallil said. "And the one thing that they did find a correlation with was time of submersion."

One study, published in the journal Resuscitation in 2002, found that submersion time serves as a predictor of survival for near-drowning victims. The average amount of time spent underwater by the 61 patients in the study was 10 minutes. But, the patients who spent less time underwater (just five minutes) had the least amount of neurological disability after the incident. The victims who didn't survive spent an average of 16 minutes underwater. A similar study, conducted in 2013, found that there was a very low likelihood of a "good outcome" following a submersion lasting longer than 10 minutes.

However, neither of these studies found a strong correlation between the likelihood of survival and the temperature of the water in which a person was submerged, or a person's age. So while several news reports about the Italian teenager's harrowing 42-minute ordeal have concluded that his survival was a result of his youthor the relatively cold temperature of the Milanese canal in April, these are actually just guesses. It's just as likely that he survived because he received excellent medical attention, including the use of extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, or ECMO (a form of life support that removes carbon dioxide from the blood and oxygenates red blood cells), Fallil said.

Editor's Note: Medical experts agree that intentionally holding your breath underwater for extended periods of time (whether as part of a training exercise or a competition) is a dangerous activity that increases the risk of drowning.

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Giant Redheaded Centipede Photo Goes Viral, Horrifies the Internet. Fix on site 0800429429, Dr Mobiles Limited

You don't have to be a Kardashian to stand out on the Internet — all you need is at least 20 pairs of bright-yellow legs, a gleaming red head and venomous fangs.

Last week, the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department (TPWD) posted a picture of a giant redheaded centipede to its social media pages that met all of the above criteria. The image quickly went viral. While many people reacted with horror (apparently, giant, colorful centipedes are the stuff of nightmares), this critter doesn't eat people or seriously harm them in any way (at least not usually).

However, giant redheaded centipedes (Scolopendra heros) — which can be found in certain regions of the southern United States and northern Mexico — do take people by surprise fairly often, said Ben Hutchins, an invertebrate biologist with the TPWD. [Gallery: Out-of-This-World Images of Insects]

In a 2014 article published in TP&W magazine, Hutchins explained that S. heros typically hangs out under rocks, logs or leaves. But sometimes, these centipedeswander into people's homes, where they can cause panic, thanks to their 8-inch-long (20 centimeters) bodies and dozens of legs (they typically have 21 to 23 pairs). The critters use their many appendages to grasp prey while feeding.

Though S. heros mainly munches on invertebrates like insects and arachnids, the impressively sized centipede is also known to take down larger prey, such as rodents, snakes, lizards, toads and other small vertebrates. In captivity, giant redheaded centipedes seem to prefer eating moths, according to the University of Arkansas Arthropod Museum.

The critter kills its victims using its "fangs," or forcipules, which are located near its mouth and contain venom glands that inject a toxin into its unlucky prey. The giant redheaded centipede is also thought to inject venom into prey with its many legs, which can make tiny incisions in human skin, according to the Arthropod Museum.

When one of these giant creepy-crawlies bites a human, the result is usually pretty painful, according to both the Arthropod Museum and Hutchins. Victims of these centipede bites report localized pain and swelling, but Hutchins said people also have reported skin necrosis (tissue death), dizziness, nausea and headaches, Hutchins wrote in his article.

Hutchins also lists muscle tissue damage, kidney failure and heart attack as rare side effects of the centipede's nibble. A case report published in 2006 in the Emergency Medical Journal cites a bite from a centipede, likely of the genus Scolopendra, as the cause of acute myocardial infarction (heart attack) in an otherwise healthy 20-year-old man. Whether a giant redheaded centipede was responsible for that unfortunate event isn't stated in the report.

Should you happen upon one of these giant centipedes, pay attention to its colorful body parts. Known as aposematic coloration, or warning coloration, the critter's bright colors serve to warn predators that, while S. heros might look tasty, it's really a poisonous treat. Consider yourself warned.

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