On August 22, 2004, two armed robbers stole "The Scream," a famous painting by Edvard Munch, from the Munch Museum in Norway. They also escaped with another Munch painting entitled "The Madonna." The museum estimated that the two stolen paintings were worth approximately $19 million (£10.4 million). On March 7, 2005, three more works by Munch were stolen from a hotel in Norway: a 1915 watercolor entitled "Blue Dress" and two lithographs including a self-portrait of the artist. Authorities did not know if the two robberies were related.

Kasparov found that he was no match for IBM's Deep Blue supercomputer, becoming the first world champion to lose a match to a computer under standard time controls. After the loss, Kasparov said that he detected a deep intelligence and creativity in the machine's moves, suggesting that human chess players had intervened. IBM denied that it cheated, saying the only human intervention occurred between games, when programmers were allowed to shore up weaknesses in the computer's play revealed during the course of the match. Years later, it was suggested that the behavior Kasparov noted may have resulted from a glitch in Deep Blue's program.

Although the Rubik's Cube reached its height of mainstream popularity in the 1980s, it is still sold today and is widely considered to be the world's best-selling toy.

Mikhail Baryshnikov, the preeminent male classical dancer of the 1970s and 1980s, never returned to Russia after his 1974 defection. He became a naturalized citizen of America in 1986.

On March 3, 1991, Rodney King was beaten by LAPD officers after a high-speed chase during his arrest for drunk driving. A witness, George Holliday, filmed the incident from his nearby balcony and sent the footage to local news station KTLA. The footage showed an unarmed King on the ground being beaten and jolted with a 50,000-volt stun gun. Four officers were eventually tried on charges of use of excessive force. Of these, three were acquitted, and the jury failed to reach a verdict on one charge for the fourth. Within hours of the acquittals, the 1992 Los Angeles riots started, sparked by outrage among racial minorities over the trial's verdict.

Not having a human donor heart available, James D. Hardy of the University of Mississippi Medical Center transplanted the heart of a chimpanzee into the chest of dying Boyd Rush in the early morning of Jan. 24, 1964. Hardy used a defibrillator to shock the heart to restart beating, which it did for 60 to 90 minutes before Rush died without regaining consciousness.

The Roswell UFO incident, which involved a United States Army Air Forces balloon crash at a ranch near Roswell, New Mexico, has been described as "the world's most famous, most exhaustively investigated, and most thoroughly debunked UFO claim."

Alaska was admitted to the union on January 3, 1959, and Hawaii followed on August 21.