Alaska is 50. The territory once known as Seward's Folly became the 49th and largest US state on this date in 1959. US Secretary of State William Seward bought the 587,875 square miles (1,522,595 sq km) in 1867 for $7.2 million. Here are some other tidbits of trivia about the state that makes up America's extreme northwest: the state motto is "North to the future"; its flower is the forget-me-not. The state bird is the willow ptarmigan; the fossil is the wooly mammoth; the insect is the four-spot skimmer dragonfly and the state sport is dog mushing. Alaska is an exclave of the US, separated from the other mainland states by British Columbia, Canada.

According to baseball lore, a curse was placed on the Boston Red Sox after Babe Ruth, the "Bambino," was sold to the New York Yankees in 1920. Before the sale, the Red Sox had won 5 World Series titles; the Yankees had never even played in a series. Following the sale, the Yankees went on to win 26 World Series titles. The Red Sox, meanwhile, failed to win another series for more than 8 decades, finally breaking the "curse" in 2004. How did some Red Sox fans attempt to "reverse the curse"?

Spider webs: they can be a work of art, sparkling with the morning dew. But you wouldn't want to walk into one in a dark room. The silky thread thrown out from the spider's spinnerets is stronger than the same weight of steel, and far more flexible. Though most webs are relatively small, some spiders have been known to spin their webs near each other, with the webs joining. In 2007, a web found in Texas' Lake Tawakoni State Park measured 200 yards (180 m) across. Last month, scientists confirmed that threads found embedded in a prehistoric piece of amber were part of a 140,000,000-year-old spider web. According to an Oxford University paleobiologist, this proves that arachnids had been ensnaring their prey in silky nets since the dinosaur age.

the "discovery" of a planet closer to the Sun than Mercury was announced by French mathematician Urbain Jean Joseph Le Verrier (1860)

Congress and President Richard Nixon set a national speed limit to conserve gasoline following the 1973 oil crisis (1974)

last Moorish stronghold in Spain surrendered to Roman Catholic monarchs Ferdinand II and Isabella I (1492)