Washington Post reporter Janet Cooke was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for a harrowing article about an eight-year-old heroin addict on April 13, 1981.
The story spoke of the struggles of a little boy in Washington DC named Jimmy.
The article stunned the city and drew attention to the insidious nature of the urban drug crisis.
But when a biographical article of Cooke was published after she won the Pulitzer, reporters at her previous newspaper noticed discrepancies in her resume.
When alerted, Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee questioned Cooke about her past.
Not only had she embellished her resume, but she had fabricated the story about Jimmy.
Two days after winning the Pulitzer, she published a confession, resigned and returned the prize.
She did not work in journalism again.
An explosion aboard the Apollo 13 mission forced the astronauts to reverse course before landing on the moon on April 13, 1970.
Running low on oxygen, water, electricity, and with their air filling with toxic carbon dioxide, it took all of NASA's ingenuity to figure out how to get the astronauts back to Earth.
Astronauts Jim Lovell, Fred Haise and Jack Swigert aboard the space craft were lucky to remain alive after an oxygen tank ruptured two days after lift-off.
After frantic efforts by the crew and mission control, the tank was repaired and Apollo 13 returned safely to Earth.
The astronauts survived thanks to the Apollo abort guidance system, a backup computer program made in part by aerospace engineer Judith Love Cohen.
The previous year, Cohen had solved a critical problem with the system while she was in labour.
Cohen printed out the issue when she went into labour, and figured out a solution while in hospital.
She then gave birth to actor Jack Black.
Convinced the Soviets had invented a mind-control drug, the CIA began its own wide-ranging experiment on April 13, 1953.
Much of Project MKUltra involved giving unwitting subjects regular doses of LSD, of which little was known at the time.
Some of those subjects became influential figures in the hippie movement, including writers Ken Kesey, Allen Ginsburg and Robert Hunter.
Notorious Boston mobster Whitey Bulger was given daily doses of LSD while in prison.
Harvard student Ted Kaczynski was subjected to 200 hours of a "purposely brutalising psychological experiment" as part of the experiment. He later became the Unabomber terrorist.
Robert F Kennedy's assassin Sirhan Sirhan was operating under MKUltra mind control, his lawyer claimed.
The wide-ranging study was later dismissed as useless.

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