A pyrotechnic device misfired during launch at a gender-reveal party hosted by a family in El Dorado, California, leading to a raging wildfire. The device was intended to blow out blue smoke if the couple was expecting a boy, pink if they were expecting a girl. Neither color was released; instead El Dorado and 7,300 surrounding acres were immersed in a thick black smoke as the fire blazed through the area’s tall wild grass. The gender of the child still remains unknown. The New York Times reported:

A papyrus from the Carlsberg Collection offers insight into the gender-prediction strategies of the ancients. A team of scientists determined in 1963 that while sex could perhaps not be discerned from the method described, which relied on barley and buckwheat, the ancient Egyptians had indeed created the earliest pregnancy test, as only the urine of a pregnant woman would cause the grain to sprout. The University of Copenhagen, which holds the Carlsberg Collection, published a translation of this papyrus in 1939, noting that a similar pregnancy test was shared in Germany in 1699.