Posts

Like fast-food companies that exploit our human cravings for fat and salt, social media companies aren’t inherently evil. However, to remain healthy and in control, we should be alert to their methods and wary of our dependency on their platforms. This list details some of the ways that social media companies exploit human vulnerabilities to maintain our attention and make a profit. 10 Uses The Color Psychology Of Red The color red is associated with danger and warning....

Octopuses are fascinating creatures. They are one of the most intelligent animals on the planet, and have a completely different brain and nervous system to us. Their legs are even capable of directed and independent movement even if chopped off. In South Korea, therefore, you would be wise to take caution when eating saknakji, a live octopus dish. A small octopus is dismembered, drizzled with soy sauce or sesame oil, and then eaten....

10 Eel Exfoliation Bath Some very expensive bubble baths leave you feeling slimy after you get out of the tub. Their manufacturers prefer to say “moisturized”—but for one treatment, “slimy” is definitely the word. To get that perfect glow in their skin, some people in China are taking baths filled with tiny eels. Each eel is about the size of a pencil. They wriggle over the body and nibble at the dead skin covering it....

10Cyriak Cyriak is a professional freelance animator from the UK. He has been uploading videos to YouTube since 2006. Typically, Cyriak uses Photoshop and After Effects to edit his work, and his resume includes commercials and music videos. He’s even animated some of Adult Swim’s signature “bumps.” But just about everything Cyriak has ever done is incredibly creepy. Several of his videos begin with mild-mannered clips of everyday sights—like a herd of cows eating, or a house cat meowing—before morphing into horrifying, multi-limbed nightmares....

The Church of Almighty God, aka Eastern Lightning, was created in 1991 by former physics teacher Zhao Weishan. Its primary belief is that a woman named Yang Xiangbin, also called Lightning Deng, is the female reincarnation of Jesus and has returned to Earth to guide her followers. She is also alleged to be Zhao’s mistress. This cult is notoriously dangerous. The group teaches that in the Old Testament God was known by the name Jehovah....

Some medical experiments, particularly from the 19th and 20th centuries, seemed harmless or even silly knowing what we do today. Other experiments, however, were enough to make a normal person sick. Experiments on children, animals, and the poor are seen as particularly evil because of their defenseless nature. There were no laws a century ago to protect these victims—or anyone else—from doctors and surgeons who wanted to play God with the lives of the living and, strangely enough, with the dead....

The following is a list of ten everyday items born from the battlefield. 10 Duct Tape Much like every toolbox, broken car window, and down-home first aid kit, no list of military breakthroughs is complete without duct tape. Originally imagined by a factory worker to seal and waterproof ammunition boxes, duct tape quickly became a handy solution to all sorts of problems encountered on the battlefield and far beyond. Watch this video on YouTube That worker, Vesta Stout, nearly failed to get her world-shaking invention into the hands of interested parties....

At ground level, though, gardens can look like battlefields- with plants, insects, small birds and mammals all jostling for space and for food. To survive in the garden ‘jungle’, you have to make use of anything at your disposal- including some targeted chemical weapons. Top 10 Places You Don’t Want To Visit 10 Tree-killing fungi We do associate many fungi with poison, which is entirely fair because a lot of toadstools and mushrooms contain highly toxic chemicals (and they have associated scary names, like the ‘Death cap’ and ‘Satan’s bolete’)....

In the past, toxic chemicals were sometimes used in everyday items, such as asbestos being used in a multitude of daily goods before its detrimental health effects were discovered.[1] Poisons were also used throughout history in order to, for example, get rid of political rivals or problematic lovers. So sometimes, items discovered today are revealed to be deadly to those who handle them or to hide secret poisons. 10 Suicide Glasses The International Spy Museum in Washington, DC, has a pair of glasses with a sneaky little secret....

However, despite all we know—or think we know—about the Sphinx, there are still a plethora of questions to be answered. And as we will see as we move down our list, it would appear there are some who might prefer the secrets of the Sphinx remain exactly that. 10 Buried In Sand Over the years, some of the finest archaeological minds of the Western world never saw all of the Sphinx....

10Ned Ludd In the early 1810s, the wool and cotton industries came under attack from a group known as the Luddites, which protested the introduction of new machines that put hand weavers and other tradespeople out of work. The leader of these riots was said to be General Ned Ludd, who the Luddites claimed lived in Sherwood Forest and organized the uprising. Quickly, the protests spread from the town of Nottinghamshire to cities like Yorkshire and Derbyshire....

10Homoerotic Star Trek Fan Pairing Becomes Official, Briefly Almost from the original Star Trek series’s first run, a popular joke about the show’s fans was that some of them wanted to see the characters James T. Kirk and Dr. Spock in a relationship. Supposedly, female fans liked to imagine the two in romantic situations but didn’t want to imagine either with another woman. In 1985, fanzine contributor Della Van Hise was able to release the officially sanctioned novel Killing Time, which dealt with the subject....

10 Iaculus In the seventh century, Isidore of Seville embarked on an ambitious project. He wanted to record everything that mankind knew, and his resulting volumes were known as the Etymologies. In them, he also wrote extensively on animals known and rumored to exist and referred to the Roman poet Lucan when he wrote about an African flying snake called the iaculus (also spelled jaculus). Lucan wrote that when the iaculus was on the hunt, it would wait for prey in a tree....

So scientists have to get crafty (and a little lucky) to uncover prehistory’s culinary secrets. Still, they have found some interesting ones, which could change the way we view prehistoric people. They appear to have been more advanced than we thought. 10 Paleolithic Processed Flour “Cavemen” were eating wild oats long before the agricultural revolution according to some amazingly old residue detected on a 32,000-year-old pestle-like grinding stone. That makes it history’s oldest oatmeal....

10The Blue Dye is Real! Ever since Breaking Bad‘s monumental success, actual meth dealers started adding blue dye to their crystal meth in an effort to increase sales. The idea was to “brand” their product. However, the effect was not quite the same as Heisenberg’s. In fact, the blue dye was doing nothing to increase the quality of the meth; it was actually making users sick. Leave it to a methamphetamine dealer to ruin the allure of crystal blue persuasion....

10 Wallis Simpson1936 Wallis Simpson, Time’s first female choice for Person of the Year, was an American socialite whose third husband happened to be Edward VIII, the former king of England. King Edward was forced to abdicate to avoid a constitutional crisis that loomed from his desire to marry a twice-divorced commoner from the New World. Edward’s reign was threatened as head of the Church of England, which did not allow its members to marry a divorcee if their spouse was still alive....

What followed was a series of destructive raids that culminated in two major battles—the Battle of Djahy and the Battle of the Delta. The former, a land battle, was won by the army of Pharaoh Ramses III. The latter, a naval battle, not only repulsed one of the last major invasions by the Sea Peoples but may very well have saved ancient Egyptian civilization. Despite their important role in history and the widely held notion that they were responsible for the Late Bronze Age Collapse, a near-catastrophic decline in civilization throughout the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean, the Sea Peoples remain the subject of controversy....

10Jack Foley Although Jack Foley didn’t invent sound effects, he definitely helped codify the form. With the success of The Jazz Singer in 1927, the former director and stunt performer found a new calling. The rush was on to add sound to silent movies as fast as possible. Foley added a particularly rich soundtrack on the 1929 film Show Boat. Watch this video on YouTube Foley was very precise and attentive at his job....

The influence of the Knights Templar in history is undeniable. What’s more, to some, that influence is still felt today. Here are ten intriguing points of interest concerning one of the most powerful and respected organizations on record, and one whose true history continues to be studied today. 10 The Surprise At The Battle Of Bannockburn In the summer of 1314, a small, exhausted, and pieced together (but effective) resistance inflicted one of the most shocking defeats on one of the best armies in English history....

But nuclear holocaust isn’t the only way Man’s thin veneer of civilization can be stripped by catastrophe. It may have even already happened in our past (the vast majority of cultures have a Great Flood in their mythos). Regardless, what is perhaps amazing is that within the time frame of verifiable history, to include more than 60 years of nuclear capability, no such calamity has occurred. Shouldn’t stop us from thinking about the possibilities, however....