15 Big Cheats and Fakers Who Won

There are all sorts of fakers and cheats; many win and get away with it, many others get caught and shunned for their actions. Some are even found out, but walk away as though nothing happened, because the public simply doesn’t care. These are the 15 biggest cheats, fakers and frauds who won. Some kept their winnings, and some are hated and reviled to this day.

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Via:Manolith

15 Cute Animals That Will Cause You Horrible Harm

When we think of animals that will destroy us, rend us limb from limb, and leave us in a bloody mess, we usually thing of the huge and horrifying. Which means we forget about the real threats: the tiny, the cute, the gorgeous. The animals at which we ooh and aaah over, but are deadly, poisonous and generally all around nasty. And, after writing this list, I've come up with two pieces of advice. 1) Never go in the water. 2) Never visit Australia. Combine the two, and it's even more true: never go in the water in Australia! Seriously, terrifyingly deadly critters everywhere.

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Via: Brainz

4 Lost Civilizations (and what might have happened to them)

I’ve been to Pompeii, the Italian town that was buried by the 79 CE eruption of Mt. Vesuvius. To see a town that was abandoned so abruptly, coupled with plaster casts of the victims who weren’t able to evacuate in time, was positively chilling. I can only imagine that visiting the remains of the four civilizations Nathan Johnson from the University of Wisconsin-Parkside dug up for this story would be equally sad and thought-provoking. Nathan is an Economics major who came to UW-P from the University of Minnesota, making me think he has an affinity for below-zero temperatures. – Stacy Conradt

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Via: Mental Floss

6 More Cannibal Killers

In comparison to the worldwide murder rate, cases of cannibalism are rare, but they stand out because of the horror they instill in the rest of us. In addition to the six cases featured in the post 6 Horrifying Modern Cannibals, I found these six cannibal stories from all over the world.

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Via: Mental Floss

10 More Enigmas That Defy Explanation

What is it about the bizarre and mysterious that piques our curiosity? It entertains our sense of wonder and excites our imagination, for sure. Luckily for us, history is marked with strange, logic-defying occurrences to amuse us. Here is a list comprised of 10 more unexplainable and interesting phenomenon and incidents that we crave so much.

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Via: Listverse

Slaughterhouse-Five: A letter from Kurt Vonnegut to his family

In December of 1944, whilst behind enemy lines during the Rhineland Campaign, Private Kurt Vonnegut was captured by Wehrmacht troops and subsequently became a prisoner of war. A month later, Vonnegut and his fellow POWs reached a Dresden work camp where they were imprisoned in an underground slaughterhouse known by German soldiers as Schlachthof Fünf (Slaughterhouse Five). The next month - February - the subterranean nature of the prison saved their lives during the highly controversial and devastating bombing of Dresden, the aftermath of which Vonnegut and the remaining survivors helped to clear up.

Vonnegut released the book Slaughterhouse-Five in 1969.

Below is a letter he wrote to his family that May from a repatriation camp, in which he informs them of his capture and survival. Transcript follows.

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Via: Letters of Note

25 Famous Thinkers and Their Inspiring Daily Rituals

Many find it interesting to glimpse inside the lives of famous thinkers in an effort to understand where such thought and intelligence is rooted. In that vein, here is a peek into the routines and rituals that writers, philosophers, and statesmen have depended on to keep their work on track and their thoughts flowing. Whether you need inspiration to make it through the next college semester or are working on a future best-selling novel, explore these daily rituals you may want to incorporate into your life.

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Via: Online College

6 Horrifying Modern Cannibals

Cannibalism, as repulsive as it is, can be understood in cases where consuming the deceased is an alternative to certain starvation. Those who eat human flesh by choice, however, tend to be the kind of people who will torture and murder to satisfy their curiosity. Be warned that some of the following links are disturbing.

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Via: Mental Floss

Democracy on the High Seas: How Pirates Rocked the Vote

Everyone knows that swashbuckling types aren’t exactly known for obeying the rules. But years before the United States gained its independence, democracy was actually thriving aboard pirate ships. Perhaps that’s because they reasoned that a little law and order was better than the alternative. Crammed aboard a ship with 300 unruly sailors, pirates were quick to adopt a government rather than let anarchy ensue.

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Via: Mental Floss

Neanderthal 'make-up' containers discovered

Scientists claim to have the first persuasive evidence that Neanderthals wore "body paint" 50,000 years ago.

The team says its find buries "the view of Neanderthals as half-wits" and shows they were capable of symbolic thinking.

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Via: BBC News

8% of Human DNA Comes from a 40 Million Year-Old Virus

About eight percent of human genetic material comes from a virus and not from our ancestors, according to researchers in Japan and the U.S.

In his article, Feschotte speculates about the role of such viral insertions in causing mutations with evolutionary and medical consequences.

The research showed that the genomes of humans and other mammals contain DNA derived from the insertion of bornaviruses, RNA viruses whose replication and transcription takes place in the nucleus.

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Via: Science Daily

Synthetic Alcohol Gives Drinkers a Buzz Minus the Hangover, Addiction

Still feeling the sting of New Year's Eve all these days later? A synthetic alcohol substitute developed from chemicals similar in composition to Valium could give users the pleasant feelings of tipsiness without affecting the parts of the brain that lead to barroom brawls, crippling addiction, and sleeping in your car.

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Via: Popular Science

When Fear Makes Us Superhuman

The following is an excerpt from Extreme Fear: The Science of Your Mind in Danger by Jeff Wise, published on December 8 by Palgrave Macmillan (Scientific American is a Macmillan publication). Extreme Fear explores the neural underpinnings of this powerful and primitive emotion by relating instances in which people were forced to act under duress and presenting the latest findings from cognitive science. In the following passage from the chapter
entitled "Superhuman" a seemingly ordinary man performs an extraordinary feat of strength to rescue a cyclist who has been run over by a car.

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Via: Scientific American

The End of a Beautiful Friendship: Houdini and Arthur Conan Doyle

It seems strange that a man best known for creating the quintessential detective, who based his deductions solely on reason, would also be one of the biggest proponents of Spiritualism around the turn of the last century. Equally strange is that a man who based his career of performing illusions and magic tricks was one of the most stringent disbelievers of the same religion. Perhaps strangest of all was the friendship of these two men, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Harry Houdini.

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Via: Neatorama

10 Trailblazing Scientists About to Change Your Future

1. Erich Jarvis, Neurobiologist
2. Nathan Wolfe, Epidemiologist
3. Emily Oster, Economist
4. Hiroshi Ishiguro, Roboticist
5. Jeffrey H. Schwartz, Forensic Anthropologist
6. Pardis Sabeti, Biological Anthropologist
7. Thomas A. Jackson, Aerospace Engineer
8. Sebastian Thrun, Probabilistic Roboticist
9. Nima Arkani-Hamed, Particle Physicist and Applied String Theorist
10. Margaret Turnbull, Astrobiologist

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Via: Mental Floss