idiosyncracies

This list contains ten lesser-known tales of dragon-slaying from around the world. A great number of these took place in Europe—most likely because dragons there have long been considered a force of evil, whereas in the East they are often seen as symbols of goodness and prosperity.

There may well be some awesome tales that didn’t make it into this list (any tale with a dragon in it is awesome, after all)—so please let us know in the comments.

It most often requires great cunning to defeat a dragon, and that’s the virtue which crops up again and again in stories about dragon slayers. We start the list, however, with a case of brute strength being the victor.

An unnamed dragon is said to have terrorized the area around the Austrian city of Innsbruck. It hoarded a massive treasure of gold, small pieces of which occasionally got swept away by the local river and found by villagers. Whenever the dragon noticed a loss of coin, it would devastate the surrounding countryside, smashing houses and killing locals in a fury of revenge.

Thankfully, a giant by the name of Haymo happened to live nearby. He was twelve feet tall, and of noble heritage. His strength was unmatched—and he believed that he could stand up to the dragon. So the giant put on his suit of armor, and marched with grim determination through the piles of rubble the dragon had created from what had been whole villages. 

Finding the dragon just as it was getting ready for another rampage, Haymo jumped onto it and began pounding it with his fists. The dragon writhed and squealed in pain, eventually breaking free and fleeing to its cave. Haymo followed it, ultimately stabbing it and cutting out its tongue, which he presented to the locals as proof that they no longer had to fear the terrible dragon.

Krakow, the ancient capital of Poland, is said to have been founded above the lair of a dragon known locally as Smok Wawelski. There are a number of versions of this tale, but the most popular has it that the dragon pillaged the countryside for many years, devouring livestock and terrifying farmers. The king sent out a call to noblemen and knights throughout the land, stating that whoever managed to slay the dragon would be rewarded with riches and marriage to his daughter. But none of the knights were able to get the better of the dragon, who quickly reduced all comers to a pile of ash.

A poor shoemaker’s apprentice named Skuba eventually volunteered his assistance. The king, who was by this stage rather desperate, agreed—though few people had much faith in the ability of the young lad. Skuba knew that he couldn’t kill the dragon with force, so he set a trap.

He killed three lambs, stuffed them with spices and sulphur, and left them lying outside the dragon’s cave. After the dragon had devoured this tasty morsel, he experienced a massive burning in his stomach. The pain became so great that he drank half of the nearby river in an attempt to quench it—eventually consuming so much water that he actually exploded.

Should you ever find yourself in Poland, you can still visit the dragon’s cave today.

According to various pre-Hindu religions, the asuras were a type of demigod or demon (direct translation is difficult as the pantheon is different to those familiar in the West). The most powerful of these demigods was Vritra, a dragon so big that his body covered the whole world. He would sometimes use his coils to block rivers, earning him the nickname “bringer of drought.” He eventually had the nerve to steal Earth’s entire supply of water, turning the planet into a desolate wasteland.

Vritra was slain by Indra, who would later go on to become king of the gods. Shortly after Indra was born, he set out and managed to demolish ninety-nine fortresses belonging to Vritra. Inevitably, a huge battle ensued. Indra was ultimately victorious, and “with his own great and deadly thunder smote [Vritra] into pieces,” thereby freeing the waters of the world.

The story of the Brno dragon is similar to that of the Wawel dragon above, except that this dragon is actually a crocodile. Yet its nickname—the “Brno dragon”—and its present-day resting place, hung by chains from the ceiling of the Town Hall, justify its place on this list.

Legend has it that near the beginning of the last millennium, the people of Brno were tormented by this beast, who lived in a cave and would eat anything that came his way. The frightened townspeople didn’t know how to deal with the problem, but they were luckily soon visited by a traveling butcher.

The cunning butcher, hoping to slay the beast, sewed a bunch of quicklime into an ox-pelt and left it out to be eaten. The dragon duly gobbled it up. Quicklime reacts rather vigorously with water—so when the beast washed its meal down with large swigs from the river, the contents of its stomach began to boil. The crocodile burst open, much to the delight of the locals, who sewed him back up and had him mounted on the ceiling for prosperity. The butcher earned a reward of one hundred gold coins, and presumably several xp into the bargain.

In Norse mythology, the dwarf Fafnir was one of three brothers. He didn’t begin life as a dragon, but became one after murdering his father for gold. He hid in the wilderness with the treasure, and became a dragon in order to better guard it. Unfortunately for the upstart dragon, he also happened to breathe poison around the land, which the locals understandably weren’t too happy about.

Fafnir’s brother, the blacksmith Regin, asked his own step-son—the young hero Sigurd—to kill the problematic dragon. Sigurd decided to dig a ditch, hiding there with the aim of suddenly leaping out and stabbing Fafnir in the heart.

Odin, King of the Gods, for his own reasons turned up and advised Sigurd to dig a number of other ditches to drain away the dragon’s blood, so that he wouldn’t drown. Sigurd listened to the advice, and when Fafnir showed up he duly attacked him. Though he missed the heart (instead plunging his sword into the dragon’s shoulder), the wound still turned out to be fatal.

Regin then asked Sigurd to cook the dragon’s heart. Sigurd, for some reason seeing nothing odd about this, did as he was told. He touched the heart to check if it was cooked, and burned his thumb in the process; and when he touched his thumb to his mouth in order to ease the pain, he suddenly found that he was able to understand the speech of birds. These birds told Sigurd that Regin intended to kill him, so the young hero killed Regin first, and made off with all of the gold himself.

The story of the dragon of Modiford starts out with a little girl named Maud. She was walking in the woods one day when she found a bright green baby dragon, smaller than a cucumber. She took it home with her and fed it milk, but as it grew in size, it began to consume chickens and other small animals. When it reached adulthood, it took to eating people—though throughout this process it remained friendly to Maud.

In what seems to be a recurring theme, the people living in the area weren’t too keen on having a man-eating beast in their midst—but they were at a loss as to how they might get rid of it.

There are a number of stories about how the dragon was killed. Most of them involve a convicted criminal who was offered pardon in exchange for slaying the beast. According to one story, he hid in a cider barrel and shot the dragon when it approached. Another story has it that he rigged the barrel with spikes and hooks, and the dragon impaled itself when it attempted to wrap itself around him. Two more stories involve the dragon being ambushed in its sleep—in one instance by the above criminal, and in another instance by a rabble of pitchfork-wielding villagers.

Perhaps the people of Modiford celebrated the dragon’s death a little too enthusiastically, and the details became blurry? We can probably forgive them for that.

There are two versions of the battle of the Hittite Storm God with the dragon-like giant Illuyanka. I will recount my favorite one here, but you can read them both here if you wish. Sadly, we know very little about the details of Hittite mythology, so the story has a few gaps in it (we aren’t told, for example, why the Storm God and the dragon didn’t get along).

During their first battle, Illuyanka the dragon was victorious over the Storm God. The despondent Storm God went to see the Mother God, Inata, to ask for her help in getting revenge. Inata came up with a plan, but she needed some assistance to carry it out—and for this, she went to a human man called Huspashiya. 

Huspashiya agreed to assist the god in return for letting him sleep with her, which she duly did. They then put together a large feast, with quite a significant amount of alcohol, and invited the serpent Illuyanka and all of his family to have his fill. When he was too drunk to move, they proceeded to tie up the serpent and the rest of his family up, allowing the Storm God to come and finish him off.

Huspashiya’s fate wasn’t much better, either. He went to live with his newfound goddess-lover, but was forbidden from looking out of the window. After twenty days of resisting the temptation to do so, he finally couldn’t help himself—and when he looked out, he saw his wife and child. He begged to be allowed to return to them, and . . . that’s all we know for certain, as the original source of the story is damaged from that point onwards. Scholars suspect that he was either killed for disobeying, or granted his wish after being castrated.

The story of the Lambton worm begins in the thirteenth century with a rebellious young boy named John Lambton, the son of a local lord in Durham Country, England. One Sunday, John decided to skip church, instead deciding to go fishing. Despite being warned that skipping church would bring no good, John set himself up for some relaxed angling. After a couple of hours, he caught a small, black, worm-like creature, which had the features of a salamander. Thinking it strange but of little further interest, he threw it into a well and got on with his life.

In adulthood, John joined the crusades as atonement for his youthful transgressions. While he was gone, the worm—by now fully grown—had emerged from the well. It wrapped itself seven times around a local hill, terrorizing villagers by eating their livestock and even snatching small children. The elderly Lord Lambton was able to sedate the worm by offering it twenty gallons of milk a day—but the local impact of the worm’s presence was devastating.

Upon his return from the crusades, John Lambton learned of the giant worm. Many had already tried to slay the beast, but whenever a piece of it was cut away it would simply reattach and heal itself. John sought the advice of a local witch, who advised him to attach spear-points to his armor and to fight the worm in the local river. He did so—and when the worm tried to wrap itself around him, its flesh was torn by the spear points, and the mangled pieces were washed away by the river’s current.

John was able to vanquish the beast, but in doing so he incurred a curse against his family which would last for nine generations: not a single of his descendants was to die peacefully in bed, as long as the curse lasted.

While walking along the river one day, the Shinto storm god Susanoo came across an old couple and their daughter, a young girl. Noticing that both of the couple were in tears, Susanoo enquired as to the cause of their troubles. They explained that they had once had eight daughters, but in each of the last seven years the giant serpent Orochi had eaten one daughter—and was now due to return for their last.

The old man explained that the beast had eight heads, eight tails, and a body the length of eight valleys. If there’s one thing this list has taught us, it’s that the best way for a storm god to slay a dragon is to get it drunk. Susanoo advised the old couple to build a fence with eight gates, and behind each gate to place a bucket of refined liquor. They duly did so, and when the beast arrived, each of its heads gulped down the contents of the buckets, which resulted in the dragon becoming intoxicated. Susanoo proceeded to hack the beast into pieces, turning the River Hi into a river of blood.

This is the only African tale on this list, taking place in what is modern-day Ghana. In the town of Wagadu, in ancient times, the people had made a deal with a dragon called Bida. They fed the dragon ten young maidens each year, and in return Bida made it rain gold three times annually. The town chief Lagarre, grandson of the chief that had originally made the deal, was able to renegotiate this to just one maiden a year in return for the same three rainfalls of gold. Eventually, it became the turn of the most beautiful maiden in the kingdom, Sia Jatta Bari, to be fed to the beast. She was dressed in wedding garb, and led out to the dragon’s lair.

Sia’s lover, Mamadi Sefe Dekote, had other ideas. He rode dutifully with the procession, but secretly harbored a plan of his own. He knew that it was the dragon’s custom to stick its head out of his cave three times, before snatching its meal on the third. As Bida’s head came out for the final time, Mamadi struck the dragon, killing it, and saving Sia. Celebrations all round, right?

Not quite. It turned out that the people had become quite used to the rainfall of gold provided by Bida—so they chased both Mamadi and Sia out of Wagadu. Also, it seems that Sia didn’t love Mamadi quite as much as he loved her, and tricked him into cutting off a finger and a toe. She then declared that she couldn’t love anyone who didn’t possess a full compliment of digits.

Mamadi was understandably upset by this point. He presumably reminded Sia that he’d killed a dragon for her, but ultimately turned to a witch for a love potion, which made Sia fall instantly in love with him. Mamadi then tricked Sia into sleeping with one of his servants—and when she realized what she’d done, she died instantly of pure shame.

Alan is an aspiring writer trying to kick-start his career with an awesome beard and an addiction to coffee. You can hear his bad jokes by reading them aloud to yourself from Twitter where he is @SkepticalNumber or you can email him at mailskepticalnumber@gmail.com.

The post 10 Lesser-Known Dragon Slayings From Legend appeared first on Listverse.

The average person has an intelligence quotient of 100. An unsourced claim gives O. J. Simpson’s IQ as 89. Marilyn vos Savant has been cited in the Guinness Book of World Records for the highest measured IQ of 228, a number that can be sourced back to…Marilyn vos Savant. But Savant’s gifts to mankind’s progress include a “Dear Abby” style newspaper column, and a few books mostly compiled from this column. Here are eight reasons why your IQ really doesn’t matter all that much.

The first standardized attempt to measure the human’s mental capacity was courtesy of Alfred Binet and Theodore Simon, who formulated a test to measure verbal ability. Binet and Simon only wanted to use the test to find those children who suffered from mental retardation. This experiment was furthered by William Stern in 1912 to compare a child’s mental age with his or her chronological age. Stern coined the term “intelligence quotient.” The score is calculated by dividing the mental age by the chronological age, then multiplying the quotient by 100. If a child of 10 years old has a mental age of 5, his IQ is 50. Determining his mental age is the difficult part.

Once an average person reaches the age of 15 or so, the IQ test is no longer important, since the mental age has reached maturity. But an average child of 5 should have a mental age of 5. If that child has a mental age of 1, he has a below-average IQ. The two most popular tests used today are the Weschler and the Standford-Binet. On the latter, Albert Einstein (who will make quite a few appearances in this list) scored a now famous 186 as a child. On the former, the same score registers as a 160. The problem with either number is that the tests were not originally conceived for the purpose of scoring this high.

Extremely high scores are routinely inaccurate. 180 on the Standford-Binet is typically the top of the scale, and anything measured over it has few precedents for comparison and should be taken with a grain of salt. Suffice to say, the test-taker has a high degree of adaptability, versatility, and fast retention of information. But is a 186 “smarter” than a 176?

All the various tests can do is discover the very low scorers among children, and these scores are quite accurate. The difference between a 79 and a 69 is highly noticeable, and the test can determine which is which and the reasons why. Given our current understanding of intelligence, the only feasible method by which to score extremely high IQs accurately is to make the questions harder. Spatial reasoning diagrams have many more moving parts and last longer; jumbled words are longer; arithmetical sequences have more gaps. But if you can perform these mental feats on simple challenges, the only difference between them and the more difficult ones is the time you require to solve them. If so, then disregarding the time you need to finish the test, your score ought to be the same. You did the same kind of work. If you deserve a bonus for the extra difficulty, then your score has become arbitrary.

Quite a few IQ tests measure “general knowledge.” Here’s an actual IQ question this lister came across when he was 5: “What color is an apple?” Well, the only apples this lister had seen in his first 5 years were green. Got that one wrong. There are quite a few colors of apples. Some are more than one color. Mensa’s test includes questions like, “2D is to mobius strip as 3D is to ______.” Google says the answer is “Klein bottle.” Now that we know, are we smarter? Einstein once said that he did not like to clutter up his memory with facts and numbers that he could just look up in a dictionary.

As general knowledge goes, the intent is to ask questions to which everyone on Earth, at an age of 5, should know the answers. There are some questions that fit the bill, like “What is 2 + 2?” but does a correct answer to this question indicate a higher mental capacity in the child? IQ tests have historically tried to eliminate all unfairness, and the only way to do so is to eliminate “general knowledge” questions. One question ths lister encountered on the Internet is, “If you unscramble the letters in CIFAIPC, you would have what?” The choices include the correct answer, “ocean.” This question measures vocabulary, reading, and visual reasoning. But suppose the person taking the test understands English and yet has never heard of the Pacific Ocean.

IQ tests were invented for the purpose of scoring children. We all know that children require a lot of parental discipline to ensure they don’t grow up to be criminals. It always starts innocuously enough with bullying, name-calling, and lording any advantage that can be found over a supposed inferior child. While the children with high IQs are usually deemed the nerds of a group and picked on by the larger, and usually dumber, bullies, the nerds frequently pick on each other as well. Size may not matter, but the group that knows everything about Star Trek will publicly ridicule the individual who wants to fit in but can’t.

Children are mean. They require maturity to grow out of this, and though good parenting is essential, it really only stops with age. This is why parents are usually told that it is a better idea not to inform their children of their IQs. If it’s even one point below the arbitrary average of 100, the child will feel inferior. If it’s well above average, the child will likely lord it over his peers. If it is average, the child will probably still feel inferior.

But then, adults seem to take their IQs very seriously—when it’s in their favor. We have groups around the world like Mensa, the Triple Nine Society, the Prometheus Society, and the Mega Society. The last of these is said to be the most exclusive intellect club in the world. Applicants must score at least 171 on the Standford-Binet test to be accepted. Mensa requires “only” a 132. But what good is it to be a member? The Mega Society does very little that can be described as helpful. They have meetings now and then around the world, and at these meetings, the members just schmooze and congratulate each other. More on this at #1.

The Internet, and so-called “experts” before it, have long propagated some theoretical, famously high IQs across history. They are, of course, utter conjecture, since the IQ, as a notion of measured intellect, and its tests have only been around since the turn of the 20th Century. But if you google “famous high iqs,” you’ll find well known webpage(s) claiming that on the scale that measures an average as 100, and Einstein’s as 160, Leonardo da Vinci “scored” 220. That’s an outright lie for a number of reasons: da Vinci didn’t score anything on a test that had yet to be invented; he might have had a 220, but not because the webpage says so—nobody knows; the numbers on these sites seem to be estimates based on the person’s significance to history, as well as the diversity of their exploits.

Everyone knows da Vinci had his hand in everything. But is that why Einstein scores lower at 160? Einstein is less creative? If you think it’s difficult to measure intellect in terms of the black-and-white mathematics and sciences, imagine measuring a person’s skill in liberal arts. You pick the single genre of the arts. Let us say “literature.” The tests usually measure skill in spatial reasoning, reading, vocabulary, arthmetic, memory and sometimes general knowledge. So in terms of vocabulary, would Shakespeare have a higher IQ than Ernest Hemingway, because Shakespeare uses bigger words in his work? Hemingway had this to say about it, “William Faulkner is of the opinion that because I do not use the 10 dollar words, I don’t know them. Well, we both have Nobel Prizes, so I assure you, I do. But there are older ones, simpler ones, better ones, and those are the ones I use.”

And how do we measure the IQ of Ludwig van Beethoven? He was good at music, but not good at mathematics. His mathematical education stopped at arithmetic. He couldn’t even do intermediate algebra. If he were to take the test, he would probably score low, but the absence of math and science from his mind didn’t hurt his career much. Charles Dickens is said to have had a 180 IQ. Why? Because Nicholas Nickleby is a good story? It is impossible to judge this literature as better than that (within reason), because all liberal arts are subjective endeavors. Justin Bieber has a lot of fans, and a lot of them probably think his music is better than Mozart’s.

Is it fair to say that Stephen Hawking’s estimated 160 deserves to be lower than Isaac Newton’s 190? They both worked in the same fields. But Newton “created” the calculus. Hawking simply works with it. Is that worth a 30 point drop? Andy Warhol was a rather good painter for someone with an 86, although to be fair, he may have answered the questions wrong on purpose, in protest. Who was smarter, Warhol or Jackson Pollock?

Einstein is typically remembered as a poor student when he was young, but that is grossly unfair. By the time he graduated from high school, Einstein had made his poorest showing how fast he answered questions. The German teachers were trained to drill the knowledge into the students by rote, and this was not how Einstein’s brain worked. When asked a question, he thought for a while to remember the answer, then thought some more to be sure of it. This was all it took to come close to failing several times, but he never did. His teachers considered him retarded. One of them just shook his head while Einstein was thinking and said, “Einstein, you will never amount to anything!”

Most IQ tests are timed, which means your speed is part of the score. Even if you answer every question correctly, your slow speed will pull your IQ down a few points, sometimes many. But is speed important in life? If you’re an astronaut working calculus to correct your decaying reentry trajectory before you burn to death, time is more than money, but how many of us will experience such a problem in life? And besides, why not get the math right before you reenter?

We know by now that the popular legend of Einstein the F-student is not true. He never flunked a course in his life, and in high school, he got very good grades. But for someone who redefined the entire 20th Century, whose last name has become a byword for “genius,” you would expect straight As, and Einstein did not get them. His report card for junior/senior year in high school is well know across the Internet, and it shows grades of 6, or A, in algebra, geometry, applied geometry, physics, and history. He scored 5 in chemistry, Italian, and German, a 3 in French, and 4 in geography and art. Most of them fair grades, but then, his strongest suits are obvious.

IQ tests typically measure the scientific and mathematical disciplines very well because you’re either right or wrong. There is no gray area. In this regard, it makes sense why Einstein would score a 186. He had a lot of talent for math. But while in elementary and middle schools, he scored a solid 3 to 4, or about a C, in most linguistic subjects, even his own language. If the test he took was balanced, with focus given to the liberal arts, his scores in these subjects certainly pulled his overall score down, which means his mathematical brain probably scored a lot higher than 186. On top of all this, Einstein failed his entrance exam to get into the Swiss Federal Polytechnical School. He aced the math and science sections, but failed French, Italian, history, and geography. He had to spend a year in a run-of-the-mill vocational college until they let him retake the exam. So how can we trust the single number?

If Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali were to have taken the same IQ test, which one would have scored higher? Ali seems the more reasonable answer, but this is strange inasmuch as we know very little of the mens’ intellectual capabilities. They didn’t work in mathematics or mechanical engineering. They were boxers. They made millions by beating people up. Ali won two of their three encounters, but don’t count Frazier as a footnote to Ali’s glory. Frazier was the only man to beat Ali in his prime. He did it on points and he knocked Ali down.

What do you think Frazier would have scored on an IQ test? An average 100? But a high IQ doesn’t enable a person like Einstein to box well. Einstein had no desire to box, or do very much that is physical. Perhaps it is fair to say that there is such a thing as a “physical IQ.” Boxing is a sport of motor skills. These are controlled by the brain, and some people are born with an incredible knack for refining them with ease. Franz Liszt had extreme motor skills in his hands and feet.

If two boxers train in the same way, and one of them very quickly learns how to duck, jab, dance, and counterpunch, while the other simply can’t get it, we see the existence of “talent.” IQ tests are used to measure universal truths in mental acuity. Is it fair to say that the boxer with more aptitude for the sport is the more intelligent of the two? IQ tests do not root out such natural prodigies.

Of course intelligence is rather important to life as a human, and the higher one’s is, the better, but only if it is put to good use. The film Good Will Hunting deals with this requirement to use one’s “gift” for the improvement of mankind and the world. Everyone knows Einstein was a genius. But is he famous because of his 186 IQ? Or did his papers on Relativity and the photoelectric effect have anything to do with it? He was also rather involved in the creation of the atomic bomb. Time Magazine calls him the Man of the 20th Century.

Ever heard of William James Sidis? He lived from 1898 to 1944 and is reputed to have had a “ratio IQ” between 250 and 300. This IQ is a matter of very heated debate to this day, because the sources don’t agree and all of them are hearsay. There is, however, no doubt that he had an extremely fast aptitude for learning anything. By his 20s, he was able to speak in over 40 languages, and claimed to be able to learn one in a day. He invented his own language, called Vendergood, which was a mishmash of Ancient Greek, Latin, and about 8 other European languages. J. R. R. Tolkien did the very same thing with Elvish, and spoke at least 30 languages. But we don’t think of Tolkien as having an IQ above 250, and yet he wrote a lot more than Sidis, and Tolkien’s literature is popular. Sidis invented a rotary calendar that would always be accurate even to the leap year. But why is that important? We already have working calendars. With a 300 IQ, it’s a shame he didn’t invent the time machine or a real lightsaber.

Rene Descartes, probably another high IQ holder, famously wrote, “Cogito, ergo sum.” “I think, therefore, I am.” While this lister definitely agrees, he has always thought of this statement as incomplete. William Sidis proves it. He squandered his natural talents on the trivial. Einstein reached the heights of his greatness with “only” a 186. What could Sir Isaac Newton have done with a 300? Perhaps the phrase should be, “Cogito, ergo sum. Facio, ergo recordaremur.” “I think, therefore I am. I do, therefore I will be remembered.”

FlameHorse is a writer for Listverse. He has no idea what his IQ is.

The post 8 Reasons The IQ Is Meaningless appeared first on Listverse.

For some reason, the world is enthralled with the idea of the impostor. They’re sneaky, deceitful, and devoid of morals—but dang it, they do it with style. For example, one of the most famous impostors in recent history is Frank Abagnale, inspiration for the Spielberg/DiCaprio film Catch Me If You Can. He robbed, cheated, and lied his way into a fortune, but no matter how many checks he forged, you just can’t help rooting for the guy.

In the past we’ve talked about some of the greatest impostors in history, but here’s another installment for your viewing pleasure. These are 10 of the greatest impostors and con men of the 20th century.

Our first entry begins in the final years of the 1800′s and carries over to the leading decade of the 20th century. Cassie Chadwick was born Elizabeth Bigsley in 1857, and it wasn’t long before she embarked on a long and incredibly successful con career. It only took fourteen years to lead to her first arrest—she was picked up after forging checks in Ontario under the claim they they were inherited from a long lost British uncle. The court released her shortly, claiming her to be insane—a dubious accomplishment for a 14-year-old.

As the years progressed, so did Cassie’s schemes. In 1882 she married her first husband, masquerading as a clairvoyant named Madame Lydia DeVere. The high profile wedding, however, brought her past victims out of the woodwork and to her front door, demanding payment for the money she had stolen from them. The marriage lasted less than a year.

Fifteen years and three husbands later, Cassie Chadwick embarked on her most ambitious scam to date, and the one that turned her into a legend—she convinced the world that she was an illegitimate daughter of Andrew Carnegie, the ludicrously wealthy steel and railroad mogul. Over the next eight years, she scammed up to $20 million in bank loans under Carnegie’s name—while the banks themselves were too afraid to ask Carnegie to vouch for the loans for fear of stirring up controversy over his “illegitimate daughter.” The entire scheme collapsed around her in 1904 when she was arrested after one bank called her bluff. She was given 14 years in jail, but in 1907 she died due to heart complications.

It’s hard to fault a man for trying, no matter how devious their intentions may be. And it’s hard to find a man who tried harder than Stanley Clifford Weyman. Unlike most impostors, Weyman wasn’t in it for the money—he wanted the adventure, famously stating: “One man’s life is a boring thing. I lived many lives. I’m never bored.”

In between impersonating navy and military officials, journalists, and the actual U.S. Secretary of State, he also masterminded a meeting between an Afghani princess and Warren Harding, the President of the U.S. See, in 1921, Afghanistan and Britain were in talks to negotiate a peace treaty, and Princess Fatima, of Afghanistan, was visiting the U.S. However, the U.S. government wasn’t acknowledging her official presence.

So what did Weyman do? He visited Princess Fatima under the guise of a Liaison Officer for the State Department and promised that he would arrange a meeting between her and President Harding. All he asked was that she supply $10,000 as a complimentary present to the State Department. But here, where most con men would have taken the money and run, Weyman actually followed through on his promise—he used the $10,000 for first class transport and accommodations for the princess, then lied his way up through the chain of command at the White House until he got to the president himself. When the press released his photo beside the princess and the president, he was recognized and arrested. Why did he do it? Just to see if he could.

It’s rare that an impersonator will manage to make a positive impact on the world and save the lives of the people who come to depend on him. Most impostors are after money or, in the case of Stanley Weyman, excitement. For Ferdinand Demara, impersonation was about filling in gaps, picking up the pieces where a job was needed, whether he had the training for it or not.

Early in his “career,” Demara was a soldier in the military. Not happy with where that was taking him, he decided to fake his own suicide in 1942 and assumed the name of Robert French, then began teaching college psychology at a Pennsylvania university. Every now and then he would move to a different university position under a variety of names. Eventually, though, he was caught and given jail time—not for impersonating anyone, but for deserting the army years earlier.

Out of jail and with the headlines of the Korean War plastered across newspapers, Demara decided to assume the name of an acquaintance, a surgeon named Joseph Cyr. Under his new identity he got a job on the Canadian destroyer HMCS Cayuga and shipped off to Korea. Unfortunately, he turned out to be the only surgeon on the ship, and ended up performing more than sixteen major surgeries—with no formal training. All of his patients recovered. In the biography of Demara’s life, The Great Impostor, Demara claimed that he simply read a surgery textbook before operating.

George Dupre is an interesting case, in that his only real impersonation was of himself. However, the history he actually had and the history he claimed to have were so different that he inadvertently became one of the greatest Canadian war heroes in the years following WWII.

After the war ended, Dupre began traveling across Canada as a public speaker, describing his missions as a spy for the Special Operations Executive, a legendary espionage organization sometimes referred to as the Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare. Dupre wove intricate tales of life behind enemy lines in occupied Paris, working with the underground resistance to overthrow the Nazi Gestapo. He described his harrowing experience as a prisoner of the Gestapo undergoing weeks of physical and psychological torture yet refusing to divulge any information. His story became so widespread that a book was written about it, The Man Who Wouldn’t Talk, and Dupre became an international sensation.

Except that none of it ever happened. With the fame from the book came testimonies from people who had actually served with Dupre in the war. The truth was, Dupre spent the entire war behind a desk in London. It turned out that Dupre had just embellished a few stories for fun, and somehow the entire thing spiraled out of control. Aside from the fame though, Dupre never benefited from the book deal and the public talks—he donated all his proceeds to Scouts Canada. His biography was reclassified as fiction.

Most of the impostors on this list got their start at a young age—few of them achieved notoriety before the age of twenty. David Hampton is now considered one of the youngest successful con artists and impersonators, and his story has since been adapted into the play and film Six Degrees of Separation. His gimmick: impersonating actor Sidney Poitier’s son (Sidney Poitier actually has six daughters and zero sons).

In 1983, at the age of nineteen, David Hampton tried to get into a Manhattan night club with a friend. The bouncers refused to let them in, but when Hampton came back later and told them he was Sidney Poitier’s son, they immediately showed him to the VIP section. Thus, an identity was born. Hammond took to showing up at first class restaurants, claiming that he was meeting his “father.” He would dine, then act disappointed when his father never arrived while simultaneously signing the check in Poitier’s name.

Soon he began to target the wealthy citizens of Manhattan—including Calvin Klein and Gary Sinise, among others. Hampton would introduce himself as David Poitier, then make up a story about how he had been mugged and needed a place to stay until his father arrived the next day. In one of these homes he stole an address book, and took to calling first, claiming that he was a friend of their son/daughter from college.

After Hampton’s story became famous in Six Degrees in 1990, he began traveling the country under various other personas (“David Poitier” wouldn’t exactly fly anymore), playing the impersonation game until 1993, when he passed away from AIDS.

Christian Gerhartsreiter is a German who moved to the U.S. in 1979 in the hopes of getting a job as an actor. His plan worked—but not exactly in the normal sense. A mere eighteen years old with no money, no connections, and no legal visa to be in the States, he decided that the best thing to do would be to get married and obtain a green card through his wife. So that’s what he did—he found a young woman named Amy Duhnke and told her that if he were sent back to Germany he’d be conscripted into the German army to fight the Russians (this was during the Cold War). She agreed to marry him, but the day after the wedding Christian skipped out on the honeymoon and pointed his compass towards California, where his true calling lay.

His true calling, of course, was to become Clark Rockefeller—the faux multimillionaire social butterfly who spent the next two decades—from around 1985 to 2006—claiming to be a member of the illustrious Rockefeller family. The plan worked exceedingly well until his wife Sandra Boss (of 11 years we should add), began to get suspicious that he was not, in fact, a Rockefeller. The married couple had been living exclusively on Sandra’s income the entire time, while “Clark” pursued high profile social connections.

And the rest, as they say, is history. Sandra Boss discovered the lie, filed for divorce in 2006, and left with their daughter. Two years later, Clark was arrested for kidnapping his daughter in Boston, sparking a whirlwind investigation into this mysterious German’s true identity. As it turned out, he also killed a guy.

Stanley Kubrick is an American director who’s something of a legend among movie buffs. The words “greatest director in history” have been thrown around, along with the words “not British” and “heavily bearded.” Those last two are particularly important, because in the early 90′s the reclusive Kubrick began to show up in social clubs in London—only now, he was clean shaven and decidedly English. The “new” Kubrick was actually a man named Alan Conway, who had taken to using the name for the social status it imparted.

Despite the changes in his physical appearance, and reportedly having next to no knowledge of any of Kubrick’s films, Alan Conway (real name Eddie Alan Jablowsky) managed to keep the charade going. Since the real Kubrick hadn’t been seen in public more than a handful of times in the past 15 years, it couldn’t have been terribly difficult—and even people who had actually met Kubrick in real life were fooled by the act. The film critic Frank Rich was famously convinced and, based on Conway’s behavior, came to the conclusion that Kubrick was gay (which Conway was).

Unfortunately, this story would be hilarious if it wasn’t quite so tragic. Conway was a violent alcoholic, according to his son, and his impersonations were closer to fanatical delusions than any carefully calculated plan. Conway passed away in 1998 from heart problems.

In the past, masquerading as one of the captains of industry seemed to be the surest way to a quick million. These days, the Hollywood faces are the new American royalty. In 1992, Tehran native Anoushirvan Fakhran came to the States on a student visa, and spent the next several years living a lavish lifestyle, sprinkled with privileges usually reserved for celebrities and visiting royalty. That’s because nobody knew him by the name of Anoushirvan—to everyone who knew him, he was Jonathan Taylor Spielberg, nephew of director Stephen Spielberg.

In fact, he had even gone so far as to officially change his name to Spielberg in 1997. Then, in 1998, an anonymous woman placed a call to Paul VI high school in Fairfax, Virginia. She claimed to represent Steven Spielberg, and said that his nephew would be filming a movie in the area and wanted to research high school life. So the school allowed “Jonathan” to attend free of tuition, and gave him an official transfer from his previous school, the fictitious Beverly Hills Private School for Actors. Jonathan Spielberg was now a student.

During this time, Jonathan and his mother were living in a posh apartment in Fairfax Village, and Jonathan drove a BMW to school, often parking in the school principal’s reserved space. Nobody complained; he was related to a celebrity. Eventually though, the scheme backfired—Jonathan stopped attending classes, and the school tried to reach Steven Spielberg to find out why. Jonathan was arrested and sentenced to 11 months in jail for forging documents.

Steven Russell is probably closer to an escape artist than an impostor, but the means through which he masterminded his many prison escapes are the stuff of legend. In 1990, Russell lost his job and, instead of searching for new work, faked an accident and sued the company. This landed him his first prison sentence, and his first chance to escape. In 1992, Russell impersonated a prison guard by changing his clothes and just walking right out of the prison.

On his second arrest, which was for embezzling nearly $1 million from a medical company, Russell was given a $950,000 bail—he couldn’t pay it, so he simply called the courthouse, told them he was a judge, and reduced the bail to $45,000, which he promptly paid. Unfortunately, he was quickly tracked down again once the error was discovered, and Russell found himself facing a 40 year sentence for the previous embezzlement charges.

So he escaped again—this time by coloring his prison uniform with several dozen green markers until it resembled surgical scrubs. Again, he walked right out the front door. And again, he was quickly found and arrested. So this time Russell typed up fake medical records on a typewriter in his cell, and, through judicious use of laxatives, convinced the prison guards he was dying of AIDS. Then he called the prison and said that he was a doctor looking for volunteers to test a new AIDS treatment. When the prison warden announced the news, Russell promptly volunteered.

The next time he was caught, he faked a heart attack and was taken to a hospital under guard of FBI agents. So he asked to use the phone—and called the very agents guarding him under the guise of an FBI detective to let them know that they no longer needed to guard him. Russell is currently back in prison, looking forward to his release date in the year 2140. The film I love you Phillip Morris is based on his exploits.

The Rockefellers just can’t catch a break. Before the German Clark Rockefeller, there was Christophe Rocancourt, the “French Rockefeller.” Christophe started his scams big, and kept the ball rolling his entire career—his first scam was faking a property deed in Paris, and then selling that deed for $1.4 million.

With his wallet freshly stuffed, he then hopped the ocean to the United States and began fraternizing with the Hollywood fat cats, claiming to be a French relative of the Rockefellers. Through this alias (and others), he convinced multiple people to fund his fictitious projects. Most of the time, he never even had to make any concrete claims—he would just show up at a party and make a vague mention of his mother, who might happen to be an actress one week, or a famous producer the next week.

In 2006, he was interviewed by Dateline, and claimed that he had, all said and done, scammed about $40 million in his lifetime. His modus operandi was to convince someone wealthy that he was working on a large investment, but needed some capital to get it off the ground. The person would give Rocancourt the money, and Rocancourt would disappear. He famously convinced Jean Claude Van Damme, the action star, to produce a movie of his.

He was arrested for fraud in 1998, but has continued his scams well into the 21st century. As of 2009 he was in jail in Vancouver, where he told reporters, “I never steal. Never. I lied, but I never stole.”

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We’ve all heard of the Pyramids of Giza—thousands of years old, and just about the most famous buildings of all time. But ancient Egypt doesn’t have a monopoly on pyramid construction; mankind ever since has been pretty keen on the idea, coming up with all kinds of different twists on the same general theme. Here are some of the greatest alternative pyramids we’ve managed over the years (including a few we didn’t quite pull off):

Famously, the Egyptian pyramids were built to host the body of the king. They became temples to the dead, and a new source of worship. That’s all very nice—but perhaps a little elitist. That was the thought of Thomas Willson in 1829, when he proposed a new solution to London’s ongoing problem with graveyard overpopulation: a pyramid mausoleum which could contain the corpses of five million people, and which, if completed, would have been ninety-four floors high (by comparison, the Chrysler Building has just seventy-seven floors). And it would have been located in the middle of London.

Willson thought the idea compact, hygienic, and ornamental, and he hoped that people would come from afar to have picnics and admire it. He also calculated that it would bring in a tidy profit of around ten million pounds. Not all envisaged the idea in the same way, however: one historian has described it as a “nightmarish combination of megalomaniacal Neo-Classicism and dehumanized Utilitarian efficiency”, which is an old-fashioned way of saying “this stinks.” In the end, public opinion turned against it—Londoners most likely deciding that they would rather picnic a park than beneath a colossal pyramid of death.

We associate the Romans with amphitheaters, temples, and statues—but one thing we don’t tend to think of is pyramids. Well, think again. Smack-bang in the middle of Rome is a two-thousand-year-old, 121-foot (37m)-high pyramid.

The Romans had only recently made Egypt a province, and were obviously impressed with their huge tombs to ancient kings. “I like the sound of that,” a Roman magistrate called Gaius Cestius probably said—and had one built for himself, Roman-style, upon his death. Alas, as with the Egyptian pyramids, advertising your tomb in such grand style isn’t always a good idea; both his body and the pyramid’s other contents were plundered in antiquity.

What do you do when you want to build a sixty-five-floor pyramid in the middle of crowded Mexico City? Why, you turn it upside-down and build it underground, of course. That’s the proposal of a Mexican architectural firm. They want to give the city’s main square a glass floor, and build a pyramid of offices, homes, and shops underneath it.

Mexico has a rich history of pyramid building from the Maya civilization, and according to one of the architects, the proposed pyramid would “dig down through the layers of cities to uncover our roots.” Because there’s nothing like building a vast, hi-tech underground shopping centre to discover your roots. At a projected $800 million, the city hasn’t yet expressed much enthusiasm for the idea.

What’s the biggest pyramid in the world? The Great Pyramid of Giza? No—there’s actually one that’s twice as big.

Though not as tall as the Great Pyramid of Egypt, the Great Pyramid of Cholula—which also has the less catchy name of Tlachihualtepetl—is much wider. It can be found in central-east Mexico, and was built over a period of a thousand years, from the third century B.C. to the ninth century A.D.  

Some say that it was built by a giant called Xelhua, but archaeologists, predictably, disagree. They claim that the pyramid was constructed by a series of ancient Mexican civilizations, who added layer upon layer over the years. These days it’s quite overgrown, and doing its best impression of a hill—so much so that the Spanish built a church on it in the sixteenth century.

Everybody thinks of Egypt as the pyramid capital of the world, but there’s another country that has twice as many pyramids: Sudan. Located directly to the south of modern Egypt, they were mostly built around the third century B.C.—around eight hundred years after the last Egyptian pyramids were built.

There are more than two hundred and fifty of them, ranging from twenty feet (6m) to one hundred and twenty feet (36m) high. Many of these have only been discovered in the last few years, suggesting that either the Sudanese were fantastic at hiding their pyramids, or that archaeologists prefer more glamorous locations in which carry out their digging.

It may not be much to look at these days, but the mausoleum pyramid of the first Emperor of China is deadly. It was built from 246 B.C. to 208 B.C., supposedly by as many as 700,000 men—and it was filled with more traps than would fit into an Indiana Jones movie.

It was supposed to be a representation of the Emperor’s palace and universe, and in this vein he had all his childless concubines killed and buried with him. Lovely. Workers, too, were buried alive, in order to preserve the pyramid’s secrets, and trees and grass were planted to make it seem like a hill. The Chinese are yet to excavate, claiming that archaeology isn’t sophisticated enough to do the job properly. But it could well be that they’re simply scared of the traps; for instance, it’s known that the pyramid was filled with a moat of mercury. More than two millennia later, mercury readings from the site are still dangerously high.

Being an architect is tough work. You spend months getting your drawings and measurements perfect—only to have the builders read your plans the wrong way round. That looks like what happened in 1983, for the construction of the 262-foot (80m)-high Slovak Radio Building, in Bratislava, Slovakia. Inside is a concert hall—and it proudly boasts one of the largest organs in Slovakia. If you’re visiting in a group, make sure everyone is spread around evenly; it looks like it could topple at any moment.

Sure, it didn’t last long—but for a while, New York had its own pyramid. At the end of World War One, thousands of helmets from captured German soldiers were taken back to America, and in a somewhat macabre victory display, they were piled up into a pyramid at Grand Central Terminal.

Somehow, we don’t think this would be received very well today. Still, it’s a touch more civilized than the similar actions of fourteenth-century Central Asian emperor Tamerlane. During one siege, he built a pyramid of 90,000 human skulls in front of a besieged city to intimidate them. We imagine that it worked.

Pyramids of death don’t die that easily. In 2007, a group of German entrepreneurs unveiled their designs for a 1900-foot (580m)-tall pyramid to house the bodies of up to forty million dead people. It would also be multi-colored, as if to compensate for the fact that it would be filled with dead bodies. For around $1000, anybody could sign up to have their ashes encased in a block after they die—and the color would be of their choosing. At around ten times the size of the original Great Pyramid, it would have almost literally cast a shadow over the neighboring villages.

Remarkably, the group were given $115,000 of funding from the German government to pursue the idea; since then, however, the plan seems to have faded due to lack of interest and local objection to having a gigantic multi-colored pyramid full of dead people on their doorstep. But don’t worry: if you’re interested, you can still sign up here.

Why restrict pyramid building to our own planet? The Curiosity rover sent by NASA to examine Mars found something rather curious. This pyramid looks like it’s been copied from the ancient Egyptian ones—or perhaps it’s the other way round.

NASA scientists say that the pyramid is most likely the product of wind erosion; but in the minds of ancient aliens theorists, it’s “hard evidence” that our world today has been shaped by mystical space aliens from Mars. One thing is for sure, however: if the aliens who built this rock were the ones who visited Earth, they must have been pretty tiny. The Pyramid of Mars is about the same size as a football.

N. Christie is currently traveling the world to determine once and for all what the Seven Wonders of the World really are.

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Saber-toothed tigers never fail to capture our imagination. They’re an (albeit extinct) example of just how terrifying teeth can get—but as we’ll find out, the dangers of extreme dentition aren’t merely confined to the past. In this list, we’ll take a look at the most dangerous, bizarre, and shocking teeth you could ever hope to avoid encountering:

There are some animals so bizarre and disturbing that we begin to question how evolution managed to create such creatures. The four species of babirusa possess exceedingly bizarre weaponry, with which they carry out acts of aggression.

Native to Indonesia, these “Deer Pigs” not only possess massive lower canines that curl, fang-like, over the upper jaw—but their upper canines also come in backwards, pairing with the lower tusks and curling back towards the head. Males slash each other with their sabers during vicious mating disputes. The upward direction allows them to be effective in combat, but if the Babirusa fails to grind them down, they may grow into the animal’s skull—with fatal results.

Yes—saber-toothed deer. The thought is so strange and terrifying that one might be tempted to dismiss it as fantasy. In fact, several species of ungulate known as “musk deer”, native to Eurasia, possess massive fangs, which develop from outgrowths of the canine tooth.

Musk deer fangs extend several inches past their lower jaw. Unlike the infamous cats of the distant past, musk deer go to battle against other males with their canine sabers, sinking them into each other during mating disputes. The creatures are genetically distinct from true deer (cervids), and are named after the powerful scent they produce to mark their territory.

Back when the saber-toothed tiger was still roaming around on land, the terrifying payara was evolving exactly the same weaponry for domination of the rivers—but in reverse. Growing to lengths of more than four feet (1.2m), payara stalk the waters of the Amazon, sinking their three-to-four-inch fangs through the vital organs of their prey.

As the stricken prey sinks towards the bottom, the payara’s cavernous jaws engulf it. Unlike most saber-toothed animals, its fangs remain entirely inside its mouth, sliding into two holes in the upper jaw. The ghastly appearance and potential danger of a bite from the “vampire characin” sends chills through the spine of even the most seasoned fisherman.

At first glance, the goosander looks like a typical waterfowl; but when feeding ducks at the pond, you might not want to offer your hand to the members of this unusual species. As the largest of the “Sawbills” of the genus Mergus, the goosander inhabits rivers, estuaries, and park lakes throughout Eurasia, Canada, and the USA.

Extending from its bill are more than one hundred and fifty razor-sharp teeth, curved backwards, which can slice through the bodies of fish like a hot knife in butter. A bird with teeth is always going to be an anomaly—but even more eerily, this dinosaurian “devil duck” may at times saw up small mammals, and even other birds, as though it were some form of aquatic raptor.

The fact that an animal is a herbivore should never tempt you into the belief that it poses no danger to you. Some plant eaters still have particularly wicked canine teeth.

Take the familiar and apparently blasé dromedary camel, for instance. Although this species has long been used as a pack animal and grazer, those thick lips hide impressive teeth that reach over three inches (7.5cm) in length. With such massive jaws and sharp teeth, it is easy to understand how owners have been killed—sometimes in their sleep—by camels with a mind for revenge. It is well within their power to crush a human skull. Fatal bites, such as the one recently reported in China, may also occur during mating season, when the animals are defensive and territorial.

This is the only extinct species on this list. The helicopron was a shark, twenty feet (6m) in length, which used its enormous teeth in a manner unlike that of any known living creature. Attached to a circular muscle, the shark’s mouth apparatus would shoot out and shred prey into bite-sized pieces, much like an actual chainsaw.

The shark’s bizarre form of dentition was misunderstood by scientists for years, before the strange and disturbing truth was eventually revealed. The two-inch (5cm)-long teeth were tightly packed in a descending spiral, ensuring that the prey was torn to pieces with great speed.

The “unicorn of the sea” was afforded mythical status by explorers and researchers—until the moment when the bizarre creature was properly documented and found to be real.

In a bizarre twist of physiology, this relatively small, thirteen-foot (4m)-long whale developed a lethal “spear” atop its head, which could be used during territorial disputes and in self-defense. Occasionally, it is used to break up ice in the whale’s arctic habitat.

In a departure from the norm of symmetry in the animal kingdom, the narwhal’s enormous weapon is actually a modified right canine tooth that angles forwards and extends through the animal’s forehead. The narwhal has no other teeth in its oddly-shaped jaws, but on occasion, the left canine socket may sprout a second “tusk,” sometimes of equal length to the first.

Baboons are the largest monkeys on Earth, filling out at more than eighty pounds (36kg). Despite being around half the size of most humans, the average baboon’s fang-like canines often reach two inches (5cm) in length—even longer than the teeth of most adult lions. Although these simian sabers appear fit to kill even the most intimidating prey, they are more often used in mating season fights among rival males—suggesting that it was sexual selection which led to the development of oversized fangs. But this doesn’t afford much comfort to those who stray into baboon territory.

The hippopotamus may reach a length of more than sixteen feet (5m), and can put on an incredible nine thousand pounds (4000kg) in weight, making it the third-most massive land animal. The hippopotamus (to avoid the contentious plural) also has the largest canines of any land animal, with two sword-like teeth that reach a whopping sixteen inches (40cm) in length.

Essentially, we are dealing with a truck-sized river monster with teeth capable of running through two humans in one bite. And we grew up thinking that crocodiles were our biggest enemies on the Nile… 

In one notable case, a tour guide was partially swallowed by a hippopotamus, and his arm was lost. And in a final fascinating twist, genetic research has shown that these saber-toothed creatures are relatives of whales, rather than pigs as once thought.

With a name like that, anything is possible—this is one fish you do not want to meet on a diving trip. Reaching well over two feet (60cm) in length, these tropical reef inhabitants can be found in shallow waters. They are known to fiercely defend their territories against intruders, including human explorers. Triggerfish teeth—their purpose being to crush rock-hard coral—are shockingly sharp and powerful, and appear almost human-like.

Triggerfish teeth are unusual in that they are straight yet extremely thin. This makes them exceptionally sharp, yet they’re also extremely strong, and resilient to damage.

Ron Harlan investigates of the mysteries of nature and the bizarre findings that often crop up on this planet. He is a freelance writer and student of science.

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We’ve all had “that” journey: the one which saw us miss our flight, get snowed in somewhere in Delaware, and which ended up with us being forced to spend the night warming ourselves with a cigarette lighter. But no matter how awful our worst journeys might have been, they just don’t compare with the following eight trips from hell. You may say that missing Christmas with your family “killed you”—but at least that wasn’t literal. The same cannot be said of:

In late 1957, the Soviets needed a snappy follow-up to Sputnik. Given thirty days by the Kremlin to come up with something impressive, or else to get packing for Siberia, Russian scientists decided to do the only logical thing: send a stray dog into space.

On October 31 that year, “Laika” was placed into a narrow rocket and left on a frozen launching pad for three days. In all likelihood, this was the highlight of her trip; the actual lift-off subjected her to enough G-Force to push her heart rate into the ‘danger’ area. At the same time, a malfunction caused the rocket’s thermal control system to shut down, essentially turning the cabin into the space-borne equivalent of a sealed car in a sun-baked parking lot. Within five hours, Laika had become both the first creature to reach orbit, and the first creature to die in orbit: a bitter consolation prize rendered even worse by her patent inability to understand it.

During the Winter of 1719, Swedish Lieutenant-General Carl Gustaf Armfeldt was stuck in Norway with 6,000 battle-weary soldiers. In a desperate attempt to make it home, Armfeldt ordered his men back across the Tydal Mountain range—a useful shortcut into Sweden, provided it isn’t midwinter and your troops aren’t carrying summer equipment.

What followed was one of the biggest logistical screw-ups in military history: the first leg of the journey saw two hundred men die of exposure as the army scrambled for shelter in a tiny village. Rather than be put off by the screaming agony all around him, Armfeldt decided that the best course was to carry on—right into the heart of a blizzard.

In the horror that followed, frostbite set in, horses perished, equipment was burnt for warmth, and wolves descended on hapless victims. By the time the remnants of the army had finally reached Sweden on January 15, nearly four thousand men were dead, with another six hundred maimed for life. Because life laughs in the face of justice, Armfeldt was “punished” for his incompetence with a massive promotion.    

Burke and Wills were the Laurel and Hardy of exploration. Tasked in 1860 with finding a land route from Melbourne to Australia’s north coast, the duo set out with such ‘essential’ supplies as 1,500 pounds (680kg) of sugar, a filing cabinet, a heavy wooden table and matching chairs, and a giant gong. In normal circumstances, you’d like to think that God would have taken pity on their amusing incompetence. But Victorian Australia was not “normal circumstances.”

Having timed their trip to coincide with a blisteringly hot summer, the two quickly ran out of supplies, temper, and luck. The original party splintered, with mass-desertions leading to Burke and Wills running for the coast almost entirely by themselves. When they finally got there, their goal was obscured by miles of mangrove swamps – meaning they technically failed, as well as dying in the process. A year or so after setting out, the two explorers expired over ninety miles (145km) from safety, having accomplished nothing and wasted £60,000 of public money in their very successful suicide attempt.

Any trip that ends with you eating a significant proportion of your loved ones is never going to wind up on a list of “10 Loveliest Journeys.” But did you know the Donner trip was awful even before the cannibalism began?

It’s true: the party had every sign of being totally doomed from the start. For one thing, the guy they were meant to be following across the brand new trail turned out to be a fruitcake. Rather than guide them through the mountains, he left letters tacked to trees and generally led them into areas so dangerous you’d swear it was an assassination attempt. This included the Great Salt Lake Desert—an area of the world so inhospitable that even the Elder Gods fear it. Unsurprisingly, this slowed them down.

Secondly, local native tribes decided to start killing their animals like crazy—an inconvenience made worse by the simmering tensions within the group. This leads nicely to number three: they all hated each other. No kidding: two members of the group even had a whip/knife duel at one point. With that sort of animosity, the cannibalism was probably something of a relief.

We all know the phrase “Doctor Livingstone, I presume?” But what you probably didn’t know was the full extent of misery Livingstone had undergone before he heard it.

In 1866, Livingstone became determined to find the source of the Nile. How determined? Well, he leapt in a boat for Africa, leaving everything he loved behind, and vanished for six years—eventually resurfacing up as the comical “pet” of a local tribe. And he really was something like their pet: despite the fact that he was riddled with dysentery, suffering from malaria, and bleeding internally, the tribe who found him would only offer him food on the condition that he eat it in full view, for their amusement. They were certainly amused, falling over themselves with hilarity while watching this stuffy white man scrabble for survival—much as we now watch Bear Grylls sleep inside a camel for cheap kicks.

Those six years didn’t exactly end well, either; shortly after the famous words above were spoken, Livingstone plunged back into the jungle and promptly died—seven years after setting out, and no closer to discovering the source of the Nile.

You know those days when nothing goes your way, and life feels hopeless? Well, Robert Falcon Scott had roughly sixty of those—consecutively. They also culminated in his death, which is something we can’t often say about our own bad days.

The year was 1911. No one had yet reached the South Pole, and the race was on to claim it in the name of one or another superpower. In the British corner was Scott: a Navy officer and scientist with some decidedly odd ideas about Antarctic travel. In the Norwegian corner was Amundsen: an expert in cold weather exploration, and one of the greatest explorers of his day.

Despite being clearly fated to lose, Scott made a game effort for the pole: by which I mean he wasted days collecting rock samples, and arrived five weeks late. The return journey was even worse: the weather reached previously-unrecorded savageness; temperatures dropped so low that the snow became like sand; and an unprecedented super-storm pinned down and killed the team just a few miles from safety. In the end, Scott’s pole attempt achieved nothing, killed everyone involved, and made the British look like fools.

Mungo Park was one of the first Europeans to properly explore central Africa. In the process, he managed to set a standard for awful journeys, against which all future disasters could be measured.

Planning to sail down the Niger River and into the Congo (thought at the time to be joined), Park’s expedition was crippled by dysentery even before it reached the river proper. What followed was an exercise in how not to navigate through nineteenth century Africa. Park’s river boat cruised into various territories where it really wasn’t wanted, often resulting in ferocious attacks. Luckily, the Europeans had enough firepower to save their skins—at least until the boat got snagged on a rock.

Thousands of miles from safety, outgunned and outnumbered, Park’s crew were massacre by arrows, leaving Park no choice but to jump into the rushing river. Unsurprisingly, this resulted in his immediate death by drowning—a fact which sadly escaped his son, who died on an expedition to rescue his father some eleven years later.

This is it: the granddaddy of all nightmare journeys. In 1914, Ernest Shackleton set off for Antarctica. Before long, his ship became trapped in pack ice, which forced the crew to make a perilous journey across the ice to the only solid ground for miles: a desolate lump of rock called Elephant Island. And that’s when shit got real.

With no other options, Shackleton organized a desperate expedition to the island of South Georgia: eight hundred miles north, across storm-lashed seas. Not your ordinary storm-lashed seas, either: Shackleton reported waves bigger than any he’d seen in two decades of sailing. Ice gripped the boat and sea-spray drenched the occupants, and sleep was impossible. It took fourteen days to reach their destination—and the journey wasn’t over yet.

Thanks to the unfavorable ocean currents, the team was forced to land on the wrong side. Since it was impossible to sail round to safety, they were forced to cross the harsh interior on foot, without maps, more or less navigating through guesswork. After fighting their way for three days through thick fog over mountains, they finally reached humanity—at which point Shackleton very nearly slipped and fell to his death. But he didn’t, and here we come to the uplifting bit: everyone survived. In the face of the harshest conditions on Earth, Shackleton managed to keep every single one of his men alive and to bring them home. So remember that next time you’re having the “journey from hell.”

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Turns out the world isn’t all about lions, giraffes, dogs, and cats. Our planet contains many animals that are just now being discovered by scientists. Not only at the bottom of the ocean, either; a six-foot-long tree lizard and a new kind of African antelope have been among the discoveries so far this year. Here are ten animals—both recently discovered and otherwise—which you should know about:

The Angora rabbit is the product of hundreds of years of domestic breeding; generation after generation of humans have bred it for its wool. Its appearance can be described with any number of metaphors: a cat that touched a power line; a cotton ball with a face; and a sheep with a straightener, among them.

There are actually multiple breeds of this rabbit, and they were very popular among French royalty.

The dumbo octopus can be found at really, really deep parts of the ocean. Seven thousand meters deep, to be more precise. It’s not called the dumbo octopus because of its intelligence, either; it’s thus named because it actually uses its ears to swim. 

Despite being one of the only octopus species that swallows its victims whole, we have to admit that these guys are pretty cute. We don’t need to fear for ourselve,s either; he’s only about twenty centimeters in length at his full size. Apart from that, scientists don’t know much else.

The rather hideous blobfish isn’t a particularly fast swimmer. In fact, it doesn’t really have much going for it at all; it hangs about at the bottom of the ocean, waiting for its micro-organism dinner to drift by. It doesn’t even have to swim most of the time, as its body tissue is slightly less dense than water, allowing it to float at the bottom of the ocean.

But how does it avoid being eaten? Well, it turns out that the blobfish doesn’t even taste very good; in fact, it’s inedible for humans. They’re still endangered, however, since overfishing leads to large numbers of them being hauled out of the ocean at a fast rate. We can’t help but feel a little sorry for the blobfish.

The kakapo is a New Zealand parrot, which owes its existence to the lack of native mammalian predators on the islands. Among its numerous qualities, the kakapo smells weird, barks like a dog, and is nocturnal. Its numbers have been declining ever since Europeans brought dogs and cats to New Zealand, and it is now critically endangered.

Let’s list some general characteristics of the olm: it has three toes on its front limbs, and two toes on its back limbs; it is blind; it lives to one hundred; and it can go ten years without food.

That’s one remarkable creature. In addition to all that, olms have great hearing and olfactory systems. Its olfactory system is so well made, in fact, that it can sense quantity of small organic organisms around it. Many fisherman are said to have developed a belief in sea monsters, after catching one of these creatures.

The matamata turtle’s shell and head may look extremely tough—and probably are—but they are actually designed primarily for camouflage. Just imagine if you were looking at this guy from above; he would be very difficult to distinguish from the bottom of a creek. You would also get a fairly nasty surprise if you were to step on one; although they’re rather harmless, the creep-factor of camouflaged matamata turtles surely approaches that of spiders or snakes.

The barreleye in the picture above is one of the only ones ever seen alive. They have been documented since 1939; but most of the time, nets or lines have pierced the fluid bubble that makes this fish so unique.
 So why exactly does this fish have a transparent head? Well, it essentially functions like a cockpit. Its advanced eyesight can be directed backwards and upwards through a swiveling of the eyes, allowing it to see prey and predators alike.

Tarsiers are peculiar creatures, which stand at a diminutive height of five inches. Most of their diet is comprised of insects, but they have been known to jump from tree to tree in search of heedless birds. They’re also nocturnal, and move incredibly fast with the help of their dextrous fingers (and long tail). Females usually have about one little baby tarsier per year. Much like owls, they’re able to swivel their heads 180 degrees.

I couldn’t find much information on the flying squid, because many people mistake it for flying fish. Only within the last twenty years has the flying squid begun to be seriously discussed in academic circles.

It has been recently confirmed by scientists that a kind of flying squid indeed exists, and is known as the red, or neon, flying squid. We don’t know how they jump out of the water, or why. It’s possible that their motives are similar to those of regular flying fish—but they’re very hard to track down, so we can’t be sure just yet.

Darwin’s bark spiders were discovered as recently as 2009. Interestingly, their silk is much stronger than the silk of other spiders that have previously been studied. It is even ten times stronger than kevlar (which is used to make bulletproof vests).

Somehow, these spiders manage to string their webs across rivers. One can only guess at how they manage to do so; it’s possible that they float across in the breeze.

The best way to study them is by boat, because that’s the only way scientists can analyze their behavior up close. They eat bees, dragonflies, and mayflies (up to thirty-two mayflies have been found in one web at the same time).

Kevin Shaw is a not-so-intelligent student who is trying desperately to understand the cause of oppression and hatred all over the world.

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Very few science fiction stories would be complete without the staples of the genre—laser rifles, robots, and above all, flying cars. Intrinsically distinct from aircraft, flying cars are defined by their ability to perform equally well on the ground as in the air. Indeed, the popular image of a flying car looks no different from a normal auto on the ground—it just happens to be able to fly, at least if you push the right button.

Well, the twentieth century certainly wasn’t short on innovation—and it should come as no surprise that we’ve made a few decent attempts at flying cars over the years. Some were genius, others hilariously misguided, but they all add an extra little pinch of flavor to the legacy of our era. Here are ten amazing examples of flying cars from over the years.

The Curtiss AutoPlane is pretty much the first glimpse the world got of a flying car, outside the pages of fiction. In 1917, an aviation engineer named Glenn Curtiss dissected one of his own airplane designs and slapped some of the pieces onto an aluminum Model T. The airplane it was based on was called the Curtiss Model L trainer, a triplane (three rows of wings) with a one-hundred-horsepower engine (which is about as powerful as a decent tractor).

Like a car, the front two tires could be turned with a steering wheel inside the cabin, and it was propelled on the ground and in the air by a propeller attached to the back. Unfortunately, the “limousine of the air” never really flew—by all accounts, the most it could manage was a series of short hops before it was discontinued at the start of WWI.

This flying car is almost a legend, and besides this photo and a brief mention of the vehicle in a newspaper clipping from Andalusia, Alabama, it might as well have not existed at all. According to the story, the photo above is of Jess Dixon; it was supposedly taken sometime around 1940. Although it’s considered a flying car by aviation history buffs, the machine is actually closer to a “roadable helicopter,” due to the two overhead blades spinning in opposite directions. In other words, it’s a gyrocopter that can also roll.

The Flying Auto was powered by a small forty-horsepower engine, and foot pedals controlled the tail vane on the back, allowing Mr. Dixon to turn in mid-air. It was also supposed to be able to reach speeds of up to one hundred miles per hour (160 kph), and was able to fly forwards, backwards, sideways, and hover. Not bad for a flying car that was never heard from again.

The Convair Model 116 Flying Car took flight for the first time in 1946, and looked like nothing more than a small airplane welded onto a car. And essentially, that’s exactly what it was. The wings, tail, and propeller could be detached from the (plastic) car, allowing it to be driven like a regular vehicle on the road. When it needed to go where no roads could take it, the plane attachment was fitted on.

The 116 model only had one prototype, which itself managed a whopping sixty-six flights. A few years later, designer Ted Hall recreated the machine as the Convair Model 118, bumping the engine from a 130-horsepower model to a 190-horsepower beast that gave it more power in the air. Convair planned to build 160,000 for their first production run—but that never panned out, thanks to a tragedy which saw one of the prototypes crash in California. When the pilot took the car into the air, he had assumed that the fuel tank was full. But the ConvAirCar had two fuel gauges—one for the car’s engine and one for the plane’s—and while the car still had plenty of gas, the plane engine ran dry in mid-air. Such are the dangers of multi-tasking.

The Curtiss-Wright VZ-7 resulted from one of the first attempts by the US military to get involved in the flying car industry. Ideally, the VZ-7 was meant to be a type of flying jeep. Like a jeep, it allowed the pilot to maneuver through rough terrain on the ground—but with the not-insignificant bonus that it could also fly. It was developed by Curtiss-Wright, which, interestingly, formed through the merger of the Wright Company (the Wright Brothers) and Curtiss Aeroplane (Glenn Curtiss). Curtiss and the Wright Brothers had been fierce rivals during the early days of aviation.

The VZ-7 was designed as a VTOL craft—Vertical Take-Off and Landing. It flew with the aid of four upright propellers, which were positioned behind the “cockpit,” more or less just an open-air seat. In order to maneuver, the pilot could change the speed of individual propellers, tilting the craft forwards, backwards, or to the side. Technical aspects aside, the entire thing was a death trap, since none of the propellers were covered—and in 1960, the army cancelled the project just two years after its commencement.

With the VZ-7 grounded forever, the army turned to a very different prototype: the Piasecki VZ-8 AirGeep. Bear in mind that helicopters had already become popular by this point; but it turned out that the military was interested in something smaller than helicopters, which could be successfully flown with less training.

The AirGeep went through seven different versions before it was finally deemed “unfit for military use,” but they all kept the basic design: two large vertical propellers in the front and the back of the craft, with a seat in the middle for the pilot and either three or four wheels for ground use. While the first model was flat, later ones curved upwards at the front and back to form a flattened V-shape. The navy even tried to fit one model with floats, with the hope of using it at sea—but that idea was eventually abandoned, along with the rest of the program.

In 1971, the Advanced Vehicle Engineers company in California decided to design a flying car that was reminiscent of the ConvAirCar of the 1940s. They took a Ford Pinto, welded a Cessna Skymaster to the top, and essentially called it a day. The bizarre hybrid monster that resulted was dubbed the Ave Mizar.

The car-half of the craft was fairly similar to any normal Ford Pinto on the street. The Pinto’s engine brought the plane up to speed for take off, at which point the plane’s propeller took over. Upon landing, the car’s brakes were responsible for slowing it down. Unfortunately, in 1973—just a year before the car was scheduled to begin mass production—the right wing of one prototype crumpled in mid-air. The car plummeted to the ground, taking any future it might have had with it.

As we broach the modern era, it’s surprising to see how far we still are from developing a practical flying car. Case in point: the Butterfly Super Sky Cycle, which doesn’t look much different to Jess Dixon’s fabled Flying Auto. Like the 1940s incarnation, the Super Sky Cycle is technically a road-able gyrocopter, with a single folding propeller and a swiveling tail to steer the craft in flight.

The Super Sky Cycle was built in 2009 and is now (as of 2012) fully legal to drive, provided you have a motorcycle license and a pilot’s license. It even folds down to seven feet (2.1m), allowing it to fit into most garages. The gyrocopters are manufactured by Butterfly Aircraft LLC, and sold as kits that you assemble at home. It may not be what most people envision when they think of flying cars; regardless, they’re available to anyone with an spare $40,000.

In 2009, the Terrafugia Transition had its first successful test flight. Since then, it’s gone through a whirlwind of upgrades and remodels, resulting in several completely new designs and a second successful test flight in 2012. In any case, the Transition finally offers something that at least looks futuristic. It has the aerodynamic shape of a plane, with wings that fold in and then swivel into a vertical position while on the ground. It can reach up to seventy miles per hour (110 km/h) on the highway, and 115 miles per hour (185 km/h) in the air.

One problem that the company faced in designing the Transition was that it was too heavy to comply with FAA regulations, due to all the extra parts needed to be safe on the road—such as bumpers and airbags, for instance. In 2010, the FAA decided to let the flying car slide through the regulations, which changes its classification and makes it easier to get the appropriate pilot’s license. Unfortunately, it still costs more than a Lamborghini.

Bringing some much needed style to the world of autogyros, the PAL-V One is a Dutch design, which makes some huge changes to the traditional format. For starters, it only has one engine; the power is automatically switched between the tires and the propeller, depending on whether or not it is making contact with the ground.

What’s especially interesting about the PAL-V craft is that it’s only meant to fly below four thousand feet (1,200 m), which essentially means that you don’t have to file a flight plan to use it—a huge hurdle for flying cars in modern times. This could well lead to GPS-guided “digital corridors,” invisible highways in the sky that would allow airborne traffic to remain organized, like cars upon a regular highway.

The AirMule is more like an airborne ambulance than a car—but the idea is still the same. It’s being developed by the Israeli company Urban Aeronautics, and its main purpose would be assisting search and rescue missions. While it could feasibly reach the same speeds as a regular helicopter, it uses less than half the airspace, so it can also squeeze into areas that would be impossible for a helicopter.

If you’ve been reading, you can probably tell that it looks a lot like the AirGeep designs the military tried to hatch in the 1970s. But it has one crucial difference: it’s flown remotely. That’s right, the AirMule is unmanned, which either means it’s going to be instrumental in saving lives, or—based on the way UAVs have been used in the past—taking them. Even so, it won’t necessarily be on autopilot—Urban Aero plans to use a remote pilot with flight controls and a bank of monitors to control the AirMule in real time—a little like the way we might control planes in a complex video game.

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Temperature is one of the fundamental measurements in physics, and it’s absolutely crucial to all kinds of life. But at ultra-high and ultra-low temperatures, things can get very weird—as you’ll see. Here’s a list of ten interesting facts about this important factor in our world:

The hottest man-made temperature ever recorded is 7.2 trillion degrees fahrenheit, or about four billion degrees celsius. Since we hope to minimize the use of superlatives in this list, let’s just say: that’s pretty hot. 

In fact, it’s about 250,000 times hotter than the temperature at the core of the sun. The extreme recording was made at the Brookhaven Natural Laboratory in New York, in their 2.4-mile-long Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider. Scientists had been smashing gold ions together, in an attempt to recreate big-bang like conditions by creating a quark-gluon plasma. In this plasma state, the particles that make up the nucleus of atoms—protons and neutrons—break apart, and create a “soup” of their constituent quarks.

We’ve already made mention of the Bose-Einstein condensate. It’s a phenomenon that occurs to matter at a fraction of a degree above absolute zero. Though previously seen only at these super-cold temperatures, scientists were able to recreate the effect at room temperature, by using light instead of matter.

They managed to do this because of the relative density of the matter and the light; one of the scientists involved, Jan Klars, explained that “Our photon gas has a billion times higher density, and we can achieve the condensation already at room temperature.” They forced light to travel through two mirrors with particles of dye between them. As the light bounced back and forth, it lost a little bit of energy each time it passed through some dye. And when it reached room temperature, the light effectively began to behave like an ultra-cold gas made of traditional matter. 

This result takes on a whole new relevance when we learn that it could lead to new types of lasers—which, after all, should be the ultimate goal of all physics research.

Some of you may be familiar already with the following comparisons—but take a moment to think about what they really mean, in relation to the normal temperatures of human experience. 

The sun—to borrow an understatement from an earlier entry—is pretty hot. It’s at its hottest in the centre, which reaches around twenty-seven million Fahrenheit (fifteen million Kelvin). In comparison, it’s actually less than ten thousand degrees Fahrenheit at its surface (about 5,700 K).

The centre of the Earth stands at about the same temperature as the surface of the sun. Apart from the sun’s centre, the hottest part of our solar system is the core of Jupiter, which, remarkably, is five times hotter than the Sun’s surface.

And the coldest-known place? That’s actually on our own moon, where temperatures in the shadows of some craters are only thirty Kelvin above absolute zero. The temperatures, measured by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, are even colder than those on Pluto.

The SI unit of temperature is the Kelvin. The temperatures used to define this are absolute zero—the bottom limit of temperature—and what known as the triple point of water. A triple point is defined as the temperature by which a substance’s traditional three states of matter exist in an equilibrium. At this point, the most infinitesimally small alteration to temperature or pressure can be used to alter its state one way or another.

To define one Kelvin, you take the difference in temperature between the triple point of water and absolute zero and divide it by 273.16. There are limited practical applications of the triple point of water, but its proximity to the melting point is key to causing the watery cushion needed to allow people to ice-skate.

The rules of nature that govern temperature are known as the Laws of Thermodynamics. Originally there was only a first, a second, and a third law—but then scientists came up with a fourth law. The newest law stated that “if two systems are each in thermal equilibrium with a third system, they are also in thermal equilibrium with each other.”

That basically means that if two objects don’t have a net exchange of heat with a third object, they’d not do so with each other—which is how we define them as being at the same temperature.

Scientists soon realized that this law is fundamental to the whole field of thermodynamics; they also realized that it should have been the first rule they formulated. Because “first law” was already taken, they gave it due respect by calling it the “zeroth law.”. It was around 1935 when the law was coined—meaning that scientists didn’t get around to formally defining what temperature meant until a couple of hundred years into the development of the field.

Some people have established their homes in the most unlikely of places. The coldest permanently inhabited places in the world are the towns of Oymyakon and Verkhoyansk in Siberia, which we’ve mentioned before. During winter, temperatures there average below minus fifty degrees Fahrenheit.

The coldest city in the world is also in Siberia. Yakutsk, with a population of 270,000, is not much warmer in the winter than its smaller cousins—often dropping below minus forty degrees Fahrenheit. But at the height of summer, temperatures can swing all the way up to the other end of the scale, to almost ninety degrees Fahrenheit.

The highest recorded average temperature belongs to the abandoned town of Dallol, in Ethiopia, which recorded an average temperature of ninety-six degrees in the 1960s. The record for hottest city is Bangkok, with average air temperatures breaking above ninety-three degrees between March and May.

But the record for hottest workplace likely goes to Mponeng gold mine, in South Africa. At two miles below the surface, rock temperatures can reach 150 degrees Fahrenheit. Ice must be pumped into the mine—and the walls insulated with concrete—to allow people to work there without perishing.

Making things cold has produced a lot of interesting and important results in science. Humans make the coldest known things in the universe, many orders of magnitude colder than anything that occurs naturally. Refrigeration allows temperatures of a few milliKelvin to be accomplished. The coldest temperature ever achieved is slightly below one hundred picoKelvins, or 0.0000000001 K. It’s necessary to use a type of magnetic cooling to achieve temperatures this low. Similar temperatures can be achieved on a small scale using lasers.

At these temperatures, matter behaves differently to the way it does normally (see Bose-Einstein condensate above as an example)—a fact which is key to revealing the many odd quirks of quantum mechanics.

If you were to take a thermometer out into deep space and leave it there, far from any source of radiation, it would read 2.73 Kelvin—a little lower than minus 454 degrees Fahrenheit. That happens to be the coldest naturally-occurring temperature in the universe.

Space is kept above absolute zero by background radiation left over from the Big Bang. Although space is nevertheless very cold, it’s interesting to note that one of the biggest problems encountered by astronauts is actually heat. Bare metal on orbiting objects can reach five hundred degrees Fahrenheit (260 C) due to the unimpeded heat of the sun, and needs to be covered in special coatings to lower the touch temperature to “only” 250 Fahrenheit (120 C).

Outer space itself, however, is constantly getting cooler. Theory has long predicted this, and recent measurements have confirmed that the universe is cooling by around one degree every three billion years.

It’ll continue heading towards absolute zero, though it will never quite reach it (an impossible feat). The background heat of the universe makes little difference to us; the effect of celestial bodies in our solar system and galaxy dwarf it. So it’s not going to counteract global warming, in case anyone has ideas.

Heat is a mechanical property of matter. Put simply: the hotter a thing is, the more energy its particles have as they move around. The atoms in a red-hot solid are vibrating more quickly than the atoms in a cold piece of material. Likewise, those in a liquid or gas whizz about with a speed which depends on how hot they are. That’s pretty basic stuff, which you probably learned in high school—but for hundreds of years until the late nineteenth century, scientists believed that heat itself was actually a substance. This is known as the caloric theory.

The gas of “heat”, scientists believed, would evaporate from a hot substance, thereby cooling it. It would flow from a hot object into a cooler one. Many of the predictions arising from caloric theory actually hold true, and a lot of scientific progress was possible in spite of this fundamental misunderstanding. Caloric theory even had proponents up until the late nineteenth century, at which point the mechanical theory of heat was established beyond dispute.

This list has made many mentions of absolute zero. We’ve even mentioned it on Listverse before. But what about the other end of the scale? How hot can things get? 

The short answer is that we don’t know for certain; and it’s a question at the forefront of modern fundamental physics.

The hottest temperature commonly mentioned in science is known as the Planck Temperature. It’s the hottest temperature believed to have occurred in the universe, a mere fraction of a moment after the Big Bang. It’s about 10^32 Kelvin. To give you some perspective, that’s about ten billion billion billion times hotter than the temperature mentioned earlier, which was itself 250,000 times hotter than the core of the sun. And you thought your bath water was hot. The Planck Temperature is the highest temperature possible, according to the Standard Model. Any hotter, and conventional laws of physics begin to break down.

It’s possible that temperature might continue to increase even after this point; and we simply don’t know what would happen if it did so. Anything hotter than that is basically too hot to exist in our current model of reality.

Alan is an aspiring writer trying to kick-start his career with an awesome beard and an addiction to coffee. You can hear his bad jokes by reading them aloud to yourself from Twitter where he is @SkepticalNumber or you can email him at mailskepticalnumber@gmail.com.

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Consumerism and the practice of flaunting one’s status through clothes, jewelry, and other things has existed since the dawn of civilization. Yet, the endless cycle of working to buy has never been more rampant than it is now. How did the United States, a nation founded on Puritan, non-materialistic tenants become filled with the biggest shoppers on the planet and end up occupying 29% of the World’s consumer market? As it turns out, Americans were carefully and systematically manipulated into becoming insatiable shoppers.

The man who is largely responsible for introducing advertising as we know it was none other than Sigmund Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays. Bernays’, nicknamed the “father of public relations,” studied his uncle’s writings on psychology and group mentality and learned humans react to feelings not facts. With this knowledge, he saw an opportunity to capitalize on people’s subconscious desires by selling goods with the promise of delivering power, status, sex appeal, glamour, health, and other things with emotional connections. His uncle also taught him that humans often act irrationally when emotions are involved and can be led to believe objects are a symbol of their character. Bernays used these theories to manipulate people into buying products they didn’t necessarily need or want.

One of Bernay’s first widely known marketing campaigns was for the American Tobacco Company where he was tasked with attracting more female smokers. Of course, he had one major hurdle to overcome—it was 1928 and there was a longstanding taboo about women smoking in public. So, Bernays’ consulted a psychoanalyst to help him get at the root of the taboo and was told that cigarettes symbolized the penis. Bernays shrewdly decided to center the Lucky Strike campaign on female power and independence, by advertising cigarettes as “torches of freedom,” equating smoking to female equality. His advertising efforts caused a national stir and almost immediately made it acceptable for women to smoke.

Bernays dominated the marketing arena throughout much of the 20th century and is the reason why those in the US consider bacon and eggs the quintessential breakfast, why Ivory soap is preferred by doctors, and, according to some, is the reason why people believe water fluoridation is safe and beneficial. He had so many successful campaigns that “Life Magazine” named him one of the most influential Americans of the 20th century.

From the start, it seems the idea of a consumerist, malleable society was linked with government ambition. Some of Bernays’ earliest work was as a press agent for the American Committee on Public Information during World War I. In that position, he promoted President Woodrow Wilson as a liberator, spread the tenants of democracy, and was so accomplished he joined the President at the Paris Peace Accords in 1919.

After seeing the effectiveness of propaganda, those in authority weren’t too keen on putting the art of manipulation back in the bag, so to speak. So, even after the war, both the government and businesses continued to use propaganda as a way to control citizens, and occasionally the interests of the government and corporations aligned.

For example, manufacturers were worried the high production and sales they’d grown accustomed to would dwindle once the war was over. Naturally, they didn’t want to see diminishing profits, so they used Bernay’s advertising strategies to convince people to buy more by linking goods to unconscious desires. At the same time, many presidents touted the ‘buy, buy, buy,’ mantra in the hopes it would boost the economy. President Herbert Hoover said to Bernays, “You have taken over the job of creating desires and have transformed people into constantly moving happiness machines, machines which have become the key to economic progress.”

Once consumerism settled in as the basis for the American economy, those in power gradually quit seeing Americans as citizens, but regarded them, above all else, as consumers.

Indeed, it seems today’s leaders treat us like potential buyers, and instead of giving us well-formed, fact-based arguments, they offer sales pitch-esque communications and package their platforms as if they’re destined for the marketplace. In 2002, when George W. Bush’s chief of staff Andrew Card was asked why the administration waited months to explain the reasoning for invading Iraq, Card replied “You don’t roll out a new product in August.”

Overtime, the habit of referring to “citizens” as “consumers” became increasingly common, and now the terms are used interchangeably. This evolution, however, doesn’t sit well with everyone. According to a recent study conducted by Northwestern University, many folks take offense at being called a consumer, “as if their sole purpose and reason for existence on this planet is to consume—to eat, drink, use, watch, and buy stuff.” Interestingly, the study also found that being labeled a consumer automatically makes people behave more selfishly.

In an interview shown in the BBC documentary “The Century of Self” Bernays said the word “propaganda” developed a negative connotation after World War I and II, since it was associated with something Soviet Communists and Nazis used to perpetuate their command. To distinguish his profession Bernays quit calling his industry propaganda and renamed it “public relations.” Still, public relations was little more than a euphemism, as it continued to rely on the fundamentals of propaganda: half-truths, persuasion, and attempting to change public attitudes. Although advertisers weren’t coercing people into supporting a particular political party, they were using their messages to influence how citizens felt about clothes, cars, beauty, and everything in between.

Nowadays most of us know we can’t take any advertisement at face value. In other words, we understand celebrities are paid to carry a certain brand of bag, we see the Coke can placed blatantly front and center in our favorite TV shows, and we know cars are supposed to represent male sexuality. Yet, even knowing these ideals were completely manufactured, it’s nearly impossible to keep them from seeping into our own beliefs — that’s the strength of the propaganda.

Apparently, Bernays didn’t realize his form of marketing so closely resembled fascist strategies and was shocked to learn Joseph Goebbels, Hitlers Reich Minister of Propaganda, kept copies of Bernay’s writings and used them to engineer the rise of Nazism.

Early advertisers understood the only way to keep consumers buying was to ensure they were never wholly satisfied. Although most companies didn’t make shoddy products (although planned obsolescence is currently an issue), they did use ads to convince viewers they were somehow inferior if they didn’t have the newest, most expensive gizmo on the market.

Wall Street banker Paul Mazer made it clear when he said, “We must shift America from a needs- to a desires-culture. People must be trained to desire, to want new things, even before the old have been entirely consumed. We must shape a new mentality in America; man’s desires must overshadow his needs.”

It was no secret customer dissatisfaction was the goal for many manufacturers. Charles Kettering, director of General Motors, wrote an article for a 1929 magazine which he candidly titled “Keep the Consumer Dissatisfied.” In it, he tried to persuade readers that continual consumption was the only way to sustain the economy. He said, “You must accept this reasonable dissatisfaction with what you have and buy the new thing, or accept hard times.”

While it may seem like it’s our economic duty to continually spend (and subsequently work harder), in truth we could all work a fraction of the time and still have enough goods and services to meet everyone’s needs. Secretary of labor James J. Davis discovered this fact in 1927 and discussed it in an interview with “Nations Business,” pointing out that America’s textile mills “could produce all the cloth needed in six months’ operation each year” and only 14% of the country’s shoe factories were needed to provide every citizen with footwear for a year. Later in the interview it was suggested that all the world’s needs could be met by only three work days a week.

Facts aside, intuitively it seems like we should be working significantly less than our ancestors. After all, we have machines, assembly lines, computers, the internet, and a wealth of technology meant to make our lives simpler, yet, according to an ABC News article, we are working longer hours than at any time since statistics have been kept, and Americans are working more than anyone else in the industrialized world.

So, what gives? Why isn’t technology making our lives easier and why aren’t we all jumping on board the three day work week that was shown viable in 1927? Unfortunately, it’s all done for the sake of business profits. Working employees everyday and getting greater numbers of products to market is more profitable for business owners than just meeting everyone’s needs—that is, of course, if they can convince people to buy the products. But, thanks to Bernays and his followers, corporations know how to turn citizens into consumers, trigger their unconscious cravings, and make them purchase unnecessary products.

In his later life, Sigmund Freud became increasingly withdrawn from the world as he felt humans were innately evil and civilization was a largely ineffective construct meant to restrain our animalistic sides. Bernays and others latched onto this notion and felt it was their obligation to direct the masses towards what was best for society.

Bernays’ own daughter said her father felt the public’s judgment was not to be relied upon since people could very easily vote for the wrong man or want the wrong thing, so they had to “be guided from above” by a group of enlightened despots. As expected, Bernays deemed himself one of the enlightened and used his advertising messages to influence the people towards his will.

Walter Lippmann, a 1920s political commentator, had similar notions and believed people would operate under a mob mentality if not adequately governed by the intellectually elite. He argued that the average person had too many limitations (selfishness, preconceptions, limited social contact, prejudices, etc.) to make socially responsible decisions. Such philosophies gave those in power the ability to justify their manipulative tactics.

For the elites to maintain dominance over the average man and keep him on the perpetual work/ buy machine, they had to link consumption with an emotion nearly all Americans share: patriotism. And nothing is a greater symbol of Americanism than democracy.

Those who judged themselves enlightened, like Bernays, saw nothing wrong with manipulating the public into thinking consumption was a democratic necessity. In fact, he may have believed it himself, as he said, “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in a democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country… we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons… who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.”

The idea of consumption being fundamental to consumerism became so ingrained that today when someone speaks of anti-consumerism or anti-capitalism they are immediately pegged as a socialist or communist. Yet, others would argue a capitalistic, consumption-based society is by definition undemocratic because it perpetuates low wages and creates class divisions which prevent all citizens from having an equal say in the decisions affecting their lives. In other words, those with the most money have the most power and influence.

There were a few who spoke out about how unbridled consumerism led by corporations could result in excessive waste, depletion of resources, and a submissive working class.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt particularly stood out in his distrust of a corporate-run economy. In his 1936 “Acceptance Speech for the Democratic Nomination for President” he said, “It was natural and perhaps human that the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over government itself. They created a new despotism and wrapped it in the robes of legal sanction. In its service new mercenaries sought to regiment the people, their labor, and their property. And as a result the average man once more confronts the problem that faced the Minute Man.”

Fearing Roosevelt’s sentiments could undermine their influence, the industrial elite from corporations like General Motors, DuPont, and General Foods came together and formed the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM). Together they started spreading the message that Roosevelt was running the country into debt and was responsible for the slow economy. In a 1936 internal memo, NAM was tasked with “re-selling all of the individual Joe Doakes on the advantages and benefits he enjoys under a competitive economy.” NAM packaged its message with the idea that sacrificing a free economy would lead to the handing over of all freedoms to the government, including free speech, religion, and press.

In the 1920s, manufacturers realized they could expand their profits even further by targeting a largely untapped market—the poor and lower-middle classes. Obviously these folks didn’t have much disposable income, so businesses came up with a sort of workaround: the installment plan. These plans allowed consumers to buy expensive goods by agreeing to pay for the product in increments over a set period of time. Often this setup resulted in the buyer paying far more than the product was actually worth, yet it made it possible for many more people to purchase costly items such as cars, appliances, furniture, washing machines, and other luxury goods.

Creditors, debtors, and installment plans were nothing new for the time, but being in debt always carried a certain stigma. Savvy advertisers knew they had to remove the shame of debt if they had any hope of the masses taking advantage of the installment programs. And so they did. “A small cash payment,” “convenient monthly payments,” “a reasonable down payment,” and other persuasive sayings, which are all too familiar today, became mainstream. In some publications the number of advertisements mentioning installment plans more than tripled through the 1920s. Also, the overwhelming success of installment buying in the auto industry (thanks in large part to GMACs marketing efforts) made it socially acceptable to use installment plans to buy other types of goods.

Unfortunately, the Great Depression that followed the roaring 1920s was more painful for those who participated in installment plans, since their lack of income also meant the repossession of many of their belongings.

Unfortunately, it seems neither businesses nor citizens have learned from the mistakes of the 1920s and ’30s, since we’re still persuaded to rack up debt and live outside our means.

Content and copy writer by day and list writer by night, S.Grant enjoys exploring the bizarre, unusual, and topics that hide in plain sight. Contact S.Grant here.

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Premiering in 1969, Sesame Street has been one of the cornerstones of childhood for over forty years. Utilizing the Muppets of Jim Henson, songs, animation, and above all a deep empathy for children, the show has become a cultural phenomenon around the world, earning hundreds of millions in revenue and even spawning its own theme park.

According to author Malcolm Gladwell, “Sesame Street was built around a single, breakthrough insight: that if you can hold the attention of children, you can educate them”. Although a show expressly for the little ones (there are none of the ‘adult’ jokes floated in shows like “Spongebob Squarepants”), “Sesame Street” has continually been at the forefront of major societal issues that programs for mature audiences have ignored, including death, racial tolerance, and the differences between us. The show seeks not only to educate and entertain, but to help children understand the world around them. Below are ten fascinating facts which contribute to Sesame Street’s legend.

In recent years, as many around the world have begun pushing in earnest for gay marriage to become legal, a grassroots Internet campaign has surfaced urging longtime Sesame Street characters Bert and Ernie to finally acknowledge their homosexuality and tie the knot. Although the show has been renowned for preaching a message of tolerance, they carefully backpedaled away from these claims, stating: “Bert and Ernie are best friends. They were created to teach preschoolers that people can be good friends with those who are very different from themselves. Even though they are identified as male characters and possess many human traits and characteristics (as most Sesame Street Muppets™ do), they remain puppets, and do not have a sexual orientation.”

Although blasting loud music to psychologically torture people is not an entirely new concept, its use has really come to the forefront since the opening of the US’s Guantanamo Bay detention camp in Cuba. The purpose of the camp was to detain and interrogate subjects captured in the “War on Terror” begun since the events of 9/11. A great deal of controversy has arisen as pictures and stories have leaked to the public, and President Obama has made promises to close the camp that have yet to materialize. Amongst far more sinister and humiliating tactics, the soldiers at Guantanamo have been known to inundate Al-Qaeda operatives with blaring, repetitive songs including hard rock music and the Sesame Street theme that are known to break down mental resistance. Amnesty International has condemned this ploy, while the Pentagon has called it a mere “disincentive”.

One of the original human characters on the show, Mr. Hooper ran a general store that served as a focal point and served such fare as birdseed milkshakes. When actor Will Lee died of a heart attack in 1982, there was some debate by the show’s producers how to handle the situation. Some leaned toward having the character retire, but eventually it was decided to deal with the issue. A child psychologist was consulted and the situation was handled gently, but head-on, with Big Bird unable to understand that his friend wasn’t coming back. When Big Bird expresses concern that it “won’t be the same” without Mr. Hooper, another of the adults tells him “You’re right, Big Bird. It’ll never be the same without him. But you know something? We can all be very happy that we had a chance to be with him and to know him and to love him a lot, when he was here.”

The episode aired on Thanksgiving Day, 1983, to ensure that the children who saw it would be around family that could help them with their feelings when they saw it. In retrospect, Mr. Hooper’s passing has been honored by many as one of the most important moments in television history.

The main focus of Sesame Street is a 3 apartment brownstone building (Bert and Ernie live in the basement). The show itself is filmed in Astoria, Queens, but the actual location of Sesame Street has been under debate for years. It is intended to be a neighborhood in Manhattan, though which exactly is up for debate, even amongst staffers of the show. Some suggest the Upper West Side, and others claim that it is modeled after the Alphabet City area of the Lower East Side. Some detail oriented investigators have tried to pin down the location based on clues from the show itself, including zip codes printed on envelopes and background shots of characters walking around.

Despite the terror they invoke, vampires are really terribly vulnerable creatures, with a laundry list of weaknesses: sunlight, garlic, and religious symbols amongst others, depending on which franchise you are considering. But folklore speaks of one of the more rarely considered chinks in the vampire’s armor; arithmomania— an aspect of obsessive-compulsive disorder that in an uncontrollable urge to quantify and count things. Should one find himself confronting by a ravenous, undead ghoul, he could merely throw a handful of rice on the ground. The vampire would be helpless but to fall on his knees and count every single grain. This vulnerability has been rolled into the popular Sesame Street character “Count von Count”, the world’s least intimidating vampire, who teaches children basic concepts of arithmetic.

Elmo is one of the most popular (and obnoxious) denizens of Sesame Street, a bright red puppet known for his falsetto voice and habit of talking about himself in the third person. Elmo has been around for years, but he was relegated to the background for some time, until he was picked up in 1984 by young puppeteer Kevin Clash. Clash breathed life into Elmo, and over the next decade, his star rose exponentially. Elmo hit is stride in the mid to late 90s, with the release of the “Tickle Me Elmo” toy and the film “Elmo in Grouchland”. And then in 2012, 22 year old Sheldon Stephens emerged, claiming that he had Clash had an inappropriate sexual relations when Stephens was underage. Clash acknowledged the two had shared a relationship, but that it had been between two consenting adults. Stephens later recanted his statement, but other men came forward, claiming that Clash had also slept with them when they were teenagers. Clash quickly resigned. When he left the show, he made the statement: “Personal matters have diverted attention away from the important work ‘Sesame Street’ is doing and I cannot allow it to go on any longer. I am deeply sorry to be leaving and am looking forward to resolving these personal matters privately.” Since leaving, additional allegations have been levied against Clash. He has recently come back into the spotlight when he was nominated for four Emmy Awards, despite the scandal.

Aloysius Snuffleupagus is a woolly mammoth Muppet who spent fourteen years as Big Bird’s “imaginary” friend. Whenever adults would appear, Snuffy would vanish by way of coincidence, and the grownups would disbelieve Big Bird that he ever existed. Snuffy was revealed to the entire cast in 1985. According to Martin P. Robison, who plays the character, the producers decided that due to stories of abuse of children, they did not want to portray a situation between adults and a child character who wasn’t believed despite being honest. They were afraid they were giving kids the message that their parents might not listen to them in case they had a “unbelievable” story to tell, such as being sexually abused by a relative.

AIDS devastates sub-Saharan Africa like no place in the world; hundreds of thousands of children are born with the disease each year. Most of them die before the age of five. A staggering percentage of the children in the area have been orphaned by the virus. First appearing on 2002’s “Takalani Sesame” in South Africa, Five year old Kami is an upbeat yellow “monster” Muppet like Grover. She is portrayed with a perpetual case of the sniffles as a nod to her condition, which has also claimed the lives of her parents. Kami contracted HIV from a blood transfusion. Along with educating the children of South Africa and Nigeria about the disease, Kami helps them to deal with the societal stigma attached to HIV/AIDS and the inherent sense of loss and fear. Kami has since been appointed a representative of UNICEF projects throughout the world.

Africa is not the only place to host its own version of “Sesame Street.” There are varieties throughout the world, in Europe, Asia, Australia, and the Middle East. The earliest international adaptation was Brazil’s Vila Sésamo. Many other versions exist, each tailored to the specific language, environment, and social circumstances of the area in which it aired. While many of the characters carried over, others were added or replaced. In the Canadian version, the main character was a giant polar bear named Basil, who learned French from his bilingual friend. In the version from the Philippines, the Big Bird character is a giant pink turtle named Pong Pagong; in Israel it is a hedgehog named Kippi Kippod, and in Kuwait it is a camel named No’Man. According to Joan Ganz Cooney, one of the creators of the Sesame Workshop, she was stunned at the international interest in the show: “To be frank, I was really surprised, because we thought we were creating the quintessential American show. We thought the Muppets were quintessentially American, and it turns out they’re the most international characters ever created.”

In 1990, Jim Henson, the creator of Sesame Street’s Muppets, died suddenly of a bacterial pneumonia. In the wake of his passing, two memorial services (one in New York and one in London) were staged wherein both characters from Henson’s “The Muppet Show” and “Sesame Street performed”, including a heartrending version of “Being Green” by Big Bird. Henson’s only request was that no one wear black. Although the services were open to the public, they were not televised, and only certain recorded segments exist. Along with Muppet performances and eulogies from friends and collaborators, excerpts from Henson’s correspondence to his children were read, including this passage: “Please watch out for each other and love and forgive everybody. It’s a good life, enjoy it.”

Mike Devlin is an aspiring novelist. As Muppets go, he prefers Kermit.

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According to the great tragedian, Euripides, “The first requisite to happiness is that a man be born in a famous city.” Although his statement may not be far from the truth, the pursuit of happiness is not relevant for this list. The focus of this list is to collect ten small places which had or still have a great impact in the world. From Athens, Beijing and Rome to New York, Paris and London, big cities have always been the magnet for culture, arts, wealth, political influence and human population. But what about the small cities and towns with legacies and influences that far exceed the size of their city walls? The criteria for the selection were simple: ten places with a great impact and influence around the world, with a population of less than 125,000 citizens. The aim of this list is twofold; to stimulate the curiosity of readers on one hand and to promote thought as to what other small places with a great impact could or should have been included.

The Town of Bethel was brought to the world’s attention in 1969 when nearly 500,000 people (almost 100 times more than the population of the town) gathered at Max Yasgur’s Farm for “Three Days of Peace and Music.” The Woodstock Festival was a four-day (not three as originally planned) rock music festival, which started on the 15th and ended on the 18th of August 1969 and made Bethel one of the most famous places in the world that summer. The turnout of spectators was expected to be sixty thousand. However, the area was attended by approximately half a million people, most of who belonged to the hippie movement. The end of the festival created the largest traffic jam in United States’ history and paralyzed many main streets of NY state. The Woodstock Festival remains today, almost 45 years later, the most powerful and influential music festival ever, even though its anti-war and peaceful messages were never really delivered to the “recipients”.

Maastricht is a municipality and the capital of the province of Limburg. The city’s name is derived from the Latin name “Trajectum Ad Mosam”, which refers to the bridge that was built by the Romans under the reign of Caesar Augustus. The city would not gain global attention until the signing of “The Treaty of Maastricht” in the early 1990s, which is officially known as “The Treaty of the European Union,” and it is considered to be the most important treaty in the European continent’s modern history. Historically, there is no similar treaty with such an extensive economic, political, social and cultural content, which involves so many countries and participating states. The Treaty of Maastricht was signed on 7 February 1992, and placed the city in the world map of fame.

Probably the vast majority of the readers has never heard of this city and might wonder why it is in the list in the first place. This is a very rare case that the actual city doesn’t get the recognition it deserves because it hides in the bigger picture. Now if you had read about Transylvania or The Carpathian Mountains, what would be the first thing coming to mind? Vlad III, Prince of Wallachia maybe? Not likely. Vlad the Impaler? Maybe so. Dracula? Sure thing.

What most people ignore though is that the man who inspired Bram Stoker to write one of the best selling books in the history of horror fiction and influenced the film industry to make hundreds of movies related to his name and legacy (with billions of dollars profit), is that he was born and raised in the small city of Sighișoara in Romania. Transylvania, which many people often mistake as the city of Dracula’s birthplace, is the region in which the city of Sighișoara belongs. Today, Dracula’s building of birthplace is used as a museum-themed restaurant and the specialty of the menu is, of course, rare blue steak which swims in blood.

During the first century B.C., Julius Caesar gave the land which took from The Massalian Greeks and the local tribes, to the victorious Roman Legions. It eventually became a kind of second capital of the Roman Empire, known as “The Little Rome of Gaul.” As befitting a major Roman center, it had a number of impressive public buildings. Most of these remain part of the city’s life even today and many monuments have been designated as UNESCO World Heritage Sites.

Many centuries later and more specifically during the 19th century, one of the greatest painters ever, Van Gogh, would connect his name and legacy with the city’s, since he lived and worked in and around Arles. When, in 1888, Van Gogh cut off his ear, he was taken to the Hotel-Dieu, a 16th-century hospital with a galleried garden which he painted. Also some of the great painter’s paintings such as “Starry Night over the Rhone” portray various locations of Arles and are known as “Paintings of Arles”.

Yorktown is a small and peaceful census-designated place in York County, Virginia, which is not known for its large tourism or intense lifestyle. On its lands however, took place the most decisive and tough battle (also known as Siege of Yorktown) of the American War of Independence, which actually ended the war and lead to the recognition of the United States as an independent nation from the United Kingdom. The consequences of this battle were the collapse of the British Government, even though turf wars followed before the new British Government would finally accept defeat and officially acknowledge the independence of the United States. Unfortunately, the only attraction that Yorktown has to offer to its few visitors nowadays, is the impressive “Victory Monument,” which was installed back in 1884.

The city of Dachau became famous around the world and connected its name with one of the darkest and most ghastly war crimes in modern history. Dachau’s concentration camp was the first of the Nazi concentration camps established in Germany. It was located on the grounds of an abandoned munitions factory near the medieval town of Dachau, from which it took its name. In this camp, the Nazis initially tortured and brutalized its own German people who were against the Nazi regime, while later it was used for captives of all ages and nationalities, mainly Jews and various other ethnic groups and minorities, from the countries Nazis conquered during WWII. The Dachau concentration camp functioned until the collapse of Nazi Germany in 1945 and unfortunately thousands of brutal crimes against humanity were committed there during the war.

This small area in Greece has incredible history and a global influence that exists even now. The tradition of lighting an Olympic Flame comes from the Ancient Olympics which took place in this small city exclusively. During the Ancient Olympic Games, a sacred flame was lit from the sun’s rays at Olympia, and stayed lit until the Games were completed. It was first introduced into our Modern Olympics at the 1928 Amsterdam Games. Since then, the flame has come to symbolize the light of spirit, knowledge, and life. The torch is traditionally lit in this small but historic city named Olympia, which every two years (including Winter Olympics) becomes the center of the world, since it is estimated that over a half billion of people around the globe watch the specific event and the torch relay that follows.

Pisa is a small, but very historical and important city of Italy. The University of Pisa is one of the oldest in all Europe and opened in 1343. The biggest attraction of the city, however, and the basic reason this city is so famous around the world (and attracts millions of tourists every year) is the Leaning Tower of Pisa, which was built entirely of marble during the period from 1172 to 1350. It consists of 6 floors and because it was built on loose ground, inclined towards the south (an incline that is gradually increasing each year). It is 56 meters tall and many scientists and top architects from all over the planet, visit Pisa just to study and admire the specific architectural “miracle.” The Cathedral Square (Piazza del Duomo) is also another top touristic and historical building of the city, which is a UNESCO World Heritage site as well.

Waterloo is a very small city which does not attract many tourists, yet it’s one of the most famous cities in history, and its military impact is unquestionable. The Battle of Waterloo is one of the most famous battles in military history, and it took place in modern day Belgium on June 18, 1815. It marked the final defeat of one of the greatest generals of all time, French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, who conquered a big part of Europe in the early years of the 19th century. The Battle of Waterloo, in which Napoleon’s forces were defeated by the British and Prussians, signaled the end of his reign and the end of France’s domination in Europe. Today, nearly two centuries later, Waterloo is still used as a term around the western world to define or characterize disastrous or decisive defeat, especially in fields such as politics, sports and of course, military. Waterloo was also the title of the second studio album by the legendary Swedish pop group ABBA. The song was victorious in the Eurovision Song Contest of 1974 and was recently voted as the greatest song in the history of the contest.

If the boxing term “pound for pound” existed to measure the historical influence and impact of a city, it’s quite possible that the city of Corinth would earn that title. Corinth is located in one of the most powerful ports of the Ancient world and was the first Greek city-state that colonized Italy (Syracuse) and gave birth to another city (Corfu). By 730 B.C. Corinth had emerged as a highly advanced Greek city-state (probably the most powerful at the time), way before traditional and well-known ancient Greek cities developed, such as Athens, Sparta and Ancient Macedonia.

Corinth was the homeland to one of the Seven Sages of Greece, Periander, while the greatest cynical philosopher of all time, Diogenes of Sinope, spent most of his life there, where he met Alexander the Great and the two had one of the most historic dialogues in history.

The two most important athletic events of the Ancient times (after the Olympic Games), the Isthmian and Nemean Games, took place in Corinth. But the Corinthian legacy doesn’t stop here. The contributions of the city in architecture were immense as well. The Corinthian order was the latest of the three principal classical orders of ancient Greek architecture. It took its name from the city-state that it originated, but it was followed and adored mostly from the Ancient Romans originally and most European architects and artists during the Renaissance.

Nonetheless, Corinth is probably more known through religion. Over a billion and a half Christians around the world are aware of The First and Second Epistle (also known as Corinthians,) which Paul the Apostle, who lived and preached in Corinth, wrote to “the church of God which is at Corinth” as the bible mentions.

During the modern years, Corinth became famous once again worldwide, for another unique achievement, in construction this time. The Corinth Canal, which was first attempted by the Ancient Greeks and Romans, was finally constructed. On July 25, 1893, the Canal of Isthmus was first used and was, at the time, one of the most impressive artificial constructions in the world. It attracts to this day thousands of tourists from all over the world.

Theodoros II is a collector of experiences and a law graduate. He loves History, Sci-Fi culture, European politics, and exploring the worlds of hidden knowledge. His ideal trip in an alternative world would be to the lost city of Atlantis. His biggest passions include Writing, Photography and Music. You can view his photostream here.

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Insects represent more than eighty percent of all species. Currently, there are around 900 thousand different kinds of insects known to science, with estimates of at least a million still waiting to be discovered. Many of us find them disgusting or scary, while others are fascinated by their huge variety, as they have colonized most terrestrial environments in the most surprising and fascinating ways. This list reveals ten insect superlatives ranging from the smallest to the most dangerous to the most daring of these creatures:

The giant weta native to the Little Barrier Island of New Zealand (Deinacrida heteracantha) proudly bears the name of the heaviest and largest adult insect in the world, the record weight for one being of 71 grammes or 2.5 oz and more than 8.5 centimeters or 3.4 inches in length. A relative of the grasshopper and of the common house cricket, the giant weta is nowadays a vulnerable species.

Fairyflies are tiny members of the wasp family and the smallest family of insects known to science. Dicopomorpha echmepterygis is a fairyfly native to Costa Rica, the males of the species being no more than 0.14 mm in length, about the same size—if not smaller—than the single-celled paramecium we normally find in lake waters. This species feeds on the eggs of other insects.

The harvester ant (Pogonomyrmex Maricopa) is the world’s most venomous insect—however, it does not pose any threat to humans at all. Its venom is roughly 25 times stronger than that of the honey bee, but it is delivered in small doses, therefore rendering the harvester ant quite inoffensive. Most of you probably expected the Japanese giant hornet, the African killer bee or the bullet and of South America as contenders to this title; surprisingly enough, the winner turned out to be in your very back yard, as members of these species are generally found throughout the US.

The Globe Skimmer (Pantala flavescens) has recently been found to be the insect with the longest migration of all insects, its journey dwarfing that of the famous monarch butterfly. Using the monsoon, these dragonflies travel from India to East and Southern Africa and back again, which adds up to between 14,000 and 18,000 kilometers. Furthermore, the long migration of these insects renders them as an accessible food source for migratory birds, which means that if anything happens to this species, many species of birds would find it very difficult, if not impossible, to perform their annual migrations.

This species of dragonfly (Austrophlebia costalis) has been clocked to a speed of 35 mph, which makes it the fastest insect in the world in terms of flight speed. Although there are previous claims that it would top 60 mph, most experts disagree on their veracity. Nevertheless, there are many who consider that the title of fastest insect remains disputed among dragonflies, hawk moths, and horseflies, with various unverified measurements circulating about each one of these species.

Locusta migratoria, or the migratory locust, is arguably the most feared species of insect known by humankind. Although the mosquito is responsible for the most human deaths, the locust is the one insect that has made men cry in horror throughout history. Although locust swarms are rare nowadays, locust plagues still occur in some parts of the world, as was the case in Madagascar, last year, or the 2004 locust outbreak that affected several countries in West and North Africa that resulted in losses of around $2.5 billion in terms of agricultural devastation.

I suppose few people will be surprised by the title of this entry. I mean, everyone knows the allegations that cockroaches are capable of survival nuclear fallout and so on… Therefore, in hopes of raising at least a few eyebrows, I would like to mention a case in which a German cockroach nymph (Blattaria germanica) managed to live inside another very hostile environment: a human colon. The nymph probably arrived there after having been inadvertently swallowed by the 52-year woman while she was eating, and somehow managed to survive the digestive enzymes of her stomach.

This rather large member of the stick insect family lives on the Lord Howe Island found between Australia and New Zealand. It is also an example of what biologists refer to as the Lazarus effect, namely when a species is thought to be extinct, but it is found again afterwards. The current population of wild Dryococelus australis is thought to consist out of less than fifty individuals (24 at the moment of their rediscovery); with so small a population, however, the species remains critically endangered. Nevertheless, there are efforts to breed the Lord Howe Island stick insect, the Melbourne Zoo of Australia managing to breed over nine thousand individuals within their specially designated breeding program.

A species of cicada, the water boatman (Micronecta scholtzi) is the loudest animal on Earth for its size. Although the entire cicada family is famous for their loudness (with some species managing to sing in almost 120db), the water boatman, at only two millimeters in length manages to make a noise 99.2 db loud, is similar to standing in the front row of a loud orchestra or listening to a jackhammer from fifty feet away.

Argentine ants (Linepithema humile) have been recently found to be the insects with the largest colony in the entire world, whose domination may rival that of humans! Scientists have discovered that the members of the species living across America, Europe and Japan actually belong to the same colonies, as they will refuse to fight one another. Furthermore, a series of experiments hinted that these super colonies might actually be one worldwide colony of ants, as their members did not exhibit hostile behavior towards one another and recognized their familiar pheromone scent, despite being separated by thousands of miles. Furthermore, this unusual phenomenon seems to have been created by humans, who inadvertently introduced them to all continents from South America.

Victor Pintilie is a student of the natural world who likes to discover the intricacies of nature; his ambition is to become a reputable freelance writer about nature-related subjects.

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It’s not easy being a politician. The pressure is high, the rewards low and there simply aren’t enough hours in the day for screwing the electorate. Yeah, that’s right: screwing. For all they claim to be representing us, the truth is our politicians are almost-exclusively looking out for number one. How else do you explain stuff like:

Lobbying is bribery for rich people. Only instead of being super-illegal it’s encouraged, and instead of letting them bend the law it allows them to simply change it. Take gun control. In the months after Sandy Hook, it looked like there would finally be some movement on this issue. Public support for new laws was over ninety percent, both sides of the house seemed interested and it looked like a vote would sail through. Then the day came and the vote came back ‘no’. So what happened? The pro-gun lobby put forward a convincing argument and senators rationally changed their minds, right?

Wrong. In the immediate aftermath of the vote, the Guardian revealed that all but 3 ‘no’ senators had received thousands of dollars in pro-gun money. In other words: they’d been bribed. And, thanks to lobbying laws, that bribe was legal.

Now, lobbying is rarely this overt, but it’s happening all the time—usually in the form of Washington’s ‘revolving door’. Put simply: a senator will align himself with a lobby group, vote their way and—the moment he’s kicked out of office—get a lucrative job at that same group. It’s about as openly corrupt as you can get in a democracy and guess what? There are approximately zero plans to change it.

If there’s one group of people politicians of all colors are happy to piss on, it’s welfare recipients. Whether they’re talking about ‘Welfare Queens’ existing on the government teat, Obamacare bankrupting us all or food stamps becoming unaffordable; politicians sure do like to put the boot into those taking government money. So it should come as no surprise that the biggest ‘Welfare Queens’ of all reside on Capitol Hill.

In 2011, it was revealed that 23 members of congress were claiming farm subsidies. Of those 23, five were sponsored by the Tea Party: the very same Tea Party that opposes all Federal hand-outs. Between them, the Washington Welfare Queens had raked in over $18 million of your money, often while demonizing others for doing exactly the same thing. No matter where you stand on social security, you gotta admit that’s pretty low.

Remember how I said lobbying was the most-corrupt you could get in a Western democracy? Turns out I lied. Welcome to Britain, where the UK parliament could give Silvio Berlusconi lessons in corruption.

Four years ago, an investigation by the Telegraph revealed that British MPs were using their expense accounts to pay for anything they felt like. And while you or I might be tempted to charge the odd drink or meal to whatever company we work for, these guys were charging for freaking houses. Not only were the charges highly-immoral, they were frequently ludicrous: one politician had the taxpayer pay £1,600 for a duck house and £30,000 for 28 tons of manure; while another claimed £2,200 to have his moat cleaned. As in his actual moat: as in something you only have if you already live in an actual castle. One MP even submitted rental costs for a non-existent property. By the time the dust settled, it became clear the government had been screwing the taxpayer for years, so the whole lot of them were locked in the tower of London and summarily beheaded. At least they would have been if there was any justice in this world.

Nepotism is where useless people get money or power because their mommy or daddy was kinda important. While some families, like that of Kim Jong-Un, take a direct approach—our Western version is more to do with handing out lucrative jobs and contracts to people on the basis of nothing more than sharing a handful of genes.

Last year, the New York Times ran this story reporting on the findings of Washington watchdog Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics. After trawling through a heck-load of records, the group had discovered 82 lawmakers diverting public and party funds to their relatives, often in the form of lucrative salaries for doing not very much. This included 20 members who used money raised for their own campaigns to campaign on behalf of a son, daughter or spouse. Worst of all, as the NYT editorial noted, the revelations came at a time of eight percent unemployment and worsening poverty: a time when hundreds of thousands of young people were getting thrown on the scrapheap. In other words, plenty of intelligent graduates are being frozen out these jobs in favor of people of no discernible talent—effectively creating a ‘political class’ with no connection to real life whatsoever.

Let’s flip back to the UK for this one. Over there, lying has gotten so routine that two separate stories of made-up government statistics broke in one week. First, an important minister was caught out justifying welfare-robbery by making up facts. Then another high-ranking politician was caught quoting figures from an opinion poll commissioned by a motel-chain, which is about as scientific as it sounds. And that’s just in one week: go back even further and you have a guy who was caught speeding on camera and blamed his wife—despite her being at a public conference at the time.

But these are just a handful of examples. Time and again, we encounter politicians breaking election promises, breaking contracts and just flat-out lying whenever they’re caught being racist. These are the same people trying to make a living off their ‘honest image’: yet experience often shows them to be anything but.

It’s a cliché to say someone thinks he or she is ‘above the law’, but our politicians apparently didn’t get the memo. Whether it’s driving while under the influence, sleeping with prostitutes, embezzlement, getting drunk and starting fights or simply being Nixon, our politicians break the law like it won’t apply to them. And they’re usually right: penniless people who smoke crack get the best part of a decade in prison; rich guys apparently get off with a wrist-slapping six months.

But none of that even begins to touch on the issue of government law-breaking. Put simply, sometimes the entire government makes a law then completely ignores it—as happened recently in England. After a court ruled the government had violated its own minimum wage laws by forcing hundreds of people into near-unpaid labour; the sociopaths in charge voted to bring in another law making them immune from liability. So, to recap: government makes law, government breaks law, government changes law to cover its own ass. There’s a word these sort of people need to hear more often, and that word is “guillotine”.

But our politicians aren’t completely stupid: often they simply vote for what would benefit them to begin with, rather than what would benefit the country. Take the expiration of the Bush-era tax cuts and the collective hissy fit Washington threw at the thought of a few rich guys paying a little extra each month. But did you ever stop to think who might benefit from those cuts—aside from millionaires?

That’s right: politicians. According to the New York Times, two thirds of senators were millionaires in 2008, while the poorest senator is still earning around 3.5 times the average American wage. Then there’s the massive $19,000 pay rise they awarded themselves in 2009—in other words, at the exact same time the economy was in free-fall and we were being told the country was broke. Not to be outdone by their American counterparts, British politicians later went one further by voting themselves a £31,000 salary increase—about $50,000. That’s a 30 percent increase; seemingly-timed to coincide with devastating UK cuts to public services.

Earlier this year, the daughter of a Mexican official was refused a table at a Mexico City restaurant, so responded by getting her Dad’s inspectors to close the place down. While that case is pretty overt, we here in the West are just as adept at abusing high office—so much so that Business Insider regularly publishes its list of ‘most corrupt members of congress’, and it sure makes for some ugly reading. Their 2012 edition includes a congresswoman who forced her staff to spy on an opponent; a congressman who used campaign funds to finance his daughter’s graduation party; another who offered foreign donors Green Cards in exchange for money; another who allegedly bribed a Federal witness; one who ran a giant Ponzi scheme; several who accepted inappropriate gifts and several more who violated Federal laws. And this list is updated every year with new infractions, new abuses and new redefinitions of the word ‘corruption’. In other words, we could give a Banana-Republic lessons in abuse of power, and no-one’s willing to do a thing about it.

Most of the items on this list deal with some form of hypocrisy—but sometimes, it gets really overt. It may be the moral hypocrisy of talking up God and family values while cheating on your three wives, or evangelizing about raising taxes when you don’t pay any yourself, or running your whole campaign on honesty when you’re really as corrupt as the rest of them.

But what really sticks in the craw is this constant mantra that we’re all suffering equally from this economic Armageddon. We’re not: most of us have seen our taxes rise, our incomes shrink and our jobs get a heck of a lot more precarious. Our politicians, meanwhile, have been living it up: installing hundred thousand dollar beds on five hour flights, ordering expensive designer cushions to perch on and enjoying $60 breakfasts at taxpayer expense. Out of touch is one thing, but these guys seem to be living on a different planet.

Here’s some quick facts: ninety one percent of Americans back moderate gun control measures. Eighty seven percent want the tackling of Federal corruption to become a priority. Fifty percent back legal marijuana. Fifty three percent favor gay marriage. At the time of writing, literally none of those things are being dealt with. Now, I’m not trying to say that majority opinion is always right, or that the government should be ruled by opinion polls. However, when the government consistently supports unpopular measures in the face of hard, scientific evidence, you have to start wondering who they’re working for in the first place. ‘Cause, right now, it sure as hell isn’t us.

The post 10 Ways Our Politicians Are Screwing Us appeared first on Listverse.

Mathematicians like to classify and organize numbers in all kinds of ways. Natural numbers are used for counting and ordering; nominal numbers are used for naming (like a driver’s license number); integers are numbers that can be expressed without a fraction or decimal; prime numbers can only divided by 1 and by themselves; and so on. But there is no limit to how we can understand and use numbers; accordingly, there is a branch of pure mathematics, primarily based upon the study of integers, called “number theory.” Though we now understand that number theory has boundless applications, uses, and purposes, it can appear to be frivolous to the point of pointlessness – especially the subset known as “recreational number theory.” Number theorist Leonard Dickson once said, after all, “Thank God that number theory is unsullied by any application.”

But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t provide a measure of nerdy fun for those so inclined. Read on to learn what makes a number “interesting,” “weird,” “happy,” “narcissistic,” “perfect,” and more!

Ah, amicable numbers. They love each other so much. How much? Well, let’s take a classic pair—284 and 220—and see just how friendly they are. Let’s take all the proper divisors of 220 (that is to say, all its divisors that leave no remainder, including the number 1, and excluding the number itself) and all them up:

1 + 2 + 4 + 5 + 10 + 11 + 20 + 22 + 44 + 55 + 110 = 284

Now, let’s take 284 and do the same thing:

1 + 2 + 4 +71 + 142 = 220.

Voila: a pair of amicable numbers. Other pairs include (1184, 1210), (2620, 2924), and (5020, 5564). This type of number pair was discovered and studied by the Pythagoreans, and has been the subject of much research through the centuries – Fermat, Descartes, Iranian Muhammad Baqir Yazdi, and Iraqi Th?bit ibn Qurra are among the many mathematicians who have delved into the world of amicable numbers. Topics of further study include attempts to discover if there is an infinite amount of pairs, to discern patterns, and to better understand why and how this happens.

Because mathematicians would never be satisfied with mere amicable numbers, “betrothed numbers” are pairs where the sum of the proper divisors of each number is equal to the other number +1.

“Emirp” is the word “prime” spelled backwards, and it refers to a prime number that becomes a new prime number when you reverse its digits. Emirps do not include palindromic primes (like 151 or 787), nor 1-digit primes like 7. The first few emirps are 13, 17, 31, 37, 71, 73, 79, 97, 107, 113, 149, and 157 – reverse them and you’ve got a new prime number on your hands.

Mostly, saying “emirp” over and over is kind of a blast. Give it a whirl!

There is an old paradox in the world of mathematics that is known as the “interesting number paradox.” Simply put, if you keep counting natural numbers, eventually you’ll encounter one that isn’t interesting; where it gets paradoxical is that by virtue of being the smallest uninteresting number, that number has now become interesting.

Of course, this is all subjective, as it relies on a vague definition of the word “interesting.” Very generally speaking, a number is considered interesting if it has some type of mathematical quality that sets it apart; 19 is interesting because it’s prime, 999 is interesting because it’s a palindrome (and the UK version of 911); 24 is interesting because (among other reasons) it’s the largest number divisible by all numbers less than its square root. Mathematicians

Achilles was a powerful Trojan War hero who was extremely powerful but had one flaw—his achilles heel. Like him, Achilles numbers are powerful but not perfect.

So, let’s begin with a powerful number. A number is considered powerful if all of its prime factors remain factors once they are squared. 25 is a powerful number because its one prime factor, 5, remains a factor once its been squared (25, which goes into 25 once). Now let’s move onto perfect powers, number that can be expressed as an integer power of another integer; 8 is a perfect power, as it’s 2 cubed.

So now, back to the original premise – Achilles numbers are powerful, but they are not perfect powers. 72 is the first Achilles number, as it is powerful, but it is not a perfect prime. Others include 108, 200, 288, 392, 432, 500, and 648.

What are weird numbers? To understand them, we must first begin with “abundant” numbers. Abundant numbers, also known as “excessive,” are bigger than the sum of their proper divisors. 12, for instance, is the first (smallest) abundant number—the sum of its proper divisors, 1+2+3+4+6, is 16. 12, therefore, has an “abundance” of 4, the amount by which the sum of its divisors exceeds the number. There are many even abundant numbers, but we don’t get to an odd one until the number 945.

Some abundant numbers are “semiperfect” or “pseudoperfect,” meaning that they are equal to all or just some of their proper divisors. 12 is an imperfect abundant number because some of its divisors can be added together to form 12.

At last, we arrive at weird numbers. A number is weird if it is abundant but NOT semiperfect; in other words, the sum of its divisors is larger than the number itself, but no subset of divisor sums equal the number. Weird numbers are uncommon – the first few are 70, 836, 4,030, and 5,830.

While weird numbers are not equal to the sum of any of their divisors, untouchable numbers take it a step further. For a number to be untouchable, it must not be equal to the sum of the proper divisors of ANY number. A few untouchables are 2, 5, 52, and 88; in fact, 5 is thought to be the only odd untouchable number in existence (though it hasn’t been formally proven). There are an infinite number of untouchable numbers, meaning there is no such thing as the largest one.

So having discussed the weird and the untouchable, it’s time to check in with the grandaddy of all proper divisor-related numbers: perfect numbers. A perfect number is one that is exactly equal to the sum of its proper divisors (again, excluding itself). The first perfect number is 6, as its divisors (1, 2, 3) all up to 6. Six is followed by 28, 496, and 8,128. Early Greek mathematicians knew only of these first 4 perfect numbers; Nichomatus discovered 8,128 by the year A.D. 100. Three more were discovered, the first circa 1456 (33,550,336) by an unknown mathematician, and in 1588 (8,589,869,056 and 137,438,691,328) by Italian mathematician Pietro Cataldi in 1588.

All known perfect numbers are even; it is not yet known whether an odd prime exists or is even possible. English mathematician James Joseph Sylvester wrote “…a prolonged meditation on the subject has satisfied me that the existence of any one such [odd perfect number]—its escape, so to say, from the complex web of conditions which hem it in on all sides—would be little short of a miracle.”

Some numbers are weird; others are happy. If you’d like to find out if a given number is happy, you’ll need to perform the following set of operations. Let’s take the number 44:

First, square each digit, then add them together:

4^2 + 4^2 = 16 + 16 = 32

Then, we’ll do it again with our new number:

3^2 + 2^2 = 9 + 4 = 13

And again:

1^2 + 3^2 = 1 + 9 = 10

And finally:

1^2 + 0^2 = 1 + 0 = 1

Voila! It’s a happy number. Anytime you take a number, perform this “procedure,” and eventually arrive at the number 1, you have yourself a happy number. If your number never reaches 1, then sadly, it’s unhappy. Interestingly, happy number are extremely common; there are 11 of them between 1 and 50, for example.

As a final note, the greatest happy number with no recurring digits is 986,543,210. That is a happy number indeed.

Narcissistic numbers, also known as Armstrong numbers or “pluperfect digital invariants,” are numbers that—listen closely—are equal to the sum of each of its digits when those digits are raised to the power of the AMOUNT of digits in the number.

Ok. What? Let’s take an example of the four existing narcissistic cubes:

153 = 1^3 + 5^3 + 3^3 370 = 3^3 + 7^3 + 0^3 371 = 3^3 + 7^3 + 1^3 407 = 4^3 + 0^3 + 7^3

In these cases, each digit is cubed because there are three digits in the number. Then, those cubed numbers are added together to produce a sum equal to the original number. There are no 1-digit narcissistic numbers, nor 12 or 13-digit ones; the two 39-digit ones are:

115132219018763992565095597973971522400 and 115132219018763992565095597973971522401.

English mathematician G. H. Hardy recognized the frivolity of such numbers by proclaiming in his book “The Mathematician’s Apology” that “These are odd facts, very suitable for puzzle columns and likely to amuse amateurs, but there is nothing in them which appeals to the mathematician.”

A repdigit is a natural number with one repeating digit; the name, in fact, comes from the term “repeated digit.” The most famous redigit is the so-called “Beast Number” 666, a common symbol of the antichrist or of Satan. A repunit, then, is a repdigit that only uses the number 1; repunits pop up frequently in binary code and are related to that most famous of primes, Mersenne Primes. It has been conjectured that there are an infinite number of repunit primes, so if you’d like to try to prove it, please do so at your leisure.

The post 10 Fun Examples of Recreational Number Theory appeared first on Listverse.

Space exploration is a grand adventure. Its mystery has always captivated us and the inevitable discoveries to come will add to the many cosmological insights we already have. But let this list serve as a warning for any weary inter-solar travelers. The universe can be a very frightening place. I hope no one should ever find themselves stuck in one of these ten worlds.

Our planet maintains a high ratio of oxygen to carbon. Carbon actually makes up only about 0.1 percent of earth’s bulk (hence the scarcity of carbon based materials like fossil fuels and diamonds). Near the center of our galaxy however, where carbon is more plentiful than oxygen, planet formation is very different. It is here that you find what cosmologists call carbon planets. The morning sky on a carbon world would be anything but crystal clear and blue. Picture a yellow haze with black clouds of soot. As you descend farther down into the atmosphere you find seas made of compounds like crude oil and tar. The surface of the planet bubbles with foul smelling methane pits and black ooze. The weather forecast doesn’t look good either: it’s raining gasoline and asphalt (…no smoking). But there would be an upside to this “oil-well hell.” You may have guessed it. Where carbon is plentiful you also find high quantities of diamond.

On Neptune, one can find constant jet stream winds that whip around the planet at terrifying speeds. Neptune’s jet-stream winds push frozen clouds of natural gas past the north edge of the planet’s Great Dark Spot, an Earth-size hurricane, at a staggering 1,500 miles per hour. That is more than double the speed needed to break the sound barrier. Such wind forces are clearly beyond what a human could withstand. A person who happened to find himself on Neptune would be most likely be ripped apart and lost forever in these violent and perpetual wind currents. It remains a mystery as to how it gets the energy to drive the fastest planetary winds seen in the solar system, despite it being so far from the sun, at times farther from the sun than Pluto, and having relatively weak internal heat.

Nick-named Bellerophon, in honor of the Greek hero who tamed the winged horse Pegasus, this gas giant is over 150 times as massive as earth and made mostly of hydrogen and helium. The problem is that Bellerophon roasts in the light of its star at over 1800 degrees F (1000 degrees C). Bellerophon’s star is over 100 times closer to it than the Sun is to Earth. For one thing, this heat creates an extremely windy atmosphere. As the hot air rises, cool air rushes down to replace it creating 1000 km per hour winds. The heat also ensures that no water vapor exists. However, that does not mean there is no rain. This leads us to Bellerophon’s main quirk. Such intense heat enables the iron composing the planet to be vaporized. As the vapor rises it forms iron vapor clouds, similar in concept to water vapor clouds here on Earth. The difference though, is that these clouds will then proceed to rain a relentless fury of molten iron down upon the planet (…don’t forget your umbrella).

The densest and most massive exoplanet to date is a world known as COROT-exo-3b. It is about the size of Jupiter, but 20 times that planet’s mass. This makes COROT-exo-3b about twice as dense as lead. The degree of pressure put upon a human walking the surface of such a planet would be insurmountable. With a mass 20 times that of Jupiter, a human would weigh almost 50 times what they weigh on Earth. That means that a 180 pound man on Earth would weigh 9000 pounds! That amount of stress would crush a human beings skeletal system almost instantly. It would be the equivalent of an elephant sitting on your chest.

On Mars a dust storm can develop in a matter of hours and envelope the entire planet within a few days. They are the largest and most violent dust storms in our solar system. The Martian dust vortices tower over their earthly counterparts reaching the height of Mount Everest with winds in excess of 300 kilometers per hour. After developing, it can take months for a dust storm on Mars to completely expend itself. One theory as to why dust storms can grow so big on Mars starts with airborne dust particles absorbing sunlight, warming the Martian atmosphere in their vicinity. Warm pockets of air flow toward colder regions, generating winds. Strong winds lift more dust off the ground, which in turn heats the atmosphere, raising more wind and kicking up more dust. Surprisingly, many of the dust storms on the planet originate from one impact basin. Hellas Basin is the deepest impact crater in the Solar System. The temperatures at the bottom of the crater can be 10 degrees warmer than on the surface and the crater is deeply filled with dust. The difference in temperature fuels wind action that picks up the dust, then the storm emerges from the basin.

Simply put, this planet is the hottest planet ever discovered. It measures in at about 4,000 degrees F (2,200 degrees C) and orbits its star closer than any other known world. It goes without saying that anything known to man, including man himself, would instantly incinerate in such an atmosphere. To put it in perspective, the planets’ surface is about half the temperature of the surface of our sun and twice as hot as lava. It also orbits its star at a blistering pace. It completes a full orbit once every Earth day at a distance of only about 2 million miles (3.4 million km).

Jupiter’s atmosphere brews storms twice as wide as the Earth itself. These goliaths generate 400 mph winds and titanic lightning bolts 100 times brighter than ones on Earth. Lurking underneath this frightening and dark atmosphere is a 25,000 mile deep ocean of liquid metallic hydrogen. Here on Earth, hydrogen is a colorless, transparent gas, but in the core of Jupiter, hydrogen transforms into something never seen on our planet. In Jupiter’s outer layers, hydrogen is a gas just like on Earth. But as you go deeper, the atmospheric pressure sky-rockets. Eventually the pressure becomes so great that it actually squeezes the electrons out of the hydrogen atoms. Under such extreme conditions, the hydrogen transforms into a liquid metal, conducting electricity as well as heat. Also, like a mirror, it reflects light. So if you were immersed in it, and caught under one of those ferocious lightning bolts, you wouldn’t be able to see anything.

(Note: Pluto is technically no longer classified as a planet). Do not let the picture fool you; this is not a winter wonderland. Pluto is an extremely cold world where frozen nitrogen, carbon monoxide, and methane blanket the surface like snow during most of its 248 year plutonian year. These ices have been transformed from white to a pinkish-brown due to interactions with gamma rays from deep space and the distant Sun. On a clear day the sun provides about as much heat and light as a full moon does back on earth. With Pluto’s surface temperature of -378 to -396 F (-228 to -238 C) your body would freeze solid instantly.

The temperatures on the star-facing side of this planet are so hot that they can vaporize rock. Scientists who modeled the atmosphere of CoRoT-7b determined that the planet likely has no volatile gases (carbon dioxide, water vapor, nitrogen), and is instead likely made up of what could be called vaporized rock. The atmosphere of CoRoT-7b could have weather systems that unlike the watery weather on Earth cause pebbles to condense out of the air and rain rocks onto the molten lava surface of the planet. And if the planet doesn’t already sound inhospitable to life, it also could be a volcanic nightmare. Evidence suggests that if CoRoT-7b’s orbit is not perfectly circular, gravitational tugs from one of its two sister planets could push and pull the surface, creating friction that heats the interior of the planet. This heating could cause extensive volcanism across the planet’s surface, with even more explosive activity than Jupiter’s moon Io, which has over 400 volcanoes.

Little was known about Venus (where the dense atmosphere is opaque to light at visible wavelengths) until the Soviets launched the Venera program back in the space race days. When the first probe touched down and began transmitting data back to Earth, the Soviets effectively achieved the only successful landing on the surface of Venus to this very day. The terrain was so incredibly volatile, the longest any of the probes lasted was 127 minutes before they were simultaneously crushed and melted. So, what would it be like to live on Venus, the most dangerous planet in our solar system? Well, almost instantly, you would be suffocated by the toxic air and crushed by the tremendous gravity of the planet. With pressures up to 100 times more than Earth’s, its 40 miles thick atmosphere is so dense that walking on Venus’ surface would be like walking under 3,000 feet of water here on Earth. Simultaneously, you would be incinerated by the extreme 475 degree C temperatures, and eventually dissolved by the high concentration of sulfuric acid, which actually rains down on the surface of Venus.

Ross is a law student and long time Listverse reader.

The post 10 Terrifying Planets You Don’t Want To Visit appeared first on Listverse.

Radio contests, should, in theory, be quite simple: offer a cool prize for a cool challenge to draw in listeners. Sometimes, however, radio stations think cool means “horribly tasteless” or “exceedingly dangerous”, and then things like this happen:

Some people will go to great lengths to see their favorite band or artist live in concert, so radio stations have long hosted contests to win tickets to such events. Some have more trouble drawing the line than others, as KOMP 92.3-FM of Las Vegas demonstrated in 1999.

DJ Greg McFarlane was trying to think up a radio contest for listeners to win Mötley Crüe tickets, and after he used his idea of making them re-enact the Pamela Anderson-Tommy Lee sex tape live on-air (albeit clothed) he was stumped. But, in a flash of inspiration, he decided he would make listeners drink a few ounces of his own urine (presumably after consulting a group of five year old children).

Three contestants actually came into the studio prepared to face the challenge, but got cold feet when they realized McFarlane was in no way kidding. Then, in McFarlane’s own words, “The fourth guy walks in, pushes everyone out of the way and throws it down like it was Pepsi.” So congrats to that guy, for winning tickets to the show, and condolences to McFarlane, who was immediately fired.

Weddings can be expensive. So BRMB radio in Birmingham, England, generously offered to cover the costs of matrimony for one lucky couple. There was a tiny catch, however—they would only do it if the couple agreed to walk down the aisle nude.

The winners of 65% of a listener vote, Kelly Clinton and Lee Wiggets, had been together for eleven years but had never married due to financial concerns. So they jumped on BRMB’s offer to cover all their expenses, and got married on March 15, 2011, wearing almost nothing but their birthday suits. The groom used a top hat to cover his crotch (which is admittedly a pretty classy way to cover one’s crotch), and the bride was able to wear a veil and some barely-there underwear.

An inability to conceive is undoubtedly one of the biggest problems a couple can face, and is sure to come packaged with its share of frustration and anxiety. Luckily for citizens of Ottawa, Ontario, local radio station Hot 89.9 was there to capitalize on that frustration and anxiety.

In 2011, Hot 89.9 started a contest called “Win a Baby” in which one couple would be chosen by listener vote to receive in-vitro fertility (IVF) treatments, a value of around $35 000. The contest naturally came under fire for commoditizing babies, as well as taking a financial and emotional problem for many couples and turning it into a popularity contest. To its credit, in spite of being pretty tasteless, it did promote political discussion about the lack of government aided IVF treatments in Ontario.

Sadly, most of us will never get an opportunity to attend our own funerals. But listeners of the German radio station Radio Galaxy in Aschaffenburg, north Bavaria, got the next best thing when they were presented with a chance to win their funeral.

No, the radio station wasn’t going to kill anyone (that’ll be later on the list). Instead, listeners sent in their own epitaphs in the hopes of winning 3000 Euros (around $4195 at the time of the contest) to be spent on death insurance, which would cover funeral costs. For those who don’t know, an epitaph is simply the writing on one’s tombstone. For example, the epitaph on the tombstone of Mel Blanc, the voice of Bugs Bunny, is “That’s all folks”. Winston Churchill’s is “I am ready to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter.”

Not everyone has such a sense of humor about death, however, and the radio station came under some criticism including a lawsuit from the Association of German Undertakers.

When people have trouble getting a date, there’s only one place to turn: radio contests. One of these people, a man named Travis Harvey, did just that, and wound up the subject of Waukegan radio station WXLC’s “Win a Date with Travis” contest. It was a fairly straightforward contest, and a woman going by the name Jane Doe ended up winning herself a date with the man the station hailed as a “kind” and “great guy”.

Except he wasn’t, though, because he raped her. Originally slated to take her out to dinner, he told her he was too tired and instead invited her to his home for dinner. After one drink she felt extremely drowsy, and that’s when Harvey raped her.

Can this one really be blamed on the radio station? Doe thinks so, as she began a lawsuit against parent company NextMedia for $50,000 worth of damages. She insists they were negligent by not doing a background check on Harvey, who had been twice convicted of violating a domestic order of protection that had previously been taken out by another woman. She also sued Harvey, who pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting her.

90.3 Amp Radio in Calgary, Alberta, in response to the body issues that many women have as a result of the glorified and pervasive images of airbrushed female models and celebrities, held a contest in which those same women could compete for a breast augmentation operation (hey, I didn’t say it was a helpful response).

The contest was called “The Breast Summer Ever” (because nothing goes together like sexual degradation and puns), and all contestants had to do was submit pictures of themselves and reasons for wanting to get the surgery. The reaction to the contest was mixed; some listeners were disgusted, though hundreds of people entered the contest.

In the end the winner was a transgender known only as Avery, who received 76% of the 30 000 online votes. Avery said in an interview that the breast implants will help her to not “have to face so much bigotry on a daily basis,” so the contest at least ended up helping someone in need.

German radio station RTL 89.0 had a MINI Cooper to give away, but they couldn’t be bothered to actually come up with a contest to do so. So they pretty much shrugged their shoulders and said they’d give it away to whoever would perform the craziest stunt.

Enter 39 year old Andreas Muller. Muller, who really, really liked MINI Coopers, needed a way to top the list. So he decided to offer up some valuable skin real estate and get a tattoo of the word MINI, in the one place where showing it off in public would likely get him arrested (his penis, for those who skipped the title and/or are really slow). Yes, this man really did get the word MINI permanently inked onto his Cooper, and he did it live on air with the female host looking on. And yes, he got the car.

If you’ve ever thought of a wife as something to be won in a contest, then you’re not alone! Because apparently there are a lot of radio stations who share your point of view.

100.3 The Bear in Edmonton, Alberta is one of many examples of radio stations that have offered the chance to win a foreign bride, and all of them have been highly criticized for demeaning women. The Bear’s “Win a Wife” contest sent the winner to Russia to be taken care of by a matchmaking service called Volga Girl.

Another radio station called Q104, in Halifax, Nova Scotia, created a contest called “The Male is in the Czech” where the winner would be flown to Prague, in the Czech Republic, to participate in a “dating-service” and the opportunity to pick a bride. The contest met with protestors who showed their disapproval by picketing the station. Also, because they were going for completely tactless, the last day of the contest was on International Woman’s Day.

Oh, and New Zealand radio station The Rock FM (we’ll talk more about them later) got in on the fun, too, sponsoring their own contest in which the winner would be flown to the Ukraine to pick a bride from an agency. After complaints, they changed the name of the contest from “Win a Wife” to, no kidding, the “Win A Trip To Beautiful Ukraine For 12 Nights And Meet Eastern European Hot Lady Who Maybe One Day You Marry” contest.

It’s starting to become clear that radio stations will turn anything into a contest, as long as they can make a pun out it. “Hold Your Wee for a Wii”, sponsored by KDND 107.9 of Sacramento, California, is no exception. And yes, it’s exactly what it sounds like.

This was back in 2007, when people were still pretty excited about the Nintendo Wii. As it happened, KDND 107.9 had themselves one and were willing to part with it to the listener who could go the longest without urinating. Every fifteen minutes, contestants were given eight ounces of water. The last one to break and go to the bathroom would win.

As it turns out, people don’t just urinate for fun, and holding it in can lead to some big consequences. For one of the competitors, a woman named Jennifer Strange, the consequence was death. Strange drank around seven and a half litres of water before relieving herself, and died hours later of a condition called acute water intoxication. This tragic turn of events resulted in 10 employees of the radio station being fired, as well as a lawsuit that resulted in a 16.5 million dollar settlement for Strange’s family.

New Zealand radio station The Rock FM needed a contest for Valentine’s Day 2012, but didn’t want to deal with annoying restrictions like basic human decency. So DJs Jono Pryor and Robert Taylor came up with a brilliant idea for a prize: they would take care of all the costs of one lucky couple’s divorce. Provided the breakup occur live on-air, of course.

The Rock ended up choosing a winner, whose name was Sam. Sam (a woman) was scheduled to call her husband Andy on February 14, 2012, and tell him that she was leaving him. Instead of a depressing and heartbreaking phone call, what happened next was actually pretty awesome.

When the DJs called who they thought was Sam’s husband Andy, a woman answered. Confused, they asked if they were speaking with Andy, and the woman answered, “No, it’s not Andy and it’s never gonna be Andy and it wasn’t Andy to start with, you fucking idiots.” It turns out it was Sam’s lesbian partner Amber, who with Sam proceeded to tell Pryor and Taylor exactly how terrible they are and how disgusting their contest was.

The hosts clearly had no idea how to react, and pretty much just let themselves be berated. At one point one of them said “I feel like I’m in an episode of Scooby Doo, and we’re finally figuring out how you caught us out, and we woulda gotten away with it if it weren’t for you dastardly lesbians.” So, lesson learned? By the way, it’s really the kind of sabotage that has to be heard to appreciate fully.

Michael Alba is on twitter @MichaelPaulAlba. Follow him for your chance to win a baby!

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Sometimes construction projects can take a while to get done. And hey, that’s understandable—we’re talking about huge, complicated jobs that require a ton of skill and foresight to pull off properly. Starting them up, on the other hand, only takes a bit of money and some workers. What follows are ten famous structures that had the money, but not the skill and foresight—they’re “works in progress,” or, if you’d prefer, “colossal screw-ups.”

You’ve probably heard of Westminster Abbey. It’s one of the most famous and beautiful churches in the world—let alone England—and is by all accounts an architectural masterpiece. Surprisingly enough, however, it is not the mother church of Catholicism in the country—that honor belongs to Westminster Cathedral, which is literally right down the street from the Abbey. Another honor belonging to Westminster Cathedral? It’s never actually been completed.

Work is still ongoing, supposedly, but almost the entire interior is undecorated—leaving nothing but unfinished brickwork in its place. This is quite contrary to most Catholic churches, as anyone who’s ever been inside one can attest—and indeed, the Cathedral was (and is) supposed to look just as fancy as the rest. Work began in 1895, but apparently it’s been too expensive to finish decorating the mother church of literally all of England. And Wales.

The ‘German Stadium,’ as it’s called in English, broke ground in September of 1937 in Nuremberg, Germany. If you’re at all familiar with world history, that should probably raise a red flag.

Yes, the stadium was the brainchild of one Adolf Hitler, who wanted to build a gigantic, Roman-style arena for various nefarious purposes (including, but not limited to, hosting various Nazi rallies and replacing the Olympics with something called the Aryan Games). Thankfully, World War Two halted production before they could get any serious work done, and (also thankfully) the Nazis didn’t do so well in that. Thus the only remains of Deutsches Stadion are some crumbling pillars and walls from a test site, and a big lake in Nuremberg that filled in the former construction pit.

The Cathedral of Saint John the Divine is one of the largest Christian churches in the world, and an iconic feature of Manhattan in New York. By all means it should be considered a landmark, but officials in charge of that sort of thing are waiting until the building—which was started in 1892—is actually finished.

Construction on this thing has pretty much been a mess from the start—it’s been plagued by everything from financial woes to engineering problems to wars and fires, not to mention the fact that the designers switched up its whole architectural style a couple times (just for the hell of it, presumably). Church officials are still trying to figure out exactly how to finish this thing, but in the meantime it enjoys the affectionate nickname ‘Saint John the Unfinished.’

This one definitely fits into the realm of colossal screw-ups. The Super Power Building is to Scientology as the Vatican is to Catholicism, according to church leader David Miscavige. Work began in 1999 in Clearwater, Florida, and was estimated to take two years and $40 million. In 2003, work was abandoned for six years so that the church could re-plan the entire interior and solicit their followers for donations, despite the daily $250 fines it was getting for just sitting around. Work commenced in 2009, but the building has still never opened. Many followers left the church in disgust, having donated millions to the cause, and in January 2013 Luis and Rocio Garcia actually filed a lawsuit against the church for wasting their money.

The International Space Station (ISS) isn’t so much a building as it is a ‘modular structure,’ but it belongs on this list because it’s in a state of perpetual construction. Unlike most of the items here, the ISS kind of has to exist that way—and considering it’s operated and maintained by countries from all over the world, the fact that construction hasn’t fallen apart yet is actually pretty impressive. The first ‘component’ of the ISS, called Zarya, was launched into orbit in 1998, and the most recent one was added in 2011. Now, to be fair to the premise, the ISS was technically supposed to be ‘completed’ by 2005—but due to changes in technology and science, this date never really stood a chance. Hence, we have several new components scheduled to be attached over the next couple of years, and construction has been vaguely deemed ‘nearly halfway’ finished.

Not only is the Ajuda National Palace in Lisbon a famous tourist attraction, but it was also the official residence of the Portuguese royal family. That of all things, you’d think, would put it on the Portuguese builders’ priority list. Apparently not, though, because construction—which began in 1796—was never actually completed. Unfortunate finances and a series of wars led to the project being repeatedly adjusted and scaled back, but construction continued in spite of these setbacks all the way up until the Portuguese revolution in 1910, which abolished the monarchy. Currently, the half-finished palace functions as a museum.

If you’ve heard of Woodchester Mansion, it’s possibly because it’s been featured on a few ghost-hunter type TV shows under the presumption that it’s haunted. To be fair, a mental hospital was interested in setting up shop there at one point, and soldiers were stationed in the surrounding area during World War Two—but seeing as no one ever actually lived in the place, I’d take any rumors of ghosts with a grain of salt. No, the real reason Woodchester Mansion is famous is because it’s a hell of a shell of a house—an outer mansion with an almost completely unfinished inside. See, the guy who commissioned it, William Leigh, was kind of a perfectionist. An increasingly poor perfectionist, though—whenever he managed to get any money to have his mansion worked on, he always personally supervised construction and/or changed up the plans. So the half that’s built is built well, at least. The mansion is open to visitors, in case you ever wanted to see the inside of a house that only has an outside. Which, let’s be honest, sounds kind of awesome.

Like the poor Portuguese kings and queens who had to live in Ajuda Palace, the good parliamentarians of New Zealand have been working out of an unfinished building for over a century. Plans for the then-new headquarters were drawn up in 1911, and involved two stages of construction: one for the important chambers, and the other for the apparently-not-so-important chambers, like a library, and the Crown Law Office. The whole thing was supposed to take just two years, but they didn’t even get started until 1914, and they didn’t get the first stage done until 1922 (in fairness, there was a war going on at the time). In any case, the second stage of the official parliament buildings was never built—so it wasn’t ‘officially opened’ until 1995. It’s still not finished, technically speaking, but a different library/office building called the Beehive has been put up in the extra space. So at least they’ve got something.

Most of the items on this list, despite being incomplete, are still being used for something or other. But as promised, some of them are nothing more than useless, colossal screw-ups. Marble Hill falls into that latter category.

This nuclear plant in Indiana was started in 1977, and for about 7 years was all set to become a fully functioning, power-generating cornerstone of the nuclear power industry. Then, in 1984, after sinking $2.5 billion (with a ‘b’) into getting the reactors to about the halfway point, the company behind the project up and abandoned it—they simply couldn’t afford to continue. They ended up selling some of the equipment to recover a few million (not with a ‘b’) in lost costs. The plant’s been sitting half-finished ever since, although the company that owns it now is currently in the process of demolishing it.

Unlike Saint John’s Cathedral up there, the Sagrada Família church in Barcelona has received a lot of prestigious recognition—despite being a work in progress since 1882. Not only has it been designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site, it’s also been visited by the Pope and proclaimed a basilica (which for churches is kind of like winning the Super Bowl). The Sagrada Família is the brainchild of the famous architect Antoni Gaudí, who spent most of his life building it up into the grotesque, nature-inspired work of art it is today. Tragically he passed away in 1926, after being hit by a tram. His masterpiece, at that point, was less than a quarter complete.

But it’s been carried on ever since, inspired by Gaudí’s vision, and funded almost exclusively by the millions of tourists who flock to it every year. Today, the Sagrada Família is more than halfway done, with an optimistic completion date of 2026—the centennial of Gaudí’s death. Barring that, the current head architect is confident that it will be finished “perhaps in less than a century.” So keep your calendar open.

If you like unfinished works of art and/or colossal screw-ups, MJ Alba urges you to check him out on Twitter @MattJAlba. If you want to help him get more followers than his brother, that would be pretty cool too.

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Throughout the years, both men and women have contributed to the steady growth and evolution of mankind in their own special ways; some sought to work in the realm of mathematics whilst others opted towards the development of heavy machinery or musical devices. All of the many contributions brought forth by innovative minds around the world have in some way made things easier or transformed previously perceived “impossibilities” into realities. Unfortunately, many of the world’s most influential inventors received little to no recognition throughout their lives despite the seemingly obvious importance of their ideas. Here are the top ten inventors who received less recognition than they deserved for their efforts.

The first person to ever formerly invent a form of glue was Peter Cooper (he patented a kind of fish glue). Chances are you’ve never heard of him or any of the people who patented other forms of glue. Of course, you’ve definitely never heard of glue’s original inventors as they resided in Roman and/or Greek civilizations centuries ago. Everyone uses glue now but nobody ever really remembers glue makers for their achievements in the creation of sticky stuff.

Ever wonder who invented something as simple as play-doh? Of course you have since the inventors are barely remembered to this day. Much like a large number of other inventions, “play-doh” was created by accident. It was originally developed to be used as wallpaper cleaner before its potential as modeling clay for kids was noticed. When it first began being sold (in 1956), it came in a single color that was close to white (but not quite). The very next year, “play-doh” was released in different colors and kids everywhere rejoiced (though not all at once).

If you are in doubt of this simple invention’s implications in our society then you surely are omitting the fact that just about every child in the world knows what the fuzzy pumper barber shop version of this toy looks like.

Although something as simple as a zipper may hardly seem like an invention to most people nowadays as we are all quite accustomed to them, they were not around since the dawn of time. The zipper in its modern form was actually invented by Gideon Sundback in 1917 and was originally named the “continuous clothing closure” (which just rolls right off the tongue).

Initially, it was not adopted into the clothing industry as people felt it looked far too uncouth to be effectively used as a part of any garment. Instead, it slowly made its way into the world by being used in the creation of boots and tobacco pouches. Later on, it received its catchy name from the marketing group at B.F. Goodrich and it has been used in most forms of clothing ever since. No thanks were ever really given to the creator of the modern design though so its importance must have been overlooked.

Lyman was known to be a very dedicated inventor; he worked hard to come up with a truly useful idea that people now use every day, the can opener. Although it was not his only invention, it is known to have been his most famous one. In 1870, Lyman successfully created the world’s first rotating wheel can opener. Prior to Lyman’s invention, the only can openers that were available were basically just variations of a knife. With Lyman’s novel device, the procedure of opening a can was made much simpler. Unfortunately, Lyman’s invention (though ingenious) was not utilized by many due to the fact that the can needed to be pierced before you could use it. In 1891, Lyman died with very little recognition for his achievement besides the patents he had been awarded for it.

Henry Blair’s misfortune as an inventor came primarily due to his race. In his patent records, Henry Blair is listed as a “colored man” (the only description of this kind in early patent records) and all of his patents were signed only with an “x” as he was illiterate. His most notable creation was an automatic cotton planter that tilled the ground and dispensed seeds through a special wheel-powered device.

Blair was presumably a slave; however, the law for the issuing of patents allowed both slaves and free men to obtain patents at the time. In 1858, this law was changed to exclude slaves from obtaining patents. It was not changed back until 1871. Unfortunately, Blair died in 1860, eleven years too early to have benefitted from this change.

Walter Hunt was an American mechanic born in New York in 1796. Throughout his life he worked as an inventor and he managed to create a variety of different devices. The lockstitch sewing machine, safety pin, a forerunner of the Winchester repeating rifle, a successful flax spinner, knife sharpener, streetcar bell, hard-coal-burning stove, artificial stone, street sweeping machinery, the velocipede, and the ice plough are his most notable creations.

Many of his creations have served as indispensable additions and improvements to basic activities and devices in modern times. This is especially true for things like the simple safety pin and the complicated sewing machine. Unfortunately, none of his extremely useful inventions managed to win him an award throughout his life (nor afterwards).

Something as common as simple Velcro was not always used for clothing purposes nor was it always taken seriously. In fact, the idea and its creator were both scoffed at initially. De Mestral’s invention was refused by many people due to the fact that it was not “aesthetically pleasing” (its materials were originally wool and scraps of leather) and it was known to wear out quickly.

De Mestral struggled to get his invention used until his patent expired in 1978. He died in Commugny Switzerland without any awards for his efforts; however, the municipality named an avenue after him posthumously upon recognizing his accomplishment afterwards. He was also later inducted into the Inventor’s Hall of Fame in 1999 for his invention.

Philo Farnsworth was an inventor from the U.S. who crafted a couple of extremely important devices during his life (1906 – 1971). He is known now as the first person to create an electronic television device which he called the image “dissector”. He also helped to bring forth the idea of nuclear energy through fusion with the “Farnsworth-Hirsch fusor,” a device that could produce electrons in abundance and is known to be the main source for the approach taken to modern fusion design. He held 165 patents mostly in the fields of radio and television.

He was presented an Eagle Scout award when people noticed that he had earned it; too bad this didn’t happen until 2006 (over thirty years after his death). The award was given to his wife who then died four months later.

Winkel was living in Amsterdam in 1814 when he first discovered that a pendulum that was correctly weighted on either of its pivot’s sides could steadily keep time, even very slow tempos. He called his invention the “musical chronometer” and donated the first model to the “Hollandsch Instituut van Wetenschappen, Letterkunde en Schoone Kunsten” in Amsterdam.

Unfortunately, poor Winkel failed to adequately protect his idea and in only two years, Johann Nepomuk Mälzel had successfully patented his own version of the device under the name of “Mälzel Metronome” which featured a scale. This forever cast a shadow over Winkel and to this day people still miscredit Mälzel with being the inventor of the device.

William Austin Burt was the original inventor, maker and patentee of the very first typewriter in America as well as the first solar compass that was workable as a surveying instrument for boats (the equatorial sextant). His typewriter was far ahead of its own time unfortunately and it was actually his great grandson who built the most recognized version of the machine (though even his version struck ahead of its own era and saw very little success in his lifetime).

William Austin Burt’s equatorial sextant was adopted by the General Land Office as a standard instrument for all major boundary lines (particularly in regions of magnetic disturbance). The device’s popularity steadily grew; however, congress refused to renew his patent when it expired in 1850 and he apparently never even received the $300 for his right in the invention.

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Theatre can hit you hard and fast if you’re in the right mood. It is more immediate than film and television, it asks you to sympathize with the characters, no matter how cruel they can be, and it is never exactly the same each time you go. While musicals and comedies tend to do better at the box office, it takes a great artist to make the audience go home both satisfied and horrified. This is a list of some of the best and most twisted minds that the theatre presented us with in the last century. Definitely keep your eyes peeled for these names in your local theatre’s upcoming seasons.

The only reason that Strindberg lands so far away from number 1 is that most of his work was done in the 19th Century. But he lived in the 20th Century and he is one of a great many responsible for shaping and inspiring the playwrights listed below. I can’t think of one of his plays that could be described as a happy experience. He certainly wrote great experiences—but not happy ones. He wrote a realist manifesto in his introduction to Miss Julie then swiftly left it behind, moving into weirder and creepier forms represented brilliantly in his A Dream Play and Ghost Sonata later in his career. He was a self-absorbed misogynist, expressing his frustrations and mental-daemons sweepingly with his paintings, poetry and essays, as well as play scripts.

Straddling the 19th and 20th Centuries, Maxim Gorky jump-started his career with only the second play he ever wrote, aptly titled The Lower Depths. While pursuing a style of realistic theatre, Gorky wrote The Lower Depths with a greater focus on creating fascinating characters rather than a memorable plot. It is speculated that, while developing these characters, Gorky might have made regular visits to a local homeless shelter, offering booze in exchange for stories and time. First reception of this play was extremely negative, criticizing the bleak hopelessness and amoral content of the character’s lives. Despite these initial reviews, it is considered today as one of the cornerstones of Modern Theatre. Though The Lower Depths remains his most popular play; he went on to write fifteen more plays after, maintaining his taste for the ruthless examination of human struggle.

As of yet, Manjula Padmanabhan has only written five plays. Her most famous, Harvest, is a science fiction about an impoverished part of the world where people agree to let their bodies become available for harvest by wealthier Westerners who offer all kinds of luxuries in return. It’s a pretty clear metaphor for the globalized affects of capitalism on third-world workers. What Padmanabhan brilliantly does, however, is represent both ends of this equation in a single family in a small apartment in India. As the character Om spirals into fear inspired, in part, by the people who obsess over his health and control his life, his mother gradually sedates herself in the luxuries brought to her by his sacrifice. The person who owns Om, represented by weird holographic apparitions, believes herself to be generous and helpful to him. Through these, and other characters, the audience is forced to watch magnified versions of the different mercenary parts of themselves. Even Om ends up dishonest, ever the victim.

Brendan Behan makes this list for two reasons: the chilling content of his two most famous plays, and the short horrible life that he led. He was a member of the Irish Republican Army who, even after Irish home-rule, took it upon himself to visit Liverpool and blow-up strategic parts of their harbor. He was arrested, unsuccessful of his intentions. He spent three years in jail and later, not even yet twenty years of age, was arrested again for an assassination attempt. His most famous play, The Quare Fellow, is about a group of prisoners awaiting the execution of their fellow inmate. Behan presents the situation with humor and intensity. At the end of the play, the deceased is deceased and the characters are still coping with themselves behind bars. Behan killed himself with alcoholism. After the successes of The Quare Fellow, The Hostage, and his book The Borstal Boy, he continued to write but never as brilliantly or successfully. The diminishment of his craft was clearly a result of his drinking. “I’m a drinker with a writing problem,” he used to say, “There’s no bad publicity except an obituary.”

Though not all his works are particularly terrifying, this list would be amiss without the great Arthur Miller. He wrote over 50 stage and radio plays, spanning his active career over seven decades. His darker side comes across more subtly than other members of this list, drawing his audiences to examine their existential selves with the nuances of his story-telling rather than relying on gimmicks in form or spectacle. Plays like All My Sons and A View from the Bridge start in the recognizable workaday world and carry us expertly into haunting scenes of violence at the plays’ climaxes. Death of a Salesman hardly needs mention as the “great American tragedy;” a portrait of life’s futility, built almost artificially by the failing social system we all cling to. Miller wrote with Shakespearian grandeur of story, mingling the lives of ordinary people with the devastating realities of all the things bigger than us—God, philosophy, truth, and social structures. He made the most devastating familiar and the familiar to be devastating.

Even more prolific than Arthur Miller, Howard Barker invented an entire genre called “The Theatre of Catastrophe.” He takes inspiration from the most horrific of historical events and shows them to us openly and provocatively. By often writing characters that are imperfect or anti-heroic he invites his audiences to make their own judgments and fall into discourse among themselves. Philosophically Barker is noted for his rejection of Realism’s goal to evoke a common reaction from a crowd; we all take what we take from a play and the experienced truth lies across a spectrum. In terms of content, however, Barker is not shy of harrowing circumstances and exacting images: he takes advantage of his character’s trust in the world, describes the smell of battlefields, makes old flesh wounds into important character traits, he even pours a wave of horse blood across a huddled group of desperate workers.

Sartre is so iconic of existential thought and art that, in 1948, the Catholic Church attempted to ban his books entirely. He was an academic who, before his experience as a soldier in the Second World War, professed a sort of rationalism: the utility of one’s actions makes their existence acceptable. The war shook Sartre deeper into this self-floundering direction and he came out even more existentially tormented (if you can imagine it). His most famous play, Huis Clos (No Exit, in English), puts the three most terribly matched people in the same room for all of afterlife so that they can torment each other as they watch their loved-ones slowly forget them on earth. All of Sartre’s creative writing is extremely symbolic and bleak in style, expertly reserving language as necessary to convey his sadistic messages.

Known for some of the longest play titles in history, Peter Weiss’s style and subjects of interest are pretty hard to miss at face value: The Persecution and Assassination of John-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade is one example, or how about Discourse on the Progress of the Prolonged War of Liberation in Viet Nam and the Events Leading up to it as Illustration of the Necessity for Armed Resistance against Oppression and on the Attempts of the United States of America to Destroy the Foundations of Revolution as another example? His plays are clearly at once specific and sweeping in subject. Often inspired by the power abuses of military formality, Weiss uses metatheatrical conventions to push the audience emotionally in and out of his stories. His writing is capable of making an audience feel simultaneously triumphant and disgusted by the curtain-fall, forcing, in turn, a deeper consideration of what we think about ourselves.

Along with Arthur Miller, Beckett is one of the most celebrated playwrights of the 20th Century. He was a master of combining imagery with timing in order to build the most bitingly visceral productions possible. Best known for Waiting for Godot as a landmark for theatrical surrealism, Beckett’s work burrows significantly deeper in that direction with some of his shorter plays. Despite this he resented being given labels such as surrealist, expressionist, or even minimalist … though even he couldn’t deny his minimalist aspirations. Arguably his best play, Endgame, opens with a lone man on a nearly empty stage, sitting ghostly still under a tea cloth. The play is set at the end of the world where the characters are locked in a house, enduring the final stages of their painful existence. His work is incomparable to other playwright’s, beautiful to see, beautiful to hear and, when well produced, can be literally staggering to experience.

Sarah Kane only wrote six plays before her death in 1999, moving from realistic stories of intense violence to more poetic and experimental pieces nearer the end of her career. She is a pioneer of the British literary movement, “In-Yer-Face-Theatre,” attacking her audiences with the cruel and obscene. Probably because of the grotesque pushiness of her plays, they were not well received by her own community during her lifetime. She has, however, had pieces played for large audiences in Mainland Europe and very successfully revived in the Americas. Her writing is violent in content and affect, shocking her audiences with the darkest possibilities of human action; Kane wrote about sex, pain, torture, death, racism, and rape. She was a brilliant wordsmith, building poetry with the slightest necessity of language, but certainly not a playwright for the more sensitive theatergoers.

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