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From a mayor who tripped on his own beard to a woman devoured by a pack of frenzied Dachshunds, history is full of some incredibly unusual deaths. Wikimedia CommonsA spontaneous human combustion, recreated by an artist. July 20, 2018. We fear things that seem to be obviously terrifying, like monsters and poisonous spiders, though most of us won’t experience unusual deaths or die in an extraordinary circumstance. Instead, we will likely die from something mundane....

From baby cages to glowing tires to bicycle roller skates, these weird inventions of decades past simply never made a splash. Like this gallery?Share it: Share Flipboard Email And if you liked this post, be sure to check out these popular posts: 11 Nikola Tesla Inventions That Cemented His Place As One Of History’s Greatest Minds 11 Of History’s Weirdest Inventions Six Bizarre Inventions That Never Caught On 1 of 26Blizzard MaskWomen wear plastic headgear intended to protect one from snowstorms in Montreal....

Archaeologists said it was the oldest and richest Viking settlement that has been found to date. Bjarni EinarssonA Viking settlement dating back to 800 AD has rewritten the historical timeline of the ancient seafarers. Researchers are stunned by the recent discovery of a pair of Viking longhouses in Iceland. Most astonishingly, the estimated age of one of the structures pushes back previous estimates of the date of Viking settlement in the country....

The high cost of bird’s nest soup comes from the dangerous retrieval process of the nests, and the painstaking cleaning they go through to become safe to eat. For the past 400 years, Chinese cooking has been home to one of the most expensive delicacies in the world, bird’s nest soup. Made from edible bird nests, called the “Caviar of the East,” bird’s nest soup is extremely rare and extremely valuable....

Discover the exact probability that humans are alone in the universe, as calculated by a new study that updates the Drake Equation. Photo: den-belitsky/Getty Images Are we alone in the universe? Any one of us can stare up at the sky and ponder that question, but scientists have long had a concrete formula to answer it: the Drake Equation. But the problem with the Drake Equation (developed by Dr. Frank Drake of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in 1961) was always that it depended on several unknown variables that prevented an accurate calculation — until now....

Researchers believe this is a survival tactic. Everyone has those nights when their significant other comes to bed and — for one reason or another — they decide to feign sleep to avoid talking or …doing other stuff. Well, female dragonflies take this kind of sneaky sexual rejection to the next level — faking their own deaths to avoid having sex with aggressive males. Scientists recently captured this phenomenon on video for the first time while observing moorland hawker dragonflies in the Swiss Alps....

Otis Ryan has caused several disturbances in a Florida area lately. His most recent: telling kids in the playground where babies come from. WPBF NewsOtis Ryan accused of yelling where babies come from to children. Otis Dawayne Ryan, a 30-year-old man from Florida, was arrested on May 20 and charged with disorderly conduct. Ryan was arrested after he scaled playground equipment at a park at Clearwater Beach, Fla. and shouted a vulgar explanation about where babies come from to the children who were playing there....

The circumstances surrounding death of 70-year-old Il Hun Ro of Los Angeles are unknown, but Yellowstone officials do not suspect foul play. KAREN BLEIER/AFP via Getty ImagesYellowstone workers found the foot floating in the Abyss Pool, which reaches temperature of about 140 degrees Fahrenheit. In August 2022, workers at Yellowstone National Park made a gruesome find in a thermal pool — a human foot inside a shoe. Now, they’ve identified the person to whom the foot belonged: a 70-year-old man from Los Angeles named Il Hun Ro....

Before Gloria Steinem was the face of second-wave feminism, she was an anti-communist operative for the CIA and went undercover with Playboy to expose their misogynistic practices. Gloria Steinem is a journalist and activist who rose to prominence as the stylish frontwoman of the women’s liberation movement in 1970s America. As she turns 86 in 2020, the soft-spoken orator remains one of the most recognized feminist leaders today. Here’s how she became the face of second-wave feminism....

Sylvia Browne appeared on Larry King Live and The Montell Williams Show, wrote dozens of books, and made millions of dollars a year, but her body of work was a complete fabrication. Steve SnowdenSylvia Browne during an interview in the later part of her life. For most, television psychics are obvious charlatans who manipulate psychological sleight of hand. The power of suggestion and the ability to lure someone along through a threadbare detail are certainly impressive, but not supernatural....

Apparently, the highway that runs through the town is attractive for drivers due to its lack of speed bumps and tolls. Wikimedia CommonsA 30 km speed limit sign in Europe. A tiny village in northern Italy with a population of about 120 residents decided to install cameras after a substantial number of residents complained about speeding. The tiny town of Acquetico’s mayor, Alessandro Alessandri, complied with his residents’ complaints and decided to install a trial speed camera to see what the result would yield after two weeks of a test run....

Between 1969 and 1981, Joe Michael Ervin went on a violent killing spree that saw six people dead — but the extent of his crimes went largely unknown until a chance encounter with a cop. Wikimedia CommonsJoe Michael Ervin killed six people before hanging himself to evade trial. In 1981, Colorado police officer Debra Sue Corr pulled over Joe Michael Ervin, who was suspected of driving under the influence. Corr had no idea that Ervin was actually a cold-hearted serial killer — and that she was about to become his last victim....

Jeremiah Heaton has declared himself King of “North Sudan.” We sat down with him to learn more. Jeremiah Heaton plants a flag in Africa. Image courtesy of Jeremiah Heaton. In 2013, Jeremiah Heaton’s youngest daughter asked him if she would ever be a princess. He said yes — and meant it. A few months later, Heaton embarked on a flight to Egypt, where he would drive to the territory of Bir Tawil, a no-man’s land of approximately 2,000 square meters (0....

The mummified monkey was found by a construction team that was gutting the inside of a century-old building. Adam Peterson/Old Minneapolis/FacebookThe monkey mummy uncovered in the Dayton’s building’s seventh floor ceiling. A group of construction workers remodeling a historic Minnesota department store got more than they bargained for when they opened up a section of the ceiling and found a mummified creature. The group was renovating the seventh floor of the historic Dayton’s department store building, on Nicollet Mall in downtown Minneapolis when the creature was found, nestled in the rafters....

The FDA has yet to approve any birth control apps, but the creators of Natural Cycles hope to change that. Pregnancy prevention has something in common with finding car keys, Candy Crush and the ham horn: There are apps for all of them. The team who created Natural Cycles, a smartphone app designed to determine when users are fertile, is seeking to make the app a certified method of birth control in the U....

From an English spite palace to a Medieval getaway, see how time has ravaged these abandoned fortresses. One of the greatest things about ancient architecture is how it allows us to step directly into history. Our planet is rich with structures that are a testament to human ingenuity and creativity. Perhaps the best examples of this are abandoned castles that have miraculously withstood centuries of wear and devastation. These castles are an expression of the political environments of their time, like the steep walls of the Fair Castle of the Rock in Normandy, which was built by England’s King Richard I to guard his territory from the French....

The 56-year-old farmer presumably suffered an epileptic fit and fell into the enclosure. She was unconscious — but alive — when the pigs devoured her. East2WestNewsThe Russian pigs in their enclosure. A 56-year-old woman was eaten alive by pigs in the Russian region of Udmurtia last month after suffering an epileptic seizure while feeding them and falling into their enclosure. The female farmer, who lived and worked in the Malopurginsky district of Udmurtia, reportedly died from severe blood loss after the swine ate several parts of her body while she was unconscious, the Daily Mail reported....

After a trolleybus plunged into Yerevan Lake in Armenia in 1976, Shavarsh Vladimiri Karapetyan dove in and spent more than 20 minutes pulling people out from the wreckage. TwitterArmenian swimmer Shavarsh Karapetyan proved his bravery more than once. Shavarsh Karapetyan said it sounded like a bomb. On a peaceful late summer day in Yerevan, Armenia, a trolleybus suddenly careened from the roadway and plunged straight into Yerevan Lake. While most watched in horror, Karapetyan sprang into action....

The World’s Most Extreme Sports: Volcano Boarding While most sane individuals would run away from an active volcano, a few thrill-seeking adventurers run toward and then down volcanoes. The relatively obscure extreme sport known as volcano boarding attracts thousands of sport enthusiasts who travel to Nicaragua’s Cerro Negro Mountain to get their adrenaline fix. Participants gear up in protective suits, hop on a board constructed of plywood and Formica, and descend the volcano’s slope at speeds up to 50 miles per hour....

Art, sport, torture or sacred cultural emblem? The legacy of bullfighting has many proponents and equally vocal critics. Read more here and take your stand. Source: Business Insider Bullfighting has played an integral and contentious role Spanish culture for thousands of years. Testing the lines between brutality, art, sport and cultural history, the event continues to provoke viewers the world over. Naturally, the sport’s violent nature has caused many to reject the tradition as anything other than glorified savagery....