1 USS Arizona
Some people survived the sinking of USS Arizona during Pearl Harbor but some were trapped inside. It took up to 16 days for some men to die who were stuck inside. Survivors say that no one wanted to go on guard duty anywhere near the sunken ships since they would hear the banging of trapped survivors all night long, but with nothing that could be done.
2. Salt appetite can be so strong that animals including humans short on sodium will put life and limb at risk to satisfy the hunger. Mountain goats are known to cling to sheer cliffs to access a salt lick, even when a misstep means certain death. Also, salt cravings and drug addiction use the same neural pathways. As most mammals probably evolved during a salt scarcity the ways they react to it are interesting.
3. Rat Kings is a phenomenon that involves a group of rats intertwined by their tails. It occurs when young rats living close to each other get their tails entangled and encrusted with dirt. This knot then tightens when they pull away from the group. Though sometimes questioned of its authenticity, the oldest Rat King reported is a group of 32 mummified rats, held in a Thuringia museum.
4. The “Road of Bones” is a road in Russia that has a large number of human remains as part of its foundation. The bones are the remnants of the forced laborers who perished while working on the project.
5. “Saved by the bell” is a term used to say you’ve been saved at the last minute. However, it originates from the 1800s when people were buried with a string leading from their coffin to a bell on the surface. If the person was buried alive they would ring the bell and be rescued.
6 Male chicks
Male chicks are virtually useless to the egg industry. So they are either suffocated in garbage bags with waste or shoveled together by the hundreds and conveyed into a grinder to be torn apart while still alive.
7. The tarantula hawk reproduces by stinging a tarantula, dragging it back to its nest, laying just one egg on the tarantula’s back, covers the entrance to the said nest and when the egg hatches the larva digs into the still alive tarantula where it eats it’s filled before going through a metamorphosis and bursting out of the tarantula’s abdomen to resume the twisted torture again.
8. Organophosphates, including the chemical weapon Sarin Gas, work by inhibiting your muscle’s ability to relax. Your muscles basically constrict and can’t unconstrict, causing what feels like a muscle cramp through your entire body – your arms, your chest, your eyes, your tongue, everything. It most frequently kills via asphyxiation, because you can’t exhale. Surviving means a permanent, irrecoverable loss of motor function, even with rapid medical treatment.
9. Due to fresh drinking water being so scarce on the Galápagos Islands, some bird species, such as the Galapagos Hawk, have adapted by drinking the blood of other animals.
10. It used to be believed that babies as old as 15 months couldn’t feel pain. As a result, doctors would perform surgery without anesthesia. Doctors used muscle relaxants on the infants to prevent squirming, essentially paralyzing the babies for the duration of the procedure. Reports indicate that this continued up until the 1980s.
11 Angelina Jolie
Angelina Jolie once tried to hire a hitman to kill her, because she felt that a murder would be easier on her family than her committing suicide. The hitman talked her out of it by asking her to wait a month.
12. During the filming of the Lord of the Rings, Christopher Lee corrected director Peter Jackson on the right noise a person who got stabbed in the back and die. He said that person would not make an “argh” scream, but an “uh” because “the breath is driven out of your body”. His expertise stemmed from his time as an undercover agent for British Intelligence in World War Two.
13. After the death of their son, Abraham Lincoln and his wife hosted occult seances in the White House to try and contact him.
14. Pablo Escobar’s daughter once asked for a unicorn and kind of she got one. Escobar arranged for a horn and wings to be stapled onto a horse. The cobbled-together ‘unicorn’ soon died from an infection.
15. In the mid 18th century women and children were found torn apart, dismembered, or decapitated in the quiet French province of Gevaudan. These were the first of nearly a hundred attacks perpetrated by a mysterious animal dubbed as the Beast of Gevaudan.
16 Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein cheated on his wife, belittled her scientific achievements, and refused to help out around the house and made her sign a contract in which she would agree to leave the room or stop talking if he told her to.
17. Cancerous cells are produced in our body every day but our immune system kills them. When our immune system can’t keep up with them is when it is a problem.
18. The entire student body of the University of Mississippi enlisted for the American Civil War. They suffered a 100% casualty rate.
19. Charles Darwin married his first cousin and had 10 children. 3 died as infants and 3 were infertile. He was the first to raise the question if incest may cause weaknesses in offspring after studying inbred plants in his garden.
20. Chinese scientist Tong Dizhou cloned the first fish in the 1960s, but the Maoist government forced him to abandon his research and become a janitor during the Cultural Revolution.
15 Most Controversial & Costly Blunders in History
21 Iran Air Flight 655
The US Navy shot down a civilian airliner (Iran Air Flight 655) en route to Dubai from Tehran in 1988, killing 290 people, in Iranian airspace and waters. The U.S. government never apologized or acknowledged any wrongdoing.
22. A woman named Alice Blunden was so knocked out after ingesting large amounts of poppy tea that a doctor pronounced her dead. She was quickly buried but exhumed when people could hear her voice from the grave. She was so close to death that she was once again accidentally buried alive.
23. Kissing a baby on the ear can make it go deaf because of a condition known as “cochlear ear-kiss injury.”
24. In rare cases, popping a pimple in a particular area of the face, the so-called “danger triangle,” can lead to facial paralysis, brain infections/meningitis, and even death.
25. Joseph Stalin was highly suspicious of doctors and had many Kremlin doctors arrested and tortured. So few doctors were available that after Stalin suffered a stroke, one imprisoned doctor claimed he was mid-interrogation when his captors suddenly started asking for medical advice instead.