10 Most Likely Ways You Will Die

10>Fire or Smoke (1-in-1,116):                                             

   
Roughly 50%-80% of fire related deaths are due to smoke inhalation rather than burns but together, in the United States, these claims thousands of lives ever year.

9>Assault by Firearm (1-in-325):                                                          

In many countries, primarily in Europe, where gun ownership has been outlawed, gun crimes remain fairly low. Other countries, however, have a much higher prevalence of gun violence. Places like Brazil, Colombia, South Africa, Guatemala, and the United States lose billions of dollars and thousands of lives annually due to this problem.

8>Falling Down (1-in-246):                                              

If this seems benign, then you must be young. This is the leading cause of injury related death among seniors in the world.



7>Intentional Self-harm (1-in-121):                                                            

Every 40 seconds someone somewhere on this planet kills themselves and every year roughly 1 million lives are lost due to suicide.

6>Motor Vehicle Accident (1-in-100):                                                       

     
In what is probably one of the most dangerous things any of us ever do on a regular basis, motor vehicle accidents claim about 50,000 American lives every year.

5>Accidental Injury (1-in-36):                                                 

With this umbrella category being responsible for around 30 million emergency room visits annually, the number of lives lost every year as a result hover around 100,000.    
4>Stroke (1-in-23):
                                               

If you live in the developed world and you are reading this, then before you reach the end of this page you are almost guaranteed to discover the source of your future demise. Strokes are included on that list and about 1/3 of stroke victims die as a result.

3>Cancer (1-in-7):                                                  

If you live in the developed world and you are reading this, then before you reach the end of this page you are almost guaranteed to discover the source of your future demise. Strokes are included on that list and about 1/3 of stroke victims die as a result.

2>Heart Disease (1-in-5):                                        

It is commonly thought by many experts that heart disease is the leading cause of death in the world. And while this may be true, at least in academic circles, there exists a force far more sinister…

1>Chuck Norris:                                             

                 
Unfortunately there are no statistics for Chuck Norris related deaths, but it is safe to say that your probability of survival is directly correlated to what he thinks of you being alive. In other words, if your existence upsets him, we are terribly sorry. For the rest of you

Read More

10 Misconceptions About Your Body That Aren’t True

10>You can sweat out toxins:
             

Sweat consists of water, salt and electrolytes. Because your sweat glands are superficial and only found in your skin, that is all that your sweat will ever consist of. There is no way for any mysterious “toxin” to be released through your sweat.

9>Going out in the cold, especially with wet hair, makes you sick:
                                                                      

This is wrong. You get sick because of viruses. Viruses do not care about the temperature. Furthermore, your immune system is not significantly affected by the cold because your body maintains a core temperature of about 37C (98.5F). If this drops by even a couple degrees you will get hypothermia and die. The reason more people get sick in winter is because you are likely to stay indoors and around other people, which is exactly where all the viruses are.

8>Sugar makes kids hyperactive:
                                                        

It doesn’t. Studies have shown that when a child is given a placebo (what the parents think is sugar water), then the parents will consistently rank the child as being more hyper. Maybe your kids just get excited about candy, but there is no chemical effect of sugar on hyperactivity.

7>If you swim less than 30 minutes after eating you'll get a cramp:

                                                       

                                                          If your mom every told you not to swim after eating because you’ll get a cramp and drown…well, she’s wrong. You might get a cramp, but it will have nothing to do with when you ate.

6>Don’t have milk when you're sick because it makes more mucus:

                                              

Milk can thicken mucus, but not make more of it. At any rate, this won’t set you back much on the healing process.

5>You should never wake up a sleepwalker:

                                                

According to the myth, if you wake a sleepwalker it can give them a heart attack or send them into shock. While that won’t happen, it is probably best just to guide them back to bed because if you wake them up they’ll probably be really, really groggy.

4>You become resistant to antibiotics:
                                              

It is not you that becomes resistant to antibiotics, it is the bacteria.

3>Hair grows back thicker:
                                          

It doesn’t. When it grows naturally, it grows tapered. When you shave it, it has a blunt tip. This blunt tip may make your hair appear to be thicker but it’s not. The thickness of your hair is determined beneath the skin by the root, over which your razor has no say.

2>Drowning people flail:
                                                     

     
Hollywood is wrong on this one. As every lifeguard will tell you, drowning people are hard to spot because they don’t make much of a racket. Drownings are usually extremely silent with not much going on at the surface of the water.

1>Vaccines cause autism:

                                               

Although the study that started this rumor has been debunked as a fraud, everybody still seems to believe. No, vaccines do not cause autism any more than driving cars cause diarrhea.

Read More

10 Fascinating Cases Of Animal Gigantism

10Flores Giant Rat

Humans are easily frightened by the tiniest animals: Cockroaches, spiders, and mice seem specifically designed to scare the bejeezus out of us. Some grown men would even prefer to wrestle a bear or take on a pack of coyotes than let a mouse run up the leg of their pants.

These men should probably avoid the island of Flores, Indonesia. It’s home to the Flores Giant Rat, which has the single virtue of being too large to fit up your pants leg. This isn’t the kind of rodent to be restrained by mouse traps: its body can reach 45 centimeters (18 in) in length, and that’s before you add its 75-centimeter (30 in) tail. Then the rat can exceed 1.2 meters (4 ft).

This really is the stuff of nightmares, but at least most of us are physically big enough to fight off a giant rat.  Unfortunately, the rats wouldn’t have been so easy to shrug off for our ancestors: Homo floresiensis, who shared Flores Island with them around 12,000 years ago. At around 1 meter (3 ft) tall, these early humans would have come face to face with rats frighteningly close to them in size.

Luckily for the H. floresiensis community, Flores giant rats are believed to be vegetarians.

9Nuralagus

The Nuralagus rex was a type of prehistoric rabbit, which developed into a giant due to its predator-free habitat on the Mediterranean island of Minorca. The largest specimens could have weighed around 22 kilograms (50 lbs), which is outrageous when you compare it to the 1.8 kilograms (4 lbs) of the largest modern rabbits.

The tiny skull of the otherwise-giant rabbit suggests that its capacities for sight and hearing were significantly impaired compared to those of normal rabbits. This is most likely another result of the lack of predators on the island. With nothing around to kill it, there was no need to develop or maintain the traits necessary for competition and survival. As you can imagine, the extraordinary size of the nuralagus meant that it didn’t exactlyhop around the island. It instead plodded quite slowly, more like a sloth than a rabbit.

8Solomon Islands Skink

The Solomon Islands skink is unusual in many ways apart from the fact that it can reach nearly 75 centimeters (30 in) in length—three times larger than the average skink size. Unlike most reptiles, which usually produce offspring by laying eggs, the female Solomon Islands skink carries its young internally. When the baby skinks are born, they are sometimes already half the size of their mother.

The giant skinks are sometimes referred to as “monkey-tailed skinks” because their tails have the unusual ability to grasp the branches of trees. But this ability comes at a price: The Solomon Islands skink is one of the few lizards unable to detach its tail at the approach of a predator. Lacking this advantage, it will often hiss and bite to defend itself.

7Chappell Island Tiger Snake

At 2.4 meters (8 ft) in length, the Chappell Island tiger snake is the largest of all tiger snakes. For centuries, it has shared Mount Chappell Island, Australia, with a large number of local muttonbirds and absolutely no serious predators. Since it’s the only type of snake found on the island, it essentially has a monopoly over the muttonbird chicks, which it devours with relish every breeding season. The snake can eat so many hapless chicks in one six-week period that it often spends the rest of the year digesting its victims.

Like many Australian snakes, the Chappell Island tiger snake is highly venomous, and its bite can be lethal to any human foolish enough to interfere in the muttonbird business.

6Madagascar Giant Pill-Millipede

The giant pill-millipede of Madagascar is known by scientists asSphaerotheriida, but locals have dubbed it more accurately as “star poo.” Though they look like normal millipedes in their relaxed state, they have the ability to roll themselves into an armored ball at the first sign of danger. Once they retreat into their armored plates, almost nothing can force them to unroll against their will.

The largest pill-millipedes can reach the size of a baseball. Unlike centipedes but like other millipedes, the giant pill-millipedes are non-venomous, and they live on a diet of decaying plant matter.

5Saint Helena Giant Earwig

“Absolutely horrifying” is probably a reasonable description of the Saint Helena earwig, which can reach nearly 10 centimeters (4 in) in length. First discovered in 1798, the giant earwig has been inhabiting nightmares ever since.

The folk belief that earwigs are capable of crawling into human ears and eating brains is now well-known as a myth, but if you still harbor any fears, then rest assured: The Saint Helena earwig is actually too enormous to even fit in your ear.

Believe it or not, the hideous exterior of the Saint Helena earwig actually conceals a warm, loving, and tender interior. The giant species is renowned among earwig researchers for its unusually advanced levels of maternal care. After the eggs have been laid, the mother frequently cleans them to protect them from fungi and is known to defend them from predators.

The giant earwigs, like Napoleon in his later years, are endemic to the tiny Atlantic island of Saint Helena. There have been no sightings since about 1967, leading many to believe that extinction may have occurred as a result of predation from the introduced centipede.

4The Dodo

The dodo—a kind of gigantic, flightless pigeon—is not quite so terrifying as other entries in this list. But dodos are a still a very good example of island gigantism at work. Isolated for thousands of years on the small Indian Ocean island of Mauritius and completely lacking any major predators, dodos were completely fearless of humans.

The story of human contact with dodos is a famous one. When Dutch sailors arrived in the 16th century, they found the large, plump, overfed birds rather laughable. Despite the meek, trusting nature of the dodos, they were routinely butchered for food by humans, and their flightlessness made themeasy prey for even the laziest of introduced predators.

This slaughter, coupled with the fact that the dodos couldn’t reverse the evolutionary trend of thousands of years in a matter of decades, led to the species being exterminated by the end of the 17th century.

3Galapagos Islands Giant Tortoise

The giant tortoises of the Galapagos Islands off the coast of Ecuador have the potential to outlive any other vertebrate. They can routinely live for over 100 years, and one of them held on until the ripe age of 152. They’re also true giants of the tortoise world: Some subspecies can reach 250 kilograms (550 lbs) and over 1.5 meters (5 ft) in length.

At the time of Charles Darwin’s famous visit, there were 14 different subspecies of giant tortoise in the Galapagos Islands. Each kind of tortoise originated from a single ancestor, but their evolution began to diverge after they found themselves on different islands with different challenges and began to evolve accordingly.

Giant tortoises display a fascinating form of symbiotic behavior when it comes to ridding themselves of parasites such as ticks. Whenever they’re in need of pest removal, they stretch up on their hind legs, allowing passing birds to peck away all the ticks.

The number of subspecies has now dwindled to 10 after centuries of hunting, poaching, and the introduction of domestic animals. Taken together, these things probably killed more than 100,000 giant tortoises. But thanks to the increased efforts of conservationists, only 120 of the 15,000-strong population have been killed by poachers since 1990.

2Giant Fijian Long-Horned Beetle

The giant Fijian long-horned beetle is the second-largest beetle in the world, reaching an extraordinary body length (by beetle standards) of 15 centimeters (7 in). The beetle lives a simple life in the trees of Fiji on a diet of plant matter, but anyone who is generally creeped out by insects will still find cause to be uneasy: The horns which give the beetle its name can also reach lengths of more than 12 centimeters (6 in), meaning that its horns are often nearly as long as its gigantic body.

The larvae take 12 years to reach their full adult size. Many of them don’t survive that vulnerable period, since the larvae are sought out as a rare delicacy by Fijian villagers. Several tribes consider them to be sacred, and only the village high chief is permitted to eat them.

But the few long-horned beetles which make it into adulthood become truly fearsome: “Powerful jaws” and “very loud whirring noise when flying” are just some of the phrases insectophobes don’t like to hear. Upon being disturbed, the beetles will also respond with an alarming hissing noise.

1Elephant Bird

The aptly named elephant birds of Madagascar were around 3 meters (10 ft) tall and could weigh 400 kilograms (900 lbs). If you have ever seen an emu or ostrich and been amazed by its size, then you’ll understand how early visitors to Madagascar must have felt when they caught sight of these creatures before the species died off in the late 17th century.

Elephant birds were probably the largest birds ever to have lived. Even their eggs were a full meter (3 ft) in circumference, and their fearsome appearance gave rise to the legendary “Roc” of Arabian folk tales. This fabled creature was thought to consume elephants, but such a rumor says more about the effect of the elephant birds on travelers’ imaginations than their actual feeding habits.

The real elephant bird was more heavily built than the more familiar moa of New Zealand, and its eggs were even larger.

Read More

10 Things You Never Knew About The Biology Of Sex

10Arousal And Disgust

Sex is an innately disgusting thing. Copious body fluids aside, the mere act of sex is something we would never do if pleasure wasn’t involved. That may be one of the reasons arousal actually inhibits feelings of disgust.

“Disgust-induced avoidance” is the scientific term for not wanting to do something gross, like hesitating to drink a glass of water with a large fly floating in it. Normally, you wouldn’t even think about it. When you’re aroused, though, it’s more likely that you won’t care and take a big gulp anyway. In a recent study, 90 women were split into three groups: aroused, unaroused, and neutral. Then they were given 16 different tasks that ranged from “disgusting” to “more disgusting”—wiping their hands with a used tissue, reaching into a bucket of used condoms, and yes, drinking from a glass with a dead bug in it.

In reality, the bug was fake, and the condoms weren’t actually used—but the participants didn’t know that. The aroused women were overwhelmingly more likely to follow through with the tasks than any of the other groups, especially if the “disgusting” task was sexual in nature, like the condom bucket or putting lubrication on a vibrator. This suggests that inhibiting disgust is an important part of making people actually want to have sex.

9Transient Global Amnesia

Transient global amnesia is a condition in which a person’s memory randomly disappears for a short amount of time. It happens suddenly and usually it goes away after only a few hours—but during that time, you can’t remember anything past a certain point. It also affects your ability to make new memories, so you’re constantly living inside a window of just a few seconds between doing something and forgetting about it. It’s like Memento, but without all the tattoos.

Since it’s so rare—only about three people out of 100,000 get it every year—doctors don’t really know what causes it, but one similarity has been popping up regularly since it was first recorded in 1956. In most cases, the person was having sex right before their memory goes blank.

Beyond the inability to remember anything, there aren’t any other side effects to transient global amnesia, but that doesn’t make it any less frightening. In a case from 1964, a man had an orgasm, then immediately shouted, “Where am I?” In reports where the person wasn’t having sex at the time of the attack, the trigger was usually something similar—strenuous activity of some sort, or a sudden change in body temperature.

8Hot Women And Health

When you do something dangerous, like skydiving, your body pumps out massively increased levels of a stress hormone called cortisol. Cortisol is the primary hormone in the “fight or flight” response that floods your system with adrenaline and primes your body for survival. Put an attractive woman in a room with a man, however, and that man’s body suddenly can’t tell the difference between a nice set of legs and a rampaging bear.

In fact, just being alone with a beautiful woman for five minutes raises cortisol nearly to heart attack levels. It sounds like something you’d see in an old Tom & Jerry cartoon, but when Spanish researchers tested male hormone levels with a saliva swab after solo contact with an attractive female, their cortisol was actually right around the levels you’d expect to see after skydiving. The more attractive he thought the female was, the higher his cortisol levels rose.

They came to the conclusion that, like fighting off a predator, sexual interest is seen at the hormonal level as a challenge to be overcome. The more dangerous (attractive) the predator (woman), the more prepared he needs to be to survive (get laid). But there’s a catch-22: Women are actually turned offby men with higher stress levels. Sorry, guys. You just can’t win.

7Orgasmic Exercise

Getting to the gym is hard for a lot of people. It’s a commitment, and one that comes at the expense of other, more enjoyable things—like virtually anything else. But for 5 percent of women, there might be a new reason to start working out: exercise-induced orgasms. It’s exactly what it sounds like—women have reported reaching climax simply from working out. The phenomenon was first mentioned in 1953 during an unrelated sex study by Dr. Alfred Kinsey, who said that a small percentage of the 6,000 women he interviewed voluntarily mentioned that sometimes their workouts came with some extra motivation.

A more recent study found that closer to 15 percent of women have experienced the phenomenon, and twice as many get at least some kind sexual pleasure. Granted, the “study” was an online survey without a whole lot of scientific control, but it does seem to be a fairly widespread issue. There’s even a name for it—”coregasm,” since most of the time, it’s triggered by abdominal exercises. It’s female-exclusive, as far as anybody can tell—sorry again, guys.

6Zero-Gravity Sex

 credit: jurvetson

With several planned Mars missions just around the corner—some of which expect to put the astronauts and their families in zero-G conditions for more than 500 days—someone has to come out and ask the question that’s on everybody’s mind: “Can we do it in space?”

The answer is tricky, and NASA has already tackled it several times. As far as they’re willing to admit, nobody’s ever tried it, but the logistics would be something approaching rocket science. One expert put it in terms anybody could understand: “You have no traction and you keep bumping against the walls.” Or as Newton would have said, every thrust has an equal and opposite counter-thrust. Then there’s the problem of biology—sperm has never been asked to perform outside of normal gravity. In microgravity it would just ricochet around the uterus, bouncing off the walls like the kids inEnder’s Game.

Finally, there’s the small matter of what the radiation would do to a fetus if the hurdles of conception were ever overcome. We’re already unsure what the effects of long-term solar radiation would be on an adult, let alone a developing fetus

With several planned Mars missions just around the corner—some of which expect to put the astronauts and their families in zero-G conditions for more than 500 days—someone has to come out and ask the question that’s on everybody’s mind: “Can we do it in space?”

The answer is tricky, and NASA has already tackled it several times. As far as they’re willing to admit, nobody’s ever tried it, but the logistics would be something approaching rocket science. One expert put it in terms anybody could understand: “You have no traction and you keep bumping against the walls.” Or as Newton would have said, every thrust has an equal and opposite counter-thrust. Then there’s the problem of biology—sperm has never been asked to perform outside of normal gravity. In microgravity it would just ricochet around the uterus, bouncing off the walls like the kids inEnder’s Game.

Finally, there’s the small matter of what the radiation would do to a fetus if the hurdles of conception were ever overcome. We’re already unsure what the effects of long-term solar radiation would be on an adult, let alone a developing fetus.

5Boosts Immune System

When you get a cold, your first reaction probably isn’t to kick yourself for not having more sex. From a physical standpoint, sex is healthy for you—after all, it’s just another form of exercise—but it also benefits you at the cellular level by raising levels of igA, an antibody found in your mucus that kills cold germs. In most cases, igA is a good indicator of immune system health—the more igA you have, the stronger your immune system is.

When a research team tested a group of college students in 1999, they found that people who had sex at least twice a week had higher levels of igA in their system. They came to the conclusion that by regularly exposing themselves to all the various germs other people carry, these people were constantly building an immunity to a range of viruses and bacteria, similar to the waychildren who eat dirt wind up healthier.

On the other hand, the abstinent students who didn’t have that intimate contact had fewer biological defenses because their bodies weren’t getting those tiny bumps of exposure. On a final, freakish third hand, having sex toomuch (three or more times per week) drops those igA numbers right back down to abstinence levels.

4Reduces Risk Of Prostate Cancer

Maybe going for the gold in the cosmic sexolympics won’t help your immune system, but it may very well reduce your risk of getting prostate cancer. Prostate cancer normally affects men older than 45, with most diagnoses cropping up around the age of 70. In a massive eight-year study that followed 30,000 men, the National Cancer Institute found that men who popped one off at least 21 times per month were one-third less likely to develop prostate cancer than men who averaged four or five monthly deposits. During the course of the study, 1,500 participants came down with prostate cancer, further clarifying the statistics.

Despite the clear results, the researchers weren’t sure why frequent ejaculations had an effect on prostate cancer. One of the main theories is that it keeps the passages open and prevents buildup. As the good folks at Johns Hopkins put it, all that release sort of “cleans house” up in the prostate, washing away fluids and tissue that could become infected or inflamed.

3Sexual Genetics

Most people picture the Stone Age as a rampaging sex frenzy peppered withraucous interbreeding between Neanderthals and Homo Everythings, the kind from which you wake up three million years later with a pounding headache and an acute sense of regret. While it’s true that Homo sapiens and Neanderthals had some liaisons between the sheets, it didn’t happen nearly as often as we once thought. Spicy or not, the study of ancient sex is giving us something else: clues to the movements of early humanity.

The genetic similarities between Neanderthals, Denisovans, and a recently discovered African ancestor are giving us a better idea of the migration of early humans. The most prevalent theory has long been the “Out of Africa” theory, which states that all modern humans started in Africa, moved east, then migrated north into the Eurasia region.

But based on the Neanderthal genome that was published in 2010 (along with gene testing from people living in various regions in Africa, Asia, and Europe), it’s beginning to look more complicated than that. Early humans may have migrated out of Africa, mixed with Neanderthals, then gone back to Africa carrying a trace of Neanderthal genetics, which then spread and replaced the native genes. To this day, about 4 percent of our genes were inherited from our Neanderthal ancestors.

2High-Pitched Voices

If you were asked to form a mental image of masculinity, what would you picture? Muscles? Beards? Deep Mufasa-esque voices echoing through the canyons of your own insecurity? According to research, most women feel the same way about what constitutes manliness, and those are the type of men most women look for in a mate. A deep voice is inextricably linked to higher testosterone levels, which is further associated with genetic strength—big men make better baby daddies.

However, this may be one of the few cases of a woman’s body telling her the wrong thing. As it turns out, men with higher-pitched voices pack a more potent punch. A paper published in 2011 found that although deeper-voiced men were considered more attractive, they invariably had lower concentrations of sperm than their less-attractive falsetto counterparts. The reason could be a simple evolutionary trade-off—masculine men have more chances to reproduce, so each try doesn’t necessarily need to be a winner. Men who don’t get that many chances need to throw everything they’ve got into it, because who knows when they’ll get another shot?

1Human Penile Spines

Penile spines, as you may know, are spines on the penis. Plenty of animals have them, from the humble field mouse to the proud buffy-tufted marmoset. They’re usually used to rake the inner walls of a female’s vagina after sex to induce ovulation or to prevent the female from mating with anyone else. As it turns out, humans have the genetic coding to create penile spines, too—at some point, we had prickly pickles just like everyone else in nature.

So what happened to them? A team of biologists at the Stanford School of Medicine set out to compare the DNA differences between humans and chimpanzees, one of our closest living relatives, and found a very small but very important deviation. While we still have the genes for penile spines, we lost the switch that activates those genes.

You see, DNA is made up of different types of genomes. Protein-coding genes are like factories—they make proteins that are assigned to different roles. Non-coding DNA strands are like light switches—they’re responsible for turning a protein-coding gene on or off at a specific time. In humans, the penile spine protein factory is still there, waiting to be flipped on, but the switch disappeared.

Why? The best guess is that mammals that mate with a lot of partners tend to have more prominent spines, while mammals that practice pair bonding have recessed spines—for example, chimp spines are more like bumps. At some point, it became more advantageous for humans to pair together for longer, and the spine switch was lost along the way. Love is a beautiful thing.

Read More