10Robert McLaren Removed His Own Appendix In The Jungle By 1942, Robert “Jock” McLaren had already escaped from a prison camp in Singapore, fought for weeks with local guerrillas, been betrayed to the Japanese by a double-crossing comrade, and been interned in a high-security prison camp in Borneo. Books have been written about less. But McLaren was just getting started. McLaren had been a teenage cavalryman during the First World War, before immigrating to Australia and settling down to a quiet life in Queensland....

SEE ALSO: 10 Truly Creepy Demonic Hauntings The horror Jackson’s characters witnessed is a work of fiction. However, the following families all experienced something that felt very much real to them. These families were driven from their own homes, leaving behind a legacy of pure fear. 10 The Smurl Family When Janet and Jack Smurl first moved into their family home on Chase Street in West Pittson, Pennsylvania, they knew it was a fixer-upper....

These failed books are due to hubris, lack of editing, disease, old age, and drug use. Some of them may have been doomed to failure from the start. To look on the bright side, all of these authors achieved enormous success, writing some of the most famous books of the last few centuries. However, that is not the focus of this article! Instead, we will look together at the greatest failures of ten famous writers....

The genus Pseudacteon, of which 110 species have been documented, is a parasitoid of the ant in South America. Members of Pseudacteon reproduce by laying eggs in the thorax of the ant. The first instar larvae migrate to the head. The larvae develop by feeding on the hemolymph, muscle tissue, and nervous tissue in the head. Eventually, the larvae completely devour the ant’s brain, causing it to do nothing but wander aimlessly for approximately two weeks....

10 The Israeli Complex On the banks of Nahal Guvrin sits the ghostly traces of Canaanite worship. The site of Tel Burna produced scorched animal bones and sacrificial artifacts, prompting Israeli archaeologists to credit the 3,300-year-old temple complex to a cult. The vast site was used as their home and religious center. Since there is no neon sign with the honored god’s name, experts are casting their vote for either the Canaanite storm god Baal or war goddess Anat....

People love to laugh, and some scientists love to study it. Why not? It’s a fascinating subject. It’s frequently touted as the best medicine, yet there exists a wealth of anecdotal accounts of people dying while doing it. Collected here are but a few examples of scientists’ findings on one of life’s more pleasant activities. SEE ALSO: 10 Things That Will Make You Die Laughing 10 Babies and Chimps Fact: Babies Laugh Like Chimps Chimpanzees are considered to be our closest living relatives, so of course humans and chimps have much in common....

In this list, we look deep into the myth of the Mothman and examine its origins, which may be older than you think. 10 Mothman in the News The Mothman made the paper after the first reported sighting. On Wednesday, November 16, 1966, the Point Pleasant Register featured a story with the title, “Couples see man-sized bird…creature…something!” This was the first time the Mothman made an appearance in the media, but it wouldn’t be the last....

Although there are other men who didn’t get the recognition they deserved, we’re going to concentrate today on the largely unknown women of space. They not only had to battle the politics of science, they had to fight to be there in the first place. Despite the obstacles, these 10 women made significant contributions to our understanding of space and deserve to be more widely known. 10 Katherine Johnsonb. 1918 Born in West Virginia in 1918, Katherine Johnson excelled in school, entering high school at age 10 and college at age 15....

Some authors find inspiration through their own experiences, though, that are much stranger than fiction. In the following cases, those experiences entailed crimes such as robbery, torture, and even murder. Here are ten authors whose crimes are more spellbinding than fiction. 10 Blake Leibel Blake Leibel is a Canadian comic book creator, producer, screenwriter, and graphic novelist. Leibel, along with Daniel Quantz, R.J. Ryan, and David Marquez, co-wrote the graphic novel Syndrome....

Three years after the institution of the Code, director Leo McCarey’s screwball comedy The Awful Truth provided what amounted to “an instruction kit” by which to circumvent the Code’s restrictions and prohibitions. To skirt the guidelines, “lines were rewritten, dishabille scenes adroitly shuffled, and anatomies piquantly draped.” Other films used these and other techniques to evade the Code. Overall, the tactics were quite successful in most cases, and the filmmakers were able to avoid government censorship by adhering to (or appearing to adhere to) the industry’s own voluntary policing of its products....

10 Early Glimpse Of Supernovae Astronomers have witnessed plenty of supernovae after the fact. Recently, they caught two within the initial stages of dissolution and glimpsed the shock wave thrown by a dying sun. Both stars were red supergiants, elderly stars at the end of their tenure. The smaller of the two still dwarfs our own middle-aged Sun, with a radius 270 times greater. The second, girthier specimen boasts a radius 460 times greater than our relatively puny solar parent....

10They Explode If a military sadist that gives kindergarten names was ever allowed to design a plant, the sandbox tree would be it. Poison sits in nearly every part of the leaves, bark, and pumpkin-shaped seeds. The entire 30-meter (100 ft) trunk deters tree huggers with its closely packed thorns. And the seeds explode with such force that people and animals can easily get injured. While this is a good way for the tree to spread its seeds up to 40 meters (130 ft) away, the ejection speed is what makes it so lethal....

A broad range of art forms have been used for this very purpose. There’s no doubt you’ve heard the romantic tale of the Taj Mahal, a mausoleum built by an emperor for his favorite wife who died giving birth to their 14th child. It’s both achingly stunning and depressing. A teardrop glistening on the cheek of time, as the poets say. This domed symbol of love, however, isn’t the only grand romantic gesture made through art....

Today, he and his family—the infamous Borgias—are viewed as one of the most evil organizations in all of history. And yet, this family is responsible for some of the greatest contributions to human society. There are people and works of art that changed society so drastically that a world without them is almost impossible to imagine—and we owe every one of them to history’s most evil Pope. 10 Machiavelli’s The Prince Machiavelli’s The Prince is one of the most famous political treatises ever written....

Known for their torturous effects, these deadly substances spark a mixture of fear, revulsion, and a little bit of Cold War excitement. Here are ten grisly incidents which illustrate their lethal powers. 10 Skull Valley Sheep KillUnited States The Dugway Proving Ground in Utah had been used for trialing hundreds of nerve agent sprays without any reported incident. That all changed on March 13, 1968, when 1,211 liters (320 gal) of the nerve agent VX were sprayed over a target area....

In some instances, however, rapists have more to fear from their victims or the relatives of their victims. Rape victims and their family members have sometimes taken the law into their own hands and dealt with the rapist in the most unimaginable of ways. Here are ten such instances of vengeance against rapists. 10 Man Murders Wife’s Rapist, Then Cooks And Eats His Penis In November 2015, an Indonesian man named Rudi Efendi murdered a man he suspected had raped his wife....

10Thomas Jefferson Was A Pioneer Of American Archaeology By now, the many talents and accomplishments of Thomas Jefferson have been well documented, but many people are still only aware of a select few. Truth be told, Jefferson’s interests were very varied and covered not only politics but also science, music, architecture, and linguistics. One other area where Jefferson’s influence was felt was archaeology. He used his knowledge of Native American languages in order to better understand the culture, but when he found a tribal burial mound located near his home in Virginia, he decided to satiate his curiosity further by digging it up....

10Planet X In the early 1800s, astronomers knew of all the major planets in our solar system except Neptune. They also knew Newton’s laws of motion and gravitation, which they could use to predict where the planets would move. When these predictions were compared to their actual observed movements, many noticed that Uranus wasn’t going where it was predicted to go. French astronomer Alexis Bouvard wondered if an unseen planet’s gravity was tugging Uranus off course....

10 A Stephen King Book Inspired A School Hostage Crisis In 1988, Jeffrey Lyne Cox was a bright, friendly high school senior—at least, he appeared to be. Inside, he was tormented by a broken family and unrequited love. The previous year, Cox had read a book called Rage by Richard Bachman (a nom de plume for Stephen King), which is about a high school student who kills a teacher and takes his classmates hostage....

True or not, the story does show how valuable just a little bit of information can be in a situation where one might think that the number of troops, the quality of the weapons, the cunning of the generals, or the lay of the terrain may feature more in deciding the outcome of a battle. Given the outcome of a whole war could have come down to the knowledge of a single mountain path, here are 10 much larger information leaks that changed the entire world....