Beyond their works, their lives can be filled with love, romance, depravity, and debauchery. How many literary figures can honestly fit all these amazing and wild things into their lives? Actually, there is one man who was all these things. He was salacious, decadent, sexual, and literarily risque, and the world loved him. Born in Ireland and taking over the globe one grandiose moment at a time, Oscar Wilde rocked the world with his lush lifestyle, his decadent take on life, and his sordid and passionate love affairs....

The arctic area is located in the North Pole region and has a natural melting cycle during which almost half of the ice shelf melts away in summer, only to freeze again in winter and come back to its original size. During winter, the arctic ice shelf has a surface almost equal to that of the US. However, an unsettling study has recently revealed that the 3.5 km thick ice shelf from Greenland is melting away so fast that half of it could disappear by the end of the century....

Luckily, not every terrorist is a professional. Most of them aren’t even inspired amateurs. Go hunting among the lower tiers of jihadists, ultranationalists, and extremists, and you’ll find wannabe killers so incompetent and idiotic that the only sane response is to laugh your ass off at their exploits. 10 The Kangaroo Bomb Plot Although Australia has suffered at the hands of Islamic terrorists, it (thankfully) hasn’t yet experienced its own San Bernardino or 7/7....

When an unidentified body is found, a skull can unlock the secrets of that person’s appearance, even after decomposition and the passage of time. Police have been using composite sketches to identify suspects and victims for around 100 years, but forensic sculptors take the recreation of faces to another level. Forensic sculptors will study the skull and measure the tissue depth to craft a replica of the subject’s face. The portrait, usually made of clay, will also include quirks such as broken bones and dentistry....

10 Theodemocracy When Mormon prophet Joseph Smith ran for president in 1844, he advanced a new political philosophy in his platform: “I go emphatically, virtuously and humanely, for a theodemocracy, where God and the people hold the power to conduct the affairs of men in righteousness.” The idea of theodemocracy is that the best form of sociopolitical government would be a synthesis of the wills of God and the people. Proponents have argued it was a natural state of affairs both on Earth and in Heaven....

Of course, life isn’t so simple. Whether they’re built on a noble dream, a grand vision, or pure craziness, utopias have a way off going off the rails. The cities below might not all have turned into utter disasters, but they all failed at their self-stated goals spectacularly. 10China’s Deserted Desert Oasis Dubai is an incredible city. Not so long ago, it was just an arid patch of desert, inhabited by only a few traders....

Here are ten famous examples of fakes that turned out to be real. 10 Rembrandt’s Self Portrait Rembrandt is considered by some to be the king of selfies, or self-portraits, having painted nearly 100 over his lifetime. Now it turns out that a self-portrait owned by the National Trust in the United Kingdom, long thought to be a copy, is actually the real thing. Like other works considered to be fake, it had been left in storage for a long time until it caught the interest of an expert....

10 Ronan Keating Before hitting it big internationally, Ronan Keating became a European sensation as the leader of the Irish band Boyzone, which debuted in 1993. In 2002, he began his solo career, working with the Bee Gees’ artist Barry Gibbs and musician Bryan Adams. Keating wasn’t only told he couldn’t sing, but he was also nearly dropped from Boyzone. A producer demanded the band dump him because he “can’t sing....

The survivors are protected in modern times but were not always so safe. Several escaped at the last minute from being nothing more than the memory of a great idea. Others never would have existed at all had forward-thinking individuals not intervened on their behalf. 10The Eiffel TowerPetitioned For Destruction The French people were not always in love with their most famous building. In fact, many still aren’t, but public opinion has shifted in favor of the iconic Tour Eiffel....

However, sometimes, you hear about the silliest little personality quirks of famous people. It brings you back down to Earth, reminding you that they are really just people like you in the end. These notable individuals may have incredible wealth, reputations, or similar traits. But they also have very funny things about them that will make you laugh and forget for a moment that you think of them as above you....

Misconceptions and myths aside, the Romani remain one of the most fascinating ethnic groups in history. 10 The Huge Debate About Where They Came From The Romani’s origins are shrouded in mystery. In the early days of their travels, it seemed that they magically appeared on the Continent. That alone may have sparked the Europeans’ feelings of fear and mystery about the Romani. Noted professors theorized that the Romani originally made a mass exodus from India in the fifth century....

10Cows Always Face North Or South While Eating Most people don’t give much thought to grazing cows, but when a team of scientists went through thousands of Google Earth’s satellite images of cows, they stumbled upon a detail that we have missed for millennia: Cows will stand along the Earth’s magnetic poles—facing north and south—whenever they’re grazing or resting. The pattern remained consistent regardless of wind or other factors, and nobody’s quite sure why....

Death is a fact of life that everyone will go through one day and the following are the 10 most fascinating stages one’s body experiences immediately following death if the body is exposed to a natural decay and not preserved by processes such as embalming. Most of these stages are known by studying university controlled “body farms” used by forensic anthropologists in an attempt to further knowledge in the forensic field....

Polaris is the North Star; most people know this, but what they may not know is that, due to a process known as precession, it wasn’t always the North Star. As recently as 12,000 BCE, it was Vega — and sometime around the year 5,200 CE, it will be a totally different star. The night sky, as you look at it at any given moment, is always changing, and though the changes are sometimes imperceptible to Earth-based observers, the sky will never be exactly the same again as that point in time at which you just observed it....

10 The Exorcist (1973) The 1973 horror classic The Exorcist caused quite a stir amongst cinemagoers upon release based on its merits alone. But the strange incidents surrounding the film, including several on-set injuries, a fire, a motorcycle accident, and a lightning strike on a church, have also led to many labeling it as cursed. People have also linked the film to several deaths, the most notable being that of actors Jack MacGowran and Vasiliki Maliaros, who both passed away before the film hit the big screen....

Genetically modified foods are a big source of debate these days. Some don’t want anything to do with modern GMOs, while others are all for them. However, a lot of people don’t realize that many of today’s fruits and vegetables wouldn’t exist without careful selective breeding. In fact, the original versions of these popular plants might be downright unrecognizable to the modern public. 10 Carrots The earliest known cultivated carrots were first grown in the 10th century in Asia Minor and Persia....

But there was once a turbulent time that was just as perilous as the one we’re living in today. In the 1970s and ’80s, the most feared man in the world—Carlos the Jackal—was behind numerous terror attacks throughout Europe. 10 He Was Born To Be A Terrorist Many revolutionaries claim that they’re doing what they were born to do, but few have the lineage of Venezuelan-born Carlos the Jackal. Jose Altagracia Ramirez Navas, Carlos’s father, was a successful lawyer with strict Marxist beliefs....

10 Dog-Wolf-Coyote Dogs have sex with lots of stuff, including pillows, tables, and human legs. So it isn’t surprising that they might have sex with other animals that look like dogs, such as wolves and coyotes. From an evolutionary standpoint, dogs split ways with gray wolves only 15,000 years ago and from coyotes at least one million years before that. However, interbreeding is still possible, at least sometimes. All of the possible two-species hybrids have been documented: dog-wolves, dog-coyotes, and wolf-coyotes....

While it’s likely that Odysseus lived only in the imagination of the poet Homer, there is at least a slight possibility that the Greek hero may have been real. And archeological discoveries like the site of Wilusa (Troy)—and possibly Ancient Ithaca—suggest to many modern scholars that the Homeric epics are actually the preserved memories of a very real war. If there’s even a shred of truth to the legend of Odysseus, then our boy sure got screwed....

10The Suffragette Movement The suffragette movement is seen as a milestone in women’s rights (or human rights, for that matter). It was a 19th-century movement for women to collectively stand up in many places around the world and demand rights equal to those of men, particularly the right to vote. In the US, the fight for women’s rights started even before the Civil War, but it wouldn’t be until the early 20th century that it would actually start to pick up some steam....