10 Giant Cheetah The Giant Cheetah (Acinonyx pardinensis) belonged to the same genus as our modern-day Cheetah (Acinonyx jubatus) and probably looked very similar, but it was much bigger. At around 120-150 kgs (265-331 lbs), it was as large as an African lioness and was able to take on larger prey than its delicate modern-day counterpart. The Giant Cheetah was also adapted to fast running, but there’s some debate on whether it could run as fast as the modern Cheetah due to its heavier weight, which, according to some, probably made it somewhat slower....

10 Arthur Bacot Arthur Bacot was a clerk living in London in the early 1900s, but his true passion was entomology. He published a number of works on the subject, and in 1910, he was asked by the Lister Institute and the Indian Plague Commission to work with fleas to discover how plague was transmitted. He went on to work with lice, experimenting with his personal flock. Bacot raised the lice in cardboard boxes and cloth bags suspended under his clothes, allowing them to feed off his blood....

10Robotic Sea Snake The Eelume underwater robot serves an extremely practical purpose—performing inspections and maintenance on deep sea rigs, a costly and dangerous endeavor. The current generation of underwater autonomous vehicles that perform these duties are bulky, slow, and difficult to maneuver, but not the Eelume. It looks and moves just like a sea snake and can quickly and safely reach places no vehicle can. While the machine is currently cabled, manufacturer Kongsberg Maritime—which recently achieved a bit of fame by finding a decades-old submerged monster prop in Loch Ness—is working toward making the machine’s power source internal, eliminating the need for a cable and thus any restraint on its range....

At Whiteface, Texas, in an area where UFOs had been reported for weeks in early 1975, police found a mutilated young calf that rancher Darwood Marshall had found lying within a 30-feet circle of flattened crops on March 10th. The animal’s neck was grotesquely twisted so that it pointed toward the sky, its tongue had been violently removed and its sexual organs were missing as well. A few days prior to this, Marshall had discovered a mutilated steer lying in a circle of scorched wheat....

Manly P. Hall stated clearly in his book, The Secret Teachings of All Ages, that the US was nothing less than a “Masonic experiment,” designed to allow Freemasons to “dominate the world.” Considering the world from which they were escaping—one in which religious dogma still influenced all aspects of life—whether their experiment was a noble one or not is perhaps based on your own perspective . . . 10 The US Constitution Is Based On Masonic Writings The Constitution of the United States has many links to the writings of British Freemason James Anderson in his 1723 book The Constitutions of the Free-Masons, which was edited and reprinted by Benjamin Franklin (himself a Freemason) eleven years later in 1734....

10World’s Littlest Skyscraper A visitor to Wichita Falls in Texas is likely to come across the Newby-McMahon Building, which became known as the “World’s Littlest Skyscraper.” The 12-meter (40 ft) building consists of four floors, with each floor taking up a space of only 11 square meters (118 ft2). The staircases alone occupy 25 percent of its interior space, making the whole structure barely inhabitable. Who was crazy enough to invest in such a building?...

10European Green Crabs And The Salt Marshes Of New England The European green crab is generally considered one of the most hated of all the invasive species, as it is known to be quite aggressive, eating just about everything it comes across. European green crabs have colonized coasts all over the world, but they have had a surprisingly positive impact in the New England area. Here, overfished salt marshes saw the cordgrass (Spartina alterniflora) nearly eliminated by marsh crabs, a native species of crab....

Some thrill killers, like Richard Loeb and Nathan Leopold, who killed 14-year-old Robert “Bobby” Franks just to commit the “perfect crime,” manage to define entire decades. Others, like the 10 on this list, have managed to fly mostly under the radar of popular memory. That doesn’t make their crimes any less sinister, however. These thrill killers murdered without mercy and gained emotional pleasure throughout. 10 Dartmouth College Murders Hanover, New Hampshire, a tiny college town, is breathtakingly beautiful, with verdant views of green mountains tucked away behind paved streets surrounded by red brick buildings....

But every army was made up of people. The soldiers who carried out every atrocity throughout history were just individuals with minds and lives of their own, people who thought they were doing the right thing. It can be hard to wrap your mind around how these people must have seen the world, but the letters they left yield clues. 10 The Last Letter Of A Japanese Kamikaze Pilot Before the Japanese kamikazes went off to their deaths, many wrote letters home to their families....

Charles Lindbergh, the first aviator to cross the Atlantic alone, his wife, Anne, and his son, 20-month-old Charles Jr., had moved to a home in rural New Jersey to escape the press coverage that followed them everywhere. The power couple and their baby were like the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge today—everyone on both sides of the Atlantic knew and loved them. Everyone knew their baby as well. Yet before they had even finished moving in, the Lindberghs’ child was kidnapped, and a media circus like no other descended upon them....

10The Day The Clown Cried Jerry Lewis once made a film called The Day the Clown Cried. The film was never released but still became a hot topic among movie buffs. It tells the story of a German clown who is forced to lead Jewish children to the gas chamber after he mocks Hitler. One actor who saw it said it was “drastically wrong.” Lewis himself said that people would think it was either “better than Citizen Kane or the worst piece of s—t that anyone ever loaded on the projector....

10The Way You Lie Impacts Your Memory Your ability to remember your lies may depend on how you lie. Researchers at Louisiana State University studied two types of lies—false descriptions and false denials—to see how we record them in memory and later retrieve them. False descriptions are detailed lies we make up to report an event that didn’t happen. False denials are usually brief lies in which we declare that something isn’t true....

After a couple of blissfully massacre-free weeks, this week opened with not one but two separate jerkwads deciding to take out their problems on the world by killing a bunch of people. Depressing as these two events were, the news wasn’t all doom and gloom. Elsewhere we had new velvet revolutions, scientific advances, and big steps toward the federal legalization of marijuana. 10 A Shocking Mass Killing Hit Toronto This column has noted before the recent tendency of morons to use vehicles as their weapons of choice....

This week was the Groundhog Day of news reporting. After a roundup last week where we covered a devastating earthquake in Mexico and a tropical storm laying waste to the Caribbean, both stories resurfaced once more with a vengeance. There was deja vu elsewhere as well. We can only hope next week’s roundup is significantly different and significantly less tragic. 10 Mexico Was Hit By Its Deadliest Earthquake In Decades On Friday, September 8, a massive earthquake struck off the coast of Mexico, devastating the country’s south and killing nearly 100 people....

Hurricane Harvey was the major story of last week. Now we’re hoping that it wasn’t just the opening act for an even more devastating headliner. Also, President Trump wants 800,000 people out of the US, and a horrifying situation is developing in Myanmar. 10 President Trump Makes A Deal President Trump’s time in office has been considerably shorter on deal-making and winning than he promised during his campaign, but this week, it was announced that he made a 90-day deal to raise the debt ceiling—with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, Representative Nancy Pelosi, and the Democrats....

Contrary to what you learned in school, at church, and during Christmastime, there is no evidence to suggest that Jesus was born on the 25th of December—or that he was visited by three kings at his birth. December 25 coincides with a number of Pagan festival days across Europe, and was probably intended to replace the Roman Saturnalia festival. The Bible also states that there were an undisclosed number of wise men who, having “seen his star in the east”, came to adore him....

In such instances, the truth can leave us fervently wringing our hands in consternation because of a loved one’s perplexing and sometimes infuriating actions. 10 A Darkly Elegant Solution “I’m going on the kind of a trip where you never come back,” wrote Dennis Rarick. It was 1976, and the highly esteemed mathematician and computer scientist had succumbed to depression. Nagging despair had driven him to bid his father farewell in a distressing message....

10 The Agreement That Started it All Unless you’re deeply familiar with Middle East history, you probably haven’t heard of the Sykes–Picot Agreement. In 1916, the European powers met to divide Ottoman Asia among themselves. Although the meeting’s decisions wouldn’t come into effect until the end of World War I, they sowed the seeds for the modern Middle East. Britain and France received carte blanche to create new states in the region as they saw fit—a power that would have devastating consequences....

But what about its history? How did we get here? How did heroin become the drug that everyone considers essentially the worst of the worst? This list seeks to break down the history of heroin into ten parts to form a narrative which tells the tale of its history, from its creation to the present day. 10 From Opium To Heroin Heroin (also known as diamorphine) is synthesized from morphine, a potent opiate alkaloid which is derived from the poppy plant....

Top 10 Famous People Who Never Existed 10 Mavis Beacon Plenty of people reading this will be thinking “Of course, she’s a mascot, who thought she was real? I mean everyone knows Betty Crocker isn’t real, right?” Well, that would be the people who are reading and thinking “Whaaaaat?! Noooooo!” Mavis Beacon, the lady who adorns the packaging for popular typing software, is another fabrication from the corporate world with a racially-charged past (Like ‘Uncle Ben’ and ‘Aunt Jemima’)....