Posts

10Mumbai The populous coastal city of Mumbai, India, unsurprisingly features many beaches. Unfortunately, these beaches have been declared unfit for bathing. Large amounts of untreated sewage are discharged from Mumbai into its surrounding seas, leaving its shores extremely polluted. While the city has a sewage network, much waste ends up bypassing it, traveling directly into waterways. Slum residents’ practice of throwing waste directly into storm drains is cited as a primary contributor to this problem....

The majority of his work shows up overnight on billboards—illegally—like the now famous “Camel Kid” ads featuring a young Joe Camel offering cigarettes to kids, or the McDonald’s ads featuring an overweight Ronald McDonald and some not-quite-subtle comparisons to idol worship. But it’s with Ron English’s oil paintings that he really brings to life a unique mash-up between the classic and the modern. Sometimes the message is obvious; sometimes it’s a little more open to interpretation....

So today, we delve into the strange and unexplained events during some of the most famous space missions and the theories that have been put forward to explain them. 10 NASA Astronauts Reveals Encounter with Aliens NASA astronaut Leland Melvin had quite the out-of-this-world experience. During one of his space missions, Melvin and another astronaut spotted something “organic/alien-like” floating outside the payload bay. NASA tried to brush it off as just some ice that had broken off from a Freon hose, but Melvin described the object as “translucent, curved, and organic-looking....

There was more to Rome than art and philosophy, and there was more to Greece than sculpture and debate. Hollywood tends to focus more on the Parthenon and the Roman Senate than the following ten things. What you read below might make you very glad to have never set foot in the world of Socrates or Caesar. 10 Pater Familias, The Family Dictator The pater familias was the name of the leader of a Roman household, typically the eldest man or most noble birth in the family....

10Biggest Rocky Planet Kepler-10c This planet is about 2.3 times the size of Earth, which in and of itself isn’t that big—its size places it in the category scientists have dubbed “mini-Neptunes.” However, the planet has about 17 times as much mass as Earth, which is far more than anyone expected. The planet’s density proves that it is made up of rocks and other solids, which is a big deal. Normally, a planet of that size is a gas giant, like our own Jupiter and Saturn, because its gravity pulls in so much hydrogen and helium....

That is, of course, if you exclude the rare kid in school who could build almost anything with LEGO pieces. Fortunately for humanity’s unending pursuit of creativity, some of those kids grow up and go on to build even crazier LEGO structures than they did in school. The most surprising thing about these ten ridiculously elaborate LEGO structures isn’t that they’re complex (humanity has built some pretty complicated things in the past, as we all know) but that they were made with what’s commonly seen as just a kid’s toy....

10The DNC Trash Talk Their Own Donors One of the DNC’s primary functions is to fundraise for the Democratic Party. The party heavily relies on donations, so you might think they’d be grateful to their funders. No such luck. One email exchange refers to major Florida donor Stephen Bittel’s seat at a DNC fundraiser. DNC national finance director Jordan Kaplan angrily declares, “He doesn’t sit next to POTUS!” His deputy, Alexandra Shapiro, responds that “Bittel will be sitting in the sh—iest corner I can find....

10Nikola Tesla’s Short Flight Nikola Tesla undoubtedly had one of the most brilliant minds in the history of mankind, and his contributions to science greatly influenced the modern world that we enjoy today. He was also a bit of a mad scientist. Especially in his later years, Tesla gained a reputation for building—or at least claiming to build—totally impractical or simply bizarre contraptions, such as an earthquake machine or a death ray....

10Cadet Wallace The son of an RAF pilot who died of terrible war wounds in 1946, Colin Wallace (left in the photo above) was born into a fiercely loyalist Ulster Protestant family and grew up obsessed with the British military. From his school cadet unit, he moved onto the reserve Territorial Army, then the paramilitary Ulster Special Constabulary, before finally joining the regular army in the late ‘60s. In 1969, the army was deployed to deal with the worsening situation in Northern Ireland....

In centuries past, people knew a lot less about space, so they came up with significantly more elaborate possibilities about the aliens we might find there. 10Camille Flammarion’s Alien Afterlife French astronomer Camille Flammarion supported Percival Lowell’s theories about canals on Mars. When some scientists did an experiment suggesting Lowell was seeing an optical illusion, Flammarion repeated the experiment to try and prove them wrong. He believed Martians would be superior humans, due to how low a bar we’d set through our habit of war and how “we cannot even agree on a universal calendar....

During the Middle Ages and the early modern period, suspected werewolves were put on trial like witches and often tortured into confessing that they had received their wolfskins and special ointments from Satan. Many of these older werewolves were actually serial killers who possessed an animalistic ferocity. Others were rural lunatics who lived outside of their villages or towns. Either way, wolves and werewolves have caused major panics throughout history....

The role that unions have played in history should be noted, though. After all, thanks to their organizing, most of us are now entitled to a weekend (or two days off a week) and regulation of working hours, paid holidays, and a number of other workers’ rights. Sometimes, however, the clash of wills turns nasty, violent, and even fatal. 10 Canberra Protests Lead To Storming of Parliament1996 Australia had enjoyed 13 years of good union relations until summer 1996 when the government proposed to cut public services and, perhaps more importantly, reduce the powers of the unions themselves....

SEE ALSO: Top 10 Photos Of Incredibly Surreal Places on Earth 10Kirkjufell Kirkjufell Mountain is best known for the stunning pictures brought back by tourists. Located on the Snaefellsnes Peninsula in Iceland, there isn’t anything impressively significant about the mountain itself. It’s not the biggest mountain in Iceland, or the deadliest, and it can’t even claim to be one of the many volcanoes that have given Iceland the reputation of producing a third of all the basaltic lava in the history of the world....

10Greece And Rome Were Full Of Vegetarians Although it feels like a modern fad, vegetarianism has been around since at least 1847, when the Vegetarian Association opened its doors in London. But even they weren’t the first. Their inspiration came from someone way older and way wiser: Pythagoras. Aside from being an influential mathematician, Pythagoras had some very specific theories about religion. In his opinion, all living things had souls, so chowing down on a nice slice of steak was no better than outright murder....

— Ecclesiastes 8:15 When it comes to eating and drinking, Americans have no merrier holiday than Thanksgiving. But while that which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, what about a marshwort? Here now, the uncommon origins for ten common Thanksgiving words. 10 Mirth And Merriment Both mirth and merry come from an Old English word meaning “joy” or “pleasure.” These words are themselves derived from an older German root meaning “short-lasting....

While in some cases, judgement calls had to be made, at other times, businesses flat out rejected ideas and propositions that could’ve either saved them from eventual decay or propelled them to new heights. Here are ten opportunities some companies passed on, ultimately leading to their demise or a massive loss of revenue. 10 MySpace And Facebook MySpace was a pretty popular social media website made by an ambitious group of Friendster users back in 2003....

See Also: 10 Fascinating Things Blind People See 10 The Color Red Slows Your Perception Of Time Remember the first Matrix film? Remember how hyped we all were when we first encountered bullet time? Well get this: All you have to do to experience your own budget version is to see red. We don’t mean in the metaphorical, “getting angry” sense; we mean the literal color red. In 2011, a bunch of scientists in London took advantage of the overwhelming number of visitors to the Science Museum to organize a bizarre, large-scale experiment....

As we’ve demonstrated before on multiple occasions, there are few mysteries more fascinating than those involving unidentified people. Once again, here are some strange stories involving individuals whose true identity has never been uncovered. 10The Charfield Railway Disaster Children In the early morning hours of October 13, 1928, the village of Charfield, England became the site of a terrible tragedy. A mail train was traveling from Leeds to Bristol with 50 passengers aboard, but because of the thick fog, the crew failed to see a red signal before reaching Charfield railway station....

For most people, if they look around their house for things that could potentially kill them or other people, they may come to the conclusion that very few, if any, objects can be lethal. However, these ten stories will prove that even the most unlikely household items can be deadly. 10 A Coffee Mug When you drink your cup of coffee in the morning, it warms your hands and may even bring a smile to your face....

Since 2006, in France, an unknown gang of thieves have been emptying supermarket safes, using nothing more than a drill and a modified vacuum cleaner. The innovative group of bandits found a weakness in French supermarket Monoprix’s system of storing cash, and have been exploiting it ever since. Envelopes of cash are funneled into the safe via pneumatic suction tubes. Whereas breaching the safe itself might be considerably difficult, requiring explosives or safecracking, the thieves realized that if they just drilled into the delivery tubes near the safe and hooked up a powerful vacuum, they could suck the money out and get at it much more easily....