The history of the empire was also well-documented compared to the Dark Ages that followed—but those histories do tend to focus on the earlier emperors. Yet some incredible stories came after them: the man who reunited a broken empire, the teenagers who ruled Rome, and the man who bought the imperial throne at auction. Here are ten fascinating stories of Roman emperors after the first 12 Caesars reigned. 10 CaracallaAD 198–217 Caracalla and his brother Geta provide a wonderful historical tale of sibling rivalry....

Fact: Black wolves don’t occur naturally. A 2008 study at Stanford University found that the mutation responsible for black fur occurs only in dogs, so black wolves are the result of gray wolves breeding back with domestic canines. The mutation is a dominant trait, like dark hair in humans, and is passed down to the majority of offspring. It is not entirely clear what benefit black fur has for the animals; they do not seem to be more successful hunters, but do show a marked improvement in immunity to certain infections....

10 Crazy Drugs You Don’t Know (And Don’t Want To) 10 Riverside County Blood Bath While California may have legalized marijuana in 2018, a black market continues to thrive, along with the associated violence. On September 7, Riverside County police arrived at a residence in Aguanga and discovered six people dead from gunshots. An unidentified female victim was alive and rushed to the hospital, where she later died. Investigators discovered the signs of an illegal pot growing operation at the property on the edge of Cleveland National Forest....

10 Builders Of The Adytum The Builders of the Adytum, commonly referred to as BOTA, is a magical organization based out California and has growing branches throughout the world. Founded by master mason Paul Foster Case, BOTA is dedicated to the idea of spiritually uplifting humanity via the Ageless Wisdom, ancient magical knowledge written by God into nature. Their teachings are based around the spiritual potency of Esoteric Tarot, astrology, alchemy, and the Qabalah....

And they’re partly right. Funny online memes are like digital genes, carrying information from person to person, being altered and progressed as they go. Except instead of carrying the blueprints for life, they carry doges, Shreks, and Sean Beans. Sometimes, memes—be they pictures, hashtags, challenges, or not digital at all—have had a huge cultural impact. Here are ten such memes, those that were so dank they changed history. 10 Pooh Bear The meme—in this case, really any image of Pooh Bear—is heavily censored in China....

10 Seattle Raises Minimum Wage, Makes People Poorer Back in the halcyon days of 2016 when people didn’t think Bernie Sanders was an insane old communist, progressives in the US decided that raising the federal minimum wage was both workable and good. That didn’t happen, of course. But still, some cities forged ahead with their desire to make everyone rich by the simple economic masterstroke of paying everyone more. To the shock of everyone except those with a basic grasp of economics, it turns out that employers forced to pay their employees $13 per hour will actually reduce the number of hours worked by those employees to maintain their wage bill at a manageable level....

Long before the 1970’s and the platform shoes, Japanese maiko (apprentice geisha) had been wearing Okobo sandals or clogs. The reason for wearing these very high platform shoes was not solely for fashion, but also for very practical reasons. If you are wearing a very expensive kimono that hangs all the way to your feet, you do not want to get mud on it when you walk outside. Okobo are made of one piece of solid wood forming the sole....

Death Ratio: 27 out of 100,000 Making up 12% of the total deaths a year, with 905 on average, it also makes up the bottom of our list due to the huge amount of workers it employs. Truckers are highly trained before they can be put out on the road, and for good reason. Passenger vehicles get confused and scared around large trucks, leading to reckless driving that forces the truck driver to use evasive skills that can end up causing them to crash....

Address: 3625 Highland Ave., Niagara Falls, New York, 14305, United States The name may sound boring, but this isn’t just any museum of scientific interest. At the Niagara Science Museum, you can see a vast array of historic and antique scientific instruments but they are all to be found in perfectly reconstructed historically accurate laboratories. The museum covers science from the period of 1870 – 1930 so it is, in a way, showing science at the heyday of the industrial revolution....

Original title: You Sane Men, easier to find as Bloodworld. The problem with Janifer is that he was, well, a hack. He wrote professionally for fifty years. Pick up any given Janifer book and you will probably be disappointed. Although, he did garner a Hugo nomination in 1960 as the co-author (under the pseudonym Mark Phillips) with Randall Garrett for Brain Twister, a novel that thankfully did not win. However, in the blind-pig-finds-an-acorn model, Janifer knocked the ball out of the park with Bloodworld (to mix a couple of metaphors)....

John and Anne Darwin, a couple who lived beyond their means, had acquired debt of tens of thousands of pounds. They decided to escape their debt by faking John’s death and collecting the insurance money. On March 12, 2002, John left in his canoe and disappeared. A large search ensued and, on March 22, 2002, John’s wrecked canoe was found. In February, 2003, he was declared legally dead, allowing his wife to cash in on the insurance policy and pay off their debt....

Noble birth often meant a dramatic increase in the odds of mental illness, thanks to their special brand of elitist inbreeding. It also often meant that whatever decrees came from the mouths of those inbred rulers was law. Despite all the exaggerated tales of babbling, syphilitic kings and malicious rumors meant to weaken the influence of rivals, many stories of insane monarchs were quite true. In many cases, there are enough congruent eyewitness reports to essentially confirm the deeds and misdeeds of these eccentric sovereigns, including some of the most bizarre, depraved, and horrific vices in history....

List: 10 More Terrifying and Mysterious Creatures This list by “Stephen King” from November 2010 takes a look at some creepy creatures upon which myths are built. Do they exist? For some, they are just as real as the countless cryptozoological textbooks based on their elusive likenesses. Most curious examples: Owlman, the Jersey Devil, and Pope Lick Monster (and many more that sound like comic book superheroes/names of sports teams)....

The Fifth Element, directed by Luc Besson, is one of the most sumptuously designed science fiction films ever made. While the film contains many aliens and strange technologies, the ZF-1 gun is pure human ingenuity. It is a weapon for a person who cannot choose weapons. The ZF-1’s most impressive feature is the ability to fire a tracer round into a target, after which every bullet which the gun fires (no matter in what direction) will hit the first target....

Jan Henrik Schön (pictured on the left), a researcher at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey, had five papers published in Nature and seven in the journal Science between 1998 and 2001, dealing with advanced aspects of electronics. The discoveries were abstruse, but he was seen by many of his peers as a rising star. In 2002, a committee found that he had made up his results on at least 16 occasions, resulting in the public embarrassment of his colleagues, his employer, and the editorial staffs of both the journals that accepted his results....

Aside from explosions, the absence of that medium also means we cannot hear the sound of any astronomical object traveling through space. However, luckily for us, sound is a mechanical wave and we can record the frequency of those waves and convert them into sound, just as we have done with the planets, moons, comets and stars on this list. Please grab your headphones because you are in for a surprise....

Davy Jones’ “pet,” the Kraken is a giant octopus/squid which will come at Davy Jones’ beckoning to exact the cursed captain’s wrath upon those who earn it. The Kraken is so awesome, that it is never fully shown in the films, only its giant tentacles, appearing from below, captured ships to rip the galleons apart and drag them to their watery doom. However, the Kraken turns out to be mortal, as it somehow turns up dead in the third film....

While it might be a stretch to say that watching comedy shows is educational, sometimes we can learn some really important life lessons while having a laugh. Here are 10 things you might have learned from watching comedy shows on TV. 10 Comedy Acts That Went Horribly Wrong 10 It’s OK to Be a Woman I Love Lucy was a ground-breaking show in more ways than one. For starters, it was her show, and her real-life husband, Desi Arnaz, who played her on screen husband, was always only a supporting act....

The world of spit can get a little weird when doctors use it as a vaccine or modify it to become the world’s most powerful painkiller. In the darkest corner of sputum science, a new and dangerous life-form paddles around in human gob and people make a lucrative trade selling their own diseased samples on the black market. 10 Shape-Shifting Frog Spit Many cards and cartoons depict frogs snapping up flies with their tongues....

Following an arrest, they use a particular strategy to reveal the serial killer’s true personality so this can be on display during the trial. Douglas and Ressler were the first criminal profilers to interview some of the most notorious serial killers in history including Edmund Kemper, David Berkowitz, Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, Donald Harvey, and Gary Ridgway. Interviewing serial killers requires many years of training and preferably a psychology degree, however, there are some tips the experts have shared over the years about how to get inside the mind of a serial killer....