As is often the case, this event came about as much through chance as by any careful planning. If a few different choices had been made by either the Soviet Union or the United States, the history books could have looked very different. 10 Khrushchev Just Wanted A Missile When Nikita Khrushchev became the Russian leader in 1953, he had a problem. The Cold War was at its height, and the Soviet Union felt very vulnerable....

10 The Daily Temple Ritual To keep the universe running smoothly, a small army of holy men tended to the gods’ every whim with daily offerings across Egypt’s many temples. Each temple housed a particular god in the form of an enshrined statue that had gone through an “opening of the mouth” ritual to imbue it with the quintessence of a deity’s spiritual entity. These gods received the rock star treatment from priests of varying rank and allegiance who made daily offerings of food, drink, and gifts....

While that makes for a great view, divers also face life-threatening situations like toxic streams and whales in a manhandling mood. Then there are the heroes who risk themselves by saving everything from the world’s biggest fish to one of its most venomous. 10 An Adorable Carnivorous Blob When diver Emeric Benhalassa recently visited a diving site near Bali, he filmed a cute blob. The creature looked alien, but scientists have known about them for a while....

10Thomas Huxley vs. Richard Owen During his career, Richard Owen had his fair share of notable achievements, among them coining the word “dinosaur” and founding the Natural History Museum in London. However, his relationships with his peers had always been strenuous. Nowadays, Owen is regarded as jealous and petty toward his colleagues, even plagiarizing their works on occasion. His rivalry with Gideon Mantell was probably his most bitter feud, but his rivalry with Thomas Huxley was much more beneficial for the scientific community....

This cheese was first made roughly 2000 years ago in the countryside surrounding Rome. Most of it was made in the region of Latium in Italy. In 1884, the city council began to prohibit the salting of cheese inside shops, so most of the makers moved to Sardinia. It’s made exclusively from Sardinian sheep. To make it, the cheese is curdled, salted and then pressed into molds, to which it sets....

While the skeleton trade boomed, other gruesome jobs were created to support it. Some collected dead bodies from the poorhouses, and one could get quite wealthy collecting bodies from foreign battlefields. Hospital janitors made extra money picking up body parts that had been sawed off from the living, and there may have even been a bit of grave robbing for the more daring ghouls. 10 Bone Oils Maitre Mazzur was the only person in the United States with this special skill set....

10First Suggestion Stars Are Like The Sun People have mapped the stars for thousands of years, but for most of that time nobody had any clue what they were. The idea that stars were the same as the Sun, but a really, really long way away, didn’t turn up until the 16th century. In 1584, the Italian Philosopher Giordano Bruno came up with a whole bunch of theories that we now know to be true....

Luckily, certain groups have been able to make awful things sound surprisingly appealing. Some of their most blatant examples are also some of the most amusing. 10The Pentagon’s Neutron Bomb The Pentagon realized long ago that selling people on thermonuclear weapons requires some changes in lingo. In the late 1970s, the Pentagon was trying to get Senate funding to develop the neutron bomb. Instead of actually calling it a neutron bomb, it was termed an “enhanced radiation device....

However, despite the best-laid plans, things sometimes go wrong. Often, we make simple mistakes like leaving something at home, booking the wrong hotel, or missing transportation connections. Occasionally, mishaps occur that are beyond our control, and we often see tourists taking silly risks to get the perfect Instagram photo. But a few travelers have recently had holiday mishaps that were so funny that they not only made the news but also went viral on social media....

The Annals of Improbable Research is a satirical magazine that publishes news of real but peculiar goings-on in the world of science. Each year, they celebrate individuals who have made a mark with their strange and humorous scientific research. This lighthearted award is designed to “honor achievements that make people laugh, then think,” and its ceremony is held at Harvard University every September. Here are ten hilariously weird winners of the Ig Nobel award....

10 Murder In Balcombe Tunnel On June 27, 1881, coin dealer Isaac Gold was traveling from London to his home in Brighton. He was sitting in a first-class smoking compartment when he was joined by a man named Percy Lefroy Mapleton. When the train reached Preston Park Station in Brighton, Mapleton got out. He looked completely distraught and was covered in blood. He had just murdered Gold and dumped his body out of the moving train....

10 Structurally Damaged House A retired couple’s lavish £725,000 dream home developed ceiling-to-floor-length cracks in its interior walls and equally long fissures in its exterior walls. As a result, the Cambridgeshire, England, residence has become so dangerous that, only five years after its construction, its insurers insisted that the “death trap” be demolished and completely rebuilt. Having been built on shifting clay that has swelled with water and lifted the house, the residence threatens to come “tumbling down....

However, ducks are not as cute and innocent as they first seem. There’s a dark side to these animals that many people do not know about or even suspect. Ducks are sometimes cruel and violent. They have bizarre body parts and strange behaviors that you don’t often see in other animals. For too long, ducks have been revered as harmless and silly. For too long, the public has been ignorant of the dark tendencies of our friendly neighborhood ducks....

Things quickly got out of control. Leopold’s harsh policies to keep people working turned into a brutal reign of mutilations and terror that led to the deaths of an estimated 10 million people in a few short years. Life in the Congo Free State was a waking nightmare, the likes of which the world had never seen. Hopefully, we will never see it again. 10 Thirty-Two Towns Were Destroyed While Mapping The Congo King Leopold II hired a British explorer, Henry Morton Stanley, to help him establish the Congo Free State....

Sadly, these nightmares aren’t just relegated to the movie screen. Sometimes, they happen in real life. 10 Eddie M. Herrera On May 10, 2014, 17-year-old Jacqueline Gomez and her date, 18-year-old Eddie Herrera, attended their prom at a hotel in Houston, Texas. After the prom, the couple went to a hotel room where they drank whiskey and took hydrocodone pills before engaging in what Herrera said was consensual rough sex....

10 Peter Jackson’s A Nightmare on Elm Street 6: The Dream Lover Soon after releasing his first feature-length film, Bad Taste (1987), Peter Jackson took a stab at writing a script for the sixth Nightmare on Elm Street movie. The franchise had lost its way, leaning harder into comedy than horror, and Jackson, along with co-writer Danny Mulheron, planned to tackle this problem head-on in their meta revamp, subtitled The Dream Lover....

10 Bruce Gordon Trained A Pet Polar Bear In 1757, Bruce Gordon was thrown overboard when his ship was smashed between two icebergs. He landed on a sheet of ice and watched as his crewmates disappeared into the ice floe. When he found his ship, it was floating upside down. Polar bears were feeding on the corpses of his shipmates. Gordon sneaked aboard and lived on the upside-down ship, collecting supplies and feeding off the rations....

10 Radiolarians The humble, single-celled radiolarian is renowned for its ability to form intricate skeletons with radial symmetry. Their spiny, snowflake-like armor is made from lattices of opaline silica and features structural complexity bordering on the anomalous. Radiolarians of this kind have existed for at least 600 million years, and slightly simpler variants existed long before then. Influential biologist and illustrator Ernst Haeckel spent years documenting thousands of radiolarian forms. In the late 19th century, he published a series of accurate (and therefore painstakingly detailed) illustrations of them in the hopes of popularizing the theory of evolution as an explanation for the complexity of organisms....

When hurricanes break through the coastline and wreak havoc on people’s lives, human nature also gets uncovered. Sometimes, people don’t react exactly how you’d expect—and some of the facts around these disasters aren’t at all what you’d imagine. 10 Walmart Customers Stock Up On Pop-Tarts And Beer When Hurricane Frances was about to hit Florida, Walmart jumped into action. They had mountains of data on their customers and on every aspect of their lives....

Yet 50 years is a long time, and during that period, the writers have made some questionable decisions—the sort of decisions that leave viewers shifting uncomfortably on their sofas, trying desperately not to catch one another’s eye. 10 The Giant Penis Monster Before David Tennant and Matt Smith took on the role, Americans were most familiar with Tom Baker’s incarnation of the Doctor. Between 1974 and 1981, the eccentric Baker starred in a ton of classic episodes, facing down monsters armed only with his colorful scarf and snaggle-toothed grin....