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There is a lot more to January than work and dieting, though, as it is when some of the happiest events in our history took place. Here are 10 examples of human history changing for the better during January and—who knows—something equally great might happen before the end of this month. 10 The Invention Of The X-Ray Is Revealed Given that we cannot all be Superman, it’s good that the X-ray was invented to allow a range of different medical problems to be detected....

Originally, it was a small group of eight men who were essentially bodyguards, but slowly, their importance within the party grew. As their power and numbers swelled, so did their brutality. By the end of World War II, when the SS was more than 580,000 strong, they were killing thousands of people daily. 10 Torturing Political Prisoners The first concentration camp established by the Nazis was in Dachau, Germany, before the onset of World War II....

Unsurprisingly, no gift to the gods was more valuable than a human life. Many of the tales of human sacrifice from the ancient world seem fanciful, like Caesar saying Druids burned people in huge wicker statues, but archaeology has shown that human sacrifice was a very real phenomenon. Here are ten examples of human sacrifice from the ancient world. 10 Inca Mummies In 1999, the bodies of three children were discovered in a chamber high in the Andes mountains....

10 Dancing Boys Of Afghanistan In war-torn Afghanistan, an ancient practice called Bacha Bazi has been revived in which young boys are taught to dance and sold to wealthy men. The translation means to be interested in children. Poor boys are exploited and become sexually abused slaves. It was banned by the Taliban and is still illegal under Afghan law. In a place where women are not allowed to dance in public, boys are made to wear women’s clothing and dance for groups of men....

From then on, the Aztecs lived in service of the god of war. Human sacrifice became a massive part of Aztec society, with hundreds of thousands of people slaughtered each year as offerings to the gods. 10 They Staged Wars Just To Get Human Sacrifices The Aztecs’ divine duty was to fill the insatiable appetites of their gods through human sacrifice. Usually, the Aztecs used enemies whom they had defeated in war as offerings....

Discoveries of ancient artwork depicting mysterious figures have helped give rise to the “Ancient Astronaut Theory”, which claims that alien beings visited prehistoric humans, possibly interacting and sharing knowledge with them. Advocates of this theory usually point to specific examples, such as a particular rock carving in the Val Camonica site in Italy, as well as the Wandjina Petroglyph (above) sites in Australia. Using these examples as evidence reaches unsturdy ground when held up to scientific scrutiny....

10The DoctorA Supervillain A time-traveling family show centered around the heroic central character, Doctor Who plays as a sort of Superman in space, complete with messianic imagery. Yet back in 1963, Jesus parallels were the last thing on the writers’ minds. Instead, they wanted the Doctor to be a murderous old psychopath intent on destroying the future. According to the BBC’s original memos, the Doctor was meant to have escaped from his own time in search of somewhere more “perfect....

10The Lilly Warehouse Raid Police and journalists called them an Ocean’s Eleven–style gang, but the Villa brothers targeted warehouses of prescription drugs, not casinos. On March 13, 2010, they cut through the roof of the Eli Lilly warehouse in Enfield, Connecticut, lowered themselves in, and cleaned house to the tune of $80 million. The gang defeated the warehouse’s security using an insider’s advantage—they had a security report detailing the warehouse’s every weakness....

10 Material To Harvest WaterNamib Desert Beetle Rain has not blessed the sands of the African Namib Desert. The land is scorching, yet a merciful cover of light fog rolls across the sand dunes each morning. It is the perfect home for the Namib Desert beetle. When water droplets from the fog collect on the beetle’s shell, water-repellent ridges channel the drops toward its head. The shell is dotted with small, hydrophilic nubs....

The reality of the situation is that someone who is born with so much wealth and power knows that they can get away with just about anything. More often than not, they face a different justice system than other, less moneyed individuals. Just throw enough money at your legal troubles, and they’ll go away—even if you’re charged with murder. 10 Janepob Verraporn In March 2016, two graduate students in their early thirties were driving in the slow lane on an empty highway in Bangkok, Thailand....

10The Tapeworm Diet A little over 100 years ago, society started giving women the idea that they need to be super thin, but it wasn’t easy for all women to drop the pounds fast. The medical industry saw fit to help these women with diet pills containing tapeworms. It took everyone a while to realize that while tapeworms do cause weight loss, they can also cause diarrhea, vitamin deficiencies, insomnia, and malnutrition....

10 Mingi Just as Lord Voldemort is known as “He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named” in the Harry Potter book series, mingi is the tradition that must not be named among the Kara, Hamar, and Banna tribes in the Omo Valley of Ethiopia. There are about 225,000 of these tribe members isolated in primitive villages, practicing their ancient ritual in secret. Mingi means that a child is cursed and must be killed to protect the tribe....

What follows is a list of 10 interesting facts about slavery in ancient Rome, including several firsthand accounts so we can hear the voices and views of the ancients on this controversial matter. 10 Slave Population Ancient Roman society had a high proportion of slave population. Some have estimated that 90 percent of the free population living in Italy by the end of the first century BC had ancestors who had been slaves (McKeown 2013: 115)....

SEE ALSO: 60 Stunning Images of The Middle East That Will Make You Forget Its Violent Past Well, the answer is that nobody knows for sure. The majority of Egyptologists insist that it doesn’t matter at all, since there’s no reason to believe that the Egyptians shared our modern conception of race. To ask the ethnicity of the ancient Egyptians, they argue, is imposing a modern idea on a very old people....

Artists’ dollhouses comment upon the human condition. They bolster girls’ self-confidence as they acquaint them with science, technology, engineering, and math. They amuse. They test university students’ knowledge and ability. They remind the public about the seamier side of life back in the day. 10 Homicide Houses Frances Glessner Lee (1878–1962) developed a keen interest in crime scene investigation. Putting her fortune as an heiress to work, she created dollhouse dioramas of crime scenes to help detectives develop investigative techniques....

While millions of Japanese knew that day they were defeated in World War II, many in the military fighting in Asia and on far-flung islands in the Pacific did not receive the news for a time—or refused to believe it when they did. 10 Sakae Oba Stationed on the island of Saipan, Captain Sakae Oba was a veteran of the Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) who had served since 1934. In summer 1944, Japan’s troops on the island numbered about 32,000 as the US military arrived for a decisive battle....

Linguistics, on the other hand, deals with something that we all have an intimate knowledge of. However, this means we tend to hold a lot of assumptions or even outright misconceptions. These can color the way we approach language as a scientific subject. 10 Inuit Words For ‘Snow’ And A Massachusetts Fire Inspector Linguistic relativity is a theory sometimes called the “Sapir–Whorf hypothesis.” It says that a language can influence how its speakers see the world....

Some patients have gone beyond pharmaceuticals and have tried cannabis (aka marijuana), which has not been recognized by the FDA as medicine. Two main cannabinoids are present in the cannabis plant and have received serious attention in recent years. Cannabidiol (CBD) contains active ingredients from the plant but without the delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the cannabinoid that causes people to feel “high.” The compounds in CBD may dramatically reduce inflammation and pain in patients without the psychoactive effects produced by THC....

The world is a big place, and it continues to spin with various current events going on all the time. There were certainly a lot of news items over the past week that had to do with the ongoing crisis, but as you’ll find on this list, not all of them do. 10 Saudi Arabia Pressed The Pause Button In Yemen The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has been engaged in armed conflict against the Houthi rebels in Yemen for five years, but on Thursday, they called a ceasefire....

10 Spain Decided To Rebury Its Dead Dictator General Francisco Franco is the fascist leader you should probably revile a lot more than you do. As dictator of Spain from 1939 until his death in 1975, he presided over a carnival of bloodshed so bleak that historian Paul Preston named it the “Spanish Holocaust.” Franco was pals with Hitler, set up brutal concentration camps, bombed refugees, ordered his troops to gang-rape women, and had his supporters dance in the blood of his murdered victims....