Eighty-three percent of adults in America drink coffee. It’s the world’s second-most traded commodity, and it’s delicious. But there’s more to the country’s favorite hot beverage than meets the eye. From the sublime to the horrifying, coffee is a fascinating natural resource that has had a profound cultural impact around the world.

10 Deadly Coffee Crime Wave In Kenya

An epidemic of theft and violence is sweeping the coffee industry in Kenya, a country where a kilo of dried beans can be worth a week’s wages. A special police force has been set up to deal with the problem, but raids by armed gangs are a daily occurrence. Coffee growers are being forced to sleep in their fields so they can fend off would-be thieves. The thieves aren’t subtle, with reports of security guards at coffee factories being shot with arrows and beaten to death with branches. Villagers have taken to fighting fire with fire, and criminals caught in the act have been lynched in the street.

While coffee is grown on tens of thousands of small farms throughout the country, exports are only managed through licensed operations. The coffee thieves are able to make money because of corruption reaching right to the top of the tree. With 5 million people in Kenya dependent on the coffee industry to make a living, it’s a daunting issue for the government to overcome.

9 Coffee Rust Devastates Central America

Coffee rust is a fungal disease that attacks the leaves of the coffee plant. It gets its name from the distinctive orange patches it causes. The disease, which has blighted crops since the 19th century, eventually kills the plants and is a threat to the livelihoods of farmers around the world. The Arabica plant, favored by coffee connoisseurs, is coffee rust’s main victim, and countries that grow Arabica beans are currently suffering an epidemic.

In February 2013, Guatemala declared a state of agricultural emergency due to coffee rust and has provided $14 million for farmers to buy pesticides. Seventy percent of their national crop has been impacted, and there are similar circumstances throughout the region. Unfortunately, that means you may end up having to pay more for a decent cup of coffee in the next couple of years.

8 Coffee Contains Caffeine To Attract Bees

Every other coffee list on the Internet will tell you that coffee was discovered by goat herders, whose goats got a little jolly after munching on coffee berries. But why does coffee contain caffeine to begin with? Well, it’s toxic to slugs and other pests, but it turns out it also has an effect on pollinators such as bees. In fact, scientists think they get—wait for it—a buzz from the caffeine in the flowers of plants.

Scientists found that consuming caffeine helped bees to improve their long-term memories. The caffeine acts on the brain chemistry of bees in a way that makes the flowers more memorable, so the bees are more likely to return to plants of the same type. Though bees and humans are very different, some experts suggest the capacity to be affected by caffeine could be as old as the common ancestors we share, as it impacts our neurological activity on a very fundamental level.

7 Ethiopian Coffee Ceremony

The Ethiopian coffee ceremony, or bunna, is a key part of home and social life. It is a process of preparation that can take hours. It starts with the washing of coffee beans and ends with ceremonially pouring the drink into cups. The ceremony is practiced by women in Ethiopian culture, and girls are taught from a young age how the ritual is performed. It is observed at least daily, and starting the coffee ritual is the standard way to welcome visitors to the home.

The ceremony starts with fresh, green beans that are roasted in a pan while fragrant flowers are burned to provide a pleasant aroma. After that, coffee is prepared and poured into cups containing sugar, salt, or butter. It is sometimes offered at Ethiopian restaurants in the US, the UK, and elsewhere.

6 Coffee Overdose And Addiction

Caffeine, like any drug, is toxic in large enough doses. The lethal dose of caffeine would require about 100 cups of coffee, and the water from drinking that much coffee in one go would kill you before the caffeine did.

That said, there’s still enough caffeine in coffee to make you ill, especially if you’re not used to it. A 17-year-old girl in England was hospitalized after drinking seven double espressos. She suffered mood swings, raised temperature, and palpitations. She said the experience has put her off coffee for good. The other risk of over-indulging is caffeinism, an addiction that is defined as needing six or more cups of ground coffee per day.

5 Coffee Ban In 17th-Century England

Coffee first reached England in the 17th century, served in coffee houses around the country—there were 82 in London alone by the mid-1660s. But coffee wasn’t popular with everyone. A group of women, frustrated by the lack of virility in their men, claimed coffee “made men as unfruitful as the deserts.” This campaign by “several Thousands of Buxome Good-Women, Languishing in Extremity of Want,” as they called themselves, combined with concerns from other quarters, saw King Charles attempt to ban the drink in 1675.

The people were very unhappy with this decision, and Charles quickly forgot about the idea. Coffee houses went on to become the meeting places of the scientific and literary worlds, frequented by people like Isaac Newton, Robert Hooke, Samuel Johnson, and Alexander Pope.

4 Latte Art And Tasting Competition

People will compete at pretty much anything, even hot drinks. It’s that competitive spirit that gives us the World Cup Tasters Championship. In this event, participants aim to use smell and taste to identify different coffees from around the world as quickly as possible.

Coffee tasting is just one competition held in the annual World Coffee Event, which took place this year in Nice, France. Latte art is among the most impressive, and certainly the easiest to appreciate over the internet. Using nothing but hot milk and espresso, latte artists work to create intricate designs on the surface of the drink. Swirls and leaves are popular, but some artists produce pictures of dragons, cartoon characters, and teddy bears, the last being too adorable to even consider drinking.

3 Coffee In Pregnancy

Advice on what and what not to consume during pregnancy is rampant, and coffee falls into the camp of things a lot of women are told they should avoid. Much of the reason for this is that data shows that women who drink less coffee have healthier pregnancies. While that seems clear-cut, it’s far from it. Women who suffer more nausea also have healthier pregnancies, and anyone suffering nausea is unlikely to fancy a caramel latte with sprinkles.

The best data available appears to show no evidence of causation between coffee drinking and problems below around three cups of coffee each day.

2 Re-Using Coffee Grounds

Only about 20 percent of the coffee bean contributes to the flavor and aroma of the drink—the rest is tasteless plant fiber. That means that there’s a lot of stuff left over when coffee is produced—hundreds of thousands of tons of it a day. Scientists are working hard to come up with a useful way to use the waste.

Researchers at the Maine Technology Institute have investigated ways to turn spent coffee grounds into fuel pellets to be burned for energy, and one coffee production company already sends its waste to a nearby biomass plant to be burned along with wood.

Another group of scientists has devised a way to use coffee grounds to produce an alcoholic drink, by fermenting the grounds and distilling them in a method similar to the production of whiskey. The result is a beverage the makers claim has “organoleptic quality acceptable for human consumption.” They might need to work on a tagline.

1 Coffee Contamination

Coffee rust is not the only fungus that can affect coffee plants. Ochratoxin A is toxic poison produced by Aspergillus and Penicillium fungi that grow on coffee plants. The amount of acceptable ochratoxin is controlled in Europe, with an acceptable level of five parts per billion for ground coffee, and 10 parts per billion for instant, because who cares about instant coffee drinkers anyway? Its presence in coffee was only discovered in 1988, and a study shortly afterward found that 7 percent of shipments were over this safe level. Work by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN helped farmers to reduce the average level found in exports by over 25 percent between 1998 and 2004.

Ochratoxin is not the only poison found in coffee. In 2003, one man was killed and 15 people were hospitalized with suspected food poisoning. Doctors eventually deduced that the cause of the illness wasn’t sandwiches, as initially thought, but someone poisoning the coffee pot with arsenic. Sadly for the town of New Sweden, this seems to be the only event in their history worthy of making their Wikipedia page.

You can email Alan here or read his blog, where he writes stuff that isn’t lists.

You may think that the elderly are inferior in every way and do nothing but drag society down. Well, get ready to throw all preconceptions out the window as research shows us just how awesome they really are.

10They Handle Stress Better Than Young People

Contrary to our view of elderly people as cranky old coots, findings say they actually exhibit a more optimistic outlook on life than their younger peers. Not only that, they can deal with stressful life events far better, readily accepting the outcome with less anger or anxiety.

Researcher Mary Shallcross explains these findings by noting that people acquire a wealth of experience in dealing with life’s unpleasantness over time. Thus, the older a person becomes, the more readily they accept the outcome of unpleasant events such as the deaths of loved ones.

However, this ability reaches its end with truly advanced age. In the final years of life, emotional health deteriorates.

9Overweight Seniors Live Longer

The elderly, just like everyone else, should strive to be healthy. But according to an Ohio State University study, older adults (especially those in their fifties) are actually better off with a few extra pounds on their waistlines.

Assistant sociology professor Hui Zheng found that slightly heavier adults outlive their slimmer peers of the same age range. Older people are more susceptible to disease and its accompanying weight loss. The few extra pounds could help stave off a potentially life-threatening loss of weight. Not only that, the extra weight would serve as a sort of emergency food supply for old people too sick to eat.

However, Zheng warns that the benefits apply only to slightly overweight people who maintain their weight. Overweight people who continue to pack on the pounds as they grow even older risk dying a lot earlier.

8Nostalgia Is Therapeutic

Ever had that grandpa or grandma who keeps telling you stories about the “good ol’ days?” If so, we’d forgive you for a natural hatred of nostalgia. Defined as a melancholic reflection on past events, nostalgia acquired a bad rap originally. It was first viewed as a medical disease in the 17th century and then a psychiatric disorder in the 20th century. However, modern researchers have found that nostalgia is actually beneficial, especially for the elderly.

University of Southampton psychologist Constantine Sedikide, notes that modern researchers are just really beginning to find out the psychological benefits of nostalgia. For one, it can help to battle the effects of loneliness, increasing an individual’s self-esteem. It can also serve as a bridge from the past to the present, keeping people in touch with reality and giving meaning to their lives.

7Old People Helped Mankind Evolve

The elderly have been instrumental to mankind’s evolution. According to anthropologist Rachel Caspari and her colleague Sang-Hee Lee, human evolution took a huge leap forward more than 30,000 years ago, specifically during a certain time period that saw a four-fold increase in the number of people going into old age.

Although the exact cause still remains unclear, the anthropologists speculate that the population explosion occurred when people decided to keep the old folks around to tend to their children and homes while the parents were out hunting and gathering. As a result, the survival rate of the elderly increased substantially.

With more and more old people settling down together, ideas and experiences could be shared and exchanged, resulting in a significant spread of information that would be felt by future generations. As Lee puts it, old people became the figurative computer hard drives for early mankind.

6They Still Get Plenty Of Sex

The idea that old people live a sex-free life couldn’t be any further from the truth. According to a 2013 study done in the US, the elderly enjoy far more sexy time than any of us would have ever imagined. For example, more than 50 percent of interviewees belonging to the 57–75 age bracket reported giving or receiving oral sex, while one-third of those in the 75–85 range reported indulging in the act.

As significant as the study was for breaking stereotypes, it also opened a can of worms: elderly STDs. According to the CDC, the number of geriatrics acquiring STDs has risen since 2007, mainly because of lack of education in using safety measures. Public health expert Emmanuel Ezekiel encourages health professionals to assist the elderly with sex education since sex comes naturally for people living in close proximity (in retirement homes, for example).

5Their Driving Has Improved Greatly

Good news to all users of the road: A 2012 study by the US Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) found that accidents and crashes involving older drivers have significantly decreased in the last decade. Those who do get in accidents are now far more likely to survive with fewer injuries.

Since 1997, older driver fatalities have dropped by 42 percent, supported with a similar decrease in non-fatal incidents. For the Institute, this was a surprising find, since they expected that the ever-increasing elderly population would create more accidents on the road.

This positive trend could be attributed to modern cars being generally safer than previous models. Another critical factor is the improving physical and mental health of the elderly, which have helped to curb the number of accidents.

4They Could Be The Key To World Peace

The Roman Empire had a long period of peace called the Pax Romana, and some say that we’ll soon have our own version, thanks to our elderly.

Mark Haas from Harvard’s International Security Program notes that a rapidly aging population will force the United States to spend more of its budget on pensions and healthcare for the elderly instead of on tanks and aircraft. The foreseeable future will still see the US as the dominant economic and military power because rival countries including Russia and China will be hit even harder by the aging trend.

Supporters of the US’s current foreign policy say that the forced “Pax Geriatrica” will have its downsides. The US will be less able to police the world and intervene in localized conflicts. Decreased military and security spending could also leave the US more vulnerable to renegade terrorist attacks.

3Our Genes Command Us To Respect Them

We don’t just respect our elders out of good manners and maturity. We may be programmed to.

In 2010, France’s University of Rennes closely observed communication habits among a group of Campbell’s monkeys. The team noted that that older monkeys who called out tended to be answered more often, even though they communicated far less often than the younger ones. This indicated that the older monkeys—because of their greater experience in survival and higher rank in the social hierarchy—were far more influential in the group, leading younger monkeys to pay more attention to them.

Some may interpret the findings as a sociological phenomenon rather than a biological one, and some may think the results only extend to the study subjects. But the researchers conclude that respect for elders is as an evolutionary trait, which may be found generally in all primates, including humans.

2Their Brains Work Slower (Only Because They’re Full Of Wisdom)

While we young whippersnappers crack jokes at how excruciatingly slowly old people think and speak, they only do that because their brains have stored so much information. Combined with the fact that their brains need less dopamine than before, old people are also more thoughtful and far less likely to act on impulse than their younger peers. The elderly can still process new information, albeit at a slower pace for the same reason that they speak slowly.

These unique characteristics of an aging brain make up what researchers believe to be the biological root of wisdom. As University of Dallas Center for Vital Longevity’s Denise Park summarizes, “There’s a reason why we don’t have 20-year-olds running the world.”

1Older Workers Outperform Younger Peers

To learn how often cognitive performance fluctuates among workers, Berlin’s Max Planck Institute for Human Development divided participants into two groups based on their age range (20–31 and 65–80). All participants performed a series of cognitive tasks repeatedly for 100 days.

The older group’s cognitive performance varied much less than those in the younger group. In other words, they did their work more consistently. The researchers attributed the old workers’ steady performance to their being more emotionally stable as well as being more experienced to handle the various tasks.

Marc V. is always open for a conversation, so do drop him a line sometime.

George Herman “Babe” Ruth is one of the most famous baseball players of all time and one of the most famous athletes in the world. Among the famous achievements of his career were his record 60 home runs in a season, the 714 home runs in his career, his seven World Series championships, and his membership in the inaugural class of the Baseball Hall of Fame. In fact, upon his retirement, he held 56 different baseball records. His play elevated baseball into its modern incarnation.

But Babe Ruth last played baseball in 1935, and many his records have since fallen. We might ask, was Babe Ruth really that good? He was, and not just for his athletic abilities.

10He Remains A Mystery

Even though Babe Ruth is one of the most famous athletes of the 20th century, a lot about him remains unknown. His early life, particularly, is almost a complete blur. He was born in Baltimore and grew up in a poor neighborhood. We know only a little about his father, who was a tavern owner, and almost nothing about his mother, aside from that she was in frail health and died at age 39. We also don’t know much about his siblings—he had seven brothers and sisters, only one of whom survived into adulthood.

Even basic biographical facts about Babe Ruth are in dispute. For example, we don’t know if Herman was his middle name or his confirmation name. We also don’t know his exact date of birth. Well into adulthood, the Babe himself thought that he was born on February 7, 1894, until he discovered a document saying he was in fact, born on February 6, 1895. But even that date of birth has been disputed by biographers.

9He Challenged the Status Quo

Racism was deeply entrenched in baseball in the early part of the century. African-American players were banned from the Major Leagues, and baseball’s biggest star, Ty Cobb, was an outspoken racist. Babe Ruth, however, had an attitude atypical to that of many his teammates. While he never spoke out directly against racism, he played exhibition games against African Americans, attended fundraisers to benefit black churches, and even invited Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, the most famous black entertainer of his day, into the Yankees clubhouse.

These gestures rankled baseball’s leadership and may even have hurt Ruth’s career in small ways. Baseball’s commissioner, Kennesaw Mountain Landis, was a staunch segregationist who tried to block Babe Ruth from playing exhibition games against Negro League teams. He went so far as to suspend him from playing for the Yankees when Ruth defied the ban. Later on, Ruth’s antagonism of Landis may have prevented him from fulfilling his ambition to manage a team.

8He Played Through Serious Health Problems

Babe Ruth was famous for his appetite for carousal, with many nights spent gambling, drinking, and womanizing. Many stories say he showed up at the ballpark sleep-deprived and hungover, only to hit multiple home runs. This cemented Ruth’s image as seemingly superhuman in the eyes of his fans.

But his constant partying took a toll on his health, just as it would any mortal. Things finally caught up with him in 1925, when he started to feel cramped and feverish but continued playing. He collapsed and hit his head during a train ride, requiring hospitalization. This sparked a media firestorm, with newspapers around the world even incorrectly declaring that he had died. The incident became known as “The Bellyache Heard ’Round the World.”

Ruth recovered, although he was weak the rest of the season. To this day, his exact illness remains unknown but has been rumored to be anything from an intestinal abscess to syphilis.

7He Was Ahead Of His Time

Photo credit: RKO Radio Pictures

Ruth invented the idea of the modern celebrity athlete, becoming a star both on and off the field. He hired a man named Christy Walsh to negotiate contracts for him and manage his finances—the first sports agent. In addition to contract negotiations, Walsh also served as Ruth’s ghostwriter and managed his public relations.

At one point, Walsh even got the magazine Popular Science Monthly to publish a pseudoscientific article entitled “Why Babe Ruth is Greatest Home Run Hitter.” According to the clearly bonkers article, a team of psychologists from Columbia University ran tests on Ruth and discovered that “Ruth is 90 per cent efficient compared with a human average of 60 per cent.”

Ruth was also the first athlete to employ a personal trainer, who helped him recover following his hospitalization in 1925. Most athletes of the time used their time off to work rather than train, but Ruth didn’t need to work to support himself in the offseason. The trainer, Artie McGovern, put him on a strict diet and exercise regimen. As a result, Ruth bounced back to have his most famous season in 1927.

6His Tour Of Japan Was Insane

US-Japan relations were shaky in 1934. The US had halted Japanese immigration into the country, and Japan had recently invaded China for dubious reasons. It was in that atmosphere that Ruth and several other baseball players embarked on a goodwill tour of the country, playing exhibition games against Japanese teams. Ruth, of course, was the main attraction, and thousands flocked to see him play. But a lot was happening both on the field and behind the scenes.

For one, the tour launched the career of Eiji Sawamura, one of Japan’s first baseball superstars. Sawamura was a young, unknown pitcher who managed to do what the other Japanese couldn’t—strike Babe Ruth out. Sawamura went on to become one of the greatest pitchers to play in Japan before being killed in World War II.

One of Ruth’s teammates was catcher Moe Berg, who took it upon himself to gather some film of Japanese military installations. Berg sold the film to the US government and later became an actual spy during the war.

Finally, while the tour was going on, Japan’s government narrowly avoided being overthrown in a nationalist coup. If the coup had succeeded, the American players might have been in a lot of trouble.

5The Legends Are Partially True

Two legends about Babe Ruth are particularly well known. One is The Called Shot, and the other the story of Johnny Sylvester. While both of these stories have been embellished over the years, there’s some truth in each of them.

According to the story of The Called Shot, during a World Series game, Ruth was being taunted by the opposing team, so he pointed into the outfield stands right before smacking a home run into the very spot where he had pointed. For years, people thought the story couldn’t be true—it seemed too perfect. But the consensus is that, while Ruth may or may not have pointed toward the outfield, he did gesture with his arm before hitting the home run. Film of the incident exists but is inconclusive.

The legend of Johnny Sylvester also has some kernels of truth surrounded by embellishment. Johnny was a young boy who was gravely ill—possibly dying, although his exact illness isn’t quite clear. Johnny had one wish: to be given a baseball autographed by Ruth. According to the most popular version of the legend, Ruth visited Johnny in the hospital and promised to hit a home run for him, which he did the next day. In reality, Ruth only sent Johnny a package containing an autographed ball and a note saying he would try to hit a home run for him. Though he failed to hit the promised home run, he did manage one the next day, and he later visited Johnny, who eventually recovered.

4He Was Charitable

When Babe was seven, his father remanded him to Roman Catholic boarding school. St. Mary’s Industrial School for Boys was mainly for orphans and juvenile delinquents, probably because George Sr. feared Babe was on his way to becoming the latter. It was here that Ruth learned to play baseball, which of course changed his life.

Babe never forgot his roots, and throughout his life, he gave back through charitable contributions, especially to orphanages. Among the organizations he supported was the American Legion Crippled Children’s Hospital in St. Petersburg, Florida. He later left much of his estate to the Babe Ruth Foundation, dedicated to helping orphans and disabled children. Ruth was also active in the Red Cross, helping injured service members during World War II.

St. Mary’s Industrial School for Boys burned in a fire in 1919, and Ruth donated to have the school rebuilt. The school has since closed, but the baseball field is still there.

3He Hit Far More Home Runs Than We Think

“Barnstorming” was a common practice in the 1920s and ’30s. Ballplayers would travel during the offseason and play exhibition games against fellow major leaguers, local players, or Negro League teams. This gave many people across the country a chance to see professional baseball while providing some much-needed extra income to many players.

Even though he was the highest-paid athlete in the world, Babe Ruth still barnstormed. And, of course, he hit a lot of home runs. It’s been estimated that if you take the 714 home runs he hit during his career, add his postseason home runs, and then add all of the home runs he hit while barnstorming, he hit at least 1,031 home runs.

Ruth’s barnstorming enhanced his legend. Supposedly, Ruth once hit a 180-meter (600 ft) home run while playing a barnstorming game in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. If true, this would be the longest home run ever hit.

2He Died Undergoing An Experimental Medical Treatment

Babe Ruth died at age 53, just two months after making his famous final public appearance at Yankee Stadium. Ruth was said to be suffering from throat cancer, no surprise given his penchant for smoking and drinking. More recent research shows that Babe Ruth might actually have suffered not from throat cancer but from a much rarer cancer called nasopharyngeal carcinoma.

Ruth was one of the first patients to undergo chemotherapy and radiation therapy. In addition, Ruth took a new drug called teropterin, one of the first anti-cancer drugs. Teropterin had previously only been used on mice, and Ruth’s doctor had no idea how the human body might react. Ruth understood the risks but agreed to take the experimental drug anyway. Ruth’s condition improved but only for a short time. Still, the experiment gave hope that a cure for cancer could be found.

1He’s Still The Best (By Any Measure)

Although his most famous records have long since been broken, baseball statisticians consider Babe Ruth to be the best player in the history of the game. In fact, modern statistical analysis, called sabermetrics, ranks Ruth as far and away the best. Sabermetrics uses advanced statistics (beyond batting average, home runs, and RBI) to create a more complex and objective view of baseball.

Even a cursory glance at sabermetric stats shows Ruth the clear leader. Once of the most popular stats, Wins Above Replacement (WAR), puts Ruth at 184 for his career—almost 10 percent better than the next-highest on the list. He also leads in adjusted OPS+, a stat commonly used to measure hitters. He even does pretty well as a pitcher, ranking within the top 100 all-time in Fielding Independent Pitching. Not bad for a guy who made his baseball debut over 100 years ago.

There are a lot of different ways we can describe babies. To some, they’re cute and cuddly; to others, they’re frustrating and exhausting. Differences in opinion aside, one way we don’t often hear babies described as is scientifically phenomenal.

While their little, tiny bodies might look like miniature versions of our own, they function in a completely different way as newborns than they do at a few months of age. This list is merely a scratch on the surface of the spectacular functions and occurrences in a newborn baby’s body.

10 They Grow Mustaches In The Womb

A study published in 1998 found that seven in 3,000 babies grew a “mustache” while in their mother’s womb. This was determined through ultrasound tests run between weeks 14 and 16 of gestation.^[1] In this case, it wasn’t quite the “mustache” you’re thinking of, as the researchers used the term to refer to “rod-like structure on the fetal upper lip.” The seven fetuses with this structure were monitored, and in all cases, the structure had disappeared by birth, with no anomalies detectable in the newborns’ upper lips.

Fetuses, however, do grow hair in utero, and it often appears at 16 weeks. This hair, called lanugo, starts on the upper lip and spreads across the body. It usually disappears before birth but is sometimes still present when the baby is born.

9 Taste

Babies’ taste buds form in the womb, and by the time they are born, they have plenty of them. Scientists have shown that what a mother eats during pregnancy has effects on a child’s food preferences in later life, as the fetus begins tasting different foods from absorption of the amniotic fluid in the womb.

It should be noted, however, that despite their prodigious number of taste buds, babies cannot detect salt until around five months old. This has been attributed to the fact that salt is not yet a dietary requirement for them, and it should therefore be limited in their diets. Over time, a baby’s taste buds change and decrease in sensitivity, which can result in different reactions to flavors that may have previously been loved.^[2] With all this in mind, perhaps we might reconsider what we eat while pregnant if we want our children to grow up enjoying healthier foods.

8 Babies Are Born With Approximately 300 Bones

The number of bones in the average adult human body is 206. A baby, however, is born with about 300 bones, which, over time, fuse together to form the adult human skeleton as we know it. Also, a newborn’s skeleton is more cartilaginous than an adult’s. With the help of time and calcium, the bones ossify and strengthen until they form a solid skeleton.

Pretty cool, but why does this happen? A baby’s body is, by nature, designed to be soft and malleable. This is to help with delivery. Imagine if their bodies were as hard and rigid as an adult’s—birth would be nearly impossible! Therefore, babies’ bodies have softer skeletons until they enter the world, and these bones can begin to harden.^[3] Just another incredible act of nature.

7 They Have No Kneecaps

Despite having about 100 more bones than an adult, babies have no kneecaps! Well, that’s not entirely true. As previously discussed, the baby’s skeleton is more cartilaginous at birth. While the kneecap is, in fact, there, it is the softest kind of cartilage and is one of the last bones to become, well, bone. It should also be noted that because of this, the kneecaps won’t show up in X-rays, but they are technically there. The kneecaps will have finally fully ossified by three to five years of age.

Babies are blessed with this soft, pliable kneecap for the first years of their life, as they need them to crawl on. Ever wondered why it hurts to kneel or crawl now, but it didn’t when you were younger? This is exactly why. Part of the reason why this bone takes so long to form, however, is because we are on it so often as children, which slows down its forming process. It is also the biggest sesamoid bone in the body (meaning a bone which forms in the middle of a tendon). This is another contributing factor to its slow growth.^[4] Think about this the next time you kneel down and say it hurts because you’re old. You would be 100-percent correct.

6 The Eye Color Of A Baby Can Change After Birth

The color of our eyes is shaped by melanin, which is also responsible for the color of our skin and hair. Similar to how sunlight can darken our skin and lighten our hair, it has an effect on the eyes. Often, Caucasian newborns will have blue or grey eyes at birth. Once the baby opens its eyes, however, the light starts production of melanin within the iris. This process can lead to color change.^[5]

The greatest eye color changes have been shown to occur between three and nine months of age, depending on the source you consult. After this, the changes will generally be more subtle if at all noticeable. Some people’s eyes still change well into adulthood, and no, I’m not talking about contact lenses.

5 They Can Swallow And Breathe Simultaneously

Studies have proven that babies can suck, swallow, and breathe all at the same time to assist them with breastfeeding. The amount of nutrients and oxygen a baby can take in while feeding is directly dependent on their ability to perform all these tasks at once, which is a skill they slowly lose as they grow older. It is, however, inaccurate to say that the tasks occur at the same exact millisecond in time. Instead, it is an intricate action called the suck-swallow-breathe process. This requires infants to perfectly time the movement of its jaw, hyoid bone, tongue, palate, pharynx, and larynx to extract milk, swallow it, and maintain breathing.^[6]

Babies who lack this ability (often premature babies or those with respiratory conditions) have significant difficulty feeding and often need to be bottle-fed. Sometimes, this pattern is merely learned with a bit of time and encouragement. One thing scientists have yet to figure out is how exactly the tongue works when extracting milk and clearing it from the airway before the infant takes each breath. Although there have been many studies and theories presented, there is no clear answer. How a baby feeds may well forever remain a mystery. What clever little tots!

4 Babies Can’t Smile Until They’re A Few Months Old

A baby’s first smile is one of the greatest milestones parents look forward to. It’s seen as a key indicator that you’re doing okay as a parent and that your little bundle of joy is as happy as you are. But their first smiles aren’t actually intentional or in response to a feeling of happiness. They are instead equivalent to those leg kicks and arm swings that babies do while discovering their range of movement.^[7] This smile is called a reflex smile and usually disappears by the age of two months. The first real smile typically occurs between one and a half and three months of age.

Don’t be worried that you might mistakenly miss your baby’s first real smile, though. Reflex smiles are short and only occur when your baby is tired or even asleep. Their first real smile will be a clear response to something and will hold for longer. In other words, as parent, you will just know! Parents can encourage smiling through the obvious means of talking with their babies, cuddling them, and playing with them as often as possible. Studies show that this degree of affection can also cause faster development of the brain and greater social skills in later life.

3 Newborn Babies Don’t Produce Tears

No matter how loudly they scream and how much they carry on, newborn babies do not produce tears! This isn’t, however, just an act they’re putting on for their personal vendetta to keep you up at night. It’s merely because their tear ducts are still developing post-birth. The tear ducts will become functional between two weeks and two months of age.^[8] This doesn’t mean that their eyes can’t produce any water in the meantime, merely that they can’t produce enough to actually shed tears.

Unfortunately, this delay in tear duct development can lead to late discovery of developmental problems in newborns, such as blocked tear ducts, which can lead to infection. It is important to look out for crusty or abnormally watery eyes on a baby to prevent prolonged opening of the tear ducts. Either way, it’s still crazy how they can cry so much without actually producing any tears!

2 They Have An Insane Amount Of Unique Reflexes

Reflexes are involuntary movements that occur as a normal bodily reaction, like when a doctor hits your knee and makes your leg kick out or when someone throws something at you, and you catch it without having to actually think about the movement. Some reflexes are only present in our bodies while we are very young, before we gradually grow out of them.

One common reflex seen in newborns is the Moro reflex. This is also sometimes called the startle reflex, as it occurs when a baby is surprised by a loud sound or sudden movement. Upon the startle, the baby will throw back its head and outstretch its arms and legs before pulling them back in.

Another unique bodily movement you may observe in a newborn is the tonic neck reflex, also known as the fencing position. As the baby turns its head to one side, the arm on that side will straighten, and the opposite arm will bend, hence the nickname “fencing position.” This can be present in a baby as late as seven months old.

Lastly, there’s the grasp reflex, which can be fun to play with for parents. If you stroke the palm of a baby’s hand, the hand will close and grasp, bringing about the name of the grasp reflex.

Alongside these few obvious reflexes, babies have about 70 others which are less observable.^[9]

1 Newborns Know Your Taste In Music

It has been scientifically proven that newborns remember things from inside the womb a lot longer than was once thought. Studies have shown that babies actually develop a preference for the music they heard while they were in the womb and still held this preference at a year old.^[10] Even more astounding is that not only can they recognize the style of music which was played to them in the womb, but they can even remember specific songs!

Other studies have shown that babies can even display an aversion to specific types of music by kicking while hearing sounds they don’t like. What all of the studies have in common is that this ability of babies to recognize and react to certain music they’d heard in utero is based on the same mechanisms that enable them to become familiar with the sound of their parents’ voices. Perhaps we should be more careful when deciding what to rock out to in the car on the way to work while pregnant.

Over the years, cameos have become such an integral part of movies and TV shows that you can hardly watch anything without expecting a celebrity or director to pop up briefly in one of the scenes. Sometimes cameos are meant for pure comic relief, and at other times they serve as Easter eggs to be discovered while watching. On this list are some of the most awesome movie and TV cameos from the past 30 years. Possible spoilers ahead!

10 Most Out-Of-Place Celebrity Cameos In Videogames

10 Tony Stank

A list like this would seem incomplete without at least one Stan Lee entry. The late producer starred in 60 Marvel movie cameos, each of them awesome in their own way. He saves a woman from falling debris in Spider-Man 2, gets mistaken for Hugh Hefner in Iron Man and appears as a mental patient in Thor: The Dark World. Lee even has a cameo as Fred’s dad in the animation film, Big Hero Six.

One of his funniest cameos, however, is in Captain America: Civil War in which Lee appears as a FedEx worker. He brings Tony Stark a package and hilariously asks him: “Are you Tony Stank?”

Rhodey’s reaction, “Yes this is, this is Tony Stank” makes the scene even funnier.

9 King of horror calls Frasier

Frasier, a spin-off of the hugely popular Cheers TV show, ran for 11 seasons and cemented its place in history as one of the most iconic sitcoms of all time. The show wrapped in 2004 and there is talk of a reboot airing later in 2020.

Frasier Crane, psychiatrist-turned-radio-host, has taken many on-air calls from well-known celebrities playing a host of characters. These celebs include Kevin Bacon, James Spader, John Lithgow, and Gary Sinise.

In a blink-and-you’ll-miss it scene, Stephen King also makes a very brief appearance via telephone call. He plays a character named Brian and tells Frasier that he doesn’t want to be limited to “30 seconds” of airtime and will wait until the upcoming commercial break is over.

8 Wes Craven the janitor

Scream was a big deal in 1996 and starred a host of big names including Drew Barrymore, Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox, Skeet Ulrich and many more. The movie, and particularly the character of Ghostface, was so popular that it became a franchise of four movies which grossed over 600 million worldwide.

Director, Wes Craven, was involved in directing all four films and passed away on 30 August 2015. In the first Scream movie, Craven had an awesome cameo as a janitor dressed in a red and green striped jersey and a very familiar-looking hat. The kicker? The janitor’s name is Fred.

(Another awesome Scream cameo comes in the form of Linda Blair who plays a reporter.)

7 Candyman comes to Riverdale

Riverdale is an over-the-top teen drama series based on the characters of the Archie Comics. The teens in the show do weird things like join illegal fight clubs in prison, plan a siblings’ fake death, own a speakeasy, and catch serial killers. The show is also well-known for making up their own terminology such as The Matchelorette, Shankshaw Prison, American Excess, Vanity Flair, Glamazon.com and ShareBNB.

It is also stuffed full of pop culture references such as Montgomery Clift, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Lolita, Grease, Psycho and Carrie to mention but a few. In season 2, Riverdale takes things to the next level with a great cameo featuring none other than Tony Todd, aka Candyman. Todd plays Farmer McGinty who offers Jughead a ride after his ride breaks down.

6 Fire Marshall Bill

Liar Liar is classic Jim Carrey. There are a lot of exaggerated facial expressions and strange movements. Not to mention deeply cringey situations. The plot revolves around Fletcher Reede, played by Carrey, who is a terrible father and compulsive liar. He almost loses his son because of this and does everything in his power to prevent this from happening. For a large part of the film he is unable to lie after his son’s birthday wish comes true, and hijinks ensue.

Towards the end of the film, there is a barely noticeable cameo by Jim Carrey himself. He appears as his SNL character, Fire Marshall Bill, in the background of one of the airport scenes.

Top 10 Ways Hollywood Ruined Your Favorite TV Shows

5 Princess Leia on The Big Bang Theory

The Big Bang Theory was never short on guest appearances and cameos. Throughout its 12-season run, the characters run into a host of famous people including James Earl Jones, Stan Lee, Mark Hamill, Stephen Hawking, Charlie Sheen, Octavia Spencer, Rick Fox, Buzz Aldrin and many more.

One of the cameos that TBBT fans seemed to enjoy the most features both James Earl Jones and the late Carrie Fisher. Sheldon Cooper spends the episode with Jones, and they end up pranking Fisher by ringing her doorbell and running away. Fisher appears in a robe holding a baseball bat in a short but iconic scene.

4 It’s raining purple

New Girl ran for 7 seasons and had some great guest stars in the form of Josh Gad, Jamie Lee Curtis, Lizzy Caplan and Justin Long. The cameo to beat all cameos, however, happened in the 14th episode of the 3rd season which saw the legendary Prince playing himself and causing a freak-out amongst the loft mates. The world freaked out too and the show’s audience numbers jumped from an average 4 million to 26 million for that one episode.

It turned out that Prince loved the show and had his manager email Zooey Deschanel to request a guest appearance. He also requested that the previously arranged line-up of Kardashians don’t appear in the same episode.^[1]

3 Backstreet Boys in Heaven

Apocalyptic comedy film, This Is The End, was a massive hit. There are several hilarious cameo scenes and at the end of the film, two characters end up in heaven and are told that any and all wishes come true here. One of the characters then wishes for the Backstreet Boys which leads to a funny cameo by the band itself as they perform “Backstreet’s Back” while everyone in heaven dances.

2 The cameo that almost wasn’t

Some cameos are hard to come by. Eddie Van Halen declined a cameo role but did provide the music that can be heard on the cassette Marty McFly scares his father with in Back To The Future. The movie almost lost out on another cameo when Huey Lewis turned down a request to write a song for the soundtrack. Lewis even said that he “didn’t fancy writing a song called Back to the Future.”

Director, Robert Zemeckis, assured Lewis that the song didn’t have to be called “Back to the Future” and Lewis then changed his mind. Lewis wrote Power of Love without ever reading the script or seeing the film. He also went on to write “Back In Time” for the film.

Lewis himself appears in the film as a nerdy school administrator who tells McFly and his band that they are playing Power of Love “just too darn loud.”^[2]

1 Venkman in Zombieland

Bill Murray and his deadpan delivery of hilarious lines assures him a place in the long line of most-beloved actors. He has a host of films behind his name with some of his most famous roles including Peter Venkman in Ghostbusters, Phil in Groundhog Day and John in Stripes.

Zombieland is a crazy zombie comedy film that includes a running gag in the form of a list of rules for surviving a zombie-infested planet. A cameo role was created for the late Patrick Swayze, but unfortunately the actor was battling pancreatic cancer and was too ill to film any scenes. The cameo then went to Bill Murray who plays a fictionalized version of himself.^[3]

Some movie buffs have called the Murray cameo one of the best in movie history.

+ 007 in That Star Wars Flop

There are a host of cameos in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, including composer John Williams playing a bar tender, Hayden Christensen reprising his role as Anakin Skywalker, Samuel L. Jackson as Jedi Master Mace Windu, and director J.J. Abrams who voiced the new droid D-O.

Many Star Wars films also feature celebrity Stormtroopers of which arguably the most surprising one turned out to be Daniel Craig in one of the worst star films ever to appear on the silver screen: Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Craig is most well-known for playing 007 in several Bond movies. The clip is above so you can avoid paying any money to see this travesty of a film in its entirety.^[4]

++ Pretty fly for a white guy

Idle Hands is a black comedy that pretty much bombed at the box office in spectacular fashion. The movie grossed just over 4 million on a budget of 25 million and received a slew of bad reviews. However, as the years passed, the movie garnered somewhat of a cult classic status.

Watching the movie now, you might be surprised to see American punk rock band, The Offspring, playing a Ramones classic during a high school Halloween dance. A possessed hand wreaks havoc at the dance and scalps frontman Dexter Holland.^[5]

Top 10 Ways Hollywood Recycles Movies

While watching It Follows, have you noticed how there is no clearly defined time period in which the movie is set? Or during Michael Myers’ escape in Halloween 2018, did you happen to see him skulking around in the background during the gas station scene, attacking employees? How about Linda Blair’s awesome cameo in Scream?

Some filmmakers love scattering small details throughout the film, either to allude to important plot points or simply as ‘easter eggs.’

Have you noticed all the ones on this list?

(Potential spoilers ahead!)

10 Awesome Easter Eggs You Missed In Your Favorite Movies

10 The Mist

The Mist will forever be remembered as the horror movie with the most heartbreaking ending. Stephen King’s disturbing imagination is on full display in the book, but it seems even he couldn’t conjure up the final scenes of the film. The unforgettable scene in the car and what followed was the brainchild of Frank Darabont, who ‘envisioned a darker ending compared to the book.’

The movie provided a lot of other memorable moments, including Mrs. Carmody’s over-the-top fanatic religiousness and people being ripped in half by monsters hidden in a thick band of mist. David Drayton, played by Thomas Jane, is a movie poster artist who later causes viewers to be traumatized as mentioned above. Early in the film, before the horror takes hold, Drayton can be seen painting a movie poster featuring a character wearing a hat.

Eagle-eyed viewers at the time immediately recognized the painting as being a reference to Stephen King’s very popular Dark Tower series, as it depicted the gunslinger, the rose and the tower.

Audiences have also noticed paintings in the background of John Carpenter’s The Thing, Pan’s Labyrinth and The Shawshank redemption.^[1]

9 Child’s Play

In 2019, the Child’s Play franchise got a reboot with a high-tech version of everyone’s favorite creepy doll, Chucky. The movie received several favorable reviews for its dark humor and 80s nostalgia.

There is no shortage of fun details and hidden ‘easter eggs’ in the new film. An awesome nod went to Steven Spielberg’s E.T. in the form of Andy’s red hoody and Chucky’s glowing finger antics. Andy, who is Chucky’s new ‘owner’, sports a host of horror movie posters against his bedroom wall including Poltergeist III, which was released in 1988, the same year as the first Child’s Play movie.

There is also a more sinister tribute to the classic horror film, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, with Chucky skinning an unfortunate guy’s face.^[2]

8 Bird Box

For many fans (and critics), 2018’s Bird Box was a swing and a miss in the horror department. It was a massive success for Netflix however, becoming the platform’s biggest hit at the time. Some viewers called it a ‘rip-off’ of A Quiet Place and mocked the ending relentlessly. The movie inspired the Bird Box challenge in which people tried to go about their lives blindfolded for 24 hours.

During the film, Malorie (played by Sandra Bullock) and her sister discuss Malorie’s latest painting. Malorie says the painting is filled with people who are together but unable to connect. This foreshadows Malorie’s inability to connect to the two children she cares for later on. Her other paintings also seem to indicate impending horror in the form of an unrecognizable spectre hovering over a wolf and a deer.

Malorie is pregnant during the film and as the terrifying events start taking place and her world starts falling apart, many viewers drew parallels between her experience and how scary and tough life can be for a new parent.^[3]

7 A Quiet Place

Rule #1: Don’t make a sound.

This might seem like a simple enough instruction, until you see a heavily pregnant Evelyn Abbott and you realize that nothing in the movie, A Quiet Place, is going to be easy. Humans making the slightest sounds are rewarded by monsters hunting them down within seconds. The Abbott family experiences this first-hand when one of their own is snatched by a Demogorgon-looking creature.

The family tries to protect themselves, not only by being quiet, but also by using a warning system of red lights strung on their lawn. While the lights work to warn that the monsters are close, a small high-pitched sound also emanate from them once switched on. The sound is meant to distract the monsters from any human-made noises and lure them away from the house itself.^[4]

6 Scream 2

Those who weren’t fans of the first Scream movie, also weren’t fans of the sequel. Some, however, thought that Scream 2 was quite brilliant in its use of ‘a film within a film’ tactic. The movie was also filled to the brim with cameos by celebrities who would go on to star in hit movies and series, including Joshua Jackson and Portia de Rossi as well as Sarah Michelle Gellar.

There is some foreshadowing in Scream 2, for instance when Maureen’s boyfriend Phil heads to the bathroom during a trip to the cinema to watch ‘Stab’. He encounters two fellow movie-goers dressed up in Ghostface outfits. This scene is a heads-up to the fact that there are two killers in the movie.

What’s more, as Scream 2 ends, protagonist Sidney and reporter Gale are left standing alongside Cotton Weary. Weary dies at the beginning of Scream 3. This bit of foreshadowing was carried on from the first film, during which Sidney and Gale end up standing alongside Randy at the end.
Randy ends up dying in Scream 2.^[5]

10 Real Easter Eggs Hidden Around The World

5 I Still Know What You Did Last Summer

Much like the first movie, I Still Know What You Did Last Summer was never going to win any awards especially given its dismal rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Not an award it could be proud of anyway. But it has inevitably gained a cult following and still retains its cult horror movie status to this day.

Starring Jennifer Love Hewitt and Brandy Norwood, the movie picks up one year after the events of the first film and things soon turn deadly.

What some viewers may not have noticed the first (or only) time they watched the movie is that Julie and Karla (played by Hewitt and Norwood) answered the radio quiz question incorrectly, but still won the trip to the Bahamas. They were asked what the capital of Brazil is and answered “Rio.” The correct answer is Brasilia.

This clever Easter egg was meant to give viewers a clue about the Bahamas vacation being a set-up.^[6]

4 Pet Sematary

The cat came back in Pet Sematary 2019, much as it did in the original movie and, before that, the novel. Church looks arguably better in the modern version; before the whole coming-back-from-the dead-thing that is.

When the Creeds’ daughter, Ellie, sees the cat in the street after he died, she runs after him, her little brother Gage in tow. Louis Creed realizes in horror that a truck is bearing down on his children, and he runs after them, grabbing Gage just in time. However, the truck comes apart, killing Ellie. This is a departure from the original story in which Gage is killed.

Alongside this twist are a host of cleverly inserted details, adding to the movie experience. In the original 1989 film, the man driving the truck that kills Gage is listening to the song Sheena Is A Punk Rocker by The Ramones. In the 2019 film, the truck driver that ends up hitting and killing Ellie was distracted by his ringing phone. The person who called him happened to be called… Sheena. The Ramones also wrote a song called Pet Sematary for the 1989 film.

There are some great nods to Stephen King’s other stories, including IT—when the characters drive past a road sign saying “Derry – 20 mi”—and when Jud talks about a rabid Saint Bernard, referring to Cujo.

There is also a portrait of two girls wearing two very familiar dresses, in Rachel’s parents’ house. The dresses are frilly, blue, and identical.^[7]

3 Lake Mungo

Using mockumentary-style storytelling alongside found footage elements allowed the makers of Lake Mungo to freak out viewers worldwide. This Australian horror film was released in 2008 and centres around a teenager who dies and then haunts her family after her death. Cue several secrets being revealed.

The story about the double life of Alice Palmer was a hit with audiences and critics alike. And while the events unfold quite slowly, there are chilling details at the end that linger after the last name has rolled up the screen. Interspersed with the credits are several shots made up of prior footage of Alice’s ghost throughout the film, that went unnoticed. There is a particularly eerie scene in which the Palmer family stands in front of their house with a shadow watching them from the window.

At the very end of the credits, Alice (or her doppelganger) stands at Lake Mungo in complete darkness while lightning strikes overhead.^[8]

2 The Ritual

In Netflix’s The Ritual, a group of old friends on a hike find themselves face to face with a mythological creature. And not the friendly mermaid-under-the-sea type of creature, but the terrifying rip-your-guts-out-and-feed-it-to-your-friends kind.

Two of the group make it out alive and end up taking refuge in a house in which an elderly woman is praying to a stone with what seems to be the resident monster on it. The stone turned out to be a replica of the Loki Stone that can be found in Kirkby Stephen Parish Church in Kirkby Stephen, England. The stone is believed to depict Loki while bound and chained.

The film also features a cult that offers human sacrifices. The cult members chant the word blót, a Norse pagan term for ‘sacrifice.’ Nordic paganism revolved around sacrifices featuring rituals including human sacrifice. Those who participated would drip the blood of the deceased over their own bodies as they believed it would strengthen them for the coming year.^[9]

1 Friday the 13th

While some horror movie fans are terrified by mythical creatures such as the monster from the above-mentioned The Ritual or the ugly alien-looking things from A Quiet Place, others shake at the sight of scary movie villains such as Michael Myers and Jason Voorhees.

Friday the 13th is one of the go-to franchises when it comes to scary-movie-marathons. And with good reason. There are a whopping 12 movies featuring the hocky-mask-wearing killer. And with so many movies, it is just inevitable that there would be quite a few details that went unnoticed by viewers (for a while, at least.)

One of the best examples of this can be seen In Jason Goes to Hell, when a crate with the words “Ship to Horlicks University via Julia Carpenter. Arctic Expedition June 19, 1834” makes an appearance. This crate was used in the movie Creepshow in which a monster had been trapped inside since 1834. Creepshow’s plot was based on a short story by Stephen King.

The infamous Necronomicon from Evil Dead can also be seen in the movie.^[10]

10 Real Life Things That Would Be Easter Eggs in a Video Game

Some body parts get all the attention, whether it’s the famous essentials like the heart, brain, and liver or the beauty of smiles or athletic musculature. However, there is a whole world of phenomenal body parts that deserve some more attention.

These unsung anatomical heroes might not be the most eye-catching, but they’re why you don’t walk into walls, choke every time you eat, or simply keel over dead while you’re reading this article, among other things. Here is a list of ten of the most underappreciated, interesting, and important parts of the human body.

10 Vestibular System

Ever wondered how you know where your head is in space? How you don’t get dizzy every time you nod or tilt your head? Or why you can’t walk in a straight line after spinning in a circle for a long time?

The answer is the vestibular system (VS), a minuscule, complex setup comprised of three semicircular canals and two chambers in each inner ear. The VS sits behind your eardrum, just next to the cochlea. The semicircular canals are three round tubes filled with liquid, which lie in different planes, enabling sensation of movement in all directions. There are special areas called maculae (not to be confused with the maculae in the retinas) at the end of the tube loops which are covered with sensory hairs. On top of the hairs is a jelly-like substance with tiny weights in it called otoliths. When you move your head, the semicircular canals and maculae move, but the fluid and jelly lag behind. This lag bends the sensory hairs and sends a message to your brain about the direction your head is moving. When you stop moving (or accelerating) and keep your head in a particular spot, the effect of gravity on the weighted jelly tells your brain where you are in space.

So, what happens when we spin in a circle and get dizzy? Ask a friend to spin in a tight circle, either on their feet or in an office chair, for over 30 seconds and then suddenly stop and try to focus on a fixed point. They will feel dizzy and struggle to walk in a straight line, and if you look closely, you will see their eyes flicking from side to side (a phenomenon called nystagmus). This happens because your VS has stopped moving, but the fluid inside the loops has enough momentum to keep moving. This tells your brain you are spinning, but your eyes and cerebellum don’t agree, so you feel completely off-balance, and your vision is distorted.^[1] You can also watch the medical student above try it.

9 Kneecaps

If you have ever fallen on your knees or had that sickening feeling of sliding a chair under a desk and colliding with an unfortunately placed table leg, you’ve probably been grateful for their protection. However, kneecaps are much more than built-in, rudimentary kneepads!

It’s all a matter of leverage. The main function of the kneecap, technically called the patella, is extension of the knee (straightening the leg). The kneecap is tethered to the shinbone (tibia) by a strong tendon, and the top of the kneecap is connected to a major muscle in the quadriceps group. Your “quads” are a group of four muscles, hence the name. The patella increases the effective force with which the knee can extend by 33 to 50 percent due to the increased leverage around the joint.^[2]

8 Cerebrospinal Fluid

Amid all the flesh, blood, and guts in the human body is this beautiful, crystal-clear fluid. Cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) is produced in ventricles deep within the brain and circulates around the brain and spinal cord.

CSF has many functions, including protection, as it provides an area of shock-absorption for the brain when the skull is hit or shaken. It also works to provide nutrients and clear waste from the brain and spinal cord in a similar way to blood in other parts of the body. The CSF is produced and absorbed in an exquisite balance to maintain the correct pressure to surround and support the central nervous system (brain and spinal cord).

Doctors sample CSF by performing a procedure called a lumbar puncture—inserting a needle into the spinal cord and collecting some of the fluid.^[3] It can be used to identify people who have an infection (such as meningitis), a bleed around the brain (hemorrhagic stroke), and other conditions.

7 Uterus

Most women are not particularly fond of their uterus, as it is often a source of pain or problems, but it deserves a prized place on this list.

The most obviously remarkable feature of the uterus is its ability to expand from approximately the size of a woman’s fist to fill most of the abdomen and some of the thorax during pregnancy and contain a full-grown fetus, placenta, and amniotic fluid. The proliferative capacity of the uterus is unrivaled in the human body.

The muscular function of the uterus is also truly unique. Most people are familiar with the pain and power of contractions during labor (which are in themselves a remarkable feat of physiology), but a less well-known muscular function occurs directly after birth. After the placenta detaches from the inside wall of the uterus, there is a huge risk of bleeding (postpartum hemorrhage), as multiple large blood vessels are exposed.

If that happened on your arm or leg, what would you do? Apply pressure. The uterus applies pressure to itself! Straight after delivery of a baby and placenta, a surge of hormones causes intense contraction of the uterus, which compresses the blood vessels and helps them heal and close.^[4]

6 Valves

Most of us are grateful for our sphincters (or should be), but what about our valves? The cardiovascular system is essentially plumbing, and one-way valves keep things flowing in the right direction. We have four very strong pumps (the heart) which work in coordination to pump blood in a figure eight to the lungs to exchange gas and then to the rest of the body, supplying nutrients, removing waste, and keeping everything in balance.

Blood is pumped out of your heart into arteries, which expand and contract as the heart pumps. This is why you can feel a pressure wave in them, your “pulse.” As blood moves away from your heart, arteries branch into smaller and smaller vessels until they pass through extremely fine tubes called capillaries that are only a cell wide. This is when exchange happens between blood and the tissues it supplies. Blood needs to move slowly here and no longer has a pulse due to the large surface area of the microscopic capillaries.

On the way back to the heart, blood travels in veins, which converge into larger and larger vessels. However, there is not a lot of pressure driving blood back to the heart, and most of the blood needs to overcome gravity to return. To deal with this, veins have one-way valves which keep blood flowing in the right direction. Sometimes you can see valves in people’s arms, particularly when you have a tourniquet on for a blood test; they look like little knobbles along an otherwise straight vein.

There are also four essential one-way valves within the heart. Each of the four pumping chambers in the heart has a one-way valve which snaps shut when it contracts to prevent blood from being pumped out in the wrong direction. The chambers in your heart work in pairs, and it is the sound of these valves snapping shut during the pumping action that you hear as the two “lub-dub” heart sounds. If there is anything wrong with how the valves work, you can hear added heart sounds, and the pump will work less effectively.^[5]

5 Lens

If you’ve ever had glasses fitted, you know how arduous the process is to find exactly the right lens to correct your vision. Much like the lenses in glasses, you have lenses within your eyes. They are transparent, concave structures that bend light to focus images onto the back of your eyeball, the retina, which sends the information to your brain to be interpreted as vision.^[6]

Unlike glass or polycarbonate lenses, our anatomical lenses are elasticated and able to change their shape to focus on objects at all different distances. As we age, the lens gradually loses elasticity. This is why most people require glasses to assist with reading as they get older; the lens is less able to recoil or “bounce back” into its thickest form, which is required for near vision. Glasses help to bend the light more, prior to passing through the eye.

4 Ciliary Muscle

How exactly do our lenses manage to change shape? This is achieved by the ciliary muscle, a rim of muscle around the lens which contracts and relaxes to make the lens thicker or thinner.^[7] This, in turn, bends beams of light entering the eye more or less, to keep images in focus.

This muscle movement, known as accommodation, is one of the most sophisticated motor functions in the body. Indeed, our eyes are among the most complex organs in our bodies.

3 Epiglottis

Anatomically, our trachea is in front of our esophagus, so every time we swallow, our food or water needs to pass over our windpipe and in to our food pipe. If this action is not coordinated, we choke.

The epiglottis is a flap of elastic cartilage which projects from the top of the larynx (the top part of the windpipe). When you swallow, the larynx is pulled upward. This is why you can see people’s throats move up and down when they swallow. The “Adam’s apple” is a prominence of cartilage in the larynx which makes this action more obvious in males. When the larynx is pulled upward, the epiglottis is folded over the entrance to the windpipe so that food and water pass over it, into the esophagus.

This is why it is important to lie someone on their side in the recovery position in first aid when appropriate. This is to keep their airway open and to allow any water or secretions to drain out of the mouth instead of into the airway.^[8]

2 Diaphragm

The diaphragm is a large area of fibrous and muscle tissue which separates the abdominal and thoracic cavities, and when it twitches, we get hiccups. Although the rib cage expands and contracts, diaphragm is the main muscle responsible for breathing. When relaxed, the diaphragm is dome-shaped, curving up into the thoracic cavity. When it contracts, the muscle flattens, increasing the intrathoracic volume and creating a sucking action, drawing air into the lungs as they expand.

The diaphragm also helps to regulate pressure on the chest and abdomen when vomiting, coughing, urinating, and passing stool.

When you look at an X-ray of the chest, the diaphragm is higher on the right than the left, due to the location of the liver.^[9] Every time you breathe, all your abdominal contents below the diaphragm move slightly as you inhale and exhale.

1 Skin

It’s the largest organ in the body, and although it’s one of the more highly recognized body parts on the list, its importance is not. The skin has six primary roles, if any of which stopped working, you would get very sick or even die.^[10]

Firstly, skin provides a barrier against physical, thermal, chemical, and radiation sources of potential trauma encountered in daily life. Also, skin regulates your body temperature. As annoying as we find sweating to be, it is actually essential to maintaining our normal physiology and is also involved in another primary function: maintaining the body’s fluid and electrolyte balance.

Skin also has multiple immune functions, acting as both a physical and immunological barrier against infection and allergic triggers. Metabolic functions of the skin include the production of vitamin D and other proteins that cells need to work. Finally, the skin is the most diverse sensory organ in the body, capable of sensing heat, cold, light and firm pressure, pain, and vibrations.

Littoral Spaces
Medicine / Arts

We consider the modern times to be advanced in every way. However, we forget that a lot of very awesome things have been discovered or invented that were, for one reason or another, lost to the winds of time.

Some of them weren’t just good for their own time. They also rival anything we have today. Here are 10 surprisingly awesome things from history that we somehow lost.

10 Wootz Steel

Damascus swords are quite famous for their quality and craftsmanship, though they are only one of the things made from a lost, ancient material called wootz steel. Once shipped from India across the entire world for its high quality, wootz steel is said to be the best steel ever made, even by today’s standards. Weapons made from it were the finest.

While Damascus swords were successfully replicated by modern techniques, they’re still not really true Damascus weapons if they aren’t made from wootz, which was lost at some point. We know quite a lot about the composition of the metal and other details, though we haven’t been able to replicate it even with modern methods. It remains one of the best inventions we somehow managed to lose.^[1]

9 Sutro Baths

Imagine the best swimming pool you have visited, and then consider that Sutro Baths in California had at least seven of them. Aside from being a wonder of the recreational world, it was also the biggest indoor swimming pool facility at the time with seven pools of varying temperatures, various types of slides, a high-diving spot, and a capacity of a whopping 10,000 people at a time. (Today, it would still be the biggest facility in the USA.)

Unfortunately, the pool hit on hard times during the Great Depression. Even when they tried to renovate it with a whole new ice rink, it never really regained its lost glory.^[2]

8 Iron Pillar Of Delhi

While the world was making other advances, India was strangely fixated on perfecting metals. One of the longest-standing mysteries for metallurgy scientists as well as casual enthusiasts has been the iron pillar of Delhi. Seemingly a normal iron pillar in the middle of archaeological ruins, its very existence has baffled scientists ever since they’ve seen it.

It doesn’t rust at all, which isn’t just peculiar for an iron pillar from the fourth century BC but for all iron pillars in general. We still don’t have the technology available to make iron like that, even though we can make new materials that don’t rust.

Studies have suggested that the iron pillar may be coated with a film that protects it from rust. However, some have also noted that it may just be the high amount of phosphorous chosen for the design that gives it corrosion resistance. All in all, everyone is guessing here as its construction technique was never recorded.^[3]

7 New York Hippodrome

These days, a lot of venues could vie for the position of the greatest theater in New York City. However, for those who were alive during its time, the Hippodrome Theater always unanimously held that title.

Meant for the masses instead of the upscale Broadway theatergoers, the Hippodrome had a seating capacity of 5,200 with a stage about 10 times bigger than a normal Broadway stage. It was so popular that it inspired many other Hippodromes across the country that are still operational. But nothing beats the original.

Unfortunately, the mighty Hippodrome proved to be too big to sustain itself. Due to production costs becoming too high and the Great Depression causing an overall slowdown, the Hippodrome was demolished in 1939.^[4]

6 Mirror Burner

Everyone who has tried to make a piece of paper catch fire with a magnifying glass knows that this stuff should definitely be made into weapons, but no one has ever been crazy enough to pull it off. Well, no one except Archimedes, whose infamous death ray was nothing but a bunch of mirrors pointed at Roman ships during the siege of Syracuse. It was like a magnified magnifying glass, if you will.^[5]

While Roman and Greek historians definitely mention the device used in that naval siege, we’re not quite sure why the designs were never preserved to reproduce it. Through experiments of their own, a team of MIT researchers as well as a Greek engineer back in 1973 have proved that the death ray would work. However, we know that it still wouldn’t be the same as what Archimedes built millennia ago.

5 Guaira Falls

Now we’re no stranger to awesome waterfalls. The whole world is littered with a variety of them, and many are popular tourist attractions. But Guaira Falls was especially magnificent as it once pumped the highest amount of water (about double the amount that goes through Niagara Falls) into seven enormous and violent sets of waterfalls on the Paraguay-Brazil border.

It was one of the natural wonders of South America. The water flow was so intense that its gushing could be heard as far as 32 kilometers (20 mi) away.^[6]

The falls were destroyed when the Itaipu Dam was built over them, which sounds like a good decision considering that the dam provides 75 percent of Paraguay’s electricity. Still, we lost one of the most awesome waterfalls in the process.

4 Universal Antidote

If we told you that a universal antidote exists for all kinds of known poisons, you’d probably ask us why we aren’t making bank selling it. For one, we don’t have the recipe anymore as it was lost a long time ago.

But more importantly, we’d have to be as paranoid about getting assassinated with poison as King Mithridates VI of Pontus. He had a reason to be paranoid, too, as he was one of ancient Rome’s most powerful and despised enemies.

Famous for his expertise in toxins and chemicals, he made himself what reliable records say was a universal antidote with a bunch of ingredients. This kept him safe from all types of toxins and poisons.

Many scientists believe that he just had too much poison, which made him immune to the whole thing. But we know that his concoction worked on others as it was a widely accepted and reproduced drug in Roman and Greek antiquity. Also, we can find records from physicians and scholars talking about it at the time.

So we know that a universal antidote existed. But we have no idea when exactly in history we managed to lose such an important technological advancement.^[7]

3 Chacaltaya Glacier Ski Resort

Once the highest resorts in the world, the ski resort at Chacaltaya Glacier in Bolivia wasn’t just an awesome landmark that we lost. It was also one of the first casualties of climate change.

At 5,421 meters (17,785 ft) high, the resort hosted professional skiers from around the world with an unparalleled view of the surrounding mountains. Around 2009, however, the glacier was as good as gone and the resort had to finally shut down.^[8]

According to many studies conducted on the glacier during its time, the region saw an increase in temperature of 0.5 degrees Celsius (0.9 °F) in 1976 and 2006, which ultimately resulted in its disappearance.

2 Stradivarius Violins

Opinions on who makes the best musical instruments vary among musicians depending on the instrument and what you mean by “best.” Different instruments are good for different uses, and it’s difficult to identify the best makers in the world.

That’s not true for violins, though. It’s a unanimously and scientifically accepted fact that the best violins are those made by Antonio Stradivari, an Italian luthier in 17th- and 18th-century Italy. No one has been able to replicate or even understand the production process behind Stradivarius violins. The ones we have left are in private collections, sold for ridiculous sums of money.^[9]

Some scientists hypothesize that the wood used by Stradivarius was special due to the mini ice age in Europe at the time, which is why they’re so superior to any other violins. Again, we may never know the exact reason behind their superiority, which was a closely guarded family secret.

1 Advanced Sustainable Agriculture

Sustainable farming is all the rage these days and for good reason. Many of our farming practices leave a devastating impact on the environment, though it’s still expensive and time-consuming to do it in a 100 percent green manner. If only we had figured out how to grow stuff and not ruin the environment in the process some time in our history.^[10]

The thing is, we did. The Aztecs had uniquely engineered farms called chinampas (aka the floating gardens). Due to being built on mountain slopes with an elaborate drainage system, the farms never flooded and always retained water without any supervision.

The Aztecs also planted willows along the periphery which would eventually grow enough roots to protect the soil from erosion as well. The systems went out of use once the area started being colonized as the Spanish didn’t understand the Aztec systems and introduced their own farming methods to the region.

Despite science’s many attempts to fully understand how these terraces worked, we have never been able to replicate them.

Himanshu can be found shouting obscenities at strangers on Twitter or making amateur drawings on Instagram. He has written for Forbes, Cracked, Screen Rant, and Arre. Pay him money for writing stuff for you here: [email protected]

Anyone who’s had a pet dog, cat, or other animal is well aware of their amazing abilities. A dog can smell scents and odors imperceptible to people, and a cat’s fantastic balance and nimble coordination are greater than those of the most gifted acrobat or gymnast. Animals that aren’t usually kept as pets also exhibit incredible powers, such as hibernation, using sonar to navigate, walking on water, and delivering powerful electrical shocks to prey or threatening predators. These astonishing powers aren’t the only ones animals possess, though, as the 10 recently discovered awesome animal abilities on this list clearly attest.

Top 10 Animals That Surprisingly Make Good Guards

10 Heat Smell

 

Dogs have a tremendous sense of smell. Their noses are “up to a hundred times more sensitive” than those of people. They can even smell radiation, or, more specifically, thermal radiation, or heat, even when it’s “weak.” Their ability to sniff out the body heat of potential prey serves them well when they develop “impaired sight, hearing, or smell,” because their being able to detect body heat with their noses enables them to hunt, even when their senses aren’t as sharp as they used to be. Ethologist Marc Bekoff, professor emeritus at the University of Colorado, Boulder, is so impressed with this newly discovered animal ability that he characterizes it as nothing less that “fascinating.”

Other animals, including black fire beetles, some snakes, and the common vampire bat, are known to use this ability, but no one suspected dogs could be capable of sniffing out body heat. The “smooth skin on the tips of [dogs’] noses around the nostrils” is both “moist [and] colder than the ambient temperature.” Aware of this fact, scientists wondered whether dogs might be able to sense heat with their noses. They put the matter to the test by subjecting them to an MRI scan while the dogs were exposed to objects emitting various levels of thermal radiation. The resulting data showed that, yes, dogs can smell “weak hot spots.”^[1]

9 Magentoreception

 

Dogs’ ability to smell heat isn’t the only amazing power scientists have recently discovered. It’s been known for some time that birds, salamanders, and frogs, among other animals, can navigate by sensing the planet’s “weak magnetic field.” The sense that accounts for this ability is known as magentoreception. Dogs, it has been found, also possess this sense, just as has been “long suspected.” Although it’s unclear how canines are able to detect the Earth’s magnetic field, it’s now known that they do. “I’m really quite impressed with the data,” biologist Catherine Lohmann said.

Dogs use this awesome ability to scout out new paths through unfamiliar territory, which helps them to hunt, and their magentoreception may help them to perform other tasks as well. Further research is needed concerning this amazing discovery. It seems a safe bet to predict that it will soon be forthcoming.^[2]

8 Oxygen-less Survival

 

It’s tiny. Its home is the salmon, in the muscle of which the parasite lives. Neither its size nor its abode is what’s most awesome about the animal, though. It’s able to get along just fine without an element vital to the lives of every plant and animal on the planet—except itself. The 10-celled Henneguya salminicola (H. salminicola) is the only animal known to be able to breathe without oxygen. One of the many people astonished by H. salminicola’s ability is Dorothée Huchon, a zoologist at Israel’s Tel Aviv University, who declared, “Aerobic respiration is a major source of energy, and yet we found an animal that gave up this critical pathway.”

The absence of mitochondrial DNA in the parasite’s structure indicates it doesn’t need the genes required for respiration, because these genes are contained in this portion of DNA. The fact that the genes are missing shows that H. salminicola can no longer “perform aerobic cellular respiration.” In other words, it survives without the need for oxygen. Although it’s not known how the parasite accomplishes this unique feat, Huchon said that it’s possible that H. salminicola somehow siphons off energy from its host’s cells. It’s also possible, the zoologist says, that the parasite “may have a different type of respiration such as oxygen-free breathing.” In either case, Huchon said, “It is generally thought that, during evolution, organisms become more and more complex, and that simple single-celled or few-celled organisms are the ancestors of complex organisms. But here, right before us, is an animal whose evolutionary process is the opposite.”^[3]

7 “Lasso Locomotion”

 

Some snakes have exhibited a bizarre, but fascinating ability to “climb” trees using a method called “lasso locomotion.” The brown snakes, which were brought from Australia, Papau New Guinea, and the Pacific Islands by cargo ships back in the days of World War II, have become more than nuisances in Guam, where the predatory reptiles have wiped out ten indigenous species of birds. To fight back, local inhabitants of the island have come up with some creative tactics, including “air-dropping drug-filled mice” for the snakes to nibble on and using dogs to hunt down the snakes. So far, such efforts have met with failure.

Birds are especially susceptible to attack, because the brown snakes live in trees. To protect the birds, Colorado State University ecologists Julie Savidge and Tom Seibert recommended that smooth metal poles be installed “at the base of bird nest boxes.” The snakes wouldn’t be able to climb such smooth surfaces, and the birds would be safe, the scientists reasoned. The snakes surprised them. On-site video cameras caught the predators winding their bodies about the poles, like lassos, and then wiggling up the poles. Seibert’s response: “We just kind of looked at each other in shock. I mean, this wasn’t something a snake was supposed to be able to do.” This awesome, recently discovered ability adds a fifth means of snake motivity, lasso locomotion, to the four already identified: slithering, rectilinear movement, lateral undulation, and concertina locomotion.^[4]

6 Empathy

 

Like many other animals, rodents are social. They live in groups, and they depend upon one another for their survival. But do they also feel each other’s pain? Can they empathize? That’s what a team of researchers wanted to know. Defining empathy as “the ability to understand what other individuals in their group [or “conspecifics,” as scientists call them] feel and to share that feeling,” the researchers set out to find out. They divided their mousy subjects into three groups, each of which would be subjected to a different sort of stress. One group had their tails pinched. The second group was injected with formalin. The third group was anesthetized.

“The test mice in this study could . . . reliably determine that the treated mouse was in a pain state using visual cues,” the team’s article in the Brain and Behavior journal stated. As a result of empathizing with the mice in pain, other mice, the “cage-mates” of the “distressed” animals, showed empathetic behavior toward the victims by exhibiting “no heightened interest in anesthetized conspecifics or conspecifics with swollen limbs,” but showing “interest in formalin?injected conspecifics.” It was less clear whether “stranger mice” experienced empathy for the “distressed mice.”^[5]

5 Shape-shifting

 

Although the mutable rain frog was first discovered in 2006, in the rain forest of Ecuador, the amphibian’s awesome ability to shift its shape wasn’t known until some years later, when a second of its species was found. Its ability to change the texture of its skin from rough and “spiny” to “smooth” in only minutes made one researcher, in catching the frog for a photograph, thought she’d grabbed the wrong specimen. Later, intending to return it to its natural habitat, the researchers placed moss in the amphibian’s container. When they looked in on the frog after a while, it had reverted to its rough skin.

A series of photographs show the mutable rain frog at various segments of time—90 seconds, 150 seconds, 180 seconds, 270 seconds, and 330 seconds. Within three minutes, it could be mistaken for a different frog; within five and a half minutes, it probably would be.

The scientists were even more amazed when a second species of frog, the Sobetes robber frog, was found to have this same astonishing ability. Now, researchers think, many other amphibian species may be able to shift their shapes as well.^[6]

4 Brainless Learning

 

It’s yellow—or “yellowish”—and it resembles a plant, sometimes. Other times, it looks like a mushroom. Still other times, it might be mistaken for, well, mucus. It’s a mystery. Scientists have no idea, yet, whether “The Blob,” as the whatever-it-is is called at present, is an animal or a fungus. The bizarre life form was discovered in France, at the Paris Zoological Park, looking “like a fungus, but acting like an animal.” It also has some other awesome features, among which are “720 sexes,” the ability to “move without legs or wings,” and the power to heal “itself in two minutes if cut in half.”

Needless to say, the zoo’s director, Bruno David, is impressed with The Blob, perhaps most of all because “it has no brain but is able to learn.” It can find its way out of a maze to locate food or bypass a line of salt, which it “hates.” When food awaits it beyond a “salt barrier,” The Blob will find a way to get around the line of salt more quickly than it’s apt to do otherwise. Such learning is impressive, indeed, but it’s not all The Blob can do. “If you merge two blobs, the one that has learned will transmit its knowledge to the other,” David said. The mysterious Blob is named for the alien in the science fiction-horror movie The Blob, starring Steve McQueen. Like the zoological Blob, the movie Blob liked to eat, too, so much so that it consumed pretty much everything in its path during its visit to a small Pennsylvania town.^[7]

3 Survival Genes

 

Despite their microscopic size, tardigrades are tough. These “water bears,” as they’re better known, survive extremes that would kill other animals much larger than themselves, including us. They owe their awesome survivability to special “survival genes.” One genus of tardigrades, Ramazzottius variornatus, are especially hardy. In fact, they are “arguably the toughest and most resilient species found in the entire tardigrade clan.”

Geneticist Takekazu Kunieda and his colleagues at the University of Tokyo have discovered one of the secrets of the water bears. They’ve “evolved a special protein that protects [their] DNA from radiation damage. Extremophiles, they are also capable of surviving such extreme conditions as “freezing, total dehydration, . . . and even the vacuum of space.” In fact, “scientists successfully revived a tardigrade that had been frozen solid for more than three decades—a new record for this durable species.”

It was once thought that tardigrades didn’t develop their awesome abilities on their own but that they had had help. Geneticists at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill “found that 17.5 percent of the tardigrade genome comes from other organisms, including plants, fungi, bacteria, and viruses” as a result of horizontal gene transfer. However, the findings of the Japanese researchers “challenges this assumption,” suggesting that the tardigrades’ awesome survivability are “proprietary,” rather than consequences of gene transfer. Researchers believe that the tardigrades’ amazing abilities may have remarkable medical and genetics applications.^[8]

2 Super Taste

 

A taste bud is an amazing receptor. These clusters of specialized cells, which detect the flavors of everything from vanilla ice cream to olives, may not be as well understood as once thought. The taste buds of mice are revolutionizing the way scientists think about the sense of taste and the ability of taste buds to detect flavors.

Tastes are usually classified into five types: bitter, sweet, salty, sour, and umami. (“Umami” refers to a savory taste.) Traditionally, scientists held that taste buds could detect only one or two types of flavor, and research showed that taste cells seemed able to pick up only certain compounds. For example, such cells might detect “sweet sucralose” or “bitter caffeine,” but not both. Thanks to the taste buds of mice, this picture has become a lot more complex.

When neurophysiologist Debarghya Dutta Banik and colleagues removed certain taste cells from the taste buds of mice, the rodents’ other taste cells responded to various flavors that were introduced to them. After the subject mice were presented with several tasty compounds, researchers discovered that the mice had “a group of cells” capable of sensing “multiple chemicals across different classes.” To make matters still more complicated, the brain was also shown to affect a mouse’s sense of taste. Without a “key protein needed for these broadly tasting cells to relay information,” the brain didn’t receive “the flavor messages” and the mice would lap up “bitter solutions,” despite the rodents’ normal dislike of such tastes, Banik said.

As Kathryn Medler, a neurophysiologist at the University at Buffalo in New York, points out, the sense of taste has survival value. Without the ability to taste foods, people would find meals much less palatable and might eat less, becoming malnourished. The sense of taste has another survivability function as well. Taste also helps people avoid food that might be “spoiled or toxic,” since it is likely to taste unpleasant, should it be sampled. The fact that “taste works similarly in mice and humans” suggests that the sense of taste might be restored to people who lose this sense because of the effects of chemotherapy.^[9]

1 Time Measurement

 

Animals can tell time. When an animal is waiting, a group of recently discovered neurons “turn on like a clock.” Daniel Dombeck, the leader of research conducted at Northwestern University, said that his team’s findings show that dogs, like other animals, have “an explicit representation of time in their brains” by which they are able to “measure a time interval.” That’s how pet dogs know whether their caretakers are behind schedule in feeding them.

Dombeck’s knowledge that the temporal lobe of the brain “encodes spatial information in episodic memories” led him to hypothesize that the lobe might also be “responsible for encoding time.” As James Heys, a postdoctoral fellow in Dombeck’s laboratory, explained, every memory has two common elements: “space and time,” since memories occur “in a particular environment and are always structured in time.”

To test his hypothesis, Dombeck and his team built an actual treadmill “in a virtual reality environment,” through which a mouse ran down a hallway to a door “halfway down the track.” Six seconds after the mouse arrives at the door, the door opens, admitting the rodent to a waiting reward. The physical door was later replaced by an “invisible door” in the virtual reality scenario. Various cues alerted the mouse to the whereabouts of the invisible door, but, in repeated tests, the animal still waited six seconds before continuing down the track to claim its reward.

With the mouse hooked up to a brain imaging apparatus, Dombeck and his colleagues monitored its brain activity and found that neurons related to “spatial encoding” fired as the mouse ran toward the invisible door but “turned off” when it reached the door, and that “a new set of [timing] cells” were activated instead. “This was a big surprise and a new discovery,” Dombeck said. One of the potential applications of his team’s research, Dombeck observed, might be “new early-detection tests for Alzheimer’s” in which people suspected of having the disease would be asked to “judge how much time has elapsed or ask them to navigate a virtual reality environment.”^[10]

Top 10 Surreal Animals That Really Exist

About The Author: An English instructor at the University of Nevada Las Vegas, Gary L. Pullman lives south of Area 51, which, according to his family and friends, explains “a lot.” His four-book series, An Adventure of the Old West, is available on Amazon.

English history is full of tales about famous, heroic knights. From the legendary King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table to the rebellious Harry Hotspur and Black Prince of Wales, there are enough chivalric stories to fill hundreds of books.

But the Chivalric Code was a real way of life for thousands of people over the course of the Middle Ages, and many of them lived awesome lives that are sadly forgotten now. Here, we’ve hunted down ten of the greatest knights you’ve probably never heard of.

10 Gilbert De Clare

In many ways, Gilbert de Clare was the archetypical English knight.^[1] A descendant of William the Conqueror and a relative of both the king of England and, by marriage, Robert the Bruce of Scotland, Gilbert was also the head of the powerful de Clare family. And at the age of 23, he already had several years of military service in Scotland under his belt.

It was only natural, then, that he was one of the leaders in Edward II’s doomed Scottish campaign in 1314, the one which ended in defeat at Bannockburn. Having been involved in a skirmish the day before the battle, de Clare was one of the generals who urged Edward to be more cautious. Outraged, Edward accused him of cowardice.

Eager to prove his courage to the king, de Clare led the charge against the Scots the next day. He was surrounded and separated from the main force and killed. His death was considered a tragedy by both sides; he was the first English earl to be killed in battle in nearly 50 years. Robert the Bruce personally stood vigil over his body in the aftermath and allowed Gilbert’s remains to be returned to the English.

Whether or not we think de Clare’s actions were brave or foolish, it is hard not to appreciate his commitment to the Chivalric Code and its requirement that knights show bravery in the face of adversity, and his death would have far-reaching consequences for the king when his lands ended up in the hands of the hated Despenser family.

9 Thomas Of Lancaster

Concerned about the king’s judgement and how susceptible he was to manipulation, Thomas of Lancaster was one of the key figures behind the Ordinances of 1311, which imposed severe restrictions on King Edward II’s authority, and was also involved in the execution of one of the king’s closest friends, Piers Gaveston, in 1312.^[2] Edward was easily swayed by those who impressed him, and Lancaster considered this a threat to the realm.

He rebelled in 1321 in protest against the power of the Despenser family, who many believed were controlling the king behind the scenes, but he was defeated at the Battle of Boroughbridge. At his trial, which was judged by the Despensers, the king, and their allies, Lancaster was not allowed to speak in his own defense. He was beheaded at his own castle in Pontefract.

Lancaster had always been popular with the common folk for supporting the Ordinances, which they thought protected them from royal exploitation. A cult rose up around him following his death, and he became a saint. Edward II sent a group of armed guards to the church where his body lay to prevent people from making the pilgrimage to see him. The route obviously continued to be popular, however, as a riot broke out outside his tomb in 1323.

8 Henry Of Grosmont

Of all the knights on this list, Henry of Grosmont is probably the one we know most about—in terms of his personality, at least.^[3] Henry wrote a book, Livre de Seyntz Medicines, which tells us much about his everyday life.

Henry was the nephew of Thomas of Lancaster and was just as brave and stubborn. Henry was an avid jouster and obviously loved a thrill. He celebrated Christmas in 1341 by taking part in a joust without armor. Naturally, the contest resulted in two deaths and a serious injury—but Henry came out of it unscathed.

Later in life, his successes in France led to him being made lieutenant of Gascony, and he won key victories at battles with the French at Bergerac and Auberoche, which netted him enough money in ransoms to eclipse the king’s own annual income and made him one of the richest men in England.

But it is perhaps the insights into his daily life that make him so interesting: Henry was a self-confessed braggart who loved to talk about himself and thought he was great at dancing. He loved the smell of flowers, getting drunk, and reading “trivial” books—though he admits he didn’t learn how to read until later in life. And then there’s perhaps his most hilarious trait, one we can all sympathize with: He struggled to wake up early every day.

7 Andrew Harclay

Andrew Harclay was a knight for whom principle was everything.^[4] Like many others on this list, his life revolved around war, and he spent much of his life fighting the Scots on the border, especially after he was made sheriff of Cumberland in 1311. He led the defense against the Scots in 1313 and defeated Robert the Bruce outside Carlisle in 1315, halting Bruce’s counter-invasion that followed the disaster at Bannockburn. This stopped Bruce from rampaging through Northern England, and for it, Edward II lavished Andrew with money.

Despite his warm relationship with the king, he had been an ally of Thomas of Lancaster at court, and when he rebelled in 1321, Thomas must have expected Andrew to join him. Andrew and his army confronted Thomas at Boroughbridge in 1322; before the battle, Thomas asked Andrew to join his rebellion, but he refused. Remaining loyal to the king, Andrew defeated Thomas and captured him, which led to the latter’s trial and execution shortly after.

For this, Andrew was made earl of Carlisle, but the king’s favor was short-lived. Having fought on the border for many years, Andrew decided the war with the Scots could not be won. Seeking to protect his lands and people from further damage, he negotiated a peace with Robert the Bruce in the king’s name (but without his permission) in 1323. Edward was livid. Eager to show the upstart knight his place, the king had Andrew stripped of his symbols of knighthood by having his spurs sawed off and breaking his sword over his head. He was tried by a royal justice in his own castle of Carlisle and then hanged, drawn, and quartered. At his trial, he maintained his dignity, continuing to claim that he only acted in the best interests of his people and the country.

The king signed a 13-year truce with the Scots just three months later.

6 William De Warenne

William de Warenne began life as an arrogant man.^[5] Buoyed by the power of his father, he seems to have thought himself untouchable. He rarely attended his lord’s court and even mocked King Henry I behind his back, calling him “Stagfoot” because of his obsessive love of hunting. Needless to say, when he was caught trying to support an aborted rebellion, he was banished from the kingdom in 1101, his lands seized.

Though an intervention by his friend Robert Curthose, Duke of Normandy, got him his lands back, William seems to have learned his lesson, because he and the king slowly became friends. By 1110, William was one of the king’s closest confidantes, accompanying the royal court almost constantly. In 1119, when the king was at war with France, and many of his own lords had rebelled, William said to him: “There is nobody who can persuade me to treason [ . . . ] I and my kinsmen here and now place ourselves in mortal opposition to the king of France and are totally faithful to you.”

While there is no doubt that William gained from being the king’s friend, being granted a large tax exemption—the third-largest in the kingdom—the friendship was more than just political: William was by the king’s side when he died in 1135 and was one of just five men who escorted his body to Rouen in preparation for his burial.

5 Aymer De Valence

By the time Edward II was crowned, Aymer de Valence was one of the most experienced and respected members of the king’s court, having been one of the last king’s closest advisors.^[6] So when the court split in two over the situation around the king’s friend, Piers Gaveston, it was Aymer who held the middle ground. Torn between his loyalty to the king and the king’s failure to govern properly, Aymer seems to have been the linchpin of a middle party who tried to hold the kingdom together.

The situation worsened, however, and soon, people were calling for Piers to be banished—or worse. Knowing that Aymer was respected by both sides, the king chose him to escort Gaveston to York, where he would be tried. However, the journey took them close to the place where Aymer’s wife was staying, and he left Gaveston alone one night to visit her, trusting that Gaveston’s enemies would respect that he was under Aymer’s protection and leave him alone.

But they were not as honorable as Aymer expected, and they seized Piers. Accounts of Gaveston’s murder are graphic: He was driven from the house in his bedclothes and forced to march on foot ahead of the other knights, who shouted insults and blew horns. He was ultimately impaled with a sword and beheaded in the wilderness. His body was left by the side of the road.

This event had a massive impact on Aymer. Disgusted that the rebels had betrayed his honor and the knightly code, from that day on, he was a staunch supporter of Edward. He was a key advisor to the king even through the years of the Despensers, when nearly everyone abandoned Edward, and also seems to have acted as a kind of personal protector: He personally escorted the protesting king from the field of battle at the disaster of Bannockburn. In a time when both the king and his enemies resorted to violence to achieve their means, Aymer was a rock of morality, guided by his knightly principles and always doing what he believed to be right.

4 Roger De Mortimer

The Baronial War of 1264 to 1267 was a disastrous civil war in medieval England. Fueled by anti-Jewish sentiment, dissatisfaction with the king and his government, and famine, it tore England in two. And one of the most obvious supporters of the barons was Roger de Mortimer.^[7] Roger was due to inherit a large amount of land, but King Henry III was slow in processing the legalities, which pushed Roger onto the side of the rebels.

Roger never truly fit in with the rebels, either, however, especially after he lost a castle one of the rebel barons had trusted him to keep. He flipped sides several times throughout the war, destroying other lords’ estates and suffering the same in return. He found himself commanding a portion of the royal army at the pivotal Battle of Evesham (where he was supposedly the one who killed the chief rebel, Simon de Montfort) and from that point onward was firmly on the royal side. His ambition to punish the rebels and seize as much land from them as possible was extreme and brought him into conflict with Gilbert de Clare (an ancestor of the one mentioned above).

However, Roger seems to have regretted the damage the war did to the realm in later life. He was one of the three men trusted to govern the kingdom while King Edward returned from crusading. Their reign was marked by cooperation and peace, and Roger made serious efforts to make amends for the damage caused by the war. He and Gilbert de Clare buried the hatchet and even went on a yearlong tour together in Southern England, where they helped to reconstruct bridges destroyed by conflict.

3 Henry Percy

The Percy family were famous (or infamous) for their persistently independent, ambitious, and rebellious nature. The most well-known Percy, known as Hotspur, made Henry IV king and eventually rebelled against him. But Henry Percy, third Lord Percy, was different: He was a loyal, unambitious lord who did as he was asked and acted with honor in battle.^[8]

He fought in the Battle of Crecy in France, one of the most crucial battles in the Hundred Years’ War, at the age of 25. He remained in France until his father’s death in 1352, when he was made warden of the March and sent back home to guard the Scottish borders, as his father and grandfather had. Unlike them, however, he seems to have had little ambition for expanding his own lands at Scottish expense, and when he took part in the 1356 invasion of Scotland, his most significant achievement was in securing the Treaty of Berwick, which brought an end to the war in England’s favor. He followed Edward III’s orders to the letter and was successful in ending the Scottish war that had dragged on for decades.

It seems that his lack of personal ambition was not because he lacked military skill because by 1355, he was the marshal of the English army in France and took part in Edward’s campaign to capture Rheims in 1360. With his talent and his dedication to duty, he was in many ways the model of a high-class baron, serving in the king’s army when asked and policing the border in peacetime. His family’s chronicler said of him: “Content with the lordship left him by his father, he wished to obtain the lands or possessions of no one.” By 1362, the king’s opinion of Percy was so high that he gave Percy’s son, yet another Henry Percy, the authority to negotiate with the Scottish government on his behalf.

2 Thomas De Beauchamp

Thomas de Beauchamp was one of the founding knights of the Order of the Garter, the highest honor a medieval knight could aspire to, and was by all accounts a shrewd tactician and one of England’s greatest generals during the Hundred Years’ War.^[9]

He was part of the English campaigns in France, where he led the English center at the Battle of Crecy and was entrusted with personally looking after the prince of England, the Black Prince, on the battlefield. Edward III later paid Thomas 1,000 marks on the condition that he would serve the king in war whenever required, which tells us how great a warrior he was.

Many knights chose to retreat from the battlefield as they got older, but Thomas continued to relish combat. He accompanied the Black Prince at Poitiers in 1356 despite being older than 40, and it was said that he and William Montagu struggled like lions to see which one could spill the most French blood.

By the height of his career in 1369, the same year in which he would ultimately die of the Black Death, he didn’t even have to fight to defeat his enemies: The Duke of Burgundy, hearing that “the devil Warwick” was in the English army, retreated under the cover of darkness to avoid him!

1 Jean III De Grailly

Like de Beauchamp, de Grailly was present at the Battle of Poitiers, where he led the English cavalry.^[10] Seeing an opportunity in the way the battle was going, Jean led an attack around the side of the French army that resulted in the capture of the French king and many of his nobles. That’s quite a feat, especially since Jean was actually French himself!

He was captured by the French in 1364, who were anxious to keep him from commanding the English. At first, they refused to ransom him, and then the French king offered him considerable lands and titles to join his side. Jean accepted but swore loyalty to Edward III again soon after, abandoning his new titles.

He rejoined the English campaigns in France but was captured again in 1372. The French king once again offered him land and titles in exchange for his support, but he refused them, unwilling to break his oath to the king of England. He was said to have been so feared by the French that they kept him under close confinement in Paris. He remained in captivity until 1376, when, after hearing of the Black Prince’s death, he was said to have refused food and water, dying some days later.