Sleep. It’s the place where we’re all Vikings. Or donuts. Whatever it is that happens to you in your dreams. It’s the most horizontal you can be in a day, and it’s usually pretty relaxing. Man, who doesn’t love a good sleep? But what happens if you don’t get enough of it?

Everyone’s probably pulled an all-nighter at some point in their lives, whether for work or pleasure. You stay up all night, the morning comes around, you just figure “oh well. Been up this long, might as well stay up for a whole day.” 

At some point, though, that gets old. Usually we don’t go beyond a day or two at the most. And it’s fairly well known that at some point, you’ll start suffering some ill effects from not getting sleep.

The mechanics of how this works are not as well known, however. Nor is it always really clear exactly what goes wrong when you don’t get enough sleep, or just how bad things can get for you. So let’s take a look at what medical science tells us about sleep, how much you need, and what you’re risking if you don’t get enough. 

How Much Sleep Do You Need?

Most of the world seems to be based around the idea that we need 8 hours of sleep per night. We’ve divided our 24 hour periods into 8-hour segments as adults in the western world. You work for 8 hours you sleep for 8 hours and the other 8 hours is when you fit in everything else you need to do.

Realistically, it’s not always that simple. Medically speaking, as an adult, you should be getting at least 7 hours of sleep per night. The younger you are the more sleep you’re going to need. Babies are out there living the high life getting a recommended 16 hours of sleep per day. They’re basically cats until they’re a year old.

Hours of sleep is not a blanket thing, however. People are different and you can’t say specifically that everyone needs this many hours. Some people can function on less sleep, and some people are going to need more. In general, it’s the quality of your sleep that you need to be concerned about, as opposed to how much of it you get.

Sleep quality is concerned with how well you slept, rather than how long. Some nights you hit the pillow, you’re out like a light, and you wake up with your alarm in the morning. Ideally, you feel refreshed, and ready to start your day. That was a good, quality night’s sleep.

On the other hand, sometimes you lay down and you stare at your ceiling, you stare at the display on your clock; you toss and turn; you wake up three times to go to the bathroom, and in the morning you somehow feel worse than you did when you went to bed the night before. You could have had the exact same number of hours, but that was not quality sleep.

If you’re getting good sleep, you probably don’t need more than 9 hours as an adult. That’s not to say anything bad is going to happen to you if you sleep from 12:00 to 12:00 on a Sunday, it’s just that you probably won’t get a ton of benefit from those extra hours. 

How Long Can You Go Without Sleep?

In 1986 a man named Robert McDonald broke a world record by staying awake for nearly 19 consecutive days. His total hours was just below 454. That’s a hell of a long time to be awake and it’s generally not recommended. He had to be monitored the entire time and, as you might expect, people had to observe him non-stop to make sure he didn’t fall asleep. 

You can start feeling the effects of sleep deprivation after as little as 24 hours. Sleep deprivation has been likened to drunkenness. Going without sleep is like having a blood alcohol level of 0.1%. in most places in the world, that’s above the legal limit. That means you’re going to be suffering some cognitive impairments, slow reaction time, brain fog, all that stuff. The symptoms are all very similar to drunkenness. 

In addition to those various impairments, your stress hormone production actually begins to go up. So you’re going to start producing more cortisol and adrenaline. This is because your body knows you’re lacking sleep and trying to help you out.

By 36 hours of not having sleep, you’ll start having physical symptoms. They may not be obvious from the outside, but you’ll be suffering from hormone imbalances. Your appetite and body temperature can suffer, and your mental state will continue to deteriorate. Irritability is a very common symptom.

After two days of not having sleep, you can start experiencing something called microsleep. That happens when you’re still trying to stay awake but your brain has had enough of your shenanigans and actually shuts off for several seconds. You may not even notice it happens, and it’s like a little reset switch went off for less than a minute.

You’ll begin to notice some serious symptoms within three or four days of not sleeping. This can include hallucinations, paranoia, and even psychosis. Interestingly, there isn’t a ton of research on what happens when you stay awake this long because it’s not considered ethical to make someone do it. At this point, sleep deprivation is essentially torture, and your average doctor doesn’t want to do that to a patient. At least not in a way that would allow them to write about it in a scholarly journal after the fact.

We do know that your hallucinations can become longer and more complex at this level. It’s hard to speak without slurring, even walking without stumbling around is difficult. And by 120 hours you can experience psychotic breaks with reality.

But, just like not everyone needs the same amount of sleep, not everyone’s going to have the same experiences. The world record holder for sleep deprivation suffered very few ill effects from his experience, so your mileage may vary. As a general rule though, you probably don’t want to try it yourself.

Sleep Deficiency and Deprivation

A lack of proper sleep can manifest itself as either sleep deficiency or sleep deprivation. The terms are similar enough that you might want to use them interchangeably, but there is a technical difference between the two. Sleep deprivation could be considered more acute while sleep deficiency is more of a chronic issue. Sleep deprivation is one factor or symptom of sleep deficiency.

Additionally, sleep deficiency might involve sleep disorders that affect the way you sleep, the inability to get to sleep when you want to, or consistently poor-quality sleep.

About 1 in 5 people in America get less than 5 hours of sleep per night which qualifies a sleep deprivation. That’s essentially an epidemic. Your bad sleep can be caused by a number of things, some of which are in your control and some of which aren’t.

Sleeping at night can be hard if you take naps during the day. This throws off your natural cycle. Likewise, using devices like phones before bed has been shown to cause poor sleep. Caffeine and other drugs can affect your ability to get good, consistent sleep as well. All of this contributes to sleep deprivation which can spiral into sleep deficiency if it’s allowed to keep happening.

What Happens Physically When You Don’t Sleep

We briefly looked at what happens when you don’t get enough sleep, at least in general terms. Now let’s get a little more specific about what’s going to happen to your mind and body if you find yourself suffering from sleep deprivation for too long.

When you suffer from a lack of sleep, and that doesn’t mean not sleeping at all, that just means not getting the full, proper amount of sleep you need, you can expect that it will affect your mood the next day. There’s a good chance you’re going to be more irritable and experience other negative feelings but you otherwise or shouldn’t be affected by. You’ll also be feeling stress more acutely. 

People who did not have depression before developing sleep disorders have nearly double the risk of developing depression as those who don’t have sleep disorders. As many as 80% to 90% of people with depression suffer from insomnia. The effect on your mental health really can’t be overstated.

Poor sleep will also affect both your memory and ability to learn. In fact, your ability to learn new things can be reduced by as much as 40% if you’re not getting the proper sleep. This ironically flies in the face of the idea of a college student pulling an all-nighter to study for an exam, as you’re actually working against yourself at this point.

Just one night of sleep deprivation could affect both your balance and coordination making you clumsier and slower to react during the day. You literally walk differently when you haven’t had enough sleep.

There are also noticeable, physical tolls of not sleeping properly. Your immune system will suffer from a lack of sleep and that means you are more likely to get sick and stay sick longer. Even a simple cold is going to hit you harder and last longer when you suffer from sleep deprivation.

We have probably all seen somebody and thought they looked tired, and there’s a reason for that. You literally look different when you’re not getting enough sleep. You’re more likely to have puffy, red, or drooping eyes. Dark circles, pale flesh, and a drooping mouth were all noted as well. And because sleep affects cortisol levels, a lack of sleep could lead to more wrinkles. 

A lack of sleep has also been linked to weight gain. The same regions of your brain that are stimulated by smoking marijuana that can lead to the munchies are stimulated when you don’t get enough sleep. That means you’re inspired to eat more when you sleep less which can lead to obesity.

A lack of sleep later in life can also lead to dementia and Alzheimers. It can also put you at risk of hypertensive heart disease. Basically, sleep deprivation is bad for you across the board. There aren’t a lot of areas of your personal health that are going to improve if you’re not sleeping, but there are plenty that are going to get worse.

Arguably, the most Insidious thing about this is that it’s a game of inches. Each of these things grows slowly. So nothing is affected terribly at first, it’s just many little things chewing away at your overall health to make you feel worse in a way that’s really hard to even notice at first.

Can Lack of Sleep Kill You?

There are two ways to look at this question. If you fail to go to sleep for a long time, it’s not like your body is just going to seize up and you’re going to crap out. Lack of sleep isn’t like a gunshot wound. Lack of sleep has never directly killed anyone that we’re aware of. That said, chronic sleep deprivation can lead to accidents and earlier death. And there is evidence of lack of sleep being lethal to animals. 

There is actually a genetic condition called fatal familial insomnia which can develop over time and increase in severity the longer it goes. As it progresses mental and physical deterioration occur, including a breakdown of your body’s autonomic systems. Your ability to regulate your breathing and heart rate can suffer and that can ultimately be fatal to those who suffer from it. This is, of course, different from simply not getting enough sleep and suffering a fatal result.

As a modern culture, we tend to put our faith wholeheartedly in doctors. They’re the experts, and more often than not we take their advice without question. But what we don’t take into account is that many of these doctors either don’t have a clue or actively withhold information that could be putting your life in jeopardy. And if you think that sounds sensationalist, take a look at these facts—facts that doctors know about but which they conveniently forget to mention as you sign the bill.

10 Cancer Isn’t Always Cancer

The worst possible outcome of a trip to the doctor is a diagnosis of the Big C. We’re so terrified of it that even the word is taboo in some places, and the medical community lives by one maxim: early diagnosis. The earlier you find the cancer, the more easily you can treat it. But such enthusiasm can easily lead to false positives, and treating something that isn’t there can be dangerous.

We’re not just making that up. Mammograms are famous for misdiagnosing breast cancer, since every little anomaly in the breast can look like a tumor. The most common misdiagnosis is with DCIS, or Ductal Carcinoma In Situ. Despite the “carcinoma” in there, DCIS isn’t really cancerous ; only rarely does it turn into cancer, and practically everyone with DCIS survives, no matter what kind of treatment they get.

But when doctors quote cancer statistics, they usually lump in DCIS, which now accounts for about 30 percent of breast cancer “cases” in the US. And when faced with that option, most people choose to undergo “needless and sometimes disfiguring and harmful treatments” to get rid of something that, statistically, will do less harm than the treatments themselves.

9Some Vaccines Fail

In 2012, the US saw the worst outbreak of whooping cough since 1955. And that’s strange, considering that we’ve been vaccinating against it for over 50 years. Whooping cough is caused by two types of bacteria, Bordatella pertussis and Bortatella parapertussis, but the vaccine—the DTaP—is only designed to fight the first one, B. Pertussis. Which doesn’t seem too bad. Getting rid of half the problem is better than doing nothing, right?

Not quite. In all these years of exclusively pounding away at one of the causes, the second type of bacteria has been flourishing, to the point that receiving the vaccine causes B. parapertussis lung infections to grow 40 times as large as they would normally. And recently, the vaccine has also been less effective on the things it’s actually supposed to treat. In 2011, the CDC nearly doubled their recommendations for the vaccine, saying you need three initial shots of DTaP followed by three additional shots if you expect it to work.

That’s because vaccines can actually strengthen viruses. They can’t rewire the human genome (and you can dismiss links to autism as alarmist nonsense) but vaccines can stimulate mutations in the viruses they fight. China found that out in the worst possible way when their Hepatitis B vaccines caused the virus to begin mutating twice as fast as it normally would. We’ve been seeing the same thing happen with the flu virus—vaccines basically just fuel the virus’s instinct to survive.

8 Prescription Drugs Can Cause Diabetes

Type 2 diabetes is caused when your body either doesn’t make enough insulin or can’t effectively use all the insulin it makes. The result is a buildup of glucose, or sugar, in the bloodstream, which starts damaging nerves and blood vessels over time. About 2.3 million Americans have type 2 diabetes, and the numbers rise every year.

It turns out that some of the most commonly prescribed drugs, like antidepressants, might be causing it. In 2011, there were 46.7 million prescriptions given out to treat depression in the UK alone. When researchers at the University of Southampton looked at the numbers, they found that people who took two of the most common types of antidepressants, SSRIs and tricyclic antidepressants, were twice as likely to develop diabetes. And sure, those findings were released in 2013, but we’ve known about the link since 2008 and yet millions more are prescribed on a monthly basis.

And it gets worse—some of the most common drugs used to treat ADHD in children can triple the risk of type 2 diabetes. More often than not, that’s a lifelong condition, and kids don’t even get the choice to refuse.

7 Some Medications Increase Cancer Risk

Now that we’ve assuaged some of your worries about cancer, let’s go ahead and kick everything back up again.

Blood pressure medications can almost triple your risk of aggressive breast cancer. In the US alone, about 58.6 million people take medication for high blood pressure, so you’d think the cancer link would be more well-known.

The study that discovered this relationship looked at 1,763 women with breast cancer. Those who used a particular type of blood pressure medicine—calcium channel blockers—were 2.5 times more likely to develop cancer. The risk is greater in elderly women over the age of 55, and it likely happens because calcium channel blockers prevent cells from dying. If cells can’t complete their normal life cycle, they go rogue and become cancerous.

But even that wouldn’t be a problem if the medication weren’t so grossly over-prescribed. In a review of one hospital, 150 out of 161 doctors prescribed calcium channel blockers to their patients. But how many of those doctors told their patients about the risks? Only eight. That’s a potentially deadly lapse in duty.

6 Aspirin Can Cause Internal Bleeding

One of the more common pieces of advice from doctors is that you should take a low dose of aspirin every day. The idea is that it serves as a maintenance treatment to prevent blood clots, which can cause heart attacks and strokes. But what they don’t tell you is the small fact that doing so can trigger massive internal bleeding.

Researchers found that, out of 10,000 people, a daily dose of aspirin prevented 46 people from dying over the course of 10 years. But they also found that 49 people out of the same 10,000 experienced major internal bleeding, and another 117 started bleeding in their gastrointestinal tract. So there may be some benefits, but there may be an even higher chance that something will go horribly wrong.

On top of that, aspirin doesn’t actually work for everyone. Some people have aspirin-resistant platelets, which negates any positive effect you might get from the aspirin. But since we have no way to test for that, doctors never know if they’re recommending a dud treatment or not.

5 Heartburn Drugs Have Deadly Side Effects

One of the main problems with medications is that, while they usually do a decent job of treating what they’re supposed to treat, they often cause horrible side effects. And even though it’s the doctor’s job to tell people about those side effects, sometimes that just doesn’t happen. For example, proton pump inhibitors, a type of heartburn drug marketed under the brand names Nexium and Prilosec, have been linked to bone decay, birth defects, and an inability to absorb vitamin B12, which can lead to permanent neurological damage.

Despite that, Nexium was the single most prescribed drug in 2012, and in many cases it doesn’t even work. It’s usually prescribed to treat Barrett’s esophagus, which is when excess stomach acid burns the lining of the esophagus, but the pills don’t do a thing for the condition. Pediatricians have even started prescribing these meds to infants, even though it’s been proven that doing so can actually cause permanent intestinal disorders.

4 “Safe” X-Rays Still Cause Cancer

It’s a well-known fact that gamma radiation and X-rays carry the risk of kickstarting cancer. Now, we’re constantly exposed to radiation just by being alive, so there’s a general guideline for “safe exposure” to X-rays, which the medical profession sticks to when they look for broken bones or give you a mammogram. Radiation is measured in units called sieverts, and every year you’re exposed to about 2.4 millisieverts, just from general background radiation; by contrast, a mammogram only gives you about 0.7 millisieverts.

The difference, though, is that medical X-rays pop that radiation into you in the space of minutes, whereas it takes a whole year to absorb your typical background radiation. And it’s a huge difference, even with low-radiation “safe” X-rays. In the UK, diagnostic X-rays cause about 700 cases of cancer each year. And it could be even worse than that—some researchers claim that the majority of cancer cases were either caused or aggravated by medical X-rays.

And to top it all off, women who get X-rays when pregnant have been found more likely to give birth to children with cancer. And a CT scan is the go-to diagnostic tool for young children, which, you guessed it, is just another type of X-ray.

3 Doctors Get Paid When You Buy Certain Drugs

Conspiracy theorists aren’t shy about proclaiming the evils of Big Pharma. But conspiracy theory is one thing, and documented proof is a whole different beast. When the Harvard Law School took a closer look, they realized that they didn’t have to dig very deep at all to discover that doctors are paid handsomely to prescribe certain drugs, even when those drugs turn out to be harmful.

One of the most publicized recent cases was Dr. Joseph L. Biederman, who began diagnosing two-year-old toddlers with bipolar disorder and prescribing strong antipsychotics that were never approved by the FDA for children under 10. The manufacturer of the antipsychotics paid him $1.6 million. Then there’s Dr. Alan F. Schatzberg, who began prescribing an abortion drug to treat depression—he owned $4.8 million of stock in the company that produced the drug.

And then you have Dr. Charles B. Nemeroff, who received $500,000 to advertise as safe a drug that can cause seizures and paralysis The fact is, doctors are allowed to prescribe any drug for any illness, no matter what the drug was originally intended to treat. We’re not making a blanket statement saying all doctors take money to prescribe questionable treatments—but how do you know which ones do?

2 Pandemic Scares Are Over-Hyped

Who can forget the swine flu pandemic in 2009 and 2010? When the World Health Organization called for a state of global emergency, the world went haywire. Lines for the vaccine stretched for blocks, and doctors everywhere told people to seek immediate treatment.

Over the course of about 10 months, pharmaceutical companies raked in £6.5 billion (about $10.5 billion in 2010) from vaccine sales. Doctors tied to the vaccine’s manufacturers were 8.4 times more likely to recommend the vaccine to their patients. And not only recommend—they were more likely to publicly hype the dangers of the flu in the media, which immeasurably contributed to the state of panic.

And strangely, doctors who were being paid by pharmaceutical companies were also more likely to volunteer information to the press. That doesn’t seem like much of a difference, but it’s these quoted experts that we tend to believe in a news article. In the end, about 17,000 people died from swine flu, as opposed to the 46,000 that die every year from the normal flu. Surely the low numbers were due to the mass vaccinations—rather than, say, the fact that the disease was just a common mutation artificially inflated to terror-inducing proportions.

1 Registered Sex Offenders And Violent Criminals

Your doctor doesn’t have to disclose his criminal history, and usually that wouldn’t be considered a problem. Between the strict admission policies of most medical schools and the vague notion that hospitals probably screen their employees, who would even think to ask? Well, maybe you should.

In November 2013, the UK’s General Medical Council, or GMC, released a database with the criminal histories of physicians in the United Kingdom. It turned out that almost 800 practicing doctors held criminal records, including 31 who were arrested for assault and 330 arrested for drunk driving. The rest of them? Crimes range from theft to drug trafficking, and they’re under zero legal obligation to let their patients know about it.

And it’s not exactly rare. There’s the rapist surgeon working in Miami, and the New York doctor who was caught trying to meet a young boy for sex, and a Scottish physician who had reams of child pornography stored on his computer.

Who’s really taking care of you?

Disease is common, affecting every person at some point in their life. However, there are those unlucky few who contract some the rarer diseases—those that seem to do the most damage and are often the hardest to treat, let alone cure. Here are 10 diseases and disorders you really want to avoid.

10 Trigeminal Neuralgia

This particular disorder affects the fifth cranial nerve, one of the most widely spread in a person’s face. Known to hospitals as the “suicide disease,” there are two types. Type 1 is the acute, involving unbelievable pain shooting through the sufferer’s face that lasts for as long as two minutes. These attacks can be joined together over a period of two hours of agony.

Type 2 is less painful than Type 1, but still one of the hardest hits the human body can take. It is constant, rather than sporadic, with a painful burning or electric shock feeling lasting for years. Regular pain medication like morphine has no effect and anti-convulsion drugs often lose their effectiveness. Various surgical procedures have shown mild success, but are rarely anything more than temporary fixes.

9 Marburg Hemorrhagic Fever

First diagnosed in 1967 after an outbreak in a number of labs throughout Germany and Yugoslavia, Marburg hemorrhagic fever is a disease nearly identical to that caused by the Ebola virus. Monkeys who had been imported from Africa were infected and spread the disease while they were being used for polio research. So far, it is extremely rare, with less than 1,000 cases reported to date, and it’s almost always found in Central Africa.

The African fruit bat is believed to be the main source of infection, though how it spreads to humans isn’t quite known at this point. The initial symptoms are extremely close to much more common diseases such as malaria, so proper diagnosis can be quite tricky. If the infection is severe enough, bleeding in the mouth and rectum and neurologic problems arise. Due to the lack of scientific knowledge about the Marburg fever, there is no established treatment, but plasma and blood protein transplants have shown good results. As of right now, the fatality rate is wide-ranging, ranging from 23–90 percent.

8 Cancrum Oris

More commonly known as noma, cancrum oris is a gangrenous infection which attacks the facial tissue of its victims, usually children under the age of 6. Especially prevalent in poverty-stricken areas of Africa, not only does the disease have an extremely high fatality rate (80 percent), but those who survive are left horribly disfigured and often ostracized. Affecting nearly 100,000 children every year, the antibodies in the sufferer’s body get confused and turn on the soft tissue in the cheek, mouth, and nose.

Due to the swift progress of the disease, those infected are quickly disabled, unable to speak or eat normally. The disease has only made brief appearances in Europe and North American since its eradication over 100 years ago, most notably in the Nazi concentration camps. Antibiotics can stop the spread at the first sight of a lesion but they are often unavailable or too expensive.

7 Adhesive Capsulitis

Known by the catchier name of “frozen shoulder,” this disorder causes the sufferer’s shoulder to become so painful and stiff that it is virtually impossible to do anything with their arm. In addition, sleep can be difficult to come by, causing a myriad other health issues like depression and anxiety. As of now, there is no known cause for frozen shoulder, but diabetes and injuries or surgeries in the area are considered to be risk factors.

Frozen shoulder affects an estimated 2 percent of the population at some point in their lives, making it one of the most common disorders on this list, and it is extremely hard to treat. Even with regular medication and constant physical rehabilitation, it can take up to a year to restore mobility. Although there have been cases where it went away on its own, it usually took up to two years to resolve itself.

6 Complex Regional Pain Syndrome

Formally known as “reflex sympathetic dystrophy,” CRPS is a lifelong systemic disease which manifests itself as extreme burning pain, bone and skin changes, and unbelievable sensitivity to touch. It’s one of the most painful diseases in the world, ranked above childbirth and amputation on the McGill Pain Index, a method of evaluating pain developed in the early 1970s. Initially believed to be a systemic failure of the sympathetic nervous system, researchers now believe it is triggered by trauma, especially to the extremities. However, this is just a guess as of right now, which is one of the reasons there is no cure.

Various treatments have achieved a modicum of success, including one brought to us by the wisdom of tech support—“Have you tried turning it off and on again?” In 2003, a 14-year-old girl underwent treatment which consisted of a medically-induced coma with the intent of “resetting” the pain connections in her body. This is generally considered a last-ditch effort, as it carries enormous risk and numerous potential side effects.

5 Aquagenic Urticaria

Aquagenic urticaria is better known as an allergy to water. Though not a true allergy, as no histamine is actually released by the body, the disorder still presents with painful rashes that break out wherever water touches the skin. Usually within an hour after contact with water, the sufferer will end up with small wheals, which are raised, reddened areas also known as papules. It’s an extremely rare disorder, with only 100 reported cases worldwide.

Some scientists believe there may be a genetic component to the disorder, as there has been no evidence of transmission from person to person. However, most cases take place in separate families, with only a few happening to relatives. While some cases can be quite gentle, most are extremely painful, with sufferers resorting to either extremely short baths or none at all in order to avoid the pain.

4 Brainerd Diarrhea

As you can probably guess from the name, this disease is a severe, acute form of diarrhea first described after an outbreak in Brainerd, Minnesota. The exact reason for the contraction is unknown to scientists at this time, but it may be caused by the consumption of contaminated water or raw milk. Sufferers experience 10–20 episodes of explosive, watery diarrhea every day. Nearly all of the recorded outbreaks have taken place in the United States, though there have only been eight since it was first discovered.

Brainerd diarrhea can last for months—even up to a year—with no respite for those afflicted because it’s extremely resistant to any form of antimicrobial treatment. Drugs like Imodium have been reported to offer some relief, but only in very high doses. Because the exact source of the disease is unknown, there is no known preventative measure, other than to boil all well water and avoid unpasteurized milk.

3 Sickle Cell Anemia

Sickle cell anemia is a genetic blood disorder in which the red blood cells form abnormally, taking the shape of a crescent or sickle. In addition, there aren’t enough blood cells to transport oxygen throughout the body. Those afflicted with SCA also lose the defective blood cells up to 12 times faster than those without the disorder.

A mutation in one of the genes responsible for hemoglobin is the root cause of the disorder and it seems to be most prevalent among those whose ancestors lived in areas where malaria was common. The symptoms vary person to person, but fatigue and chronic pain is extremely common and never goes away. Thanks to modern medicine, it isn’t the killer that it once was, with many people making it to their 60s and beyond. However, while blood and marrow stem cell transplants have shown some promise, there is still no cure.

2 Adiposis Dolorosa

For anyone familiar with Latin or the TV show Doctor Who, it will be obvious that this particular disease has to do with fat. Also known as “Dercum’s disease” after the doctor who first described it, sufferers are plagued with tumors called lipomas all over their torso. Nearly all of those who get this disease are obese women between the ages of 35–50.

With no known cure or cause, Dercum’s disease is believed to perhaps have a genetic component to it, as it does seem to run in some families. Other scientists theorize that it is an autoimmune disorder, as healthy tissue is attacked by the body. Tthe only treatments available for this extremely painful condition focus on one symptom at a time, utilizing pain medications and weight loss strategies. Liposuction has shown some mild success at treating the disease.

1 Ondine’s Curse

For those of you unfamiliar with French or German folk tales and mythology, Ondine was a nymph who took a mortal as her lover, who swore that each one of his breaths would be a testament of his love for her. After he committed adultery, Ondine—or her father, in some versions—cursed the cheater to stop breathing the next time he fell asleep. Otherwise known as “congenital central hypoventilation syndrome,” sufferers lack the function of the autonomic nervous system which regulates breathing. This means that they have to consciously remember to breathe.

When they sleep, most are hooked up to ventilators. If they are able to survive into adulthood, the sleep masks used to treat sleep apnea tend to work well enough to enable them to live relatively normal lives. Genetics are believed to play a major role as the cause of the disease, though it has appeared in adults after major surgery or trauma.

Everyone loves movies, but many of the movies they love have flaws they either put up with, or often just didn’t even realize that they have. Many classic movies have managed to pull the wool over our eyes, by giving us extremely entertaining side plots or other larger plot-lines, that really don’t make much sense when you hold them up to proper examination. If a director or writer knows how to keep their audience distracted by the right things, they can keep them from noticing, but many of these plots made no sense at all, and some were entirely unnecessary.

See Also: 10 Things You Never Knew About Famous Movie Plot Twists

10 The Entire Subplot In The Last Jedi With Rose And Finn Did More Harm Than Good

In The Last Jedi, the main plot-line was that the heroes were being tracked through hyperspace with some new technology so they could not escape at all. Two main characters, Rose and Fin, forge a plan to sneak aboard the enemy ship, and use the help of a skilled codebreaker to reroute the enemy tracking technology and confuse it long enough for them to escape.

They spent a huge portion of the movie on this, and in the end were betrayed by the codebreaker they ended up hiring. He betrayed them so much, that the enemy was able to find ships the rebels had been hiding, and kill countless more rebels than if Finn and Rose had simply done nothing at all and stayed on the ship. Their entire adventure not only didn’t save anyone, it actually cost lives, and they did it without consulting leadership, right after Rose made a big deal about how everyone needed to be a good soldier and follow rules.

9 Captain America: Civil War Makes Tony Stark Look Small, Petty, Mean And Stupid

In Captain America Civil War, we have a contrived plot where some heroes agree to stop using their powers without proper world permission, and some refuse. The plot goes further south when Bucky, Caps longtime friend is suspected of killing Tony Stark’s parents and Black Panthers father as well. They want to immediately punish him, but Bucky maintains his innocence and runs away with the help of Captain America in the hopes of proving his innocence. Despite supposedly not being supposed to use superpowers anymore, Tony Stark and several others suit up for a very anticlimactic duel between two sides of superheros at an airport, in what is a very weak battle after all the buildup, and all the sacrifices they made when it came to a decent plot.

After the fight, Captain America does manage to prove that Bucky was truly hypnotized beyond his will when he killed Stark’s parents, but this does not sate Tony’s anger at all. Instead, he turns into a crazy rage monster, and tries to straight up murder both Bucky and Captain America, and continues being a complete jerk even after he is defeated utterly, showing he still hasn’t learned anything at all. After several movies building up his character, it is disappointing to see a plot that is so interested in making a fight between superheroes, that is is willing to throw all of his development away.

8The Rage Zombies In The 28 Franchise Make Even Less Sense Than Regular Zombies

28 Days is a well known zombie franchise, and was quite popular during the height of the zombie craze, but by trying to be too realistic it sometimes backed itself into a corner leaving you with questions, where most zombie movies don’t bother so hard with a “logical” explanation. Trying to get more scientific, they say their zombies are infected by the “rage” virus, which just makes people super angry and they attack, bite up and infect others. Eventually, these zombies start to starve to death. Despite being incredibly fast zombies with a lot of energy, they cannot seem to hunt down animals, and when they find other humans, they turn them instead of eating them, despite starving and being filled with rage. Their behavior is supposed to be berserk, but they are almost too logical — working perfectly within the plot to create more and more, while still leaving a way for heroes to beat them.

Now, the fact they don’t eat each other could make sense, as they perhaps smell some sort of disease on those with the rage virus that turns them off. However, it beggars belief that what is basically a berserk animal, would only carefully bite up, and not eat or mutilate a fresh human, when they are half mad and starving to death with hunger.

7The Movie Signs Is Blisteringly Idiotic And Horribly Explained When You Examine It

The movie Signs starts out with some children finding crop circles and acting weird, then they hear noises, and see strange intruders. Before long, the crop circles are popping up all over the world, and people are sure they are seeing strange beings everywhere — many people start preparing for an alien invasion. And, sure enough, at the climax of the movie, the aliens come and attack the family and almost kill one of the children. However, it turns out the reason we were able to beat them, was because they were weak to water and baseball bats. The aliens brings no weapons, no armor or advanced technology despite being able to cross interstellar distances, and gets taken out by a baseball bat.

Worse yet, the water weakness just makes no sense at all. The movie has a character say that “they came for us, to harvest us”, but they never explain for what reason. The most abundant thing in humans you could harvest from us is water, but certainly they aren’t interested in what to them is literally poison. And of all the planets they could have chosen, they chose one that is mostly toxic to them, and don’t bring any protection from the elements at all. The only thing that really makes sense is if no aliens actually invaded and the entire thing was just global mass hysteria.

6The Plot Of Sixth Sense Only Works If All Authority Figures Are Incredibly Stupid

The movie Sixth Sense was almost an instant classic, and people will never forget the haunting line “I see dead people”, however, the movie really didn’t age as well as it could have, and when you hold it up to scrutiny, the whole movie falls apart. The movie follows a psychologist named Bruce Willis, who rarely talks to his wife anymore, is troubled about failing an old patient, and soon ends up working as a therapist for a kid played by Haley Joel Osment. He talks to the kid a lot, spends time in the family’s house, and even sits across from the kids mother at length for different times and never says anything to her.

As the movie progresses, the kid reveals that he can see dead people and talk to them, and the psychologist, while skeptical at first, starts to believe there could actually be something going on. At the end of the movie, we discover that not only can the kid talk to ghosts, but that Bruce Willis was a ghost the entire time and didn’t realize it. Now, the part where all this breaks down is the idea that Bruce Willis could have simply not realized he was dead without an incredible amount of delusion.

He has somehow never had a conversation with the mom of the child he is giving therapy too, does this not strike him as odd? He never interacts with anyone, he couldn’t possibly need to go to the bathroom, and trying to eat would just send it right through him — does he think he has a weird disease where he somehow doesn’t need to eat anymore? It seems Bruce Willis should have very obviously realized what was going on early in the movie, but then it would have been over very quickly and there wouldn’t have been much of a story to tell.

5 Killmonger’s Amazing Plan In Black Panther Is Not So Amazing At All

In the hit movie Black Panther, Eric Killmonger is an African American, originally from the secret country of Wakanda, who returns to challenge the current king for the throne. He has fought since a young age to create a new world where black people will not be oppressed, and has setup revolutionaries around the globe. His goal is to get Wakandan technology in their hands, and then they will lead a violent revolution that will takeover the whole world — he will then rule the world from Wakanda as king, and make sure black people are properly respected.

However, there are two major problems with this: For one, his enemies are living in a world with the Avengers, so they are used to dealing with all sorts of crazy tech and powers already — the moment they captured anyone, they would take the Wakandan technology, reverse engineer it against them, and use their own vibranium against them. And you are still talking about trying to take over the entire world. Which leads us to the second and bigger problem: This is the same world with the avengers and all of the X-Men, does he expect them to simply allow the world order to change to the point of one dictator bent on taking over with violence? Plus there were like a handful of ships leaving Wakanda with equipment, so this was hardly a world ending amount of weaponry.

4 Peter Quill’s Father Could Have Had All He Wanted, And He Completely Blew It

Peter Quill AKA Star Lord is a main character of the Guardians of the Galaxy franchise, and has been ably played by Chris Pratt, who helped uplift the Guardians franchise into something that would be taken as seriously as the rest of the Marvel universe. For those not entirely familiar with the plot, Peter Quill loses his mother at a young age and ends up going on space adventures with an alien named Yondu, who takes on the role of father figure.

However, his real father was a being in the Marvel Universe known as a celestial, who had incredible powers, and wanted someone else to share his powers with so they could basically seed himself all over and make the universe all extensions of him. He could not do this alone, so he went to many planets impregnating women and trying to find an heir who could contain his powers, and killing any mothers or children who did not live up to what he wanted. Peter Quill, despite having his mother killed, did not know understand that his father had killed her, and had borderline escaped his father’s purge.

When they meet at the end of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2., Ego, Peter Quill’s father (who also happens to be a planet), could have had a chance at getting Star Lord to join him while he had him under hypnosis, and have everything he ever wanted. However, while explaining his crazy plan, he happened to casually admit to Star Lord that he had killed his mother and so many other countless mothers and children around the universe. This infuriated Peter, who decided he would not stand for his father or anything he stood for. All he had to do was not reveal such details, knowing they likely would upset a human being, but he chose to share them anyway and lost everything.

3 The Heroes In Super 8 May End Up In Prison For A Very Long Time

Super 8 was a really popular movie the summer it came out, and really hit a sweet spot in the nostalgia for many people. It was reminiscent of movies like ET, or the Goonies, and starred a group of kids living in the 70s who made super 8 films and had a very strange alien event happen in their town. They were filming by a train station, and ended up barely escaping a huge train wreck. Before long, strange things started happening in their town, and it turned out that the huge train was transporting something that belonged to an alien being.

Eventually the town is evacuated as things get crazier. In the meantime, the main characters father, the town sheriff, decides that he has had enough of not getting answers of what is going on in his town, and takes matters into his own hands. He marches up to the officer in charge of the makeshift military base/Evacuation Shelter and demands answers, only to be put in a holding cell. Instead of taking matters like a man of the law normally would, he decides to force an escape by tricking and beating up a guard, and even leaving with his uniform, and later impersonating an officer to others on duty. In the end he is seen happily hugging his son, but once the military found out what he did, he would probably have a lot of answering to do and may spend many, many years in prison.

2The Timeline In Empire Strikes Back Is A Gigantic Mess If You Stop To Think About It

In Empire Strikes Back, right after the escape from Hoth, Luke Skywalker heads to Dagobah, a supposedly distant planet, and Han Solo and the others try to run away in the Falcon, the hyperdrive fails, and they end up flying through an asteroid field to escape Darth Vader. They eventually make it to Cloud City on the nearby planet of Bespin, where Han’s old friend Lando betrays him, they get captured by Vader, and Luke gets a vision of their plight and cuts short his training to come rescue them.

Now, here is where the timeline starts to get confusing. We are given the impression that Luke Skywalker spent a significant amount of time on Dagobah, but Han and Leia seem to spend very little time in the asteroid field before making it to the next planet — Bespin is supposed to be really close, and with the hyperdrive out is was unlikely they had a lot of fuel to go far. So somehow Luke manages to pack in an incredible amount of jedi training in just a couple days, and still make it halfway across the galaxy to Bespin before lunch.

The only way this really works is if hyperspace travel is nearly instantaneous even when it comes to insanely long reaches of space, which we are usually led to believe is not the case, or something doesn’t make much sense. There is also the unanswered question of how Luke could expect to have gotten any kind of jedi training in such a short amount of time. Either Han and Leia spent way longer in that asteroid field than we realize, or Luke did the most efficient training montage in the history of movies.

1 The Dinosaur Military Subplot In Jurassic World Is Stomped On By Its Own Scenes

Jurassic World was a hugely successful movie that saw quite a successful sequel, despite so many people complaining about it.. People simply love dinosaur movies, and seeing the dino’s duking it out on the big screen will always hold a certain charm with the population. However, if you ask those who did complain, some will admit that overall it fit the same general plotline of most successful Jurassic movies, but it had a subplot that really didn’t work out too well and that was the main source of their ire.

In the movie, the company InGen, which had their hands in making dinosaurs back in the earlier movies, is heavily involved in investments for this new dino theme park. Their man at the park, a guy called Hoskins who is in charge of security for some reason, thinks that the key to huge money payouts and overall military domination are using trained dinosaurs they way we now use drones. The whole thing is invalidated by its own setup, as right before Hoskins gives his dino military pitch to Chris Pratt’s character, Chris Pratt is almost eaten alive by his own trained from birth dinosaurs and barely gets out with his life. It already should have been painfully obvious at that point that the whole thing was not going anywhere.

We all watched Sesame Street as a kid, and we’ve all seen Oscar the Grouch. He’s the furry, green, grouchy fiend who lives in a trash can and sings about how much he loves trash. A chronic complainer, Oscar is always up for bringing things down in a very real way. Whether you love him or hate him, as a child, he was one of my favorite characters on Sesame Street. Most if not all of us remember and can sing Oscar’s trademark song “I Love Trash” from memory. But there are many things about the beloved grouch that most of us don’t know. We think you’ll enjoy reading these wacky facts about Oscar.

See Also: 10 Dark Stories Behind The Muppets

10 Always green?

Jim Henson’s original idea for Oscar was for him to be purple. Despite this fact, in the first season in 1969, he was actually orange. It wasn’t until the following year that Oscar the Grouch took on his trademark green color.

In order to explain the switch from orange to green, Oscar in a couple of extraordinary interviews explains about a visit to Swamp Mushy Muddy for his vacation. He says the dampness caused him to be covered in mold, therefore explaining his overnight color change.

9The political commentators

The most recent visit Oscar had with a political commentator was his April 2019 visit to Stephen Colbert’s The Tonight Show during which they performed a duet together and discuss the state of the world as it pertains to politics. Then Colbert tricks Oscar into admitting it will all get better.

In 2012 on the Daytime Emmy Awards, Oscar got together with Anderson Cooper to help officiate the awards. Anderson clearly has a blast talking with Oscar and Oscar sang a song about how much he hates the daytime. Naturally we all recognize what’s going to happen next, Anderson reminds Oscar that his show is in the daytime which appears to bum Oscar out even more.

8 The Pets

Over the years Oscar has had a menagerie of pets, with his most favorite being Slimey the Worm. We all remember Slimey the Worm and his impressive feats. He was the first worm on the Moon and he often helped Oscar when no one else could. For example, Oscar locked himself in his can on one episode and Slimey pushed a key through the top of the lid for him.

In fact, Sesame Place Theme Park loved Slimey so much; they produced a plush doll of him in 2017.

Oscar’s other pets have included ants, elephants, goats, skunks, donkeys, pigs, and a hippo and rhino just to name a few.

7Transportation

Most of us know from watching Sesame Street as kids that Oscar is not stuck to being just in his trash can all the time. Although he presumably could have if he had chosen to, since he has an Olympic sized swimming pool in there! Did you know Oscar even found a way to walk around? Oscar put two holes in his trash can so he could force his legs through them and convey himself and his trash can wherever he wants to. Of course he had a bit of help from the actor Hervé Villechaize who becomes the puppet’s legs.

But that’s not the only way Oscar gets around. Oscar actually appears to have multiple forms of transportation. One of those other forms is Bruno the Trash Man. Bruno is a mostly silent guy who carries Oscar around in his trash can to wherever he wants to go.

While these are the main ways Oscar gets around, they positively aren’t the only ones. In The Adventures of Elmo in Grouchland, Oscar has a portal in his trash can that goes directly to Grouchland.

Finally, in one episode of Sesame Street, Oscar dug a tunnel between his trash can and the trash can at Mr. Hooper’s store. As a result, where there’s a will, there’s a way with Oscar; if he wants to go somewhere, he will get there, even if means digging a tunnel, opening a portal or getting chauffeured around by a sanitation engineer.

6Family

Oscar is so grouchy, that we can’t imagine him having a family, but he does. His mother Mrs. Grouch likes to drop in on him frequently to make sure he’s still as grouchy as ever. She constantly worries that the other people on Sesame Street are going to alter him into a nice puppet. When she visits, Oscar will sometimes mock her by saying please, but much to his disgust when he does, she washes his mouth out with vanilla ice cream.

Granny Grouch is Oscar’s grandmother, though we don’t know from which side of his family since this is never explained. Granny’s choice thing to do is place big wet kisses on Oscar, which we all know he hates.

There is very little known about Grandpa Grouch, and we have no idea if he is wed to Granny Grouch or someone else. His puppet was created from an old Oscar puppet the first time he appeared on Sesame Street. The next time he appeared, his puppet was created from an old grouch background character.

Earnest, Oscar’s brother lives in Chicago, and in fact knows Mr. Hooper’s brother. On one visit, Oscar decorated his trash can, cleaned up and acted really nice towards Earnest. However, Oscar’s plan backfired; Earnest is just as nice back. Neither could maintain the niceties in the long term, and they started fighting not long after.

We never perceived it, but Oscar also has a sister whose name is Bunny. Mrs. Grouch named her Bunny just to displease her, and she succeeded. Bunny only appears on Sesame Street one time for Grouchy Mother’s Day, as a surprise for Mrs. Grouch. According to Oscar, the reason she doesn’t visit routinely is that when she does they argue.

Oscar even has a niece, although like some of the other characters in his family, we don’t know who her parents are. Irvine (pictured) appears on Sesame Street in several episodes because Oscar is her babysitter. A few times when he has to run an errand, Maria watches Irvine for him. It is next we discover that in order to get Irvine back to sleep, you have to start a loud argument. If you want her to eat, you have to set the food within reach, and then tell her she can’t eat it.

5Girlfriend

We have no idea how Oscar can be in a romantic relationship with anyone, but he has a girlfriend named Grundgetta. Apparently they are also the dearest of friends. Like Oscar, Grundgetta has several pets including Sylvia, her worm, a rottendoodle named Itchy, and a muddy piglet that she claims won the prize for Yucchiest Pet.

The spelling of Grundgetta’s name is a bit controversial and has changed back and forth between Grundgetta and Grungetta.

In 1993, Applause created a plush doll version of Grundgetta.

4 Signature song

Oscar sings about a tattered sneaker his mom gave him when he was a baby in his trademark song, I Love Trash. We think maybe he merely says that to make Mrs. Grouch happy. We remember earlier episodes of Sesame Street where Oscar sings I Love Trash and can be seen gathering the items he mentions in the song out of his trash can. These included a nasty newspaper wrapped fish, one of his favorite pieces of trash. This signature song was written and composed by Jeff Moss expressly for Oscar.

3 Inspiration

We discovered the inspiration for Oscar the Grouch came from a waiter at Oscar’s Tavern in Manhattan. The waiter is exceptionally rude and surly to Jim Henson and Jon Stone on one of their visits that rather than being offended, they are entertained. In fact, the waiter is so amusing, Jim and Jon visit the restaurant frequently just to see this waiter.

The voice for Oscar was inspired by a cabby in the Bronx that Caroll Spinney encountered when he needed a ride to work. The man possessed a gravely, raspy voice and spoke with a New York accent out the side of his mouth. Spinney determined that it was the appropriate voice for Oscar and continued to mirror the cabby’s voice as Oscar for decades to come.

2 Love

We never thought we’d see the like, but after some serious digging we found out that Oscar has indeed been in love…and it wasn’t with Grundgetta. Ouch! We discovered that Oscar once fell in love with the Wicked Witch of the West. It was even suggested that he was so grieved by her rejection that this was why he turned from orange to green and why he is so grouchy. However, since the episode in question was banned for some reason, we likely will never know for sure.

1 National holiday

We had no idea, but Oscar has inspired a national holiday for grumpy people everywhere, called National Grouch Day. Grouches everywhere can be as grouchy as they want on October 15th, National Grouch Day. Did you know that Big Bird and Oscar performed a duet on the Stephen Colbert Show in 2013? They did, just in honor of Oscar and National Grouch Day.

We love Oscar the Grouch. In the end, it doesn’t really matter if you appreciate or detest him, he has shaped generations of kids. He encouraged them to understand it’s allowable to be a little out of sorts sometimes. Oscar taught us all that less than positive feelings are normal and permissible, and that lesson is one we can all stand to be reminded of.

There are many things around us that we think work but actually do nothing, like that hotel thermostat. It’s essentially a placebo, intended to trick you into thinking you’re controlling the temperature in your hotel room. Now you know why you always feel hot despite adjusting the thermostat several times.

There is no single reason why businesses and governments trick us into thinking these things work. It could be about the money, convenience, or some problem with the underlying technology. Nevertheless, read on; you will be surprised by what you will find.

10 Hotel Thermostats

Have you ever lowered the temperature of your hotel air conditioning system yet still felt hot? That must happen a lot, considering that many hotel thermostats do not work. Hotel operators only put them there because you’ll ask them to change the temperature in your room otherwise. Besides, they don’t want you to leave a negative review on TripAdvisor.

Some hotel thermostats actually act as heat and motion detectors. The detectors automatically adjust the set temperature depending on your movements and the room temperature. Some even signal the air conditioning system to stop working when you leave the room or open a door or window.

To be clear, some thermostats do allow some control, but there is usually a minimum and maximum limit. You are unaware of these limits, and exceeding them won’t make your room any hotter or colder. Interestingly, many travelers are already catching on to this fake thermostat thing and are finding ways to bypass it.

While keeping energy use low is good for the environment, rigging thermostats is all about money for the hotels. Hotels save money when lodgers use less energy. And hotels are desperate to keep that in check, considering that guests will often waste power since they aren’t the one picking up the energy bills.^[1]

9 Progress Bars

Those progress bars that show the percentage or time left to complete a file transfer or download on our phones, computers, and other electrical gadgets don’t really work, at least not in the way we think. For instance, a progress bar at 50 percent does not mean half of a file has been downloaded. Almost all of the file could have been downloaded—or none at all.

Progress bars are not accurate because downloads and transfers involve many variables beyond the control of the system. For one, Internet speeds and network availability often determine how quickly a download will complete, while hard drive speeds often determine how long it takes to complete a transfer.

Also, a hard drive can copy a single large file faster than it can copy several smaller ones, even if their total file size is less and the large one. This is because hard drives expend more time and resources in finding and processing series of smaller files than finding and processing a single larger one.

The inability to correctly determine these variables is the reason programmers work with milestones instead. Computer programmers set milestones for transfers and downloads. The system only updates the progress bar as these milestones are reached. So that progress bar at 50 percent only means that a predetermined milestone has been reached.^[2]

8 Pedestrian Crossing Buttons

Many reading this have likely had the experience of being at a crosswalk and pressing the button hoping the “walk” signal will come up. Well, it turns out that those buttons don’t always work.

Sometimes they do work. We could divide the crosswalk button into three categories. The first works, the second does not work, and the third sometimes works.

For the first, the walk light never comes up until a pedestrian presses the button. In the second instance, the walk signal comes up at intervals, whether there is a pedestrian waiting to cross or not. Pressing the button does absolutely nothing in this instance.

The walk light is programmed to automatically come up during periods of heavy pedestrian traffic in the third instance. However, it requires a pedestrian to press the button before it will show up at other periods.

That said, it can be difficult for pedestrians to determine whether a crosswalk button works or not, so just push the button anyway. Or you could wait and see if the walk signal lights up on its own.^[3]

7 Fitness Trackers

Fitness trackers and smartwatches work fine if you are concerned about monitoring your heart rate. But if you’re concerned with measuring the amount of calories you burn during exercise, then forget them, because they don’t work well for that.

This problem is one that even affects high-end fitness trackers and smartwatches, including the Apple Watch, Fitbit Surge, Microsoft Band, and the Samsung Gear S2. A 2017 study by researchers from the Stanford University School of Medicine revealed that fitness trackers and smartwatches have error margins of less than five percent when measuring heart rates. This is pretty much okay.

However, the same fitness trackers and smartwatches had high error margins when used to measure calories burned during exercise. FitBit Surge got its calculations wrong by 27 percent, which is too high. That becomes troubling when we realize it was actually the best among the seven devices tested. The Samsung Gear S2 performed worst, with an error margin of 93 percent.

Fitness trackers do not work well for measuring calories because differences in height and weight (among other factors) mean that people burn calories at different rates. However, the trackers are often programmed to use a preset height and weight for every user without considering their actual data.^[4]

6 Open-Close Buttons On Tube Trains

Tube trains operating in London have “open” buttons that passengers can press to open the train doors. Some even have a “close” button that supposedly allows the passengers to close the train doors right before it begins its journey. We say “supposedly” because the buttons do not work. The doors are controlled by the train drivers.

Passengers actually could operate the doors until the 1990s, when operators discovered that the trains spent less time at the stations when the driver controlled the doors. There were some other reasons that forced management to pass the controls to the drivers, too. One had everything to do with safety.

Some naughty passengers were fond of pressing the “close” button when other passengers were still boarding. One such prank ended in disaster when a boy was injured after getting stuck in the door.^[5] In some trains, the buttons have been removed as part of refurbishing.

5 Sunscreen

Sunscreens have only one job: to protect us from the Sun’s harmful ultraviolet rays. A study by the Environmental Working Group (EWG) has shown that they fail miserably at that. Only one in every four actually works.

EWG conducts annual studies to determine the effectiveness of sunscreens. In 2017, the group revealed that only 73 percent of the 880 sunscreens it tested worked as advertised. The rest either did not work or contained some troubling ingredients that could do more harm than good.

EWG revealed that most sunscreens did not protect users from ultraviolet A and B rays. Some sunscreen makers also claimed their products had a sun protection factor (SPF) of over 50—which should indicate a very high quality—even though the actual SPF was much lower. The misleading labeling could cause users to think they are more protected than they really are.^[6]

4 Ultrasound Mosquito Repellents

Ultrasound mosquito repellents have been around for some years. They are small, portable devices that emit ultrasonic noise that supposedly sends mosquitoes fleeing. Sometimes, they take the form of phone apps that make an annoying buzzing sound that repels mosquitoes.

The devices and apps do not work. The rumor that ultrasonic sounds can repel mosquitoes first appeared over four decades ago. One common belief is that the ultrasonic noise mimics the sound of the wings of a dragonfly. Mosquitoes supposedly flee upon hearing the sound.

This claim seems to make sense, considering that dragonflies are natural predators of mosquitoes. However, it is wrong, since the ultrasonic sounds used in the repellents are around 15 kilohertz. The flapping wings of dragonflies emit sounds that measure between 20 and 170 hertz. Besides, mosquitoes do not flee on hearing the beating wings of a dragonfly.

It has also been claimed that the sound mimics the mating call of a male mosquito. This, too, appears to make sense, considering that biting female mosquitoes are often carrying eggs and therefore will not want to mate. However, again, this is false. The beating wings of the male mosquitoes only reach around 700 hertz, which is still nowhere near the 15 kilohertz produced by the ultrasonic apps and devices.

Besides, there is little evidence that female mosquitoes are disturbed by the sounds of male mosquitoes or any other sound, for that matter. Nevertheless, the myth is one that will continue to linger for some time. Once, a Brazilian FM station even played the ultrasonic sounds on its airwaves in an attempt to send mosquitoes fleeing from its listeners.^[7]

3 PC Cleaning Software

Ever come across premium PC cleaning software that promises to clean your computer and make it as fast as it was when you bought it? They, too, do not work. In fact, they have a terrible reputation in the tech community and have been described as the digital version of snake oil.

The premium third-party cleaners are often rigged to make it seem like they really work when they actually do not. They detect nonproblems and list them as problems. For instance, most will consider browser cookies and temporary files as having an effect on the speeds of the computer, even though they do not.

Various PC cleaning software programs also exaggerate smaller problems and make them seem like they are larger than they really are. Most operating systems have built-in cleaners that work fine if you ever need to clean your computer. They do not require you to dole out any extra cash, either.^[8]

2 Office Thermostats

Hotel thermostats aren’t the only fake ones out there. Office thermostats don’t work, either. Estimates vary wildly, but anywhere from two to 90 percent of office thermostats do not work. Interestingly, many offices once had working thermostats, but they’ve been removed because the tenants could not determine the best temperatures for them.

However, similar to the hotel situation, the tenants inevitably began ringing the heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) businesses that manage the air conditioning systems to complain that the preset temperature was either too hot or too cold. The complaints lessened after the HVAC businesses sent fake thermostats to the offices.^[9]

1 Sports Drinks

Sports drinks are often promoted as the holy grail of sportspeople. These days, advertisers advise athletes to guzzle a drink midway through their exercise to prevent dehydration and loss of electrolytes.

This is even though most people would do themselves a lot of good if they just drink water instead. Sports drinks are really just water with some minerals and lots of sugar, coloring, and flavor. Those minerals are often sodium and potassium, which are what we consider electrolytes.

For a start, consuming excessive amounts of liquid (water, sports drinks, or whatever) at any time could lead to overhydration. Overhydration often leads to hyponatremia (shortage of sodium in the blood), since excessive amounts of water dilutes the sodium content of the blood.

No marathoner has ever died of dehydration, but as of 2012, 16 marathoners had died of overhydration and hyponatremia. Over 1,600 more had been hospitalized. That said, sports drinks can work for athletes who engage in high-endurance exercises that last for over a hour. The average Joe doing basic exercises should just drink water.^[10]

The space race was an intense faceoff between the United States and the Soviet Union. The undeclared competition started right after World War II but began winding down after Neil Armstrong landed on the moon on July 20, 1969. The US had won. It came to an abrupt end after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.

While we probably know some common facts about the space race (like the time the US tried nuking the moon), there are several other facts we have never heard about. Like how Zambia joined the space race, the Soviet offered to help the US space program and the Soviet Union’s own attempt to nuke the moon.

SEE ALSO: 10 Incredibly Mysterious Things We Have Discovered In Space

10 Zambia Joined The Space Race

Zambia is one country you do not hear about often. It is a landlocked country tucked somewhere in south-central Africa. In 1964, it joined the space race and planned to land a man on the moon before the US or the Soviet Union ever did. This was five years before Neil Armstrong stepped foot on the moon.

The Zambian space program was the private project of Edward Mukuka Nkoloso, a schoolteacher and founder of Zambia’s National Academy of Science, Space Research and Philosophy. Mukaka recruited twelve prospective astronauts including a 16-year-old girl called Matha Mwamba for the planned moon landing.

Mukuka lacked funding for his space project. The Zambian government was not interested in a partnership and the United Nations, United States, Soviet Union and Israel had ignored his funding requests. Nevertheless, he continued to train his astronauts using an old drum he had found.

The trainee astronauts entered the drum, which was then rolled round a tree or down a hill to imitate flight conditions. The astronauts also learned how to walk on their hands, which Mukaka claimed was the only way a human could ever walk on the moon.

The whole thing was so hilarious that international reporters started to consider it a joke. Mukaka never clarified his intention even though he seemed to be serious about it. He once told an interviewer “I’ll be laughing the day I plant Zambia’s flag on the moon.”

The space program fell apart when the trainee astronauts started asking for money. Two of Mukaka’s top astronauts also got drunk and never for returned for training. A third joined a movie troupe. The program finally ended when the only female trainee astronaut got pregnant.^[1]

9 Astronaut, Cosmonaut Or Taikonaut?

Why does the US, Soviet Union and China have different names for space travelers? NASA calls its space travelers astronauts, Russia calls them cosmonauts and China says they are taikonauts. (This article uses “astronaut” for astronauts, cosmonauts and taikonauts).

The whole thing started during the space race. The US and Soviets were such stiff competitors that they could not agree on a single name for space travelers. The US settled for astronaut (“star sailor”) while the Soviets preferred cosmonaut (“cosmos sailor”). International astronauts hitching rides on Russian or American spacecraft identify with the term used by the host nation.

China also came up with a name for its astronauts when it started sending humans into space. It initially considered calling them Chinanauts before settling for yuhangyuan (“space navigator”). However, taikonaut (“space sailor”) is more common because it ends in “naut” and is easier for non-Chinese speakers to pronounce.^[2]

8 Children Playgrounds Were Designed To Stoke Interest In Space Travel

The space race was extended to playgrounds. Throughout the period, the US and Soviet Union designed school playground equipment to stoke children’s interest in space travel. Playground equipment were built to imitate rockets, satellites, towers, submarines and even planets.

Space-inspired playground equipment in the US started disappearing in 1973 when Congress created the Consumer Product Safety Commission. The commission took interest in playground accidents and asked playground equipment manufacturers to develop safer equipment. This saw safety and practicality overtake design.

A second blow was delivered two decades later when further guidelines demanded that sand and rubber replaced asphalt, dirt and grass in playgrounds. Several schools destroyed their playgrounds instead of complying.^[3]

7 The Soviet Union Offered The US Technical Aid Intended For Developing Nations

The Soviet Union started the space race when it launched Sputnik 1 on October 4, 1957. Thirty days later, it followed it up with the launch of Sputnik 2, which had a dog called Laika on board. The launches startled the US, which considered itself the global leader in science and technology. The US then decided it was going to launch its own rockets.

That almost happened on December 6, 1957, when the US attempted launching the Vanguard 1A rocket. Over 100 reporters and television were on ground to report the event. The Vanguard 1A barely rose three feet into the air before it lost power and crashed in a fiery fireball—all on live television.

The US immediately became the butt of jokes. US journalists used words like “flopnik” and “kaputnik” to describe the incident. The New York Times even dedicated an editorial to criticize the US space program. Not one to miss a good opportunity, the Soviet Union offered the US technical assistance intended for developing nations. The US ignored the offer.^[4]

6 The Soviets Also Planned To Nuke The Moon

Most people would have learned about the infamous project A119. It was the US’s attempt to nuke the moon. Interestingly, it appears that the Soviet Union had similar ideas. Either nation had no practical reason for nuking the moon, other than proving that they were the leaders of the space race.

The Soviet Union planned to nuke the moon right after landing on it. The idea was to put a man on the moon and have him plant a flag. Then they dropped a nuclear weapon just to prove that they landed on the moon first. The flash and mushroom cloud formed from the explosion would be visible to people watching from earth.

The Soviets later agreed that nuking the moon was a terrible idea. The nonexistent atmosphere meant the mushroom cloud would never form. The flash of the explosion would also be so brief that people watching from earth would not even notice that anything happened. The Soviets later opted to send turtles to the moon instead.^[5]

5 Some Think The Soviet Union Won The Space Race

The US won the space race when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon on July 20, 1969. However, some observers say the Soviet Union was the real winner considering the moon landing was just one of the few space firsts the US ever achieved. The Soviets reached more milestones than the US ever did.

The Soviet Union launched the first satellite into orbit in 1957. It also sent the first animal to space the same year. Four years later, on April 12, 1961, the Soviets sent the first man to space. That man was Yuri Gagarin.

Gagarin’s flight was followed by another, which had two cosmonauts on board. This was the first time two humans traveled to space in the same spacecraft. In 1963, the Soviets sent the first woman, Valentina Tereshkova, to space. Two years later, Alexei Leonov performed the first spacewalk.

The Soviet Union could not maintain its head start for financial reasons. The state required money for more important things like food and homes for its citizens. This threw its space program into decline and it was quickly overtaken by the US. It finally lost out after the US landed on the moon.^[6]

4 Buzz Aldrin Should Have Been The First Man On The Moon

As the world awaited the launch of Apollo 11, journalists and NASA officials speculated that Buzz Aldrin would be the first man on the moon. This should have been true considering that the astronaut in the right seat of the earlier Gemini spacecraft (which Apollo replaced) was always the first to leave the spacecraft.

Aldrin was in the right seat of the Apollo 11. However, the door of the Apollo had been moved to the left side. This meant the man in the left seat—Neil Armstrong in this case—would alight first. Aldrin would need to climb over Armstrong if he was ever going to be the first man on the moon.

Aldrin did try climbing over Armstrong during trials here on earth. He was unsuccessful and ended up damaging the test module. Some NASA higher-ups also thought that Neil Armstrong should receive the privilege of stepping foot on the moon first because he was the module commander.^[7]

3 The US Air Force Bungled The Space Shuttle

The space shuttle was supposed to revolutionize space travel. The first spacecraft were single use rockets. The space shuttle is reusable. NASA bragged that the shuttle would spaceflight cheaper. It even predicted launching a spaceflight every week at the cost of $20 million per flight with the shuttle.

That was like $1 billion for 50 flights a year. That is dirt cheap for a spaceflight. Unfortunately, that never happened. The space shuttle only flew 134 times in 29 years. That was between 1981 and 2010. The entire program cost NASA $209 billion. That is around $1.6 billion per flight.

The shuttle’s maximum range was also limited to a few hundred miles above the earth’s atmosphere. This was why astronauts never returned to the moon. If that was not bad enough, the shuttle was deadlier than the rockets it replaced. Two of the 134 flight crashed, killing 14 astronauts. That is a poor record for an aircraft.

The US Air Force was blamed for the failure of the space shuttle. The original design was perfect, until the air force requested for a shuttle that could launch US satellites and capture Soviet satellites. These meant the shuttle required larger fuel tanks and cargo bay than originally planned.

The Air Force also wanted the shuttle to fly above the poles so they could spy on the Soviet Union. This made NASA build a $4 billion launch facility at Vandenberg Air Force Base, California. That facility was never used.

The modified space shuttle later proved beneficial to the US space program. It was large enough to launch the Hubble Space telescope and deliver parts to the International Space Station. The original one would never launch the telescope or deliver many parts since it was smaller. It also helped wreck the Soviet space program as we will discuss below.^[8]

2 The Space Shuttle Wrecked The Soviet Space Program

While Russia prefers keeping it hush, the Soviet Union did build a space shuttle. The shuttle even looked exactly like an American space shuttle. That part was no coincidence because the Soviets built it using plans stolen from NASA.

The US left design plans of the space shuttle plans unclassified. This permitted NASA to upload it on publicly accessible online databases. All the KGB (the Soviet equivalent of the CIA) needed to do was to find them, which it did. Their reward was a space shuttle they called Buran.

The Soviets planned to use Buran to dock on the Soviet-owned Mir space station. However, the shuttle only flew once in 1990 before it was abandoned. It never docked on the Mir space station and was decommissioned in 1994.

As we mentioned in the previous entry, the space shuttle program was expensive for the US. Its effect was worse for the cash-strapped Soviet Union. Their space program went bust soon after they expended the little they had on the failed shuttle project. The fact that the Soviet Union collapsed a year later did not help issues.

The theft of the shuttle plans later proved beneficial to the US when a NASA shuttle docked on the Mir space station in 1995. The shuttle used the same facilities the Soviet Union had intended to use for Buran.^[9]

1 The Space Race Was Actually An Arms Race

Rockets are dual-use technology. That is, they have both peaceful and military applications. Put a space capsule or shuttle on it and it becomes a spacecraft. Replace that capsule with a warhead and you have an intercontinental ballistic missile. The space race was a spin-off of the nuclear arms race between the US and Soviet Union.

The US and Soviets upped their nuclear weapon programs after World War II. At the same time, either nation developed the means of delivering its weapons to the other. The US designed long-range bombers while the Soviets opted for long-range rockets.

Those Soviet rockets turned useful when the space race came along. In fact, they were the reason the Soviet Union had the upper hand at the beginning of the space race.

The US only started taking its rocket program seriously after the Soviets launched Sputnik 1 in 1957. The launch startled President Eisenhower, who feared the Soviets could use one of the rockets to deliver a warhead to US mainland. Those fears led to the space race.^[10]

Many people have a bad habit of taking knowledge for granted. When it’s something a little more esoteric like advanced calculus or how to make the perfect mole poblano it can be very obnoxious and even arrogant to act like everyone should know it. But sometimes even what you consider common knowledge may be lost on others and we shouldn’t mock others for that. After all, whatever it is, there was literally a time when we had to learn that information, too.

With all that said, it can still be surprising to learn just how few people know certain things or perform certain tasks that, to many others, seem like they should be everyday things.

10. Many Americans Don’t Know Their Blood Type

Humans have four major blood types of A, B, AB, and O. Those can be broken down as negative or positive as well based on the Rh or rhesus factor. But the basic difference between the four blood types is caused by antigens in your blood.  

If you ever need a blood transfusion, you’re going to want to have the right blood type. If you are given the wrong type, your immune system will react to the new blood and try to destroy it, which could be fatal. That’s a big deal so everyone needs to know their blood type, right?

While it may be true, you should know your blood type, there’s a good chance you don’t. One poll in 2020 suggested that only 62% of Americans knew their blood type, meaning 38% didn’t. At a population of 331 million, that’s 12.6 million people. A different survey the year before said 43% didn’t know their blood type. 

For some perspective, about 66% of Americans know their astrological sign. Also, age has a lot to do with this information as the younger a person is, the less likely they are to know. Only 32% of Gen Z knew their blood type in one survey. 

Britons seem to be in the same ballpark with more than 50% clueless about their blood type while in Asia it’s far more common to know and as many as 90% of the Japanese population are aware of their blood type. 

9. Over 40% of People Don’t Know How Much Money Their Partner Makes

Do you consider marriage a true partnership? Historically, this may be a word we choose but, in action, it’s not always the case. For most of modern, Western history there’s been an imbalance where the man is the head of the house and the woman stays home. 

Gradually, over the last several decades the economy and the women’s rights movements have seen a shift to a more true partnership where more women are also income earners. If you’re in such a relationship right now, do you know how much money your partner even makes? A large number of people don’t.

Data from 2015 suggested that 43% of people don’t know how much money their spouse makes. Traditionally, money has always been a thing people tend to keep secret. Employers don’t even want coworkers to know what everyone else is making in case someone finds out they make less than someone else. People guard their salary like it’s a state secret from friends and family and maybe they’ll let their lifestyle give a vague idea of how things are, but that’s all. 

Six years later in 2021, numbers were not much better. Forty percent of couples who lived together were in the same boat, not knowing how much the other made. This was made even more awkward by the fact people in the survey had to guess what their partner made and it was a multiple choice question with $25,000 ranges, meaning two in 5 people guessed what their partner made incorrectly by over $25,000. At the same time, over 70% said they communicated about finances with their partners very well. 

8. Over a Quarter of Americans Can’t Cook

Here’s a tough one – do you know how to cook? The word “cook” is a very vague term when you stop to ponder it. Boiling an egg is technically cooking, so if you can do that you can cook. But is that the same as making a crown rack of lamb with some dauphinoise potatoes and quenelles of a fresh mint sorbet on the side? Not exactly.

In 2011, one survey concluded that 28% of Americans couldn’t cook. In 2023, another concluded that 56% struggled to cook even basic recipes. So we have can’t and then struggled to and both are damning enough that we’ll call them “poor cooks” and leave it at that. 

The first survey covered over 1,000 people over the age of 25, so we can’t claim these are college kids with no world experience. 

Britain didn’t fare a lot better. In 2014 a survey suggested 10% of the population can’t cook anything at all and by that, they meant literally anything. Another 25% laid claim to only being able to cook about three things, and that included super basic dishes like eggs and porridge.

7. 3% of the Population Can’t Picture Things in Their Minds

When you hear that three percent of people can’t do a thing you can almost write it off as a statistical anomaly. Three percent is nothing, right? If you lose three percent on a test, you still get 97%. That’s basically perfect. But three percent can have significant meaning when the whole is a big enough number like the population of the earth.

At eight billion people, three percent of the population works out to 240 million. That’s more than 6 times the population of Canada. If it was a country, it would be the 5th largest country on earth with a population greater than Brazil or Russia. And that’s how many people in the world have no imagination.

Based on research, three percent of people are unable to conjure an image in their minds. So while most of us can hear the word “dog” and picture an adorable little chihuahua, 240 million people have something called aphantasia where they cannot visualize things in their minds. They can understand the concept of a dog, and describe a dog, and give you all the same dog facts you know, but for them, there is no image in their head to accompany it.

Until 2003 this phenomenon didn’t even have a name and came about after a man who had surgery reported he had lost the ability. Doctors had no way to explain it but when it made headlines tons of people wrote in to say they were the same way and had always thought when people talked about picturing things in your mind’s eye that it was metaphorical. 

6. 40% of Americans Don’t Know Why They Celebrate July 4th

One of the dangers of tradition is losing the meaning behind it. Sometimes it’s a harmless adaptation, like how many people celebrate Christmas as a holiday devoid of religious connotations.  But sometimes it can get a little embarrassing if you’re engaging in some celebration and you don’t even know what it’s for originally.

In 2023, a truly stunning report suggested that as many as 40% of Americans don’t know why the Fourth of July is celebrated. Despite being one of the most fiercely and clearly patriotic holidays on the calendar, the exact reason for the holiday was unknown to them. 

The stat came from a poll of 1,000 people identified as born or naturalized citizens of the US. 

In 2011, a similar poll concluded only 58% of Americans knew what America was celebrating. Only 76% knew which country America declared independence from, which should have informed the previous question a bit better, but obviously didn’t. 

5. 70% of People Can’t Identify the Seafood They Eat

You can’t see the endless shrimp special at Red Lobster and deny the popularity of seafood. People love it. But loving it and being knowledgeable about it are two different things. According to one survey, 70% of people can’t identify what they are eating. And if that sounds preposterous, consider how well you’d do if someone placed six different, whole fish in front of you with no labels and asked you to identify each one.

In Europe, people were asked to do just that with six commonly eaten fish, and on average they got two of six correct. Brits and Belgians couldn’t quite score that high overall. Brits did the worst, and the Spanish did the best.

Part of the problem, of course, is that people often buy fish as filets rather than whole, and another problem is they’re mislabeled very often. 

4. More Than Half of Americans Can’t Name All Their Grandparents

For some people, especially those in the Fast and Furious, family is everything. But for many, family bonds are not that tight. That doesn’t mean you dislike your family, either, it just means you’re not as familiar as you might think. For instance, you had four grandparents whether or not you knew them. Can you name all four?

A 2022 survey showed that 53% of Americans are unable to name all four of their grandparents. Three years earlier a different survey concluded it was a third of Americans. Average it out and still, a lot of people don’t know the names of their family members. 

One in seven people had no idea what their grandparents did for a living, and 21% didn’t know where even one grandparent was born. 

3. 25% of Americans Didn’t Know the Earth Orbited the Sun

There’s a lot to know in the universe and astronomy is by no means something widely taught throughout schools but the bare bones basics are usually covered early in science. Things like how many planets there are and how we all orbit the sun. But maybe some people skip that day.

The National Science Foundation conducted a poll in 2012 and discovered that 26% of people when asked if the Earth went around the sun or the sun went around the earth got the answer wrong. Only 39% of respondents answered that the universe began with an explosion, otherwise known as the Big Bang, and only 48% were on board with the idea of humans evolving from a more primitive species. 

The entire survey asked 10 questions of 2,200 people and the average worked out to 65% correct answers.

2. 300 Million People in the World Don’t Have a Single Friend

Sometimes people refer to loneliness as an epidemic and that sounds very metaphorical and maybe even hyperbolic. There are eight billion people in the world, is anyone truly alone? Yes. Yes, they are.

According to polls, 300 million people in the world, which is close to the population of the entire United States, don’t have a single friend. Not one person they consider an actual friend. Over 20% of people feel like they don’t have friends or family they could count on. Now maybe some of those people are being overly dramatic and maybe not but either way it’s a very sad statistic. 

Other surveys have shown that 27% of millennials report having no close friends and 22% have no friends at all. That drops to 16% for Gen X and 9% of Boomers. 

1. Three Billion People Have Never Used the Internet

How important is the internet to your life? For some it’s indispensable, for others, it’s just a really nice feature. Some people even avoid it, if you can believe that. But how many people have never used it at all?

It’s easy to imagine parts of the world where no one has used the internet from the comfort of our computers and phones but the numbers are remarkably high. According to the UN, over a third of the people in the world have never used the internet. That works out to around 3 billion people, most of whom live in developing nations with limited access to things like electricity let alone YouTube. That’s close to the population of the entire world outside of Asia.

In America, where you’d be more inclined to take easy access to electronics and the internet for granted, 7% of the population, or about 23 million people, do not use the internet. Of that number, 25% are over the age of 65.

Jerry Bruckheimer is synonymous with hugely popular movies (and movie franchises) including The Rock, Flashdance, Top Gun, Pirates of the Caribbean and Bad Boys. The 77-year-old film and television producer is also the mind behind the CSI TV franchise and the American version of The Amazing Race. In July 2003, Bruckheimer outdid himself by becoming the first producer in Hollywood history to produce the two highest-grossing films of a single weekend, when Bad Boys II and Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl was released simultaneously.

On this list are just some of the movies Bruckheimer has produced over the years and a few of the tales that make them that much more interesting.

Top 10 Amazing Audience Reactions

10 American Gigolo and Giorgio Armani

American Gigolo was released in 1980 and features Richard Gere as a male escort who gets himself entangled in a murder case. It was one of the first cinema-bound movies to include frontal male nudity and kickstarted Gere’s career as a Hollywood leading man. However, if it wasn’t for Paul Schrader, Gere might never have starred in the film. The role of Julian Kaye was offered to Christopher Reeve by Barry Diller at Paramount Pictures, but Schrader was so against the casting that he contacted Reeve’s agent to get him to persuade Reeve to decline the offer. Reeve eventually did turn it down and Gere’s memorable character was born. But not before John Travolta briefly stepped into the role before declaring it wasn’t the right movie for him.

The movie has also been credited with putting legendary Italian designer, Giorgio Armani, on the map. Armani was tasked with creating lightweight suits for Gere, and the style that shone through his clothing designs, was soon mimicked by men worldwide. The rest, as they say, is history.

9 Johnny and the horse

Not even Jerry Bruckheimer and Gore Verbinski’s producing skills combined with Johnny Depp’s quirkiness could save The Lone Ranger from bombing at the box office. The 2013 American Western Action film was almost cancelled before it ever saw the light, because of production and money problems and when it was finally released, it received mostly bad reviews.

Then there was the controversy surrounding the casting of Depp as a Native American, to which Depp responded that he believed he had Native American ancestry (possibly Cherokee) on his great-grandmother’s side and considered the role as an opportunity for him to “try to right the wrongs of the past.”

Depp also revealed during The Late Show With David Letterman that he had been lucky to survive a freak incident on set when the horse he was riding during a scene decided to suddenly jump over several obstacles. Depp slid down the horse’s back but managed to grab hold of its mane and hold on for dear life. After being dragged along for around 25 yards, Depp decided to let go and he fell to the floor, unhurt. Two other people involved with the movie, weren’t so lucky, however. A crew member was injured during shooting and a stunt diver killed while cleaning a water tank meant to be used for an underwater scene.

8 Three dancers make for a perfect routine

The most memorable part of the Flashdance film, has to be the audition scene with its eye-popping dance sequences. The star of the scene and the movie, Jennifer Beals, was only seventeen when she was given the role of Alex Owens. Beals didn’t perform the amazing dance routine however, but had two body doubles do the work for her. And when certain breakdancing elements became too difficult for the dancers to master, Richard “Crazy Legs” Colón was roped in to assist. Colón was 16 years old at the time, and he happily shaved his facial hair, put on a permy wig and donned a black leotard. It is believed that his efforts are still paying off, as he continues to receive residual cheques for the film.

The songs used in the film became massively popular with Laura Branigan’s “Gloria” selling over two million copies after the movie’s release. The song “Manic” was originally composed for the 1980 horror movie Maniac and its lyrics had to be amended for Flashdance. The made-over song was nominated for an Oscar but ultimately disqualified because of the changes made to the lyrics. This didn’t stop the soundtrack from selling more than 6 million copies though.

Flashdance received mostly negative reviews, but was a huge hit at the box-office, becoming the third-highest grossing film of 1983 in the US.

7 The story behind 12 Strong

It was probably only a matter of time before Jerry Bruckheimer teamed up with Chris Hemsworth. In 12 Strong, the plot centers around the first Special Forces team sent to Afghanistan after 9/11 and the push to take down the Taliban. For the film, Bruckheimer also allowed a first-time director behind the lens. Up until 12 Strong, the only features Nicolai Fuglsig directed were commercials.

Fuglsig succeeded in bringing the events of the real-life story to the big screen. In 2001 Colonel John F. Mulholland was busy helping plan US entry into Afghanistan and part of the project was to find the right soldiers for the mission. Some of the soldiers who would take part, didn’t even know about the 9/11 attacks, until they were packing away their gear after a training mission in Texas and heard the news reports over the radio. Operational Detachment-Alpha 595 immediately set off for its home base in Kentucky and three days later it was established that they would be the one of the first teams to be sent to Afghanistan. Their mission would eventually result in the defeat of the Taliban in just a few months.

6 The lasting popularity of Coyote Ugly

Coyote Ugly is a quintessential 2000s feel-good romantic musical comedy-drama produced by Bruckheimer and starring Maria Bello, Piper Perabo, John Goodman, and of course an iconic cameo by then 17-year-old LeAnne Rimes who belted out her hit song “Can’t Fight The Moonlight.” The song was written by Diane Warren and hit number 1 in 11 countries.

The movie was another huge hit for Bruckheimer, even though critics hated it, and it all started after a former Coyote Ugly bartender named Elizabeth Gilbert wrote an article about her experiences at the bar. Gilbert is also the author of the bestseller Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia.

Mario Bello, who plays bar owner, Lil, visited South Africa while shooting another film a few years ago and visited a furniture gallery, Amatuli, while she was in the country. The gallery has a replica of the Coyote Ugly bar in its Gauteng showroom and every Sunday night the venue had “Coyote Ugly” night which included Bello standing on the bar and handing out drinks.

5 Enemy of the State upsets NSA spies

Enemy of the State, starring Will Smith and Gene Hackman took cinemas by storm in 1998, earning itself great reviews and over 250 million dollars at the box office. After 9/11 and Edward Snowden’s explosive revelations, the movie became noteworthy for its exploration of national security and privacy issues.

This doesn’t mean that everyone was a fan of the film, especially not NSA spies. The spy agency was particularly peeved at being labelled the villain, which happened after it met with Jerry Bruckheimer and other producers and expressed hope that the NSA would be painted in a positive light.

Several complaints by NSA employees saw the light after the film, including one about a personal car visible in one of the movie scenes, window blinds being up and production helicopters interrupting daily tasks at the agency and taking photos of employees.

4 Pearl Harbor: the new Titanic

Pearl Harbor is one of Bruckheimer’s cheesier efforts of an epic war drama. Combining his skills with Michael Bay, Bruckheimer produced an ultimate success even though the film was widely criticized for being too long, containing historical inaccuracies, and consisting of mainly bad dialogue. Here’s looking at you, Ben Affleck, with your “genuine French champagne… from France.”

The film was also the first Worst Picture-nominated film (Golden Raspberry Awards) that won an Academy Award (for Best Sound Editing).

Pearl Harbor was widely touted to be ‘the new Titanic’ and Celine Dion almost sang the theme song “There You’ll Be” but ultimately turned it down because she wasn’t feeling another romantic ballad for a major motion picture. Country star, Faith Hill, was handed the song and her version received Grammy, Golden Globes and Oscar nominations. The music video was also directed by Michael Bay.

Rosarito Beach in Baja California was used as the set for the movie’s scale model work and this location was also used by James Cameron who had previously built a large water tank here and used it to sink the Titanic replica in.

3 Catwoman in Dangerous Minds

The autobiography My Posse Don’t Do Homework by retired U.S. Marine LouAnne Johnson served as inspiration for Dangerous Minds, starring Michelle Pfeiffer. Bruckheimer produced the movie alongside Don Simpson and it was one of Simpson’s last completed films before his death in 1996. Simpson was working on The Rock when he died, and the film was dedicated to his memory.

Dangerous Minds was a hit and even spawned a short TV series, even though the majority of the actors cast as students didn’t have any acting experience. Pfeiffer on the other hand, was obviously famous already because of her previous movie roles, including Catwoman in Batman. While she was preparing for her role in Dangerous Minds, Pfeiffer shadowed LouAnne Johnson while she went through her daily routine in the classroom. The students recognized her, even though she was wearing a non-descript black leather jacket and no makeup, and asked Johnson whether Catwoman was in their class. When Johnson said yes, they replied “What happened? She doesn’t look as good!”

2 The reality behind Deliver Us From Evil

With Deliver Us From Evil, Bruckheimer tried his hand at producing a supernatural horror that claims to be based on real events experienced by an NYPD sergeant, Ralph Sarchie.

The real Ralph Sarchie worked for the NYC Police Department for 20 years and retired in 2004 after which he started focusing on ‘demonology cases. Three years prior to this he had already published his book, Beware The Night, in which he detailed several experiences of evil during his time as a police officer. As portrayed in the movie, Sarchie was also involved in real-life exorcisms and helped to restrain a possessed woman while a bishop prayed over her.

Actor Eric Bana, who plays Sarchie in the movie got the fright of his life while preparing for the role, when he watched a videotape that supposedly portrays a genuine exorcism. He was so freaked out that he wouldn’t say more than “It was quite confronting. If I could have avoided it, I probably would have, but I saw it and it will be forever etched into my brain.”

1 Days of Thunder set leads to romance

Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer produced Days of Thunder, the 1990 sports action-drama flick starring Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman that focuses on the life of a young NASCAR racer from California, Cole Trickle, played by Cruise. The character of Trickle was inspired by Tim Richmond, a real-life NASCAR driver who died of AIDS in 1989.

It was during the filming of Days of Thunder that Cruise and Kidman started dating and the couple married six months after the film was released. Don Simpson had a new girlfriend during the time of filming, Donna Wilson. Wilson happened to be an actress and Simpson had a small role written for her to ensure she would have a reason to be with him on set during filming. The relationship was shortlived however, because of Simpson’s ongoing drug use and Wilson ended up with Director, Tony Scott whom she married in 1994.

Don Simpson also insisted that screenwriter, Robert Towne, write a four-page scene that would have seen Simpson as a driver named Aldo Bennedetti interacting with the characters of Tom Cruise and Robert Duvall. Simpson’s acting was unfortunately terrible and he eventually only got away with one line in the scene where he tells an ESPN reporter: “I’m glad he’s well enough to come back, and I hope I beat him, at the same time.”

Top 10 Realistic Psychopaths In Movies

There’s some place in every neighbourhood that holds a creepy sway over the people there—a park, an abandoned house, a railway bridge that comes with a dark legend. It has always been a fascinating, if difficult to explain, phenomenon; many writers and filmmakers have used this phenomenon to great effect—from Stephen King’s towns of “Derry” or Lovecraft’s “Innsmouth” to “Boo Radley’s house” in Harper Lee’s classic “To Kill a Mockingbird”, some places are simply creepy, whether logically justified or not.
Here’s a list of ten real creepy places, some that will instantly cause you to poop your pants and flee, some you won’t even realise are creepy until you learn its dark history.

Top 10 Iconic Places Pictured From Behind

10 Deadman’s Island, England

This little island near the Isle of Sheppey in the county of Kent, lying in Medway estuary where the Swale meets the river. Like any bona fide creepy island, it is off limits to the general public. But why would this place in the so-called ‘Garden of England’ be creepy, save its name? For once, the name really does say it all.

About 200 years ago, England had a real issue with where they could house the nation’s prisoners. Gaols were full and you couldn’t just hang everyone. Given that Britain’s empire spanned the globe, there were a lot of ships going back and forth. So prison hulks were born (large ship that would house prisoners prior to shipping them off to some far flung corner of the world, like the one alluded to in the opening of Dickens’ ‘Great Expectations’). Deadman’s Island is covered with the bones of many such men and boys, probably those who died of disease aboard the cursed ships. Amongst the rocky outcrops, sand and shells on the island, you’ll just as likely spot a jawbone, femur or an eyeless skull staring back at you. Great fishing spot, though…^[1]

9 Pearl’s Airport, Grenada

Graveyards are inherently creepy. This ‘graveyard’ does not house mouldering corpses under the ground, though. Rather, it’s a sort of above ground graveyard for soviet-era Russian and Cuban aircraft.

Pearl’s was Grenada’s first airport, opening in 1943 before quickly being taken by the Allied forces as a military air base during the second world war. By 1979, the Grenadian government had been taken over by a Marxist-Leninist party named the ‘New Jewel Movement’. Over the next few years, Grenada looked like many tin-pot communist states—rife with corruption, coups and extrajudicial murders. This prompted the USA to invade. During the American occupation of Grenada in the early 80s, the airport was captured by the 8th marine regiment and used as their base of operations.

The creepiness here is that the disused airport serves as a reminder of a bloody invasion, a totalitarian regime and a time the world nearly went up in flames.^[2]

8 Truby King Recreation Reserve, New Zealand

The name of this place doesn’t exactly make the hairs on anybody’s neck stand on end—it sounds like the sort of place you’d love to have a picnic with your family. Try this one—The Seacliff Lunatic Asylum. Creepier? Good, because that’s exactly the place that used to exist on this nature reserve. And it’s creepy as hell.

There are plenty of abandoned and renovated mental institutions you can visit all over the world, and they’re plenty creepy—there is something really disquieting about a place where a mental hospital used to stand. There is not much chance of a hokey, ghost-hunterish, manufactured jumpfest here. It feels sad, haunted by real pain and the crimes of long-dead patients. One such person was Edward Lionel Terry, an Englishman who murdered a destitute Chinese migrant named ‘Joe’ Kum Young in 1905. The asylum also suffered a fatal fire which ripped through ward 5 in 1942, killing all but two female patients. Not much of the original building remains, but that adds to the eeriness, conjuring images of lost souls wandering the grounds looking for their bed…^[3]

7 Davelis Cave, Greece

Every ancient culture has a few important caves. We did used to live in them, after all. Hellenic culture has a very close association with caves, especially putting virginal ‘oracles’ in them to get hopped up on goofball gasses to tell the future. This cave in Penteli, north Athens evokes such weirdness and has the history to justify it.

The cave was once a centre for the worship of the god Pan and the nymphs, a place for revelry where the lines between the temporal world and the world beyond are blurred. Later, Orthodox Christians used the cave as a hermitage, founding small church dedicated to both Saint Spyridon and Saint Nicholas (the latter famously being the basis for our modern depiction of Father Christmas—and having dealt with the devil). In the 1800s, the cave was a base for ‘Davelis’, a bandit who lent his sobriquet to the cave’s name and apparently hid some treasure there. The place was also used by the military during the cold war, lending a certain Area 51 weirdness to the place to go along with the occultish feeling. Many legends, both older and urban, are associated with the cave—paranormal activity is often reported in this dank, dark portal to the underworld… obviously.^[4]

6 Kuldhara, India

When you imagine a ghost town, images of a mining community left to be consumed by the encroaching desert somewhere in the Western US is typical. A place where the promises of the gold rush never materialised. You probably didn’t have a Brahmin settlement in Rajasthan in mind, did you?

Centred around a temple to the mother goddess (possibly Parvati), which shows remnants of statues depicting Ganesha, Vishnu and the Asura Mahishasura as well as an unnamed , local horse-riding deity. Local legend has it that the villagers were driven out by a lecherous man named Salim Singh who wanted to claim a local girl for himself. He sent guards to collect her, but the villagers sent them away ’til the next morning. When the guardsreturned, the village was abandoned. Before they left, the villagers cursed Kuldhara, causing all who tried to live there to be plagued by supernatural entities.^[5]

Or the village became gradually depopulated by the 1890s due to a dwindling water supply…

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5 Himeji Castle, Japan

On first glance, this is a classic example of a Japanese castle—magical, like something from a Studio Ghibli film. But scratch the surface and you’ll learn about the creepy folklore associated with Himeji Castle. And, much like horror classic ‘Ringu’, there’s a creepy well on site.

The story of how an evil, plotting samurai named Tetsuzan had his plot to murder the Castle’s lord, Norimoto foiled by a beautiful servant named Okiku is a sad ghost story. Okiku confided in her lover, a brave warrior named Motonobu, telling him of Tetsuzan’s plot to seize Himeji Castle. Motonobu told Lord Norimoto who feld. Tetsuzan’s evil servant, a man called Danshir, learned that it was Okiku who had leaked the plan. Seeing her beauty, the evil Danshir decided to have her for himself, finding someone else to blame for the foiled plot. She rebukes him 3 times, choosing her love for Motonobu over her safety. Danshir kills Okiku in a jealous rage and throws her body down the well. It is said that, if you find yourself near the well at night, you can hear her frantic whispers emanating from the well.^[6]

Nope.

I’ll just get some macha soft serve ice cream and some dango on a stick, please.

4 Bunce Island, Sierra Leone

Our second river island on this list is equally horrific, equally creepy but different in one key way—you can visit there. Ok, there are other differences. It wasn’t diseased prisoners found on this island; it was a centre for English slave traders, not criminals. It’s located in Sierra Leone, not England. And it was often raided by pirates like Barti Ddu (Black Bart in English) and the French during their many wars with Britain.

Bunce Island was the main processing point for slaves bound for the British colonies Georgia and South Carolina, used to work the rice plantations there. The once powerful ‘slave castle’ on the island survived many raids from Portuguese and Creole Luso-African raiders and pirates through the eighteenth century but couldn’t survive against one powerful foe—the abolition of slavery. By 1840, over 30 years since the abolition of slavery in Britain, the place was abandoned. A tragic air pollutes this place today, with funding set aside to renovate the island as a tourist destination. Perhaps it should be left to nature—history has been recorded, perhaps the ghosts of the past should be laid to rest.^[7]

3 Tommy Jones’ Obelisk, Wales

There is something tragically beautiful about this monument found in the wilds of the Brecon Beacons mountains in South Wales— The obelisk marks the place where the body of a little boy who got lost was found, now often used as a landmark for hikers who are uncertain of their location when the mountains get foggy. This is much less a simple memorial than a tool to avoid future tragedies.

The far more famous story of ‘The Lady of the Lake’ often overshadows the (far less mythological) story of Tommy Jones, but it’s worth knowing: Tommy was a 5-year-old boy from the coalfields of the Rhondda valley who was on his way to visit his grandparents who lived on a farm near the ancient town of Brecon in 1900. He met up with his grandfather and William, his 13-year-old cousin, with whom he set off to tell his grandmother that he had arrived and to expect his dad too. At some point, little Tommy got scared of the dark and decided to head back to his father had been. He never made it back. The family and some soldier who were rifle training nearby began the search immediately. Nothing. A few weeks went by, with searches of the wild countryside conducted every day until, a month later, Tommy’s body was found where the monument now stands.^[8]

2 Old Franklin Park Zoo, USA

Seeing long abandoned cages that used to house bears is almost as distressing as seeing cages with bears still held inside them. Thankfully, animals are treated marginally better nowadays (in many parts of the world, at least—we’re looking at you Pakistan). This abandoned zoo in Boston, MA, serves as a sad reminder of how we used to treat these apex predators.

Within the dilapidated, crumbling buildings, once a massively popular attraction for Bostonians, you can still see the steel cages and barred enclosures that housed the bears. If you find abandoned prisons creepy, you may well find this abandoned animal jail just as weird.^[9]

1 Just a normal street in Paris, France…

Except it isn’t all that ‘normal’. It looks pretty unassuming, to the untrained eye. But seldom do people look down and really wonder what it is they’re looking at (unless they’ve stepped in dog mess). Five indentations mark the tarmac on the Rue de la Roquette, just in front of a crosswalk. What could they be? The site of some car crash, or just where a particularly heavy lorry passed over? Why should anyone care anyway?

These indentations mark the spot where the Paris guillotine stood within the long gone Prison de la Roquette. This death machine was employed in the public beheading of 69 convicts between 1851 and the closing of the prison in 1899. The markings on the road once housed the support stones on which ‘Madame Guillotine’ stood. It is said that if you stand in the centre point of the five indentations for too long, you’re bound to die… mainly because you’d be randomly standing in the middle of a road.^[10]

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About The Author: C.J. Phillips is a storyteller, actor and writer living in rural West Wales. He is a little obsessed with lists.