It seems that most habits these days aren’t good for you. Once upon a moonbeam, cigars and opium and casual racism were perfectly acceptable staples of Western society. Not any more. They have joined a long list of human behaviour that is at best frowned upon and at worst downright dangerous. Perhaps sunscreen, breathing indoors and smiling will one day join that list too.

As well as being tasty, fish is supposed to be great for the brain.

It’s also full of poison. Exactly which poison depends entirely on the fish. While most fish aren’t actually toxic, they are all capable of carrying the toxins in their environment. Fish caught in oceans often come complete with tasty traces of mercury — the ocean happens to be full of the stuff.

Of course, if you want to avoid the horrible hazards of mercury, you could always eat some non-ocean based fishes. But these are often full of pesticides – farmed fish, for instance, are often given pesticides to stave off sea lice. Eating certain fish is also linked to the Big C. Rates of cancer-causing toxin PCB are 16 times higher in farm-raised salmon than in wild salmon. Basically – fish eating habits can kill you.

PFOS and PFOA are pretty nasty chemicals, known to damage the immune systems of mice. They can also cause liver cancer in rodents and induce testicular and pancreatic cancer, screwed up hormone levels and, most worryingly, neonatal death. If the foetus does live, it is more likely to be obese later in life.

Shockingly, the chemicals can be found in everything from food packaging to carpets and electronics – and, most unavoidably, in tap water.
Regulation differs from place to place and state to state, but there is no federal regulation on the chemicals in the US and water companies are not required to test for the toxic chemicals. PFOS have been banned in the EU while Canada seems set to follow suit.

For years, hot water bottles were made from polycarbonate plastic which contain bisphenol A (BPA), a toxic chemical linked to breast and prostate cancer, brain damage, and disruptions to the endocrine system. In 2008, some companies stopped selling the bottles containing the chemical – though they still vouched for its safety. But studies had shown that chromosomal mutations in mice jumped from 1-2 percent to 40 percent when they were kept in cages made of the stuff.

BPA has also been found in baby bottles. Canada, France, and Germany have already banned the substance from appearing in any of their bottles, and the EU is soon to follow suit. BPA can also be found in CDs, DVDs and laptops.

Perflourinated compounds, or PFCs, are a family of fluorine-containing chemicals that make properties stain and stick-resistant. They are incredibly difficult to break down, and can be found in almost everyone in the world. They are also pretty toxic. These chemicals are used in many cleaning and personal products, such as dental floss and shampoo. They’ve been linked to kidney and liver damage, and they’re especially toxic to newborn babies and fetuses. US citizens have the highest amount of PFC levels in the world.

So watching TV was never going to be the healthiest of activities… unless you do star jumps while watching “Dexter”. The University of Queensland recently revealed just how deadly TV can be.

It turns out that for every hour of TV we watch, we lose 22 minutes of our life. In the study, Australians aged over 25 watched TV for over 9.8 billion hours with the loss of some 286,000 years of their combined existence. Or to put it another way: if you watch six hours of TV every day you risk dying five years earlier. This is much like smoking two cigarettes for every hour of TV you watch. So for those of you who like to smoke a couple of ciggies while watching “Modern Family” marathons – you’re actually doubling the total time shaved off the end of your life.

Forget car exhaust and industrial smoke: the air inside your house is apparently four times more polluted than the air outside. This pollution comes from what are called “volatile organic compounds” (or VOCs): things like plants, paint and cleaning products. New buildings are especially polluted, since they have so many new materials inside.

The health effects of VOCs include a range of horrifying things, such as damage to the liver, kidneys and central nervous system – as well as less horrifying things, like eye and nose irritation and dizziness. It almost goes without saying that VOCs have also been linked to cancer.

Ah, but what if you do eat healthily, work hard, and let yourself be mildly grumpy? Surely you’d be guaranteed a long (though possibly miserable) existence?

Sulphur dioxide is found in things like dried fruit, fruit juices and even in the doctor’s choice: muesli. It’s used as a preservative, and as the glue which helps to hold the food together. Unfortunately it’s not made for the human body – and “when introduced it inhibits specific nerve signals, restricts lung performance, and is a direct allergen.” It’s also been linked to miscarriages, and is one of the top two most common air pollutants.

So you don’t exercise as much as you should, and maybe you don’t eat all that much fruit. And yes, perhaps you drink your own body weight in alcohol. Perhaps hourly. But at least you have one thing going for you: you’re happy, and them health freaks can’t take that one away from you, can they?

Well it turns out that they can. Happiness is a health risk.

The Longevity Project is a study that began in 1921; over the decades since then, it has followed 1,500 participants. One of the project’s many discoveries is that happy people are likely to die younger than people who are a bit miserable. Or more precisely – in the words of Dr Leslie Martin of La Sierra University – “Participants who were the most cheerful and had the best sense of humour as kids lived shorter lives, on average, than those who were less cheerful and joking.”

People who are happy are more likely to take risks, gamble with their health, eat more unhealthily and generally burn out as young, alcoholic, presumably still-happy junkies. If you do fall into the optimist category, don’t worry about it (and let’s face it, you won’t); death himself couldn’t wipe that smile off your face.

Eating popcorn, or some deliciously greasy French fries, is not going to help you win a marathon any time soon. Everyone knows that fast food is full of killer crap – but it’s not just the food that’ll clog your arteries.

The bag it comes in pretty much means that you’re eating death-in-a-bag. Scientists in Toronto discovered that the chemicals used in junk food wrappers to make them grease proof, are migrating from the bag to the food – and thereby to our bodies. These chemicals are, according to the FDA, “likely carcinogens”, which can cause cancer.

Diacetyl, an FDA-approved chemical found in the fake butter flavoring on popcorn, is also apparently responsible for a respiratory illness which can cause something called “popcorn workers lung“. Workers in popcorn-making factories are at high risk of picking up the illness – and it has already turned up in one American who merely ate a load of popcorn each day.

For years, everyone from skin specialists and doctors to Australian film directors have advised us to wear more sunscreen. Considering its skin cancer prevention powers, this seemed like good advice.

But it turns out that sunscreen is not as super as it seems. In addition to stopping you getting sunburn, sunscreen also blocks out the vital vitamin D. This truly terrific vitamin helps maintain healthy bones, promotes a balanced immune system, and fights HIV. It also eats cancer cells. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that people deficient in the vitamin are more likely to get sick. In fact, in Europe it’s estimated that a quarter of women who died from breast cancer might have lived if they had maintained adequate vitamin D levels and just saw more sunshine. Or, perhaps, just wore less sunscreen.

The problems with sunscreen have been known for some time now. Numerous chemical toxins have been found in certain sunscreen products down through the years. These poisonous and unpronounceable toxins include benzophenones, cinnamates and menthyl anthranilate which are banned in the EU, Canada and Australia. All are still sold in a number of sunscreen products in the US. Even worse is the fact that many of these chemicals have estrogen-like side-effects, which can lower sperm counts and cause birth defects in children. It also affects penis size.

The free radical causing agents found within sunscreen are absorbed into the bloodstream in at least 35 percent of cases, which damages the fats, proteins, and DNA of certain cells. This can age the skin prematurely, and eventually lead to cancer. So as well as defending you from skin cancer, some sunscreen products can CAUSE CANCER. And penis envy.

You can read more from Kevin Forde on his website.

Pica is defined as “the persistent eating of substances such as dirt or paint that have no nutritional value,” and it’s just one of the conditions that cause some people to eat the most bizarre and unbelievable things. Some do it for comfort or as a coping mechanism, while others picked up the strange habit following a traumatic or stressful event in their lives. Whichever the case, it makes for some pretty odd reading for the rest of us.

10 Heavy Metal

Q: What do 18 bicycles, 15 shopping carts, seven television sets, six chandeliers, two beds, and a coffin all have in common?

A: They’ve all been eaten by 57-year-old Michel Lotito of France. And you can add an entire Cessna 150 airplane to that list, too.

Lotito is another in the list of people with pica, and doctors claim he has an especially strong stomach lining and intestinal tract. Breaking objects into small, consumable pieces, he eats them with massive amounts of water to help his system to digest the metal. Despite his Superman-like stomach, Lotito has problems digesting some normal foods like bananas and hard-boiled eggs. “Monsieur Mangetout,” (“Mr. Eats All” in French) has even wolfed down a small section of the Eiffel Tower.

9 Street Meat

Cooking Instructions: Remove cat from side of road. Place smelly meat under running water for up to four days, or until odor dissipates. Cook well and serve.

That’s the formula and philosophy of Arthur Boyt of England, who says he’s been eating roadkill meals for over 35 years. He’s a taxidermist who prefers to eat the bodies of badgers, cats, and barn owls rather than throw them out after a stuffing job. It has never made him ill. Arthur keeps a freezer in his garage stocked with the likes of dead polecats, swan, buzzards, and even reptiles. And according to the 72-year-old, the best roadkill he ever ate was . . . (drum roll) . . . a Labrador.

“It has a pleasant taste and flavor that is a bit like lamb,” he says. Yeah, except a lamb probably wasn’t some poor little boy’s favorite pet.

8 The Human Leech

Have you ever drunk another human being’s blood? You have? That’s just all types of sick! Okay, I’m kidding, but a 45-year-old woman from Pennsylvania isn’t. Each month, Julie Caples drinks up to half a gallon of the vital life force, which she acquires from willing donors who apparently come over to her house and let her slice them open. She says the blood makes her feel “stronger and healthier,” and she finds that she has an abundance of energy afterward. One wonders how healthy and full of energy she’ll feel when she catches a blood-borne disease.

7 Gas Guzzler

Chen Jejun will make you glad you have a locked gas cap on your vehicle. The Chinese man, 71, gets his motor running each day by downing gasoline, a habit that adds up to roughly 3.5 liters of petrol a month. Back in 1969, when Chen was experiencing a rough cough and some chest pain, the elders in his village suggested he try taking a shot of kerosene to soothe himself. The next day he was back to his normal self, except that he’d also picked up a nasty addiction—one that has caused him to drink about 1.5 tons of gasoline over the past 42 years.

Chen’s favorite pick-me-up has also cost him his marriage and family. After his wife and kids tried unsuccessfully to make him quit, he was forced to move into a cottage by himself, where he can now indulge in the go-juice as often as he pleases. Experts say they believe Chen’s body has built up a tolerance to gas over the years—which explains why he hasn’t dropped dead yet.

6 Scorpion Scarfer

In most places, scorpions are a feared predator. Especially the little ones, which haven’t yet learned how to regulate their venom, and will sting you until their supply is depleted.

Apparently, it’s the venom that has Li Liuqun addicted to eating 30 of these rotten suckers in one sitting. The 58-year-old from China says that, after being stung by a scorpion one day, he became so upset that he picked it up off the ground and bit its head off.

“It tasted sweet and nutty and I never looked back. To me, they’re delicious,” he said. Chinese doctors believe he has become immune, and even addicted to scorpion venom (and you thought heroin was bad).

5 Foam Party

You might want to think twice about inviting Adele Edwards over for a visit—or at least make sure you keep an eye on your furniture if you do. The 31-year-old woman from Florida has spent over two decades unzipping couch cushions and snacking on the foam inside. Her favorite preparation method is to take pieces of the foam outside, rub it in dirt, then eat it. She says it began as a coping mechanism when, at the age of 10, she witnessed her parents going through a rough divorce, and it has since escalated into a full-blown addiction.

She now eats her way through an estimated seven couches and three pillows per year, a fact that has doctors concerned she might die from her bizarre condition. After a week-long stay in hospital for an intestinal blockage, Adele was found to have an iron deficiency and has begun taking supplements in the hopes of curbing her foam-eating habit.

4 Love You To Death

A 26-year-old woman named Casie, who recently appeared on an episode of TLC’s My Strange Addiction, takes the bizarre eating thing to a whole new level. After losing her husband Shawn to a sudden asthma attack, Casie became obsessed with carrying his ashes around with her everywhere she went. It led to an accident one day when some of them spilled onto her hand.

“I didn’t want to wipe them off because that’s my husband and I don’t want to wipe him away,” she said. “So I just licked it off my finger.” She has already eaten around one pound of Shawn’s ashes, and describes the taste as being reminiscent of “rotten eggs, sand, and sandpaper.”

3 Soap

Remember when you were a kid and you used the F-word so constantly that your mom had to wash your filthy little mouth out with soap? No, wait a minute, that was me. Either way, that old-school method of punishment would have been even more brutal if it had involved swallowing five bars of soap a week, Tempestt Henderson’s bizarre choice of snack.

The 19-year-old from Florida can easily go through five bars each week, and even has a love for laundry detergent. She believes it began as a coping mechanism when her boyfriend Jason left her for college, and says she just feels all-around “cleaner” when she eats soap instead of just washing with it. Diagnosed with pica, Tempestt underwent cognitive-behavioral therapy and is working toward recovering from her addiction.

2 Urine

These just keep getting creepier and creepier. Meet Carie, a 53-year-old woman who drinks her own urine. Gross! She might as well use it to brush her teeth, take a bath in, and wash her eyes out with, too. In fact, you guessed it, she actually does. Carie drinks around 80 ounces of her own urine a day and even uses it in a neti pot for nasal irrigation. She’s in a fight against cancer and believes that drinking her own urine helps her to cope with the disease.

1 Milk Of My Daughter

Tim Browne of London drinks his daughter’s breast milk with cereal in the morning, but not because he has pica or is an oddball pervert. The 69-year-old was recently diagnosed with colon cancer and began drinking his daughter Georgia’s breast milk after hearing about an American man who did the same. Having gone through chemotherapy, Tim sides with the experts, who say there is promising research suggesting the cure for cancer just might be in human milk. He describes the taste as “not unpleasant, but slightly pungent.”

Shawn Larson is a former music producer, who now spends his time writing, mastering photography, and raising a family.

In the era of the great monarchies, the royal families of European nations were people of dignity and culture, above the low and filthy lifestyles of the poor. At least, that’s what they wanted people to believe. The reality, though, is a bit different. There was enough inbreeding between the monarchs of Europe to spark some strange decisions—and some truly disgusting lifestyles.

10 Henry VIII Had A ‘Groom Of The Stool’

Among his many reforms, King Henry VIII introduced an all-important job to the English monarchy: the groom of the stool. One lucky boy, chosen from the sons of his most trusted nobles, got the job of following the king around with a portable toilet.

The groom of the stool needed to be ever vigilant. He was expected to watch the king as he ate, make notes of what he consumed, and prepare for the job to come. When the moment came, the groom would help the king undress and then clean up his mess.

This was actually a highly respected job. The groom of the stool was trusted with unparalleled intimate access to the king. He also got to live in the castle with a handsome salary.

Wiping up after the king of England became a proud tradition that continued for almost 400 years.

9 Christian VII Pleasured Himself So Often That It Became A National Crisis

Denmark’s 18th-century King Christian VII knew no love greater than his own hand. He spent so much time at it that the Danish government organized meetings to figure out what to do about it.

The doctors who looked after him were convinced that chronic masturbation was the cause of all his problems. Christian VII was mentally ill, afflicted with porphyria. In reality, mental illness was probably the root of his masturbation problems.

His chief physician, Johann Friedrich Struensee, wrote a whole book about Christian’s “masturbatic insanity.” When Struensee couldn’t get the king to put his pants back on and focus on ruling a kingdom, the doctor ended up taking over. He did most of Christian VII’s decision-making for him, which freed up some time for the king to follow his passions.

8 Joanna Of Castile Traveled With Her Husband’s Dead Body

Joanna of Castile, the mother of Emperor Charles V of Spain, spent the better years of her life married to a man known as Philip the Handsome. Apparently, she thought Philip deserved his nickname because she refused to let anyone bury him when he died.

Instead, Joanna kept her husband’s dead body in her room. Over 12 months, while Philip’s body slowly decayed, Joanna went on acting as if he was still alive. Whenever someone asked, she would simply insist that he was asleep and would wake up soon.

She would sleep with the body at night, and she would make the servants treat it with the respect due to a king. In a fit of jealousy, she wouldn’t let any women enter the room with the dead body, apparently worried that they would be overwhelmed by lust.

7 King Charles II Kept A Wig Of His Mistresses’ Pubes

In 1651, King Charles II started a new project. Every time he slept with a woman, he plucked a few hairs from under her skirt. Then he stitched them all together into a wig that gradually grew into an unnervingly thick mane of female hairs.

When the wig got big enough to cover a man’s head, Charles II donated it to a Scottish drinking club called the Beggar’s Benison Club. They loved it so much that they wore it during their ceremonies. One person even stole it and used it to start his own club, where he made people kiss it.

In 1822, King George IV took up the tradition again and kept a box full of his lover’s lower locks for his own collection. Like Charles II, George planned on making them into a wig but tragically died without ever fulfilling his dream.

6 Queen Maria Eleonora Slept With Her Husband’s Heart

Queen Maria Eleonora didn’t love her husband, King Gustavus Adolphus, for his power or his money. She loved him for his heart. When he died, she had his heart ripped out of his body so that she could sleep with it.

Maria Eleonora kept her dead husband’s organ in a golden box that she placed above her bed each night. On some nights, she even made their daughter climb into bed with her so that she could be close to her father’s heart.

It was a traumatizing experience that her daughter never forgot. She later wrote that her mother was horribly abusive and never stopped crying, saying that she “carried out her role of mourning to perfection.”

5 King Farouk Had The World’s Largest Porn Collection

Legend has it that King Farouk of Egypt had the greatest and largest collection of pornography in the world. He boasted that he had “warehouses full of the stuff” scattered around the world, with whole storage compartments filled to the brim in Rome, Monaco, and Cairo.

Writer and former pimp Scott Bowers claims that he convinced Farouk to ship several crates of porn to the famous sexologist Alfred Kinsey. According to Bowers, the crates arrived filled almost exclusively with pictures of Arab men with young boys.

When Farouk’s empire fell, looters scavenged his porn collection. Little pieces of it started showing up around the country, flooding a market with a whole new type of monarchy memorabilia.

4 King Adolf Frederick Ate Himself To Death

Swedish King Adolf Frederick had a habit of eating a dessert called semla, which is a sweet roll filled with cream. This, in itself, is not disgusting, but he ate so many that it killed him.

In 1771, the Swedish king sat down to a meal of lobster, caviar, and every other decadent food you can think of. When the meal was done, he wolfed his way through 14 semlas in a single sitting.

When he managed to stand up, his stomach, unsurprisingly, was bothering him, and he died shortly after. He went down in history as the king who ate himself to death—which wasn’t totally fair. King Henry I of England had already died from eating too many lamprey eels, apparently unable to get enough of the slimy taste.

3 King James I Only Cleaned The Tips Of His Fingers

According to a less than flattering description from Sir Anthony Weldon, King James I wasn’t the most hygienic person. Legend has it that King James never bathed, and according to Weldon, James needed to.

“His tongue,” Weldon wrote, was “too large for his mouth.” Whenever James drank, the liquid would dribble down the side of the king’s chin. James wouldn’t do much about it. “He never washed his hands,” Weldon claimed, “only rubbed his fingers’ ends slightly through the wet end of a napkin.”

This was apparently the only type of hygiene the king ever practiced. It might have been out of necessity. King James made regular use of his fingers. According to Weldon, they were “ever in that walk fiddling about his codpiece.”

2 Charles VI Didn’t Change His Clothes For Five Months

King Charles VI of France was horribly mentally ill. He would break into fits where he would run wildly through his home. On other days, he became convinced that he was made of glass and would not move a single muscle. The worst bout lasted for five long months—during which he did not bathe or change his clothes even once.

For nearly half a year, the king just stayed very still and carefully tried to avoid bumping into anybody. Then, at last, he had a brief moment of lucidity that lasted long enough for someone to change him and to clean what must have been the most disgusting pair of pants in history.

1 Louis XIV’s Throne Doubled As A Toilet

Of all the people in history, French King Louis XIV must have been the smelliest. His throne doubled as a toilet, and he would use it while conducting court sessions.

One would expect the court to notice the smell. But when Louis XIV was in the room, there were enough smells going around already to block it out. The man only bathed three times in his entire life, which was on the low side even by 17th-century standards.

The king made up for the stench by filling his rooms with flowers and dousing himself in perfume. In fact, he had a team design him a new perfume every week.

He would also change his shirt three times a day, which he firmly believed was all one really needed to do to stay clean. Like the toilet, his wardrobe changes were never affairs to be done behind closed doors. Every morning, the king of France called 100 men into his room to watch him while he got dressed.

As far as we know, every animal must rest at some point. We didn’t used to think so. Some animals, like the dolphin or bullfrog, simply have sleep habits that look an awful lot like not sleeping to the human eye.

But even those that don’t sleep at all still rest. Most insects enter into a state called torpor, which significantly reduces their awareness. Even bacteria have been shown to follow a circadian rhythm, cycling through different levels of activity based on changes in the light.

Sleep is still somewhat mysterious to us. We know that it is somehow linked to memory and we die when we miss enough of it. That covers a lot of what we know about our own sleep.

We know even less about what sleep does for each member of the animal kingdom. We do know that the need for sleep tends to exist in a delicate balancing act with the need to not become some other creature’s midnight snack. Sometimes, that means that animals develop bizarre sleep habits that we find hard to imagine copying.

10 Apes Sleep Like We Do

Every species of great ape sleeps in some kind of bed, whether those are the platforms that wild apes build in trees or the plush mattresses that humans nestle into in the comfort and safety of our own homes.

Lesser apes and monkeys don’t do this, opting instead to sleep sitting on a tree branch while they wobble and sway and occasionally waking up to check for predators. This difference is thought to have been instrumental in the evolution of great apes and, eventually, humans.

As great apes grew bigger, it became harder for them to find branches that could easily and comfortably support them. When the first great ape built a platform to sleep on sometime between 23 to 5 million years ago, the benefits of doing so became apparent.

Those who slept on platforms could shelter higher and were a bit more hidden from predators. At the same time, they were able to rest out of the range of mosquitoes. But the best advantage was that great apes could now get restorative deep sleep which helped enable the improved cognitive functions needed to grow bigger and better brains.^[1]

9 Elephants And Giraffes Sleep Standing Up

As large prey animals, elephants and giraffes are the opposite of great apes when it comes to sleep. They cannot hide away to rest and need to be ready to run at any moment. So they have naturally evolved to sleep standing up.^[2]

Sometimes referred to as a “stay apparatus,” these animals have a knee that locks in place so that they don’t have to rely on their muscles to stay standing in sleep. They share this mechanism with horses, cows, and even birds.

These animals still have to lie down sometimes, though. While standing, they cannot enter into REM sleep. Even though these two creatures require very little REM sleep, they still need it.

An elephant needs REM sleep about once every three to four days and only for about 30 minutes at a time. If they stay on the ground any longer than that, their internal organs may give out under the pressure of their immense weight.

A giraffe sleeps about 30 minutes a day. They tend to get this sleep in very short bursts, usually no longer than five minutes at a time.

8 Dolphins Sleep With One Eye Open

As well as other cetaceans, the dolphin is another creature that can’t exactly lie down to sleep. Most marine mammals have to be on the lookout for predators, but they also have to contend with the fact that they need to consciously breathe oxygen to live.

Unlike humans, dolphins breathe voluntarily and can’t become unconscious without the risk of drowning. Finally, dolphins are warm-blooded mammals living in the cool waters of the ocean. They need to keep moving to keep up their body temperature. When an animal has to keep moving, there’s only one logical thing to do: Just sleep one-half of the brain at a time. Easy.

Unihemispheric slow-wave sleep allows dolphins to get the sort of restorative sleep needed by intelligent animals, but it isn’t just for cetaceans. Many species of birds, especially migratory ones, also engage in unihemispheric sleep.

Unlike migratory birds, dolphins don’t tend to cover large distances while half asleep. Many dolphins manage to hang near the surface or swim slowly, but all generally close one eye to sleep. Probably because of this habit, some have been observed sleeping while swimming in circles.^[3]

7 Newborn Orcas Can’t Sleep

Orcas and other cetaceans don’t sleep for the first month after birth. Usually, adult orcas will sleep about 5–8 hours a day, but neither the mother nor her calf can sleep until 3–4 weeks after birth.

The mortality rate is extremely high for calves, so at least part of this is likely to keep predators away. Not many creatures are willing to contend with a mother orca defending her calf. However, there are a few more reasons that orca calves can’t sleep.^[4]

The calf doesn’t have the muscle strength to keep up with the pod, and it doesn’t have the necessary blubber to stay warm and afloat. To stay alive, the calf needs to stay in its mother’s slipstream where it will be pulled along without getting separated.

As the adult orca must keep moving to generate that slipstream, she can’t sleep, either. Researchers also believe that orca mothers forgo the unihemispheric sleep that cetaceans rely on, too, as none have been observed to swim with an eye closed.

6 Ducks Sleep All In A Row

Unlike orcas, ducks aren’t keen to miss any of their beauty sleep. There’s a reason that to “get one’s ducks in a row” means to have one’s affairs and priorities in order. It turns out that ducks are pretty smart when it comes to catching a few z’s. They can engage in unihemispheric sleep, but they do so using an interesting strategy that wards off any predator looking for a fatty duck dinner.^[5]

Ducks often sleep in a row where the ducks on either side sleep with the outward-facing eye open and one hemisphere of the brain alert. The ducks in the middle get to sleep both hemispheres while secure because of the lookout ducks, and the lookouts get to rest up a little at a time.

All the ducks benefit by getting some sleep without also getting eaten. We’re just hoping that they trade off for lookout duty sometimes.

5 Migratory Birds Power Nap

Scientists have theorized in the past that migratory birds sleep in midair because the only other explanation is that the birds simply do not sleep for weeks or months at a time. Recently, though, Niels Rattenborg from the Max Planck Institute and colleagues from other institutions have studied the sleep habits of frigatebirds. These creatures sleep about 12 hours a day when nesting on land but often spend weeks soaring over the ocean in search of food.

Their study found that the frigatebirds are indeed able to sleep in midair with one or both hemispheres of the brain and can enter into REM sleep without dropping. The birds can do this because they only sleep for a few minutes at a time and only for a few seconds when getting REM sleep. The birds also used their ability to sleep one hemisphere at a time to ensure that they didn’t knock into other birds while ascending and descending.^[6]

4 Reptiles Might Dream

Until recently, the general consensus was that only mammals and birds experienced REM sleep. This is the kind of sleep thought to consolidate memories and the sleep that many creatures risk death to achieve daily. Reptiles, amphibians, insects, and amoebae were excluded from the dreamers.

This was puzzling from an evolutionary standpoint as birds are far more closely related to reptiles than to us. But, with the evidence available at the time, scientists just had to shrug and assume that birds and mammals spontaneously evolved to dream around the same time.

New research from Gilles Laurent from the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt, Germany, had surprising results that may force us to revise that assumption. When researchers hooked bearded dragons up to an electroencephalogram (EEG), they noticed some very familiar sleep cycles.

The dragons studied went through about 350 80-second cycles per night that seemed simple in comparison to the four or five 90-minute ones that humans experience. Scientists now theorize that mammals, birds, and reptiles share a common ancestor that developed cyclical sleep about 300 million years ago.^[7]

But what do reptiles dream about? Laurent said, “If I were an Australian dragon living in Frankfurt, I’d be dreaming of a warm day in the sun.”

3 Fish Aren’t Afraid Of The Dark

Emmanuel Mignot at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, and his colleagues performed sleep studies using zebrafish with the hope that they would see whether the fish could suffer from insomnia or sleep deprivation. They found that the fish followed a simple circadian rhythm.

When lights are on, the fish don’t sleep at all. When they’re off, the creatures will nap if there is a sleep debt to pay up. For the fish, it’s far simpler than for mammals. Light triggers the release of a hormone that overrides the need for sleep until nighttime rolls around again. Lucky fish.

This isn’t the case for one particular species of fish, though. The eyeless Mexican cave fish experiences no circadian rhythm whatsoever. Damian Moran of the private company Plant and Food Research studied the eyeless Mexican tetra as well as its surface-dwelling counterpart by putting them both into fish treadmills where they could swim against a current constantly. The surface tetras used more energy under lights than in the dark, while the eyeless tetras didn’t change at all.

It makes sense that a creature that lives in total darkness and is eyeless doesn’t give a flying flip about light cycles, but the most interesting finding was what this meant for their energy use overall. Using less energy at night didn’t leave the surface tetras better off. Instead, they used 27 percent more energy than their eyeless cousins. This energy was spent revving up their metabolisms to expend more daytime energy and slowing it back down at night.^[8]

2 Parrotfish Sleep In A Bubble

Parrotfish are already gunning for a top spot on the world’s strangest animal list considering that they crunch on coral reef and change their color and sex fairly often. But this fish isn’t stopping when it comes to sleeping.

When the parrotfish settles in for a good night’s rest, it activates special glands in the gills to secrete a mucus bubble around itself. Scientists have long debated why the parrotfish does this, postulating that it may lower the chances of being eaten by eels or act as a kind of fishy sunscreen.

Alexandra Grutter from the University of Queensland is one scientist who thinks she knows why parrotfish sleep in a jelly cocoon. Fish who hang around the reef at night are vulnerable to tiny bloodsucking crustaceans called gnathiid isopods. During the day, cleaner fish nip these little ocean mosquitoes before they can latch on. At night, however, even cleaner fish have to sleep.

Grutter tested this theory by removing some sleeping parrotfish from their cocoons and leaving them vulnerable to gnathiids. The exposed fish were attacked mercilessly while the cocooned ones were largely ignored.^[9]

1 Walruses Snooze By The Skin Of Their Teeth

A walrus can forgo sleep for up to 84 hours at a time. While plenty of animals go without much sleep for a long time, only walruses do so regularly and without any notable signs of sleepiness. This finding may force sleep researchers to reevaluate ideas of how much sleep a mammal needs. On land, a walrus can sleep deeply for up to 19 hours at a time, possibly to make up for their sleep debt.^[10]

When not avoiding sleep like a college student cramming for finals, the walrus still acts much like a college kid by sleeping just about anywhere with no problem. When in water, walruses will sleep floating on the surface, lying at the bottom, or standing and leaning. These sleeps are short because a walrus needs to come up for air from time to time.

However, some enterprising walruses have figured out how to have the best of both worlds. They dig their massive tusks into an ice floe and drift off to sleep. Their head stays above water while the rest of their body is submerged, which must be super comfortable for an animal that’s never heard of brain freeze.

Renee Chandler is an Atlanta-based graphic designer and writer. She is currently coauthoring a project that you can preview and support at www.patreon.com/pterohog.

Humanity has always had an intimate relationship with food. So it should come as no surprise that some of the most notable, influential figures throughout history have often had bizarre notions of how and what to eat.

10 Zuckerberg Only Eats What He Kills

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is famous for taking on yearlong challenges of self-improvement, such as wearing a tie every day in 2009 and studying Chinese every day in 2010. It came as a bit of a shock, though, when he announced in 2011 that “the only meat I’m eating is from animals I’ve killed myself.” After announcing the decision on his private page, he posted, “I just killed a pig and a goat,” which prompted various reactions from his followers.

According to an email that Zuckerberg sent to Fortune magazine, “I started thinking about this last year when I had a pig roast at my house. A bunch of people told me that even though they loved eating pork, they really didn’t want to think about the fact that the pig used to be alive. That just seemed irresponsible to me. I don’t have an issue with anything people choose to eat, but I do think they should take responsibility and be thankful for what they eat rather than trying to ignore where it came from.”

His instructor was Silicon Valley chef Jesse Cool, who introduced Zuckerberg to local farmers and advised him on the slaughters of his first chicken, pig, and goat.”He cut the throat of the goat with a knife, which is the most kind way to do it,” said Cool to Fortune. Zuckerberg’s first kill, however, was a lobster that he boiled alive. Initially, this was emotionally difficult for Zuckerberg, but he said he felt better after eating it. As he told Fortune in an interview, “The most interesting thing was how special it felt to eat it after having not eaten any seafood or meat in a while.”

9 Beethoven’s Soup

Ludwig van Beethoven is known for many things, but few know just how seriously he took his soup. According to the famous composer, only a housekeeper or cook with a pure heart could prepare a pure soup. Beethoven brooked no opposition, particular not from his long-suffering secretary Anton Schindler. If Beethoven thought a soup was bad and Schindler disagreed, Beethoven would send him an insulting note: “I do not value your judgment on the soup in the least, it is bad.”

One of Beethoven’s favorite dishes was a mushy bread soup, which he consumed every Thursday with 10 large eggs to be stirred into the soup. He inspected the eggs by holding them to the light and then cracking them open with his hand. Woe to the housekeeper if they weren’t all entirely fresh. Beethoven would call her in for a scolding. She only half-listened because she had to be ready to flee, as it was Beethoven’s custom to pelt her with the eggs as a punishment.

According to Ignaz von Seyfried, an opera conductor during Beethoven’s time: “[Beethoven’s housekeeper] held herself in readiness to beat a quick retreat before, as was customary, the cannonade was about to begin, and the decapitate batteries would begin to play upon her back and pour out their yellow-white, sticky intestines over her in veritable lava streams.”

8 Gerald Ford’s Strange Lunch

It is a commonly cited piece of trivia that President Richard Nixon ate a daily lunch of cottage cheese covered in ketchup. After he was elected president, an article in the Washingtonian quipped that elegant White House dinners had been replaced by cottage cheese and ketchup. He even had cottage cheese with pineapple slices for lunch on the day that he announced his resignation from the presidency.

Less commonly known is that President Gerald Ford was also an aficionado of the bizarre but strangely appealing lunch menu item, which he consumed every day while reading or working. An Air Force One staffer revealed in the book Inside the White House:

President Ford had A-1 sauce and ketchup, mostly A-1 sauce, with the cottage cheese. We always had a vegetable garnish with spring onions, celery sticks, radishes. We always served ketchup and A-1 sauce with it. In most cases, he used A-1 sauced mixed in. [ . . . ] When we were going to land, he used mouthwash because of the onions.

Ford also liked a drink, although he could usually handle his alcohol. He once got drunk on martinis on Air Force One while returning from a meeting with the Soviet premier. That same staffer said, “We put him to bed. In the middle of the flight, he came out in his underwear and said ‘Where is the head?’ Normally, he knew where the head is. He could walk. He was slurring words. It was the one time he overindulged and was tipsy.”

7 Nicolas Cage’s Diet Of Dignified Animals

Nicolas Cage is known for a storied career of both great and terrible performances. There are certainly enough strange things to say about him, but his diet may top them all. He only consumes animals that he judges as mating in a “dignified way.”

Explaining the reason for his choice to The Sun, Cage said, “I have a fascination with fish, birds, whales—sentient life—insects, reptiles. I actually choose the way I eat according to the way animals have sex. I think fish are very dignified with sex. So are birds. But pigs, not so much. So I don’t eat pig meat or things like that. I eat fish and fowl.”

He may not eat those salacious swine, but he has consumed strange things in the name of art. The 1988 movie Vampire’s Kiss called for Cage to eat a live cockroach, which he did with some difficulty. “Every muscle in my body didn’t want to do it,” said Cage to The Telegraph. “But I did it anyway.”

6 Henry Ford’s Weeds

Henry Ford was a picky eater who usually had nuts or raisins in his pocket. In his youth, he was largely uninterested in food and mostly moved it around on his plate to give the appearance of eating it. This changed when he started to perceive his body as a machine and his stomach as a boiler that he needed to give the right fuel.

The act of eating was more practical than sensual, and Ford experimented with wild weeds as a source of nutrition. His dietary experiments caused misery to his business associates, although they were better received by his friend George Washington Carver, who was of a like mind on that sort of thing.

Even though Ford received a salary of almost $1 million a year, he preferred a diet of “roadside greens,” which were essentially edible weeds that Ford gathered from his garden or outside. According to biographer Sidney Olson: “There is nothing quite like a dish of stewed burdock, followed by a sandwich of soybean bread filled with milkweeds, to set up a man for an afternoon’s work.”

The weeds that Ford collected were often lightly boiled or stewed and then used in salads or sandwiches. However, the diet seemed to pay off because Henry Ford was rarely sick and lived to the ripe old age of 83.

5 Evo Morales’s Gay Chicken

Bolivian President Evo Morales caused controversy in 2001 when he claimed that eating hormone-injected chicken was a root cause of homosexuality. At the World People’s Summit on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth in Cochabamba, he shocked the socially progressive audience with his views. “When we talk about chicken, it’s pumped full of female hormones,” he said, “and so when men eat this chicken, they stray from being men.”

He also linked the consumption of fowl with male baldness. Within a few hours, the impact of his comments had spread to the international media.

Morales’s government quickly went into spin doctor mode, insisting that the president had been referring only to genital abnormalities. In a public statement, the Foreign Relations Ministry explained, “[Morales] made no mention of sexuality. Rather, he said that eating chicken that has hormones changes our own bodies. This point of view has been confirmed by scientists, and even the European Union has prohibited the use of some hormones in food.”

Many gay rights activists were unconvinced. The president of the Argentina Homosexual Community, Cesar Cigliutti, said, “It’s an absurdity to think that eating hormone-containing chicken can change the sexual orientation of a person. By following that reasoning, if we put male hormones in a chicken and we make a homosexual eat it he will transform into a heterosexual.”

In a different vein, Morales also took shots at Coca-Cola. “If the plumber comes to your house and can’t get the job done with all his tools,” said Morales, “have him pour Coca-Cola down the clogged toilet, and problem solved.” This was received more favorably as many in Bolivia believe that the US soda company exploits Bolivia’s coca supplies. Also, a local company had just launched a rival drink called “Coca-Colla,” with “Colla” being a reference to the native Andean highland people.

Morales has a long-standing antipathy toward unhealthy American food, complaining at the UN in 2013 that “the fast food of the West is a great harm to humanity.” He accused fast food companies of causing cancer and conspiring to suppress the rise of quinoa as a healthy alternative source of nutrition.

4 Howard Hughes’s Food Fetishes

Movie mogul, industrialist, and businessman Howard Hughes suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder, which was reflected in his eating habits. He gave a number of bizarre food preparation and serving orders to his servants, including wrapping spoon handles in tissue paper. They were then sealed with cellophane and wrapped in a second piece of tissue paper. He would only touch the covered handles because he was obsessively afraid of germs.

His servants had to open cans of food in a specific way, too. First, the servant would hold the can under warm running water. Then he or she used a brush and special bars of soap to remove the label 5 centimeters (2 in) from the top of the can. Next, the can was soaked to remove any dust and germs. Then the bottom was cleaned in the same manner as the top. All the indentations of the can also had to be scrubbed with soap and rinsed. Throughout the process, the servant was not permitted to let go of the can.

Hughes suffered constipation because he refused to eat leafy vegetables. His meals were very uniform, and he enjoyed a regimented menu that he changed every few months. He usually ate a medium-rare butterfly steak with 12 peas of uniform size. If any of the peas were too large, Hughes would send them back to the kitchen to be replaced. He ate almost every meal alone. According to his chef, Hughes didn’t even eat Thanksgiving or Christmas dinners with his wife.

But Hughes liked fudge. When he became reclusive in his later years, he virtually subsisted on chocolate bars and milk. He isolated himself in a studio near his home, surrounded by empty milk bottles and containers which he used to relieve himself when nature called. This reclusive lifestyle took a toll on his health. When he finally died, people compared the state of his body to that of a Japanese prisoner of war.

3 Hitler’s Flatulent Vegetarianism

Many meat lovers enjoy telling their vegetarian friends that Adolf Hitler was a vegetarian, and vegetarians often vehemently disagree. The truth is more nuanced. Until the early 1930s, Hitler showed a penchant for certain meat products, particularly liver dumplings and sausages. He is said to have subscribed to Wagner’s theory that “[the] thirst [for flesh and blood] . . . can never be slaked, and fills its victims with a raging madness, not with courage.”

Yet he did not completely turn against the consumption of meat until his niece and possible lover Geli Raubal committed suicide in 1931. After that, he refused to eat breakfast ham. “It is like eating a corpse!” he said.

Hitler also turned away from meat because he believed it caused chronic constipation and flatulence. He ate his vegetables raw or pulped into a mush. Some of his favorite foods were oatmeal with linseed oil, cauliflower, cottage cheese, boiled apples, artichoke hearts, and asparagus tips in white sauce.

The high-fiber diet had precisely the opposite effect on his bowel drama. After Hitler consumed a particularly large plate of vegetables, his physician, Theo Morell, recorded in his diary that Hitler experienced “constipation and colossal flatulence . . . on a scale I have seldom encountered before.”

Of course, this is not only the fault of his vegetarian diet but also the ridiculous regimen of drugs and treatments administered by his doctor, which included chamomile enemas and a heavy dose of supplements. Some of those supplements were vitamins, testosterone, liver extracts, laxatives, sedatives, glucose, opiates, and poisonous strychnine tablets for gas.

The argument over Hitler’s vegetarianism is a bit of a red herring. He did occasionally indulge in animal products, but so do 70 percent of vegetarians. Even so, Hitler’s decision to become a vegetarian in no way refutes the moral arguments that vegetarians hold against meat eating.

2 Mussolini’s Milk Addiction

Benito Mussolini also had digestive problems and weird eating habits, such as refusing to eat anything at banquets. He believed that eating was an activity to which one should devote one’s complete attention and that eating in the presence of others would make one “apt to eat wrongly.”

In 1925, he vomited blood while at his house in Rome and was forced to take several weeks off from public appearances. Rumors circulated that Mussolini might have to be replaced as the National Fascist Party leader. Doctors diagnosed him with a stomach ulcer and recommended a drastic change in diet after he refused to have surgery. His new diet was mainly composed of fruit and up to 3 liters (1 gal) of milk every day. This apparently didn’t help him because he suffered another ulcer in 1929.

After the Allies invaded Italy and the Fascists retreated to a German satellite state called the Salo Republic, Mussolini sought the assistance of a physician named Dr. Zachariae. Shocked by his patient’s appearance, the doctor said, “I found myself before a ruin of a man who was evidently on the brink of the tomb.” Mussolini suffered from ulcers, anemia, constipation, insomnia, and low blood pressure. His skin was dry and inelastic, and his abdominal area around his liver was engorged.

Zachariae blamed Mussolini’s ridiculous milk diet and cut his milk intake to 0.25 liters (0.5 pt) each day for a week. Then he went cold turkey. The doctor began to treat Mussolini with small doses of vitamins and hormones, which had an immediate positive effect. After his liver returned to its normal size, Mussolini remarked, “I must tell you I feel liberated. I no longer feel pains in my stomach, and I don’t fear the night.”

The doctor insisted that Mussolini eat some light vegetables like carrots and potatoes, which he had once been unable to stomach, and to take his tea without milk. Although Mussolini preferred vegetarianism, the doctor insisted that his patient eat small amounts of boiled chicken and fish to increase his protein intake. Along with injections of vitamins B and C, the new diet caused his red blood cell count to rise and his health to improve. Despite Mussolini occasionally refusing to take food while the Italian people were starving, Zachariae later boasted that he had restored Mussolini to the health of a man of 40.

1 Kim Jong Il’s Gastronomy

Due to the testimony of Kim Jong Il’s former personal chef, Kenji Fujimoto, we know quite a bit about the eating habits of the former North Korean tyrant. While much of the country was starving, Kim indulged in expensive and elaborate food and drink. He had a wine cellar with over 10,000 bottles and a library with thousands of cookbooks.

Kim was committed to getting the best food and often sent Fujimoto on foreign excursions to pick up delicacies: Iran and Uzbekistan for caviar, France for cognac, Denmark for pork, western China for grapes, Thailand for papayas and mangoes, and Beijing for McDonald’s fast food. Former North Korean diplomats also sent back exotic delicacies, such as camel’s feet, from the countries in which they were stationed.

Kim established an institute of top doctors and scientists to design a diet to increase his longevity. This was a source of concern, as the 158-centimeter (5’2″) dictator’s former eating habits had brought him to a weight of almost 90 kilograms (200 lb). The doctors began to inspect every grain of his rice by hand to make sure it was perfectly shaped with no cracks or chips. Kim insisted that the rice be cooked over a wood fire using trees cut from Mount Paektu, a legendary mountain on the border with China.

Fujimoto also revealed the dictator’s love of sushi. When Fujimoto sought to leave North Korea (after being banned from travel abroad), he did so with a cunning ruse. He showed the “Dear Leader” a new episode of the cooking show Iron Chef, in which the secret ingredient was sea urchin roe, or uni.

He casually mentioned that the best place to acquire the ingredient was from Rishiri Island off the coast of Hokkaido. Kim couldn’t resist sending the chef, who eluded his handlers at a fish market in Tokyo and disappeared into the crowd. Fujimoto didn’t return to North Korea until after Kim Jong Il’s death.

David Tormsen only eats shoe leather and chives. Email him at [email protected].

Some postcoital practices are far more dangerous than an after-sex cigarette. If you belong to an arthropod species where one partner frequently devours the other, making babies may be the last thing you ever do.

Some species of spiders, slugs, and insects regularly include a spot of cannibalism in their reproductive habits. It’s usually the males that draw the short straw when it comes to getting eaten while trying to pass on their genes. So strong is the urge to reproduce that the males of some species will even willingly sacrifice themselves for the cause.

10 Orb-Weaving Spiders

If you’re a male orb-weaving spider, your chances of surviving your first sexual encounter are poor. In fact, you have more than an 80 percent chance of being eaten by the female.

As this means that they probably have only one shot at passing on their genes, male orb-weaving spiders are fairly picky when it comes to choosing a mate. In many other species, females do the choosing.

However, like most other animals that practice sexual cannibalism, male orb weavers are more selective than the females when it comes to picking a sexual partner. They tend to go for plump, young females in the hope that they are the most fertile.^[1]

9 Redback Spiders

Male redback spiders willingly sacrifice themselves to pass on their genes, and there’s a high chance of death at every stage of their mating process. Male redbacks don’t spin their own webs. Instead, they often hang around the edge of a female’s web and make sexual overtures toward her to see if she’s ready to breed.

If she hasn’t already eaten him by this stage by having mistaken him for prey, the male then goes to extreme lengths to maintain her attention while they get down to business. He stands on his head and allows her to access his abdomen by “somersaulting” it toward her mouth.

This gives him time to insert his first palp (reproductive structure) while she is busy injecting digestive juices into his abdomen to liquefy his insides. If he still has the strength, he may be able to insert his second palp before succumbing. It is thought that this unusual way of reproducing is only exhibited in redback spiders.^[2]

That’s not the extent of the redback spider’s deadly tendencies. Although each egg sac contains around 300 eggs, the babies are so cannibalistic that very few will survive to adulthood.

8 Banana Slugs

The banana slug performs a postcoital ritual of self-cannibalism that would make any man’s eyes water. Like most types of slugs, these yellow mollusks are hermaphrodites. Although they are capable of fertilizing themselves, they usually choose to reproduce with a partner if potential mates are available. Banana slugs signal that they’re ready for copulation by releasing chemicals into their slime.^[3]

Once they’ve found a mate, banana slugs get in the mood by consuming each other’s slimy secretions. When they’ve finished exchanging sperm, they gnaw off their own penises to disengage from their partner.

7 Octopuses

Although sexual cannibalism is less common in octopuses than some other species on this list, the males still take a big risk whenever they copulate with a female. Despite being generally antagonistic and antisocial toward each other, octopuses have a surprisingly intimate way of making babies. To fertilize the female’s eggs, the male must insert one of its arms inside her body.

Female octopuses sometimes strangle their mates by wrapping their arms around the males’ bodies and squeezing. Then the female drags the body back to her den to consume it. This is most likely to happen in species with long arms, such as the coconut octopus.

To minimize the risk of becoming dinner, many long-armed species mate from as far away as possible by reaching their arm into the female’s body from a distance and actually keeping her at arm’s length. Some males even do this from outside the female’s den.^[4]

6 Anacondas

Female anacondas occasionally cannibalize their partners by strangling them. They have size on their side—the females are nearly five times as large as the males.

It seems that males prefer to mate with large females, although scientists were flummoxed as to how they could gauge the size of a female given their bad eyesight. It’s thought that the pheromones that attract males to a female contain information about her physical appearance.

It makes good sense for a female anaconda to eat her mate. Once she’s pregnant, she won’t eat again for the seven months of her gestation. So, getting a last-minute meal in beforehand is a good tactic to keep her going through a long pregnancy.^[5]

5 Sagebrush Crickets

To avoid being completely devoured by females during mating, male sagebrush crickets offer a gift of a particularly gruesome kind. While they mate, the female feasts on the male’s back wings and drinks the juices that ooze out. Only a part of the wings is eaten during copulation, so the male may be able to mate again.

However, males that have already mated aren’t usually as attractive to females because their partially eaten wings offer a less filling meal. This means that virgin males are the first choice for a female sagebrush cricket looking for a sexual partner.^[6]

4 Jumping Spider

Male jumping spiders aren’t at all picky when it comes to finding a mate. In fact, they will attempt to seduce any female they encounter with a special mating dance, even if she’s a totally different species. It’s thought that this happens because they can’t distinguish between types of spider. Scientists have even observed male jumping spiders attempting to woo dead females.

As they’re much smaller than the females they’re trying to win over, male jumping spiders are very vulnerable to being eaten by their mates. Females generally try to eat their suitors after mating, although they don’t always succeed. The male may not fare any better if he accidentally sets his sight on one of the many other species that devour males after sex.^[7]

3 Black Widow

A commonly believed myth says that black widow mating always ends with the female cannibalizing the male. However, many different species fall under the black widow umbrella. Of these, most do not partake in sexual cannibalism in the wild, although it has been observed in captivity.

Of the black widow species in the United States, only one exhibits cannibalistic behavior after mating. Latrodectus mactans females, often known as the southern black widow, do sometimes polish off their partners following copulation, but the vast majority survive to mate again.^[8]

2 Horned Nudibranch

Nudibranchs are part of the sea slug family. They have jelloid bodies and get their colorful hues from the prey they eat. Despite having no teeth, they are fierce predators. They feed by shooting out a proboscis-like structure to swallow their prey whole and will happily eat their own kind if necessary.^[9]

Nudibranchs are hermaphrodites, and during mating, both partners usually receive sperm to fertilize their eggs. For horned nudibranchs, this can end in one animal cannibalizing the other.

1 Praying Mantis

Of all the species that cannibalize their mates, the praying mantis is probably the best known. Females sometimes consume the head or other body parts of their partners when they copulate. However, this only happens during 13–28 percent of mating sessions and is more likely if the female is especially irritated or hungry.

However, there may be an unexpected benefit to males if their partners do feel a bit peckish during mating. A study in 2016 discovered that female Chinese mantises who ate their mates went on to lay more eggs, increasing the male’s chances of passing on his genes to more offspring.^[10]

Who of us didn’t grow up being told ‘Don’t chew your nails’ or ‘Stop picking your nose’? Though children may not realize it, the fact is, the human body is fairly nasty and it’s normally a good idea to try to mask our grotesque bodily habits for the good of our social image. Most of us usually grow up and out of our grosser habits by the time we’re adults or at least only indulge in secret. Usually.

But there’s a weird fascination over the disgusting and for some few there’s also fame and fortune to be found behind the stigma. These are ten examples of ways an income has been found from gross habits.

Top 10 Most Bizarre Modern Jobs

10 Pooping for Profit and Purpose

There’s a particularly nasty bacteria called C. Difficile that infects nearly half a million people in the United States alone. The symptoms include watery diarrhea and cramping, which can even reach fatal severity. To counteract this dangerous infection, a course of antibiotics is usually prescribed, but antibiotics do not discriminate between harmful and helpful bacteria. During the course of treatment some 2,000 different kinds of stomach bacteria, most very helpful, are also killed. Worse yet, C. Difficile can be difficult to permanently destroy and the tenacious invader will sometimes repopulate even after a course of antibiotics,^[1] but there is a solution.

Fecal matter transplants. These transplants are the result of taking the rich gut biome from a healthy human stool sample and distilling it into a pill to be taken by someone suffering from C. Difficile. This replenishes the population of helpful bacteria as well as assisting in the elimination of C. Difficile from the body, but not just any poop can be used for a fecal matter transplant. Out of a thousand prospective donors only 4 perfect of them qualify after rigorous medical testing. Extremely healthy poop is a rare commodity, one worth paying for. Donors can make $250 for five samples a week or $13,000 a year as compensation.^[2]

But it isn’t just about the money.

“We get most of our donors to come in three or four times a week, which is pretty awesome,” said Mark Smith, co-founder of a fecal matter transplant company, “You’re usually helping three or four patients out with each sample, and we keep track of that and let you know.”

9 Fast Food and Weight Gain For Science

In 2012 researchers from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis made an unusual offer: gain weight and get paid. Their research into weight related diabetes and hypertension hinged on being able to observe the weight gain in progress. Participants who answered the call to action were asked to consume an extra 1,000 calories of fast food every day in order to put on the pounds. Since the goal was to understand why some people develop these adverse health conditions it meant that the participants who gained this weight would likely be putting themselves in increased danger of worsening their health. This meant hazard pay.

For meeting the goal of increasing their weight by 5 to 6 percent over the course of 3 months the participants were given up to $3,500. Though it may sound like an easy task, the men and women who joined this project didn’t find it enjoyable for long.

Dr. Samuel Klein, the lead researcher on the project said, “This is not pleasant for them, It’s not easy to stuff your face every day for a long period of time.”

And one of his participants agreed, she said after two weeks, “I could hardly breathe anymore.”^[3]

8 Artsy-Fartsy Fame and Fortune

In the late 19th century a boy named Joseph Pujol discovered he had an odd talent while swimming on a trip with his family. During his swim he had an strange cold sensation inside his gut. Panicked, he went ashore to a private place and watched as liters of water evacuated from his rump. His doctor was unworried and so Pujol didn’t think of it again until years later when encouraged by his friends to repeat the feat. It was then he discovered that this wasn’t a one off event. He had the unusual ability to inhale liquid or air into his rear end and release it on command. From that moment on he began to nurture his newfound talent.

Eventually he put his skills on display as a performer, under the name Le Petomane and began putting on shows. He dazzled his audience with an array of different farts, each one described for the benefit of his fans. A small quiet fart he would liken to a bride on her wedding night and then a messy loud slop of a fart was the same woman two weeks later. A prolonged ten second fart was likened to a dressmaker ripping a cloth in two and he even emulated the blast of a canon with a loud burst from his butt.

“People were literally writhing about,” A journalist described the reaction to his performance. “Women, stuffed in their corsets, were being carried out by nurses which the cunning manager had stationed in the hall.”^[4]

Later in his act he used his talent to smoke two cigarettes at once. In the rousing finish to the show he would play famous tunes on an ocarina using a hose that channeled his farts into wind for the instrument. Le Petomane became an amazing success and at one point was the highest paid performer in all of France. He stayed in show business until after World War I when he retired from the stage to continue life as a baker. He died at the ripe old age of 88.

After his death a medical school in Paris asked to examine his remains to help better understand how his anus performed the miracles it did. His family declined by saying, “there are some things in this life which simply must be treated with reverence.”^[5]

7 Overeating To Success

Everyone loves food, but sometimes we’ll enjoy it a little too much. When our eyes are bigger than our stomach our over consumption can cause an upset stomach, spikes in blood pressure, and lethargy,^[6] not to mention regretting whatever decisions took us to that moment.

But some people take that feeling and conquer it. One such man is Joey Chestnut, who is one of the most successful competitive eaters in the world. He has held records and won competitions the world over, including the feats of eating 32 double patty hamburgers in 38 minutes, eating 74 hotdogs in 10 minutes, and 413 chicken wings in 12 hours.^[7]

His skills at overeating aren’t for nothing. In 2010 Mr. Chestnut earned $218,500 for his eating prowess.^[8] Though he admits that it isn’t always easy. After setting a new world record for hotdog eating in 2018 he said about his body afterward, “It’s not pretty, bro. There have been some double-flushers.”^[9]

6 Burping For Cash

Belching is a sport. The current record for length of a burp stands at 1 minute, 13 seconds, and 57 millisecond. This colossally long belch has gone unchallenged since 2009.^[10] A glorious sport it is, but not really one that pays. To make any money in this competitive field requires being in the right place at the right time. For some fortunate few woman the right place was St. Louis and the right time was in 2014. The call went out for actors to star in a soda company’s new commercial and the skill they needed above all else: burping.^[11]

An ad went up on Craiglist offering to pay $750 for each actor as well as drinks and snacks provided on the day of filming to help coax out the necessary belches.

“Burps of any size are welcome, from small, quiet burps to monstrously loud belches,” The ad read. Thankfully no previous acting experience was required.^[12]

10 Truly Disgusting Facts About Ancient Roman Life

5 Professionally Popping Pimples

The standard recommendation for pimples is to resist the urge to pop them ourselves, but rather to find an over the counter solution and failing that, to visit a doctor for help. They are after all trained and can perform any required popping in a sterile environment.^[13] Most of us ignore this advice. Despite the risks of scarring or infection, popping our zits is a satisfying, if disgusting experience. Unlike most items on this list though, being employed to perform this task isn’t a limited opportunity career. There are tens of thousands of people being paid to do this disgusting deed. They are skin specialist doctors called dermatologists.^[14]

Not only is this a lucrative career path on its own, paying on average $345,000 a year in the United States,^[15] some doctors take it a step further. Doctor Sandra Lee (aka: Dr. Pimple Popper) hosts a Youtube channel where she displays particularly difficult or fascinating dermatological cases. The channel has more than 6 million subscribers.^[16]

When describing why anyone would want to watch something so gross as the usual fare on her channel she said, “It’s part fascination, part can’t look away, not unlike watching a car accident. There’s also something satisfying in the resolution, like something is being removed that shouldn’t be there and now the skin has been cleansed of an impurity.”^[17]

4 Money in Exchange For Spit

When researchers are trying to make genetic discoveries, the classic approach would be to find people with the disease then look for differences between their DNA and the DNA of someone without the disease. This can be an intensive process to find, communicate with, and finally sample the subject’s DNA for the research. In other cases, some companies rely on huge collections of DNA, with associated data on the donors, to accurately trace the ancestry of a customer, but it can be difficult to maintain a library of DNA from all types of people the world over. People don’t usually line themselves up to give away DNA samples for free.

The answer to these troubles is used by such companies as Genos and DNASimple. These companies will pay you for your spit, or more precisely, the DNA contained within your spit and information about yourself. This data can be used to help match researchers with the right DNA donors easier. DNASimple pays a flat rate of $50 per sample and Genos offers to sequence your genome for around $500 and will then pay you $50—$200 if you’re DNA can be used for a scientific study. While not a livelihood, there is more and more money to be made from people’s spit. DNASimple secured a $200,000 start up loan from an investor in recent years and the industry is growing.^[18]

While some are frustrated with the idea of being paid to participate in research, Sharon Terry, CEO of the Genetic Alliance described the situation by saying, “Some people might think it’s bad to put any kind of commerce in health at all, but it’s already in there. We just don’t have any part of it, we patients. Everyone else makes a lot of money.”^[19]

Perhaps the time has come to finally sell a valuable commodity we didn’t know we had—our spit.

3 Bathroom Scouters Paid To Pee

We all need to use the bathroom, usually a few times a day, but sometimes desperately. When we’re in a new city or an unfamiliar part of town and the urge strikes, where do we go? Where’s the nearest bathroom? Will it be clean? Is there a bidet or toilet paper? Do they charge? There’s no time to answer these questions when we’re holding back the floodgates! And with no guidance there’s no telling what unholy gas station horror or side of the road bush we may be forced to use.

It turns out, knowing the location and quality of nearby bathrooms is a service worth paying for and there are apps that will indeed pay for that kind of information. One app called Toiletfinder paid $20 for some restroom reviews and $100/week for regular copy writers. Writers contribute anonymously so that their subject matter can’t be used against them by friends and family (what’s wrong with writing about pee?). Reviews are accompanied by a star rating from the reviewer and GPS location to help future bathroom goers to find the right place at the right time.^[20] Apps like this and other have hundreds of thousands of bathrooms logged and reviewed the world over.^[21]

2 Regurgitating A Living

No one. No one likes to vomit. The acid, the half digested food, the smell—Nothing about the experience is enjoyable and this disgusting bodily function is something most of us would do all in our power to avoid. What goes in should not come back out the same way, but for one man, regurgitating what he had swallowed was a novelty he discovered as a child when he needed to hide coins from other children. It turns out, no one looks for your money in your stomach. He soon found that he could easily bring back up just about anything.

This was a skill he put to good use in show business. Mr. Stevie Starr has used his ability to put on acts on television shows like America’s Got Talent and late night programs with Jay Leno and David Letterman as well as live tours. Among the objects he swallows are light bulbs, coins, thumbtacks, and billiard balls,^[22] but a performance of just swallowing and unswallowing would quickly grow redundant. Taking it to higher levels, he also swallows a cup of sugar, followed by a cup of water, then he’ll regurgitate the sugar—dry as a bone. He’ll also swallow ten numbered coins then ask the audience to choose the order they return, sometimes two at a time. What he swallows and regurgitates isn’t limited to the inanimate. In some performances he’ll consume two live fish at the start of the show and bring them back out, perfectly healthy, at the end.^[23]

Vomiting up the contents of our stomach is usually the worst way to spend an evening, but watching someone else do it is well worth the money Mr. Starr earns.

1 Professional Finger Licker Wanted

In polite company, licking our fingers after a meal is usually frowned upon, but for a company that has advertised “finger licking good chicken” for years the habit was a badge of honor. The restaurant chain Kentucky Friend Chicken has recently started a campaign to find the most highly qualified finger licker in the world to be the new face for their upcoming ad series. Their announcement on twitter asked, “Have you ever caught yourself licking your fingers and thought to yourself ‘I’d look decent doing that on a billboard?’”

This ongoing search is asking perspective professional finger lickers to submit a twitter with the hashtag #KFCFRYERME with an 280 character or less explanation of why their finger licking skills are worthy of the cause.^[24] Unlike so many items of this list, this one could still be about you.

In a follow up tweet to the announcement KFC added, “For the love of God; please keep it PG.”^[25]

Top 10 Disgusting Foods The Chinese Eat

Want to live forever? You’re in weird company. Here are 10 immortalists acting out their fear of death in very peculiar ways.

10. David Murdock

Ever since losing his third wife and two of their three sons, David Murdock, the billionaire former chairman of Dole, has been obsessed with extending human life. At 100 years old, he’s getting impatient. He regularly complains to scientists at the longevity-focused North Carolina Research Campus, which he paid $500 million to build, that progress is far too slow. But he fills the time telling relative youngsters they’re likely to die before he does. In 2006, for instance, he told the demolition contractor he hired to clear the site for the campus that “you’re probably going to die before this job’s done, because you’re so fat and unhealthy,” adding that his family would have to pay for a plus-size coffin. He’s even collecting blood from people living nearby—50,000 of them—to monitor their health over decades.

At the heart of Murdock’s efforts (and those of his hand-picked scientists) is a diet of fresh fruit and veg. A typical lunch might be a six-fruit smoothie, a green salad with nuts, a soup of more than eight vegetables and beans, and a tiny sliver of grilled fish with plenty of carrots, broccoli, and wholegrain rice. He avoids meat and dairy, as well as sugar, salt, and alcohol. He also limits his exposure to sunlight. He wants the vitamin D, but not the skin cancer. He once had precancerous growths removed from his face without anesthetics because he avoids pharmaceuticals too.

One recent interviewer (who Murdock told off for leaving a bit of their juice, telling them “You’ll go before me”) observed that he seemed a bit lost—and no amount of time or wellness would ever restore his contentment. Tellingly, although a churchgoing Christian, he doesn’t have much faith in Heaven. “People think God’s going to be standing at the gate ready to shake hands with everybody who’s coming through?” he asked his interviewer incredulously; death could just be a void.

9. David Sinclair

Geneticist and life extension researcher David Sinclair fasts for 16 hours a day and, when he does eat, limits his intake to 1,000 calories—and only plant-based foods. He doesn’t eat breakfast. According to him, three meals a day plus snacks “puts the body in a state of abundance, which turns off our longevity genes.” He started “working on” his age in his 30s by avoiding sugar and taking resveratrol but says it’s better to start fasting in your 20s—just not to the point of starvation. 16-18 hours a day is about right, he says: “a very late lunch or large dinner”.

Although Sinclair knows the importance of a good eight hours sleep each night, he only manages six. But he does have a bed that adjusts his body temperature in the night to ensure the deepest of sleeps: “it lowers your body temperature and then warms you back up toward the morning,” he says. It also monitors his heart rate.

One day, he hopes his company Tally Health—which provides personalized longevity tips—will “evolve into a personal assistant for wellness.” Specifically, Sinclair hopes to develop a device to tell us exactly what to order from the menu at restaurants, and whether to skip dessert. 

8. Dave Asprey

Bulletproof founder Dave Asprey was, as a hacker in his twenties, in pretty bad shape. He weighed 300 pounds and felt ill all the time. Even after losing loads of weight, though, he adds a knob of butter to his coffee. As far as he’s concerned, coffee is a superfood and butter makes it better. Aged almost 50, he hopes to live at least another century and a third.

Every day he gets up at 7, expresses gratitude to no-one in particular, makes coffee for his wife and kids, and swallows a “handful of supplements”—“like 40 or 50 pills”, down from 150. These include mitochondrial stimulators, peptides, and other anti-aging treatments, some of which he developed himself. He also takes probiotics and minerals, then drops his kids off at school. When he gets home, he spends 45 minutes on “some sort of biohacking”: red light therapy, neurofeedback, squats on a vibrating platform, or a resistance band workout with blood flow restriction. Then it’s off to work.

To help him keep his blood sugar stable, Asprey wears a continuous glucose monitor from a company he invests in.

7. Ray Kurzweil

Arch-transhumanist and AI nut Ray Kurzweil thinks humans will be immortal by 2029—or at least he did think that, in 2016; the trouble for hack futurists like Kurzweil is the future eventually catches up with them. In any case, immortality will be dependent on diet (he means money). Every day, Kurzweil supplements a healthy breakfast of dark, espresso-infused chocolate, vanilla soy milk, smoked fish, porridge, berries, and green tea with “thousands of dollars worth of diet pills”. As Business Insider points out, that’s roughly $1 million a year. It used to be more. In 2016, he was on 100 supplements a day—down from 250 a few years before.

Oddly, Kurzweil eats sugar. There’s plenty of it in his breakfast alone: 7 grams each in the soy milk and chocolate, not to mention the fructose in the berries. He also takes stevia—the safety of which is unknown. But playing fast and loose with his body like this may have something to do with his faith in a cyborg future. He’s among the experts affiliated with Dmitry Itskov’s 2045 Initiative. So, like others on this list, the 75-year-old only wants to keep himself alive to benefit from the next big innovation.

He seems to be well on his way. In 2015, aged 67 in Earth years, he claimed his “biological age” was more like late-40s.

6. Dmitry Itskov

Russian media billionaire Dmitry Itskov isn’t banking on biological immortality. His transhumanist 2045 Initiative, supported by Ray Kurzweil, seeks instead to transfer human souls to inorganic avatars. In 2013, he told the Huffington Post that he was “100 percent certain” that humans will become immortal by 2045; he said he learned from “an ancient text” that “whatever we intend to achieve, we will achieve.” With only 22 years left, however, he’s still not sure how to do it. 

His claims remain bold, though. He envisages, for instance, a cyberpunk future of robotic “body service shops” where post-human customers can choose bodies from a catalog—one better suited to life on Mars, say, or one that can fly over Earth. As for human pleasures like food, sex, and children, Itskov sees them as trivial; 80 years is enough for all that stuff, he argues: “Why don’t you start living for a greater purpose?” (like flying around Mars as a robot or, as he imagines his own future, “sitting somewhere up in the mountains, just meditating.”

So if traditional longevity is not a concern, how is he preparing for the future? Several hours a day of yoga, breathing exercises, and meditation, he says. The health of his “consciousness” (which, again, given his concept of it, he might as well call a ‘soul’) is paramount. Hence he avoids meat, not for his bodily health, but because the energy he gets from it makes him uncomfortable. He also avoids alcohol, because it stops him feeling the “real nature” of consciousness, and ice water because it lowers energy.

5. Jack Dorsey

Twitter founder Jack Dorsey’s approach to life extension largely centers on fasting. He eats one meal a day and nothing at weekends. This, he says, makes his days feel much longer—which is great for productivity. But some have criticised him for normalizing eating disorders. For some it’s an excuse to binge on junk, since when you’re fasting most of the time you don’t have to count calories or carbs. When Dorsey eats, though, he keeps it quite simple: fish, chicken, or steak with some vegetables. Still, if not done properly, it can lead to dehydration.

Dorsey’s also experimented with the paleo diet, meditating, and working standing up by infrared light. He seems to try every new biohack fad, hence the New York Times calling him “the Gwyneth Paltrow of Silicon Valley”. He swears by Himalayan salt and drinks a “salt juice” every morning—a mixture of water, lemon juice, and the faddish pink salt. In fact, he was so energized by the drink that he made it available to all his employees at Twitter. Unless you’re starving yourself, though, you don’t need to supplement sodium.

4. Marios Kyriazis

Marios Kyriazis is medical director at the British Longevity Society, as well as a private doctor with patients who want to de-age. His bizarre recommendations come from personal routine—reading the newspaper upside down and reflected in a mirror; writing with his non-dominant hand; listening to music he hates; and arguing the opposite of his actual opinions. 

Even more counter-intuitively, he tells his patients that stress is good. Although damaging to cells, little episodes of frantic activity (packing at the last minute for the airport, for instance) release more cell-repair proteins than are necessary to repair the damage. According to some, this process, called hormesis, leaves the repaired cells stronger than they were—lowering the risk of age-related health problems such as Alzheimer’s, arthritis, and heart disease. Not all stress is good, though. Prolonged, chronic stress is still a bad thing (for now at least). Other examples of the “short-term, mildly stimulating” beneficial stress Kyriazis is talking about include: shopping for a dinner party in a lunch break; redecorating a living room in a weekend; and learning to set the video recorder by reading the instruction manual. You know, things you’d like to spend eternity doing. 

Kyriazis basically admitted to The Times in 2005 that he’s using his patients as guinea pigs, that his advice isn’t based on clinical trials. So you might want to give it a miss, especially when it comes to another of his recommendations: sleep deprivation.

3. James Strole

Driven by the loss of his grandmother, James Strole’s evangelism for human immortality began at the age of 11. In his twenties he toured the US to speak out against death. Later he formed a cult called the Eternal Flame Foundation, or CBJ—with the J standing for James and the C and B standing for his fellow founders Charles and Bernie Brown. Preaching in 26 countries around the world and to a mailing list of 30,000, they each extracted a salary of almost $500,000 from people afraid of dying, plus $1.12 million in event revenue, fundraising, and sales. The success of the group broke down, ironically, when prominent members started dying.

But Strole still thinks he’s in with a chance. He avoids bread and dairy, shocks his 74-year-old immune system with dips in his pool when it’s cold, and takes up to 70 supplements a day—including one to “energize the mitochondria”. He also lays on an “electromagnetic mat”, which, according to him, “opens up the veins”. 

He doesn’t expect any of this to grant him immortality, though, not directly. He just wants to live until the next innovation—another 20 years or so—expecting that to grant him another 20 years to reach the innovation after that, and the next, and so on down the centuries.

2. Michael Nguyen

Former tailor to the rich and famous, Michael Nguyen recently founded Longevity House, “a curated environment” (whatever that means) and “private members’ club for Toronto’s burgeoning community of biohackers”. Lifetime membership costs $100,000 and grants those gullible enough to pay it access to all the latest fads—mostly tech, despite Nguyen’s stated commitment to “an ancestral grounding in nature”. There’s an AI exercise bike, electronic muscle-stimulation bodysuit, vibration plate, red light therapy room, and BioCharger—a controversial device that even Nguyen admits is placebo.

He’s not just in it for the cash, though; he’s a true believer himself. He eats one meal a day, takes supplements like metformin and rapamycin (which he falsely claims is “proven to reverse aging”), and uses the BioCharger daily. Although he’s in his 40s, he says his biological age is about 28.

Despite his total lack of medical training, he shrugs off his numerous critics—saying there’s always resistance “when you’re leading the charge” (which of course he isn’t). He also says he’s “operating outside the norms of society,” which, if he means this society, obsessed with money and youth, not to mention techno-solutions to manufactured problems, is also demonstrably false. Colonizing the body is just the next step for capitalism. And, speaking of colonizing, he’s also big into fecal transplants, which is exactly what it sounds like: taking poop from one person and putting it in another.

1. Bryan Johnson

Former Mormon missionary Bryan Johnson, 45, is desperately trying to get back to 18— by counting nocturnal erections and making his rectum “perform like a teenager’s”. He’s even taking blood from his 17-year-old son. He calls him his “blood boy”. The only scientific basis for this procedure, which takes a fifth of the kid’s blood, is the surgical joining, Human Caterpillar-style, of old and young mice to share a circulatory system. So it could get a lot worse for the boy, who, presumably, just doesn’t want his dad to disinherit him (as he did his fiancée Taryn Southern when she got breast cancer). 

Johnson’s aging-backwards protocol, which costs more than $2 million a year, also involves eating dinner in the morning and taking 100 supplements a day. Despite his hour-long workout, he restricts his daily calories to 1,977 (the year of his birth). “I’m trying to prove that self-harm and decay are not inevitable,” he says, apparently oblivious to the irony.

As of 2021, he’d rewound the clock by five years. Substantially less than Ray Kurzweil, for example, whose approach is far more laid-back—not to mention ethical.

Food is one of the most mysterious aspects of prehistoric life. Stones and skeletons preserve well, but ancient leftovers quickly disintegrate into nothing.

So scientists have to get crafty (and a little lucky) to uncover prehistory’s culinary secrets. Still, they have found some interesting ones, which could change the way we view prehistoric people. They appear to have been more advanced than we thought.

10 Paleolithic Processed Flour

“Cavemen” were eating wild oats long before the agricultural revolution according to some amazingly old residue detected on a 32,000-year-old pestle-like grinding stone.

That makes it history’s oldest oatmeal. It was made through a four-step process that probably involved heating and milling, the earliest evidence of a four-step process used to prepare plants.

The procedure yielded oat flour, which they then boiled or baked into flatbreads. Ancient groups like these might have been eating and processing grains even earlier, inspiring increased scrutiny of similar stones in search of more history-altering residue.^[1]

9 Cheese For The Lactose Intolerant

A 7,500-year-old piece of pottery riddled with holes stumped scientists until biochemical analysis revealed dairy fats, showing that the Neolithic people of 5500 BC had already mastered cheesemaking.

Cheese, which involves separating milk into curds and whey by adding bacteria and rennet, was a game-changing item at that time. It provided food from animals while sparing the animals, increasing a group’s farming potential.

It might also prove why humans domesticated cattle way back when most humans were lactose intolerant. Cheese products contained far less lactose than pure milk and didn’t upset sensitive Neolithic tummies. Plus it added a sorely needed supply of fats.^[2]

8 Surprisingly Rich Paleolithic Pantries

Vegetables don’t age well across millennia, so it’s almost impossible to tell what kind of plants composed the Paleolithic menu. But if said vegetables become saturated with water, the oxygen deprivation can preserve them.

Researchers at a dig in northern Israel found vegetables like these and many more than they expected our ancient ancestors to be eating nearly 800,000 years ago. The team found at least 55 types of plants, including nuts, seeds, and roots. The site also revealed the oldest incidence of controlled fire in Eurasia, which was necessary to turn most of these toxic plants into edible products.

But the ancients did supplement their diet with a bit of meat and fat, even an elephant brain discovered at a previous dig.^[3]

7 Fossil Poo Reveals Relatively Healthy Neanderthals

Sometimes, archaeology is funny, like when researchers crush up 50,000-year-old Neanderthal poo to detect its intrinsic colors. Via spectroscopic analysis, fossilized feces (coprolites) have finally revealed the scope of the Neanderthal diet.

As the foods were no longer intact when expelled from the Neanderthals, scientists looked for signature compounds that form when bacteria help break down meats and veggies.

Neanderthals ate a fair amount of big game meat, including reindeer and mammoth, but also introduced an assortment of plants to balance their diet. This discovery may rule out a Neanderthal extinction scenario in which they chronically gorged themselves to death with a meat-centric menu.^[4]

6 Ancient Toothpicks

Even with the healthiest diet, cavities are inevitable. But it didn’t always mean the end of a Paleolithic person’s eating career because some had access to dentists.

Researchers pushed tooth care back a few thousand years again with the unearthing of a 14,160-year-old skeleton with signs of dental work. The skeleton belonged to a 25-year-old who had suffered a cavity but had it picked out with a flint instrument.

So, at least some Paleolithic people knew that cavities could lead to infections and dealt with them, painfully but effectively, before they could cause more grievous bodily harm. The Paleolithic people were also compulsive toothpickers, and the study explains all the wooden and bone-hewn picks found previously.^[5]

5 Homo naledi’s Gritty Culinary Niche

Over 300,000 years ago, a number of hominins inhabited southern Africa and competed for resources. One of these hominins, Homo naledi, found a culinary niche by eating grit.

Dental mapping revealed that Homo naledi’s teeth were mostly similar to those of Australopithecus africanus and Paranthropus robustus, but they were longer, more wear-resistant, and consistently chipped.

The wear and tear suggests that Homo naledi subsisted on grittier food sources, either those covered in dust or dirt or rough plants fortified with silica.

These compounds, known as phytoliths or plant stones, protect plants from browsing animals. But some developed high-crowned molars to resist the grit, and Homo naledi may have done the same to exploit a neglected food source.^[6]

4 History’s Earliest Barbecue

Our ancestors first walked upright six or seven million years ago, but it was another five or so million years before the much fatter-brained Homo erectus emerged.

Researchers believe that the critical spark came in the form of cooking because it gave us easier access to more digestible food sources. The earliest evidence of a cookout comes from South Africa’s Wonderwerk Cave.

Analysis revealed a twig and grass fire from about a million years ago as well as grayed bone fragments. The location, deep inside a cave, quashes the possibility that the ash was swept in by wind or water.

Pot-lid flakes, or fire-chipped stone fragments, were also found, suggesting repeated fire use at the site.^[7]

3 Saharan Veggie Hot Pot

Cooking directly over fire served the early hominins fine but produced gritty, ashy food. The next step in culinary evolution was the use of cooking pots to improve food variety and quality.

Humans made the first clay pots in the Far East about 16,000 years ago, but pots weren’t used to prepare food until around 10,000 years ago according to finds from the Libyan Sahara.

Back then, grasslands, rivers, and lakes covered a verdant Sahara. And the residue from the pots shows that humans ate just about everything green, be it leaf, grain, seed, or even aquatic plants dredged from Saharan watering holes.^[8]

2 Mesolithic Mustard

After our ancient ancestors balanced their diet, their next culinary innovation was to make it tasty. They accomplished this more than 6,000 years ago with one of the world’s most widely enjoyed condiments, mustard.

Not plain mustard, mind you, but garlic mustard. Numerous Mesolithic cooking pots found in Germany and Denmark still retained residue from mustard seeds and leaves. Researchers believe that our ancestors mashed the mustard seeds into their dishes and added the garlic-flavored leaves for a one-two flavor punch.

The discovery represents the shift between the consumption of food solely for its caloric or nutritive value and the more modern modes of hedonistic eating.^[9]

1 Ancient Tortoise Appetizers

Qesem Cave in central Israel remained undisturbed for eons until road builders accidentally rediscovered it in 2000. Inside, researchers found an old habitation and a 400,000-year-old appetizer, tortoise.

The tortoises were butchered with flint knives and roasted in their shells. But they probably weren’t the main course because the prehistoric hunter-gatherers that occupied Qesem Cave for 200,000 years supped on a varied, rich diet.

They likely enjoyed tortoise as an appetizer, side dish, or dessert in addition to an assortment of vegetables. The main course consisted of much heartier game, including ox, deer, and horses.^[10]

The key to boosting your net worth is simple—spend less than you make, but doing it can be challenging.

Capitalism has brought us many benefits—we have more choices than ever before, and everything we might want is available for a price. But if we are being cynical, we could say that capitalism thrives best when everyone is in debt but has sufficient resources to pay back the money they owe and ideally get to a position where they can take on more debt.

With our desire to increase our spending, here are 10 habits that can boost your net worth.

Related: Top 10 Tremendous Wastes Of Money

10 Make Every Dollar Count

You can cut your day-to-day expenses with careful planning and shopping. Groceries are the best example. Before you go to the store:

1. Make a list and stick to it.
2. Look for offers and buy more things you regularly need when the price is right. You can always freeze or store extra products.
3. Buy store-brand goods instead of name-brands that often sell at a premium.

The other ways to save money on your shopping expenditures include:

• Don’t be tempted by extras you don’t need. There’s nothing wrong with a treat now and again, but the cost should come from your regular budget.
• Try using cheaper cuts of meat than you usually use.
• If you are making a meal for two or four, make extra and freeze it to make another meal.
• Look for offers, and haggle over more expensive items. For example, if you need a new freezer, the store will often offer a discount on display models.
• Cancel unused or unneeded subscriptions such as Spotify or HelloFresh.

One other area where you can save a lot of money is by pooling resources with your neighbors. Why does every house with a lawn have a lawnmower? Why not come together and share one for the block?

9 Invest in the Future

If you’ve got money to spare, you may be willing to gamble on the stock market. It’s unlikely that you’ll find the next Microsoft before anyone else, but some investors make a lot of money from the market. But, to do this, you need to know about market trends and predictability.

You can build a reasonably safe portfolio of shares. If you think the stock market is for you, you can research low-risk options on the internet, but beware of hidden trade fees. Possible investments include treasury bonds offering solid, if not exciting, rates of return. Gold, and other precious metals, are a traditional standby.

You don’t have to spend a lot of money on your original investment, but this should be money that you can spare and leave to accrue earnings.

8 Keep Learning

Lifelong learning might seem to have little to do with net worth. However, if you study the habits of the rich, you’ll find that most of them are keenly aware of the world around them and keep up to date on trends and tendencies.

You can check out online platforms such as Coursera or edX to find various online courses that keep your brain active. There are courses on every subject under the sun, from astrophysics to zoology, and many that help students understand finance. On both platforms, there are many courses that you can take for free.

We know that a good education is a solid investment, yet many of us stop learning once our college days are over. We shouldn’t stop.

7 Build a Nest Egg

If you squirrel money under your mattress, it will be handy in an emergency, but inflation will gnaw at its value. A better option is to open a savings account. As you explore various banking systems, check the interest rate and if the institution charges you for your account maintenance.

Once you have found an account that suits you, try to get into the habit of putting a small sum into it every week or month. Getting into the habit of saving a small sum regularly is better for your current budget. When you feel ready, you can increase your weekly/monthly savings. You should also encourage your kids to put money in their own savings accounts.

You will come across some financial advisers who suggest that your savings should hurt. They mean that you should save more than you feel comfortable with and that making this a habit will curtail your usual expenses. There’s some truth in this, but if you save more than you can afford, you will probably find that you are dipping into your savings account to meet regular bills. This is not ideal.

6 Look for Alternative or Additional Income

All of us have skills, and often those skills are underused. Whether you already have a job or not, you might want to develop an extra source of income. Why not use your skills to make a little extra cash?

For example, you could look at Craigslist and advertise your dog walking services there. The age of the internet has brought opportunities to turn your skills into money-making ventures. Even if your local economy is in the doldrums, you might find opportunities in areas you hadn’t considered.

An extra revenue stream is a great way to boost your net worth and goes toward reinforcing your income should you hit troubled times.

5 Network to Gain More Opportunities

A proverb tells us: “It’s not what you know but who you know.”

It may sound cynical, but it’s how most of us operate. You’re more likely to turn to someone you know for help than a stranger. If you have abilities and are looking for a way to make some extra cash, you might need to broaden your range of acquaintances. Let people know that you are available and good at what you do.

At first, you might find yourself doing favors for friends and then friends of friends. There’s nothing wrong with that, but make sure that they know that you expect them to pay for jobs that take up your time. Ideally, they know this in advance—it’s embarrassing to ask someone for money when they thought you were helping out for free.

Our short video gives you some ideas on how to extend your network.

4 Look after Your Body

If you are out of shape and live on a diet of pizza, consider changing your lifestyle. Physical fitness and good nutrition make you feel better and stay sharper. You will have more energy and be able to spend more quality time working on building your net worth.

Keeping fit and watching what you eat soon becomes a habit and can significantly cut your medical bills and even fast food spending. Once you start a routine, you will quickly get used to it. Start slowly—maybe a short walk after lunch. You will soon see the benefits.

3 Catch Some Serious ZZZs

Many successful people stick to a routine. And an important part of that routine is a regular sleeping pattern. Matthew Walker, a neuroscientist from UC Berkeley, said: “Human beings are the only species that deliberately deprive themselves of sleep for no apparent gain. Many people walk through their lives in an underslept state, not realizing it.”

Like keeping fit, getting into the habit of regular sleep will make you feel more alert and healthier. You will feel better able to meet the challenges of the day and work more efficiently. Quality work can lead to improved earnings and a better net worth.

2 Plan, Plan, Plan

Another habit that successful people cultivate is planning. You don’t need to have every minute accounted for; you will need some flexibility. But you should have a rough idea of how to use your time. This will allow you time to make space for activities that may increase your net worth while spending less time on activities such as watching the latest must-see show on Netflix.

1 Debt Be Gone

The main drag on most people’s income is debt. The average household debt in the United States is around $165,000. For most people, this is a weight that seems to pull them backward, causes a lot of worries, and stops them from increasing their personal wealth.

Debt is a double-edged sword. It’s difficult to manage modern life without it. The problem is that many of us take out debt—usually on credit cards—to cover purchases we don’t need to make. Marketers spend a lot of time, money, and effort trying to persuade us that we don’t need to save. What we want, we can have now. It’s a trap that many of us fall into.

Our video gives us some ideas about how to cut our personal debts. Debts are expensive and should be cut whenever possible. We don’t like to think about our debts, but we should—they won’t go away of their own accord. If you are having trouble with personal debt, you can contact your local credit counseling organization for help and advice or visit the website www.debt.org.