In the 1950s, there was a real danger afoot. The Communists, as our brave senators warned us, had infiltrated the governments of the democratic world. And they’d brought with them their most powerful weapon: the gays.

As Senator Kenneth Wherry told the American people, “Only the most naive could believe that the Communists’ fifth column in the United States would neglect to propagate and use homosexuals to gain their treacherous ends.” We needed a device that could weed out these wily gays from their patriotic hetero peers. Our mission was clear: we needed a real-life, fully functioning gaydar.

The best minds in the world got to work. And they didn’t stop in America in the 1950s—in many parts of the world, our best and brightest are to working to build one today.

10 The Hoey Committee’s Investigative Techniques

In 1950, the best and brightest minds of the US Senate were organized into a special task force called the Hoey Committee. Their mission: to identify and root out the insidious gays hiding throughout America.

It would not, as they quickly learned, be as easy as they imagined. Senator Margaret Smith, during a meeting with America’s top medical minds, disappointedly asked: “There is no quick test like an X-ray that discloses these things?”

To her heartbreak, the surgeon general explained that homosexuality didn’t show up on most X-rays. He, at least, was answering their questions. Most medical experts, for some reason, rambled on with some nonsense about sexuality being “complicated” and “fluid” and refused to hand over the machine the senators apparently hoped would make all gay men in America start glowing with a neon red light.

After two years of research, though, the Hoey Committee identified some foolproof facts about homosexuals. Gay men, they announced, could be identified through a few key clues: They were unmarried, they “seldom refuse to talk about themselves,” and they tended to have what the council called “prissy habits.”

They started a complex system for tracking, eliminating, and destroying the lives of gay men, often crushing them so fully that they drove them to suicide.

And not a moment too soon. As their report warned, gay was contagious: “One homosexual can pollute a government office.”^[1]

9 The Canadian Government’s Fruit Machine

North of the border, the Canadians were hard at work on a special machine that they were convinced could identify any gay man. They called it the “Fruit Machine,” which, in the 1960s, was something you could name a machine, and nobody would say anything. In fact, the government would pay you $10,000, and everything would be fine.

It was a gigantic device, described by those who have seen it as looking “like something out of science fiction.”^[2] It had multiple cameras, giant steel girders, and a special screen designed to project gay porn.

A suspected homosexual would be called into the security official’s office and told: “We have evidence that you may be a homosexual. What do you have to say about this?”

If they denied it, the Fruit Machine would be their judge. They would be strapped in and shown a series of mundane images which, every now and then, would be livened up with the odd picture of gay porn. While they watched, the researchers would measure their pulse, skin reflexes, breathing, and pupillary response.

If your pupils expanded on the sight of gay porn, it meant that the pictures of naked men excited you. Or that the photo was a bit too dark for you. Or maybe that you were surprised. Or probably really nothing at all, since most tests showed that the Fruit Machine was wildly ineffective.

Still, the Canadian government was nothing if not cautious. Even if the machine didn’t work, they forced everyone who failed its test to resign from their jobs, thereby saving Canada from the horrors of having homosexuals walk through its streets leading normal, healthy lives.

8 The US Park Police’s Pervert Records

The United States Park Police played a special role in America’s mission to weed homosexuals out of government. They were put on a special task force when the government received some prized intel providing an insight into the mind of the homosexual man: Gay guys love parks.

The Park Police were expanded, with countless more officers brought on to help them with their missions, including weeding out “sex perverts.” Parks, the government had learned, were “popular cruising spots for gay men.” They needed a team to watch them.

One group of Park Police spent 12 hours, from dusk to dawn, staring at the bathroom in Lafayette Park and placing bets on whether or not the visitors were gay. In their report to Congress, they declared: “I do not believe a half a dozen legitimate persons go in there to answer Nature’s call.”^[3]

Thanks to their tireless work, the US government came to an important conclusion: Pretty well anyone who goes to the bathroom in a public park can be assumed to be a homosexual. And they took that intel seriously, even firing a CIA employee on the charge that he’d been spotted “hanging around the men’s room in Lafayette Park.”

7 J. Edgar Hoover’s Sex Deviates Program

J. Edgar Hoover personally pushed the FBI into leading what he called the “Sex Deviates” program. For decades, they would stop wasting so much time tracking down organized crime and domestic terrorists and, instead, focus their resources on America’s real threat: the gay menace.

Any person accused of being a closeted homosexual, on the FBI’s orders, was to be immediately reported to the chief of investigations.^[4] The FBI would take over from there, and they would put every resource at their disposal to work. FBI agents would follow men to their homes, keep tabs on which bars and restaurants they ate at, and have professional psychologists examine detailed records of their habits, searching for those telltale patterns of gayness.

Then they’d strike. Some eager FBI agents would pull the suspected homosexuals in early, while they were still just loitering outside those notorious park bathrooms. The truly diligent, though, would wait until they were the middle of what they called “an act of perversion” and until they’d gotten really good photographs of the act before bringing them in.

It was hard work, or work that made them hard, or one of those two—but it had to be done. Nobody understood that more than J. Edgar Hoover. After all, if the rumors about Hoover are true, he had an unfortunate habit of showing up at homosexual orgies—clear proof that those contagious gays had been coughing all over him.

6 The Gulf Cooperation Council Homosexuality Test

The quest for a foolproof way to spot gays didn’t end with the 1950s, and it wasn’t limited to the United States. Decades later, in 2013, Kuwait’s director of public health, Yousuf Mindkar, took up the cause himself.

Mindkar promised his people that he would introduce sweeping reforms to improve the nation’s gaydar, declaring to the world: “We will take stricter measures that will help us detect gays.”

His plan was to revise Kuwait’s visa stipulations to require doctors to certify any incoming visitors as heterosexual before letting them into the country.^[5] Mindkar wasn’t entirely clear on how the doctors would test their patients for homosexuality, but he was confident that it would be a simple procedure. He assured the press that any doctor in any country would be able to run a thorough test for the telltale physical markings of homosexuality.

Mindkar backed down because of criticism in the international community. FIFA expressed concern that his plan might bar some fans from watching the 2022 World Cup. The concern was echoed by many in the US, who suggested that the plan would bar everyone who likes soccer from entering Kuwait and then high-fived each other.

5 The Malaysian Guide To Spotting A Gay

A 2018 issue of Sinar Harian, a Malaysian newspaper, came with a helpful checklist to teach readers “how to spot a gay.”^[6]

The article came with a checklist of the classic telltale markings of homosexuality. Gay men, it explained, love beards. They also love branded clothing, are close to the family, and like to go to the gym. But once in the gym, it warned, the homosexual male will not exercise. Instead, he will merely ogle the other men, his eyes lighting up with joy whenever he spots a particularly handsome one.

Lesbians, it said, could be detected through their venomous attitudes toward men. Toward women, the article explained, lesbians are open and carefree. They will hold each other’s hands and hug each other openly. But they behave very differently around men. Lesbians, the article explained, hate men. What little joy they get out of life, they get from belittling them.

4 The Scientific Study Into Gay Faces

In 2008, Nicholas Rule and Nalini Ambady of Tufts University conducted an experiment into one of the great questions that have plagued scientists for centuries: Do gay people have gay faces?^[7]

They took pictures of heterosexual and homosexual people, carefully chosen to eliminate the effect of what they called “self-presentation.” They even Photoshopped out their hair and pasted them onto white backgrounds, trying to leave nothing but their cheekbones and eyebrows as hints into their sexuality. Then they showed the pictures to a group of 90 people and asked them to guess which faces were gay.

The participants, Rule and Ambady claimed, got the right answer more often than not, thereby proving that everyone can tell you’re gay just by looking at you (even if they don’t realize it). Apparently, you’re not fooling anybody, and you might as well drop the act.

3 Stanford University’s Gaydar Machine

In 2017, Stanford professor Michael Kosinski took spotting gay people by looking at their faces into the next era. He turned that idea into what he claims is a working “gaydar” machine.

Kosinski and his coauthor, Yilun Wang, had a facial recognition program scan 75,000 online dating profiles, organized into groups of “gay” and “straight.” Their AI was programmed to identify patterns in “gay facial features,” searching for the unique quirks that unite all gay men. Then they pitted their machine against humans to see who was better at identifying homosexuals.

The humans weren’t much better at telling if someone was gay by looking at their face than a coin flip, which sort of ruins the entire point of the study in that last entry, but anyway, the point is that the machine got it right 81 percent of the time for gay men and 74 percent for lesbians.^[8] Finally, they had created an effective gaydar.

Or, at least, it was an effective gaydar when it looked at people’s Tinder profile pictures. When they tried using it on pictures that people hadn’t put up on dating apps, it was significantly less effective. Still, they had finally developed a machine that could identify the sexuality of people who are actively and deliberately trying to make their orientations as visible as possible.

2 The Attempt To Isolate The Gay Gene

During the 2015 conference of the American Society of Human Genetics, a University of California researcher named Tuck Ngun made a bold declaration to the world: He had isolated the gay gene.^[9]

Specifically, Ngun had found “methylation marks” that he believed could be connected to homosexuality. His study had looked at 37 pairs of identical male twins that consisted of one homosexual brother and one heterosexual brother and identified five methylation marks that he claimed were clear biological indicators of homosexuality.

Sort of. The scientific community wasn’t exactly supportive. They pointed out that he looked at 6,000 methylation marks in just 37 sets of twins, which made it pretty much inevitable that he’d be able to find some kind of pattern between them, just by the sheer law of averages. And in this case, Ngun hadn’t even found a particularly good pattern—even in his test subjects, the “gay gene” he’d identified only showed up in 67 percent of the time.

1 Penile Plethysmograph

Some devices that have been employed as gaydars still see fairly widespread use today, like the penile plethysmograph. The Czechoslovakian Army once used it to determine if men claiming to be gay to avoid being drafted were telling the truth.

Here’s how it works: first, a scientist attaches a device shaped like a thin strip of metal to the penis. Then he puts on a variety of gay pornography (or whatever else they’re attempting to determine the subject’s response to) and uses the device to measure how erect the man gets looking at each image.

Admittedly, there are probably easier ways to figure out someone’s sexuality—like, for example, if a man attaches a thin strip of metal to people’s penises, shows them gay porn, and then takes careful notes on how erect they get, it might be a clue that he himself is gay—but somehow, this one has caught on and is still used in various scientific studies today.

It has been hailed as the most accurate sexuality test known to man—and with good cause. This test has proven to be an accurate determinant of a man’s sexual preferences 32 percent of the time,^[10] making it the most effective, proven way to tell somebody’s sexuality—other than flipping a coin.

On January 1, 1917, the body of Grigori Rasputin, the advisor to the rulers of Tsarist Russia, was found trapped under the frozen surface of the Neva River. He’d been shot three times and horribly mutilated; his killers, it seemed, had even gouged out his right eye.

Everyone was a suspect. Rasputin was seen as a sorcerer and a corrupting influence on the tsar. He was hated by the Tsarists and the Bolsheviks alike. Even outside Russia, he’d made powerful enemies. Prince Felix Yusupov took the credit for Rasputin’s death, claiming that he and four co-conspirators had killed him together. And to this day, Yusupov’s story is the one that usually appears in the history books.

But Yusupov’s confession didn’t fit a single one of the facts. Every single detail in his story contradicted the autopsy and the evidence—and to this day, no one really knows for sure how Grigori Rasputin met his grisly end.

10 The Death Threat The Morning Before He Died

On the morning of December 29, 1916, Rasputin received a strange phone call. The voice on the other line, he told his daughter Maria, wasn’t one he recognized. The message, though, was clear: Rasputin’s days were numbered.

It was a death threat, though by no means the first one Rasputin had received.^[1] At this stage in his life, Rasputin was used to getting multiple death threats every day. They would come in the mail or through the phone, always warning him that he deserved to die for the greater good of Russia.

This one, though, deeply unsettled him. Multiple sources described Rasputin as “nervous” and “agitated” that day. For some reason, after countless threats on his life, the one he received the morning before he died terrified him.

Nobody knows who placed the call. The only thing we know for sure is that it wasn’t Felix Yusupov, the man who has taken credit for Rasputin’s death. Yusupov spent the day trying to charm his victim so that he could lure him out to his home, and nobody involved in his conspiracy has ever claimed responsibility for the call.

9 The Cyanide That Failed To Kill Him

Yusupov’s plan was to poison Rasputin. He lured Rasputin out to his home, where he had plates full of cakes and wine that had been laced with cyanide by one of his co-conspirators, Dr. Stanislaus de Lazovert. The plan was to feed Rasputin the poisoned food and watch him die.

There is no question that Rasputin went to Yusupov’s house. The last person who saw him was his daughter, Maria, to whom he bid goodbye at 11:00 PM on December 29. Everything that happened after that, though, is a mystery.

Yusupov claims that he fed Rasputin the poisoned cakes and wines and that Rasputin gorged down enough cyanide to kill an elephant. But no amount of poison would hurt him. Instead, Rasputin kept asking for more.

His story, though, doesn’t quite add up. The autopsy notes say that Rasputin’s body showed “no trace of poison.”

Nobody knows for sure why there was no poison in his body. Yusupov’s story seems to imply that Rasputin really did have supernatural powers, but there are certainly other explanations.

Dr. Lazovert, years later, would claim that he only pretended to poison the cakes out of a pang of conscience—but not everybody’s convinced he was telling the truth. More recently, forensic scientist Dolly Stolze concluded that Rasputin was poisoned, but the doctor performing the autopsy missed the signs.^[2]

But then, of course, there’s always the other possibility: Yusupov could have lied.

8 The Gunshot That Failed To Kill Him

Frustrated that his poison didn’t work, Yusupov pulled out his pistol and shot Rasputin in the chest. Rasputin collapsed onto his back, blood spilling out of his body, and convulsed in spasms. It took a full minute for his body to become still, but by then, Yusupov’s co-conspirators had rushed into the room.

“The doctor [Lazovert] declared that the bullet had struck him in the region of the heart,” Yusupov wrote in his memoirs.^[3] “There was no possibility of doubt: Rasputin was dead.”

The conspirators, he claims, then drove to Rasputin’s house, one of the men dressed up in Rasputin’s clothes to convince the neighbors he’d made it home safely that night. Then they came back and got ready to dispose of Rasputin’s body.

“Then a terrible thing happened,” Yusupov wrote. “With a sudden violent effort Rasputin leapt to his feet, foaming at the mouth.”

Yusupov and the other men ultimately shot Rasputin several more times before one of the conspirators, Vladimir Purishkevich, finally took him down with a gunshot to the head. Even while they tied him up and threw him into the river, though, Yusupov insists that Rasputin’s body continued to move.

“I realized now who Rasputin really was,” Yusupov wrote. “It was the reincarnation of Satan himself.”

7 The Autopsy That Contradicts Everything Yusupov Said

Yusupov’s story certainly is exciting—but it doesn’t fit the facts. The autopsy report on Rasputin’s body, conducted by Professor Dmitry Kosorotov, contradicts every single word.

In his memoirs, Yusupov claims that he shot Rasputin in the heart and even says that he had Dr. Lazovert check the body and confirm that was where the bullet had hit its mark. Kosorotov’s autopsy, though, found only three bullet wounds, and not a single one had even come close to the heart. Instead, the bullets went through his stomach, liver, kidney, and skull, with wounds that no physician could possibly mistake for a gunshot to the heart.^[4]

Likewise, Yusupov claimed that Rasputin was taken down by a long-range shot from Purishkevich that took him in the back of the head. The bullet in Rasputin’s skull, however, had entered from the front at point-blank range, while Rasputin was lying on the ground.

It’s hard to reconcile Yusupov’s story with the facts. Some have suggested that he blew the murder up to make Rasputin more of a threat—but his account is nowhere near the truth. It’s almost as though Yusupov had no idea how Rasputin died.

6 The Rumor That Rasputin Drowned

Yusupov claims that he saw Rasputin move, even after he’d taken a bullet to the skull. Still, the co-conspirators tied up Rasputin’s arms and legs, wrapped up his body in a piece of heavy linen, drove it to the top of a bridge, and hurled it into the water.

Legend has it that Rasputin was still alive when they threw him in. When he was found, his hands were unbound and lifted over his head. He’d freed his hands under the water, Rasputin’s daughter Maria would later claim, and died drowning.

It’s very difficult to tell what the autopsy says. During the trial, an expert witness claimed that the autopsy showed “there was air in Rasputin’s lungs” and that he had still been alive when he was thrown into the water.^[5]

But this is a rare case where even reading the autopsy report doesn’t give us a clear answer. For some reason, different transcriptions say different things. Even today, you can find copies of Kosorotov’s original autopsy that say there was no water in his lungs and others that say there was. We’ve even found versions of Kosorotov’s autopsy that unambiguously claim Rasputin was alive, saying, “The victim was still breathing when he was thrown into the river.”

Somewhere along the line, whatever Kosorotov wrote was changed. Did the rumor pervade so far that people rewrote his autopsy? Or was the report altered to hide that Rasputin was still alive?

5 The Horrible Mutilation Of His Body And Genitals

Whoever killed Rasputin didn’t just shoot him. They brutally and horribly mutilated his corpse.

The description, in Kosorotov’s autopsy, is nothing short of horrifying:

The left-hand side has a gaping wound inflicted by some sharp object or possibly a spur.

The right eye has come out of its orbital cavity and fallen on to the face. At the corner of the right eye the skin is torn.

The right ear is torn and partially detached. The neck has a wound caused by a blunt object. The victim’s face and body bear the signs of blows inflicted by some flexible but hard object.

The genitals have been crushed due to the effect of a similar object.^[6]

The wounds, Kosorotov would later say, appeared to have been inflicted after Rasputin had died. This wasn’t the result of a violent scuffle. It was the brutal desecration of a dead body, a merciless beating that isn’t mentioned anywhere in Yusupov’s confession.

There are explanations. Some have theorized that Rasputin may have incurred these wounds in the water, while his body floated and dragged underneath a thick layer of rough ice. The ice, it’s believed, may also have broken the ropes off of Rasputin’s wrists.

But every explanation is nothing but speculation. All we know for sure is that his body was mutilated; whether it was by the force of man or the force of nature, we cannot know for sure.

4 Yusupov’s Strange Insistence On Taking Credit

Yusupov and his co-conspirators went to great lengths to cover up Rasputin’s death. They faked him driving home, they threw him in the river, and Yusupov repeatedly told the police that the gunshots from his house had just made by a drunken guest shooting at a dog.

According to police reports, though, the conspirators confessed pretty well immediately. The officer sent to Yusupov’s house, following up on reports gunshots, said that Purishkevich threw open the door and declared:

Listen here, he [Rasputin] is dead, and if you love the Tsar and the Motherland, you’ll keep this quiet and won’t tell anyone a thing.^[7]

The police certainly found bloodstains in Yusupov’s backyard, even if the autopsy didn’t fit his story. And while he denied the murder at first, Yusupov started hungrily trying to profit off his reputation as soon as he was implicated. He even ended up writing a whole memoir describing how he’d killed Rasputin in intricate, storybook-like detail.

When an MGM film called Rasputin and the Empress came out about Rasputin’s death, Yusupov even sued the filmmakers in a court case that, in the end, had Yusupov put down on the legal records as the man who killed Rasputin.

3 The British Spy Who Might Have Killed Him

Every bullet in Rasputin’s body, according to the autopsy, came out of a different caliber gun. At least three people—or at least three guns—had to have been involved in his death.

The bullet holes in his stomach and kidney could have been made by Yusupov and Purishkevich’s guns, but the one in his skull didn’t fit. It was made with a revolver, specifically, according to the most popular theory, a .455 Webley—a gun none of the conspirators carried.

A British friend of Yusupov’s named Oswald Rayner, though, carried a .455 Webley on him at almost all times. And though Yusupov denies that he was ever there, a lot of people think that Rayner fired the shot that finished Rasputin off, all under the orders of British Intelligence.

The British had a vested interest in seeing Rasputin dead. He was trying to broker peace between Russia and Germany, and his treaty would have turned the tide of World War I against the Allies. In Rasputin hadn’t died, it’s possible that the Germans would have won the war.

And there’s a letter that seems to completely give it away. A man named Stephen Alley, stationed in Petrograd, sent a missive to England on January 7, 1917, that read:

Our objective has clearly been achieved. Reaction to the demise of ‘Dark Forces’ has been well received by all, although a few awkward questions have already been asked about wider involvement.

Rayner is attending to loose ends and will no doubt brief you on your return.^[8]

2 The MI6 Archives That Say Otherwise

The British government, more than 100 years later, still denies having anything to do with Rasputin’s death. The suggestion that Rayner killed Rasputin, they insist, is “an outrageous charge, and incredible to the point of childishness.”

They might be telling the truth. Rayner was not listed as an active agent when Rasputin died, and although countless historians have scoured through every available MI6 record, they can’t find the slightest trace of evidence that the British were involved.^[9]

Some of the arguments against Rayner fall flat, as well. One book dedicated to proving Rayner was the killer claims that the bullet in Rasputin’s head could only be “the work of a professional killer”—but that bullet, as we already know, was fired at point-blank range while Rasputin was lying down. It was hardly an expert shot.

Nor was the murder. Police Chief Serda described Rasputin’s murder as the work of “incompetent” killers whose methods were clumsier than he had ever seen in his entire career.

It was, in short, hardly the work of a secret agent.

1 The Burning Body That Sat Up

The most popular explanation for Yusupov’s outrageous story is that he was trying to erase a guilty conscience. He’d killed a defenseless man in cold blood, but he still wanted the people to believe that he was a hero. And so he changed the truth, making himself look better by selling Rasputin as a demonic monster who couldn’t be killed.

But one strange moment in March 1917 almost makes it tempting to believe that Yusupov was telling the truth: that Rasputin really a supernatural being.

A group of soldiers exhumed Rasputin’s body, threw it onto a pile of logs, doused it in gasoline, and set it on fire. They destroyed his body, afraid his tomb would become a monument to the Tsarist regime.

A whole crowd of villagers came out to watch Rasputin’s body burn—and almost every one of them insists that they saw his decomposing corpse rise up in the fire.^[10]

There are scientific explanations, of course. It’s been speculated that Rasputin’s tendons shrank in the fire, causing his body to bend at the waist. Or else the whole thing has been written off as a great mass delusion.

But Rasputin, they say, predicted every bit of it. In a letter that Rasputin (supposedly) wrote to Tsarina Alexandra shortly before his death, he said: “I feel that I shall leave life before January 1.”

Even dead, the sorcerer predicted, he would not be left in peace. His body would be burned, his ashes scattered into the winds.

Isn’t food the best? Not only is it delicious, we literally have to eat it to stay alive. Still, there’s a catch: If our dinner is spoiled, the very thing keeping us alive could end up killing us. To prevent this, we have developed a number of creative ways to keep food in prime condition as long as possible. Here are ten of the strangest ones:

Irradiation is not a new thing in cooking. After all, microwave ovens (which work by bombarding the food with electromagnetic radiation) have been around for decades. But when it comes to food preservation, “radiation” suddenly becomes a worrying word. Preserved foods and radiation together tend to conjure images of nuclear shelters, things that glow in the dark and even agonizing death.

The last one of those is actually a very accurate image. The thing is, it’s not about your death—it’s the death of pests and germs in your food. Food irradiation is a technique where the food is exposed to ionizing radiation (for instance X-rays) in order to kill or incapacitate germs and microbes. Done correctly, the process can slow or even completely stop spoilage.

Have you ever wondered how some products claim they have no additives, yet have a suspiciously long shelf life? There is a trick to that. It’s called High Pressure Processing (also known as pascalization and bridgmanization, for the scientists who helped develop the technique). The food is subjected to a massive pressure of around 50,000 pounds per square inch for up to fifteen minutes. This sheer pressure is enough to inactivate microbes, preserving the food up to ten times to its usual shelf life (for instance, guacamole normally lasts around 3 days, but the high pressure treatment increases this to a month). And it gets better: Pascalization can even vastly improve the food. Research suggests that it can double the levels of certain healthy natural antioxidants in fruit. The method sounds like something straight out of a Science Fiction story. Even so, the basic principles of the process were invented back in the 17th Century by Blaise Pascal, a French scientist.

It’s difficult to imagine burials and cuisine together, except as an unfortunate aftermath to eating really bad salmon. But although most people assume burial just leads to decomposition (everyone knows buried corpses become skeletons), it is actually a fairly effective preservation technique. Burying food can shelter it from many spoiling agents, such as light and oxygen. The soil should preferably be dry and salty, or even frozen. Just remember to use a good container—otherwise your meal might easily become worm food. Burial is also used in cooking. For instance, the Korean national dish Kimchi is prepared by burying vats of seasoned vegetables for months.

Jugging is a peculiar technique of cooking and canning meat at the same time. It is similar to the time-honored vagabond tradition of heating a can of beans over a fire using the tin as a makeshift cooking pot. Jugging is a more hardcore version of the technique: The tin is a large earthenware jug and the beans are replaced with meat. The jug is tightly closed and the food is slowly cooked inside it. The process results in a tasty, stew-like meal that is preserved in the tightly shut jug.

Jugging was a common practice in both English and French kitchens until the 20th Century, which means it’s pretty much the only thing the two cuisines have ever agreed about. Some recipes that use the technique are “Jugged Hare” (rabbit cooked in wine and juniper berries) and kippers (because the tightly shut jug helps contain their smell).

Some foods, such as fruits and vegetables have a very delicate surface texture. This makes them very difficult to preserve with conventional methods (such as heat or chemicals) so that their taste and texture doesn’t chance.

However, scientists have found a way around this problem. They bombard the fruit with plasma (which consists of ionized particles and is considered the “fourth state” of matter, along with liquids, solids and gases). The particular plasma they use is not the destructive, superheated one you may know from movie and video game weaponry. Instead, they use nonthermal plasma, which is roughly room temperature and relatively safe . . . unless you’re a microbe.

Easily the most futuristic technique on this list, Nonthermal Plasma Treatment has proven to be a reliable antimicrobial treatment that doesn’t alter the food in any way—apart from making it safer to eat and giving it a longer shelf life.

Have you ever wondered how catering services manage to transport their food so that it’s still good and fresh when they serve it? Cooking the food on location is often impossible, and they can’t just prepare it in their own kitchen and cart it to the party guests on the other side of the town.

Or can they?

The technique many caterers use is called blast chilling. It’s a method of safe and swift preservation that is custom designed for hot food. First, they cook the food. Then, they rapidly cool it down from 158 °F (+70°C) to 37 °F (+3 °C) or below. As long as the process takes under 90 minutes, the food remains in the exact condition it was before chilling. A normal storage cooler could never manage that (shockingly, they can take 12 to 23 hours to cool food properly), so a special “air blast chiller” cabinet is used for the process. The frozen food is easy to transport and all they need to do is heat it up on location—its taste and quality has remained the same.

Since the technique is effective and relatively easy, its use has started to spread beyond catering. For instance, the next time your frozen TV dinner tastes particularly appealing, chances are it has been blast chilled.

Our ancestors realized that one of the most effective ways to preserve food was to seal it away from the elements, especially oxygen. They also knew that the best way to cover food was with even more food.

This is how two classic preservation techniques were born. Aspic (which is essentially savory jelly) was created around the middle ages, when cooks found the way to turn various stocks and consommés (clear stock or broth soup) into gelatin. They started encasing food (particularly meat and seafood) inside chunks of aspic. The gelatin prevented oxygen from spoiling the food, and provided a delicious addition to the eventual meal.

Confit also relies on shutting off the oxygen. There are two variations: The meat confit, where food is slowly cooked submerged in its own fat, cooled off (so the fat forms a solid layer all around the meat) and sealed in a container. The fruit version replaces the fat with sugar water.

Both aspic and particularly confit are also revered cooking techniques. The Confit d’Canard (duck’s leg confit) of southwestern France is considered a legendary delicacy.

Air is essential to plants and animals alike. But once they become food, air suddenly turns into an enemy: The oxygen that once gave them life now aids microbes and oxidization, doing its best to decompose the food as quickly as possible.

Food industry has gotten around the problem with a trick called “modified atmosphere”. It’s exactly what it sounds like—they artificially create an atmosphere that prevents spoilage. The practice originated in the 1930s, when food ships started filling their holds with carbon dioxide in order to increase their cargo’s shelf life. Later, the industry developed packaging techniques that helped encase products in the kind of gas that was optimal for the shelf life of that particular foodstuff.

Although the practice may sound suspicious, modified atmosphere gases are actually completely safe. They’re just different mixtures of oxygen, nitrogen and carbon dioxide, all of which are naturally present in the Earth’s atmosphere.

Lye is a strong alkaline solution that is commonly used in things like soap, drain cleaners and various cleaning agents. It is extremely caustic and highly poisonous. Despite all this, it’s also used for food preservation.

When combined with fat (either animal fat or vegetable oil), lye reacts by starting a process called saponification. The end result of this reaction is usually soap, but certain lye solutions (“food-grade lye”) can be used to saponify food. This changes the texture, scent and flavor of the food to a great extent.

The most notable lye-treated foods are probably Lutefisk (lye-soaked whitefish) and cured olives. The fish is gelatinous and has an extremely sharp taste and smell, whereas the olives become soft and slightly soapy.

Lye treated food is considered a delicacy by some. But before you decide to make some, please remember that the treatment process is fairly challenging. Food grade lye is hard to come by and even if you find some, getting just one step of the process wrong can result in a dangerously poisonous meal.

Our modern world puts a huge emphasis on fresh and clean food. While there’s nothing wrong with this, it couldn’t be further removed from the priorities of our ancestors.

Humanity has been cooking meals for a long time, and the oldest way to treat food is the simplest: Just let stuff be and see if the end result is edible. Of course, we don’t call it exactly that: We dance around it with fancy terms like “biopreservation”. Still, deliberate spoiling is at the heart of many of our favorite foodstuffs.

The most commonly used variety of this is fermentation. Our favorite drinks (beer and wine) are completely dependent on this controlled spoiling process. Many milk products and baked goods rely on it. Many charcuterie products (prepared meats such as salami and dry aged beef) also benefit from the fermentation process.

Fermentation can also be used to effortlessly prepare food in most extreme conditions. An old Icelandian recipe called Hákarl requires no cooking: It’s chunks of pressed, disemboweled shark that has fermented underground for six weeks. Alaskan Inuit tribes are also known to prepare their catch by letting it ferment. This method is not without its failures, though—a lovely snack of fermented walrus can come with a side order of botulism.

Pauli Poisuo enjoys his food and also writes for Cracked.com. Why not follow him on Twitter?

Fast food is a relatively recent innovation, only about as old as the automobile, and not really taking off until the 1950s. But in that short time, it has become an ultimately pervasive part of our culture; outside the most desolate tribes, it would be difficult to find someone who has not visited a McDonald’s in his life. Fast food has established a mythos all its own; below are ten strangest marketing stunts, lawsuits, and scandals to have ever struck our drive thru world.

Burger King is no stranger to weird marketing stunts, such as the dreadful 2004 Coq Roq campaign, wherein faux nu metal rockers with chicken masks on thrashed to music filled with double entendre. Their mascot—a towering, creepy King with unmoving features, was mercifully retired in 2011. But perhaps the worst idea in company history was their 2009 Facebook “Whopper Sacrifice” campaign. The premise was simple; use the Burger King application to unfriend 10 people on Facebook, and you would get a coupon for a free Whopper. Normally, there is no notification involved in unfriending someone, but in this instance, Burger King would send the friend a message informing them that their friendship was less important to you than a free sandwich. The campaign was promptly dropped, but not before people leapt at the opportunity, abandoning almost 234,000 friends in the process (that’s more than 23,000 Whoppers).

Taco Bell is perhaps best known for its Chihuahua ad campaign, which was often derided as racist. The ads, starring Gidget, were stopped in 2000. Gidget didn’t remain unemployed for long; she found several other roles, including a spot in “Legally Blonde 2: Red, White, and Blonde”. Taco Bell didn’t fare so well… they’d stolen the Chihuahua idea from two Michigan men, Joseph Shields and Thomas Rinks. The pair pitched the idea to Taco Bell in the 1990s, but were rejected. Shortly thereafter, the restaurant chain’s new ad agency began using the concept. The men took Taco Bell to court, and in 2003, a jury awarded them $30 million. The judge promptly added on $12 million. Shields and Rinks walked away with $42 million for their troubles.

A subsidiary of Yum! Brands (which also owns KFC and Pizza Hut), Taco Bell enjoys considerable popularity worldwide, and has locations selling its Mexican fare in several countries throughout the world. A notable exception: Mexico. They made two attempts to crack the Mexican market, in 1992 and 2007, but both times folded due to lack of patronage.

Wendy’s is best known for its simple commercials starring earnest, plainspoken founder Dave Thomas. Thomas was working as a head cook in a restaurant in Fort Wayne, Indiana, when Kentucky Fried Chicken owner Colonel Harland Sanders came calling, selling franchises. Thomas, as well as the family for he worked for, bought in. In doing so, Dave worked closely with the Colonel on marketing ideas. It was Dave Thomas who suggested the idea of buckets of chicken, which help keep the product crisp. He also suggested Sanders appear in his own commercials.

The response was phenomenal, and Dave Thomas was later able to sell his share in the restaurants back to to Sanders for $1.5 million, thus giving him the capital to open Wendy’s. He’d later use this advertising formula to great effect in his own restaurants, appearing in over 800 commercials.

Despite its feel-good American dream origins, Wendy’s is not immune from the bizarre. In 2005, an employee named Steve LeMay and a co-worker were caught robbing the safe from the Manchester, NH store where they worked. The co-worker’s name? Ronald MacDonald.

In a previous list, I detailed the immense popularity of KFC on Christmas Eve in Japan, with lines snaking out the door. While business thrives in America, you aren’t likely to see that kind of rush the next time you stop in for a bucket of chicken. Unless you’d happened by in early May of 2009. None other than Oprah Winfrey advertised on her show that a coupon could be downloaded on her website for a free grilled chicken meal at KFC. According to a KFC press release, they received “unprecedented and overwhelming response”, which is the politically correct way of saying that the campaign turned into a complete circus. Millions of coupons were printed, the website couldn’t handle the traffic, and hordes of people descended on the restaurants, which quickly ran out of food. By the time KFC axed the program, an astonishing 10.5 million coupons were printed, which were eventually honored with rainchecks.

Whenever the subject of the frivolity of lawsuits comes up, the 1992 McDonald’s coffee case always pops into the conversation. While on its surface, it sounds ridiculous that someone should be able to sue a restaurant for Stella Liebeck burning herself with a beverage that by its very nature is supposed to be hot, there are several less obvious elements at play. First, McDonald’s served its coffee extremely hot—in excess of 180 degrees (your home coffeemaker will generally clock in around 140), and Liebeck suffered horrifying third degree burns right down to the bone. There are pictures available online, but I don’t suggest you look for them unless you have a strong stomach.

Second, Liebeck did not sue McDonald’s hoping to reap a fortune. Initially, the 79 year old only wanted a settlement to cover her medical expenses, which were in excess of $10,000. McDonald’s offered a mere $800.

Liebeck retained an attorney, and much legal wrangling followed. McDonald’s staunchly refused to settle despite multiple attempts to mediate the case before trial. During the court hearing, it came to light that the restaurant had fielded hundreds of complaints about burns from their coffee, and had settled many claims in the past, some for as much as $500,000. This was pretty much the kiss of death for McDonald’s; the jury awarded Stella Liebeck $2.86 million. The judge reduced the settlement, and both McDonald’s and Liebeck appealed. Before further legal proceedings occurred, both parties settled out of court for an undisclosed sum.

Tim Hortons is a Canadian donut chain, with some presence in the United States, and some scattered stores in the United Arab Emirates and Oman. Unlike a lot of restaurants, Tim Hortons was named for a real person—professional NHL defenseman Miles Gilbert “Tim” Horton, who played for several teams, including the Toronto Maple Leafs and the Buffalo Sabres. On February 21, 1974, Horton was driving home from a hockey game in Toronto in his De Tomaso Pantera sports car. When police attempted to pull him over, he fled, reaching speeds over 100mph. When rounding a curve, he lost control of the car and hit a concrete culvert. Horton, who was not wearing a seatbelt, was killed instantly. It was discovered that his blood alcohol level was twice the legal limit. Horton’s business partner promptly paid his widow $1 million for her shares in the restaurant chain. Today, the company’s revenue exceeds $2.5 billion.

Most would agree that their neighborhood pizzeria serves far better fare than Pizza Hut, whose formulaic, prepackaged recipes do very little to stimulate the palate. But the local joint will only deliver in a five mile radius. Pizza Hut delivered to space. In April of 2001, the company paid the Russian space program approximately a million dollars to take a pizza aboard a rocket sent to resupply the International Space Station orbiting earth. Rolled into the price was a photo op with cosmonaut Yuri Usachov, who offered a thumbs up after receiving his snack. Since it is difficult to taste things in zero gravity, the vacuum sealed salami pie they delivered was heavily spiced.

Rahm Emanuel isn’t exactly a household name, but he has maintained a distinguished career in American politics, serving in multiple advisory positions to Presidents Clinton and Obama, most notably as White House Chief of Staff. He is currently Mayor of Chicago. In high school, Emanuel worked part time at an Arby’s restaurant, a chain known for its roast beef sandwiches. One day, while operating the meat slicer, he severely cut his right middle finger. Being a teenager, he eschewed getting stitches and decided to go for a swim in Lake Michigan. Infection set in, and doctors were forced to amputate the top of his finger.

As an interesting aside, one of Rahm’s brothers is Hollywood superagent Ari Emanuel, the person on whom the character Ari Gold is based on in the show “Entourage”.

Mark Cuban is one of the world’s richest men, a dot com billionaire who owns the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks and regularly features on the NBC show “Shark Tank”, investing in startup businesses. In 2002, the outspoken Cuban lashed out at Ed Rush, the NBA’s head of officiating, claiming that he wouldn’t hire Rush to manage a Dairy Queen. He was fined half a million dollars by the NBA for his big mouth. The popular ice cream chain took offense at Cuban’s insult, inviting him to manage a Dairy Queen for a day if he thought it was so easy. He accepted, good naturedly serving cones and signing autographs at a store in Coppell, Texas. The event was a media circus, with lines over an hour long. Cuban had considerable trouble mastering the swirl of a soft serve cone, telling customers “Be patient with me, please. I’m new at this. It might not be pretty, but it works.”

Subway is the world’s largest restaurant chain—as of this writing, there are 39,517 Subways operating around the globe, in 102 countries and territories. The most exclusive location? Inside 1 World Trade Center. The restaurant sits inside a trailer-like “pod” that is lifted up level by level as the construction of the skyscraper progresses, from the ground all the way up to the planned 105th floor. The restaurant was opened to cater to union workers, who only have half hour lunch breaks, and thus couldn’t leave the premises for food, since leaving required waiting for a hoist to bring them back to ground level.

Most people view snails and slugs as pests. But these slimy streakers are far removed from one-dimensional garden destroyers. They amaze scientists with their abilities, and certain individuals have become the darlings of mass media.

The slow creatures can also get a little creepy. They hide inside humans and, thanks to the military, have evolved into things that include cyborg spy snails.

10 Strange Survival Mystery

Hahajima Island of Japan is home to a fragile snail. All right, “fragile” in the sense that it is really tiny—around 0.25 centimeters (0.1 in). A thumb can easily crush Tornatellides boeningi.

When researchers recently collected bird feces on the island, they found that it contained snail shells. Oddly, some of the snails appeared to be alive. Curious, the team fed over 100 mollusks to a captive population of the two bird species known to snack on the snails.

Remarkably, around 15 percent were expelled unharmed. One snail even gave birth shortly after being pooped out. The digestive system is not a Disney ride. The snails endure a harsh journey lasting 30 minutes to two hours. Why such a good percentage appear to suffer no ill effect is a mystery.^[1]

The best theories at this point?

Small equals survival. Tinier shells might be less prone to cracks and digestive juices seeping in. Tornatellides could also seal themselves away behind a mucous film that safeguards the shell’s opening.

9 Why Snail Sex Is Slow

One might be forgiven for thinking, “It is slow, because they are snails.” As garden snails are hermaphrodites, they can technically reproduce by themselves. However, they seem to prefer a partner. Each snail has eggs and sperm, seeking to both fertilize another and get fertilized at the same time.

The real reason why snails mate for up to three hours, which looks more like a cautious game than a passionate embrace, could be for their health. Researchers feel that snails do not really mind off-loading sperm but are careful about the quality of sperm they receive. Thus, they investigate the situation carefully.

If the partner is not desirable, the other might attempt to impregnate it while avoiding the unhealthy snail’s own attempts to do so. The whole dance is wrought with concentration and frustration. The complexities of snail courtship take precedence over everything, even safety. This is why mating snails are often out in the open and oblivious to their own vulnerability.^[2]

8 Snails Inside People

In 2018, an 11-year-old boy played inside a tide pool in California. During this time, he scraped his elbow. His parents made sure that the injury was disinfected and cleaned. However, a week after their trip to the beach, the wound still festered. They took their son to the doctor and explained that there was a tenacious blister that kept growing. The child was otherwise normal and healthy.

The medical staff decided to drain the blister, which was red and full of pus. After the abscess was opened, it sprang a tiny surprise on everyone—a minute sea snail. The checkered periwinkle was still alive despite being covered in human flesh and wound ooze for over a week.

Luckily, it never nibbled on the boy. Periwinkles are herbivores, and this one survived thanks to its usual habitat. They browse shoreline rocks, and since air is not always good for sea snails, the species can seal off its shell with thick mucus. This prevented the periwinkle from suffocating inside the wound.^[3]

7 Stepfather Snails

During a 2012 study, researchers found another great dad in the animal kingdom. The male marine whelk cares for his offspring, while the female leaves after mating and gluing egg sacks to his back. Each capsule contains about 250 eggs. The male must carry dozens of these bags for about a month, during which he loses a lot of weight.

However, the whelk is a dedicated dad. The species slithers about in California’s mudflats making sure that the eggs stay hydrated and cool. As if being a single dad is not hard enough, his kids are violent. Upon hatching, the baby snails massacre each other. The few siblings that survive are well-fed.

Worse, DNA analysis showed that, on average, a male cares for a mere 24 percent of his own progeny. The rest are fathered by up to 25 other males with which the mother was involved. Researchers believe that the dads accept the burden to show females that they are good parents and thus to earn more mating rights.^[4]

6 Mutant Love Drama

The common garden snail is a familiar sight. Normally, their shells swirl only to the right. A rare genetic mutation must occur for the sides to switch. In 2016, one was found in London and named Jeremy.

A year later, scientists wanted to learn more about “lefty” genetics and decided they wanted to have his babies. Since his condition prevented him from a successful mating with normal snails, they had to find another mutant.

In 2017, the call went out to find Jeremy a wife-husband. (They are hermaphrodites.) The world’s largest broadcasting organization decided to help. The BBC made the lonely snail’s plight public, and two mates were found. Enter Lefty, donated by a snail enthusiast from Ipswich, and Tomeu, who was spared after a BBC-watching restaurant owner from Catalan noticed one appetizer was a match.

With the whole world watching, Jeremy was rejected. The other two got together and made 170 baby snails. At least, shortly before Jeremy died that same year, he managed a fling with Tomeu that produced 56 babies.^[5]

5 They Get Kidnapped

Antarctic pteropods are tiny, glass-like snails. As they are delicate and live in the vast, dangerous ocean, pteropods have evolved to be highly toxic. This survival strategy comes with an unusual risk of getting kidnapped.

At one point, crustaceans called amphipods realized that the snails are so poisonous that predators avoid them. Not only are the amphipods immune to the mollusks’ deadly zap but they also abduct the pteropods to use as shields.

The crustaceans use two pairs of legs to keep the snails hostage, wearing the unlucky victims like backpacks. It takes a few snails to build the living armor, but they can cover up to half of the host’s back. This criminal behavior suits the amphipods well because it convinces predators to go look for lunch elsewhere.^[6]

The snails get a raw deal. Once kidnapped, they cannot feed and eventually starve to death. To add insult to injury, their corpses are often kept by the amphipods that abducted them.

4 Lonely George

There was once a Hawaiian tree snail that lived an unusual life. Never did this slimy creature sail up a tree in the wilderness because Lonely George was born and raised in the laboratory.

His ancestors—the last 10 Achatinella apexfulva—were captured for a breeding program in 1997. The attempt at snail romance was a disaster. For unknown reasons, all the babies died except for one. George lived for 14 years at the University of Hawaii, becoming a local celebrity and doing tours to educate schoolchildren about the environment.

George was the last of his kind. The mysterious maladies that wiped out his peers also killed off the original 10 adult snails. Hawaiian tree snails were once so plentiful that 19th-century records describe how Europeans collected 10,000 a day.

This harvest was half of the problem that ended up killing the species. At one point, the rosy wolfsnail was brought to Hawaii. The idea was to use this foreign species to eat another invasive snail, the African land snail. Except the rosy wildly feasted on native species, too. George died in 2019.^[7]

3 The Pink Slug

Australia is home to some of the strangest species on Earth. This fact echoed in the recent discovery of a new slug. The species (Triboniophorus aff. graeffei) is big and neon pink.

Measuring 20 centimeters (8 in) long, it crawls along a single mountaintop. For a long time, scientists knew the creatures were on Mount Kaputar but thought they belonged to the red triangle variety. The latter is a common sight along Australia’s east coast. A new study identified the separate species as one that evolved on Kaputar.

The slugs often live among red eucalyptus leaves, a clue as to why they turn hot pink. But camouflage does not explain why the slugs spend a lot of time out in the open. Their unusual shade might be an evolutionary quirk.

Mount Kaputar was an isolated oasis in a desert for millions of years, and such havens can produce odd creatures. Apart from giant pink slugs, the mountain also spawned unique species like the Kaputar cannibal snail and the Kaputar hairy snail.^[8]

2 Solar-Powered Slugs

As the name suggests, Elysia chlorotica is stuffed with chloroplasts. This allows the sea slugs to do something amazing—they photosynthesize like plants. Similar to plants, the slugs are green and leaf-shaped.

Found off the United States’ East Coast, this ability does not come naturally. They poach the chloroplasts from algae. After absorbing enough, they do not eat for more than nine months. They merely bask in the sun and make their own sustenance.

It remains unclear how the chloroplasts live so long and remain unharmed by the slug’s gut or immune system. In turn, the slug mysteriously survives deadly amounts of free oxygen radicals produced by photosynthesis.^[9]

How do the plant parts and the animal parts even interact?

Only a thorough analysis could clarify the symbiosis. Unfortunately, this unique animal-plant hybrid is almost impossible to find in the wild and does not live long in the laboratory.

1 Future Spies

Snails do not care for human politics. But the intelligence community cares about snails. The research arm of the United States military (DARPA) wants mollusks as batteries and listening devices.

In 2012, a project successfully turned a snail into a living battery. The experiment used the animal’s blood sugar to recharge a battery-like implant, which generated a sustainable amount of energy for months.

Although the snail equals just below the charge of an AAA battery, researchers have big dreams. They plan on tweaking the technology-biology link until snails can generate enough power to run microelectronics. This would allow the creatures to slide up and down enemy walls as living sensors and detectors. They could even get saddled with miniature cameras.^[10]

Although turning snails into cyborgs sounds weird and hurtful, the mollusks live close to normal lives. The success of their energy capacity depends on resting and eating during which glucose levels recharge the battery.

There’s an old saying that pizza is like sex. When it’s good, it’s really, really good. And when it’s bad, it’s still pretty good. One of the world’s most popular foods, approximately three billion fresh and one billion frozen pizzas are sold in the US every year, more than 12 pies per person. Below are ten strange tales about pizza, from maggots and bombs to war criminals and gremlins.

10Contaminants

Being one of the most popular food items in the world, you’d think the government would keep a careful eye on the pizza trade. Except that if you ever saw a list of the contamination levels the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) found acceptable, you might go on a hunger strike. Tomato paste and pizza sauce can be pretty funky, with an allowance of 30 fly eggs per 100 grams, or 15 or more fly eggs and one or more maggots per 100 grams. When you consider the crust and toppings, you’ll most certainly be tasting mold, mildew, insect fragments, aphids, rodent hair, and what the FDA politely calls “mammalian excreta”.

9The Moon

As mentioned in a previous list, Pizza Hut is no stranger to wild marketing stunts. In 1998, they had the idea to burn their logo into the surface of the moon with high-powered lasers. Luckily, common sense prevailed. Upon consulting experts, they learned that the necessary technology was still some years off. Moreover, for earthlings to be able to see the logo with the naked eye, it would have had to be the size of Texas. In the ensuing years, Pizza Hut has made several deals with the cash-strapped Russian space program, including emblazoning their logo on a rocket and delivering a pizza to the International Space Station.

8Nguyen Ngoc Loan

On February 1, 1968, perhaps the most enduring image of the Vietnam conflict was captured when photographer Eddie Adams snapped a shot of South Vietnamese national police commander Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing an unidentified Viet Cong prisoner on the streets of Saigon. The photo (which would later go on to earn Adams the Pulitzer in 1969) is an unflinching study on the horrors of war—the bullet from Loan’s pistol can actually be seen exiting the man’s skull. While the Vietnam War was hardly popular, this incident in particular helped fuel antiwar sentiments. Three months after the incident, Loan was wounded in action (he would eventually lose his right leg). Originally transported to Australia, he was so reviled there that he was moved to the US. Although there was talk of deporting Nguyen back to South Vietnam as a war criminal, he and his family were allowed to stay in the US.

After the war, he opened up a pizzeria in a Virginia suburb of Washington, D.C. He operated the restaurant, called “Les Trois Continents” for some 15 years, until he was identified. Business fell off, and Loan reportedly found threatening graffiti in the bathroom. He was forced out of business in 1991. Loan died of cancer on July 14, 1998, aged 67.

7Bulletproof

In 1969, former Marine Richard Davis was delivering pizzas in Detroit when he was held up. In the ensuing shootout, he wounded two of his attackers, but he was shot twice. While recovering, Davis came up with the idea for a bulletproof vest. Bullet-resistant vests have been in use at least since the 1500s, but up until about 45 years ago, they were bulky and ineffective, composed of heavy sheets of metal. Davis sought to create a vest that could be concealed beneath clothing. He designed a vest made from nylon and called his body armor Second Chance. Davis so believed in his product that he marketed it by bringing his vests to individual police stations, putting one on, and allowing an officer to shoot him in the chest with a sidearm. By the mid ’70s, the nylon was replaced with Kevlar, a synthetic fiber originally developed for use in tires. It is estimated that bulletproof vests have saved the lives of over 2,000 police officers in the United States alone.

6Danger

Richard Davis survived his brush with muggers because he was an armed ex-Marine. Other drivers aren’t nearly as fortunate. Although it might seem like an innocuous profession, often performed by teenagers, delivering pizza can be extremely dangerous. Robberies and beatings occur on a weekly basis. Drivers are often lured with fake orders and addresses into places where they can be attacked. In the most extreme cases, drivers have even been raped and murdered. Worse still, the major pizza chains do not allow their drivers to carry concealed weapons. In 2004, when a Pizza Hut driver shot and killed a robber while on the job, he was fired.

530 Minutes or Less

Domino’s Pizza got its start in University of Michigan college town Ann Arbor in 1960. Today, this multi-billion-dollar company is controlled by the controversial Bain Capital (co-founded by ex-US Presidential hopeful Mitt Romney). Domino’s has largely stuck to more orthodox advertising strategies than its competitor Pizza Hut. In fact, the company’s greatest claim to fame was their guarantee to deliver in 30 minutes or less, or the pizza would be free.

Unfortunately, the policy put them in some pretty damning legal crosshairs when their drivers got into accidents. Lawsuits alleged that the drivers were forced to drive recklessly to meet their deadlines. In 1992, Domino’s paid $2.8 million to the family of an Illinois woman whose van was struck by a vehicle delivering pizza. But then in 1993, a court awarded $78,750,000 to a Missouri woman stemming from injuries she’d received in a 1989 crash. They settled out of court for a sum believed to have been approximately $15 million, but the policy was scrapped.

4The Noid

As advertising icons go, Domino’s Noid was particularly unappealing—a monosyllabic gremlin-like character in a red rabbit suit meant to manifest the difficulties in delivering a pizza in the 30-minute deadline. The Noid would do anything in his power to make the driver late, including shooting the pizzas with a gun that turned them ice cold. Much like the Trix rabbit, the Noid was constantly foiled. The gimmick was popular enough to roll it into its own video games for computers and the Nintendo.

The story of the Noid took a truly bizarre turn on January 30, 1989, when a deranged customer named Kenneth Lamar Noid burst into a Domino’s in Atlanta, Georgia, taking a pair of employees hostage. Kenneth Noid actually believed the ads were an attack on him. The siege lasted five hours, with Noid making outlandish demands for $100,000 and a getaway car, among other things. He forced the employees to make him pizza during the ordeal. After they escaped, Noid turned himself over to police. He was charged with a laundry list of felonies, but he was found not guilty by reason of insanity.

3Philip Workman

While binging on cocaine, Workman robbed a Wendy’s. An employee triggered a silent alarm, and Workman fled when the police arrived. What happened next remains contested to this day. Workman alleged that he fled, but when the officers caught up with him, he attempted to relinquish his firearm, but it accidentally discharged when they hit him with a flashlight. The police returned fire, wounding Workman.

In the melee, Lieutenant Ronald Oliver was killed. The trial, which many regard as a sham, eventually condemned Workman to death. There was some evidence that Lt. Oliver died from friendly fire, and Workman was briefly granted a stay of execution, but a judge ruled that the evidence did not warrant an entire new trial.

Perhaps as some kind of last-minute act of martyrdom, Workman requested that a vegetarian pizza be delivered to any homeless person living near the prison in lieu of his last meal. His request was denied. When the story went public, there was an outpouring of support for the cause, and hundreds of pizzas were delivered to homeless shelters throughout the country.

2OJ Simpson

In America, the day of the year when the most pizzas are sold is Superbowl Sunday. But remarkably enough, some other odd events have caused spikes and drops in pizza sales. One such phenomenon was the OJ Simpson saga; on June 17, 1994, the nation was glued to their television sets, watching as the former football hero fled from police with friend Al Cowlings in a low-speed chase. Domino’s reported a huge increase in sales as the white Bronco crept down the highway.

Several months later, the pizza chain would notice another bizarre trend when sales skyrocketed in the moments leading up to the verdict in the case. According to company spokesman Tim McIntyre, things slowed down considerably a little after noon, when the decision was finally read out. McIntyre said “We could barely believe it, but not a single pizza was ordered in the United States for five minutes between 1 o’clock and 1:05.”

1The Pizza Bomber

The case of the pizza bomber is one of the most bizarre crimes in American history. On August 28, 2003, pizza delivery man Brian Wells burst into a bank in Erie, Pennsylvania. He was armed with a shotgun and had a bomb attached to his neck. Wells requested $250,000, but he received only $8,702 and was intercepted by the police in the parking lot. From there, he proceeded to tell a weird story—that he was delivering pizza when some men forced him to put on the bomb. Unless he pulled off the robbery for them, it would explode and kill him. While negotiating with the police, and minutes before the bomb squad arrived to disarm the device, it detonated, killing Wells.

The case remained a mystery for years, but was solved in 2007, when several people were indicted for the conspiracy. It is believed that Wells was in on it the entire time, but did not know that a live bomb was going to be used. When he found out the bomb was real, his co-conspirators forced him to strap it on at gunpoint. The money from the robbery was to be used to hire a hitman for prostitute Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong, who wished to kill her father, whom she believed to be wealthy. Diehl-Armstrong was sentenced to life plus 30 years, and another another man involved in the plot, Kenneth Barnes, received 45 years.

The story would go on to be used as the plot point in several television shows, as well as the basis for the largely forgettable comedy 30 Minutes or Less. In his review of the film, critic Roger Ebert said “Moral of the story: If you occupy the demographic that this film is aimed at, Hollywood doesn’t have a very high opinion of you.”

Mike Devlin is an aspiring novelist.

Not every food scandal revolves around a batch of moldy jam or some undercooked hamburgers. They can range from hilariously funny events to stories of terrifying neglect.

And sometimes, they are really, really strange.

10Glow-In-The-Dark Meat

In 2005, Australians were alarmed by a very strange phenomenon in their fridges: their pork chops were more luminous than their fridge lights. The meat literally glowed in the dark.

The locals understandably panicked, going as far as to suspect radioactive contamination in the continent’s meat supply. However, the authorities quickly pointed out that the meat’s eerie glow is caused by a simple, harmless bacteria. But while they were technically correct, that still didn’t mean the meat was good to eat.

The bacteria in question is called Pseudomonas fluorescens. While it doesn’t cause food poisoning by itself, it is only present in large amounts when the meat hasn’t been stored in a proper temperature, which means there are probably other bacteria that are less friendly to the eater.

9Mud Pepper

China is a hotbed of increasingly bizarre food scandals. When a country has over a million hungry mouths to feed and a famously relaxed attitude on work legislation, it’s no surprise that food manufacturers are tempted to get creative.

One prime example is from China’s Guangdong province, where a market was caught selling black pepper and white pepper that were not what they were supposed to be. The white pepper was made from flour, and the black pepper was simply ground mud.

When the vendor was confronted over the fact that his spices weren’t spices (or, in the case of his black pepper, even edible), he couldn’t understand the problem. After all, his products wouldn’t kill anyone.

8Sugared Water Sold As Apple Juice

Apple juice is not an expensive commodity. It’s not a complicated one, either: you take some apples and make juice. Yet in 1981, the Beech-Nut Nutrition Corporation started selling apple juice that was 100 percent counterfeit. In search of better profits, they had created a recipe that was 20 percent cheaper to make than regular apple juice. This may have had something to do with the fact that it contained no apples at all. The drink was just colored sugar water with some syrup for flavor, yet was marketed as 100 percent apple juice.

The company shipped their unique take on apple juice to multiple countries for 14 months before they were caught and brought to justice. To their credit, they were ashamed enough to accept full responsibility and paid millions in fines and compensation.

7Fake Eggs

Eggs are a food item that seems impossible to counterfeit. The manufacturing process is as organic as it gets. Yet the Chinese food industry has managed to do the impossible. A mixture of resin, starch, coagulant, and pigments makes up the egg white and the yolk, shaped into a perfect egg with a mold. Then, the ”egg” is dipped in an amalgamate of paraffin wax, gypsum powder, and calcium carbonate to create its shell. These completely artificial eggs are quick to manufacture (one person can make up to 1,500 in a day), beautiful to behold, inexpensive, and absolutely worthless in nutritional value.

However, this particular scandal might have consequences that are a lot less scandalous in the long run. The eggheads at Silicon Valley have been looking into the process and are quickly developing artificial eggs that are cheaper and longer lasting than the real ones. These ”Beyond Eggs” are also extremely tasty—and completely suitable for vegetarians and vegans.

6Lead-Paint Paprika

When you think of Hungarian food, the first thing that comes to mind is probably paprika. This delicious pepper variation is more important to Hungary than bacon is to America: it’s the primary flavor of their entire cuisine, and they hold it in extremely high regard . . . which made it all the worse when some greedy individuals tainted the spice in 1994.

Paprika is not a terribly expensive spice. Still, certain shady people decided to make it a little more cost-effective by lacing it with lead paint, of all things. This made it weigh more and turned its color more vivid, both of which made it fetch a better price. Sadly, it also made unwary diners eat lead paint, which is never a good idea.

When dozens of people started falling ill and a few even died, a massive sampling process found as much as 5.8 percent of all paprika in the affected area was tainted with lead paint. Although the situation has since been cleared up, the government recognizes that paprika’s reputation may have suffered a massive blow and continues to control the paprika business with an iron hand.

5Irradiated Cereal

During the 1940s and 1950s, the United States put a lot of focus into harnessing the power of the atom. The entire country was determined to uncover the pros and radioactive cons of nuclear energy.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and food company Quaker Oats were also keen to participate. So they started feeding radioactive breakfast cereal to schoolchildren.

In an effort to see what small amounts of irradiation would do to a kid, the children in the Walter E. Fernald State School were fed radioactive cereal for extended periods of time. Not only were the majority of the children mentally challenged, they were often bribed into eating their poison with gifts such as tickets to baseball games.

Since the scandal was declassified in 1993, MIT has been very open about the case and regrets that ”proper procedures for consent were not followed” in the experiment.

4Rat Or Lamb?

Lamb meat is popular for a number of reasons. It’s delicious and nutritious. It can be eaten by Muslims (who are forbidden to eat pork), and sheep are far easier to keep than cows.

However, some Chinese meat producers noticed there’s another animal that, other than being forbidden for Muslims, fits the same description: the rat. So they started to sell rat meat as lamb. They didn’t just use rat meat, either: foxes, minks and various other animals that had not undergone any inspection ended up doused in gelatin, red pigment, and nitrates, only to be sold as prime mutton.

Before long, people got suspicious and the Chinese officials decided they had to do something. The rat meat ring was eventually busted.

The strange thing is that there was really no need for this deception in the first place. Rat meat is a perfectly acceptable snack in some parts of the country, so the criminals could easily (and legally) have sold their fare.

3Toxic Oil Syndrome

In 1981, Spain encountered a strange, new disease. It was a lung infection that seemed to fight all known behavior patterns of such diseases. It was often extremely localized and was somehow able to resist antibiotics. Six hundred people died before the health officials managed to locate the cause: tainted oil.

A manufacturer had sold poisonous, industrial-grade colza oil (which is about as safe for human consumption as motor oil) to street vendors, who had sold it to the public as prime olive oil. A hasty public announcement campaign and a promise to swap all tainted bottles to actual olive oil quickly ended the outbreak.

However, some people remain skeptical to this day. The first cases of the ”disease” had happened near a US military base, and many who got ill claimed they had never touched the tainted oil. This leaves the case with a number of delicious conspiracy theories, though they are probably best enjoyed without any ”olive” oil.

2Exploding Watermelons

If there is one thing food absolutely should not do, that thing is “explode.” Of course, if there’s one place where that somehow happens, that place is China.

Perhaps the strangest food scandal China has seen happened in 2011, when the watermelons in Jiangtsu province suddenly started blowing up. The blasts ranged from simple splitting and cracking to full, grenade-like explosions with wet shrapnel and comically flying bits of shell. One farmer described his melons as landmines and couldn’t sleep because the explosions made him too nervous.

The farmers of the area had been using a chemical called forchlorfenuron to boost their crops. However, they had ignored the fact that watermelons are extremely sensitive to such growth boosters. As a result, their growth became so rapid it was literally explosive.

Instead of getting huge amounts of large, money-making melons, the farmers lost their entire crops. To add salt to their wounds, the largest Chinese TV channel picked up the story and they became the laughingstock of the entire nation.

1Radioactive Beef

Japan is renowned for its delicious meat products. Its wagyu cattle give some of the most tender and juicy meats in the world: the Kobe variant in particular is praised by many as the best beef in existence.

The country is also known for the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster of 2011. Caused by a tsunami that tore through Japan, the Fukushima catastrophe was a series of massive equipment failures and nuclear meltdowns that released disturbing amounts of radioactive materials.

Some of these materials ended up in their beef.

The officials were aware of the problem, but they were so busy with the tsunami’s aftermath that at least 500 cows tainted by radioactivity were slaughtered and sold before they could stop it. The cattle had been fed with hay from Fukushima’s immediate vicinity. The government standard for radioactive cesium in cattle feed is 300 becquerel units per kilogram, while this particular feed had an unbelievable 97,000 becquerels per kilogram.

The radioactivity in the meat itself isn’t nearly that high, so the officials say it shouldn’t present any immediate health concerns to the public. However, people pointed out that the long-term effects of ingested radioactive cesium are completely unknown. As a result, no one is ever willingly going to eat beef from the Fukushima area again, and those who have eaten it are probably going to feel pretty paranoid for the next few decades.

Pauli Poisuo also writes for Cracked.com. Follow him on Twitter.

Everyone loves a hamburger or pizza every once in a while. However, enjoying fast food often involves shutting out the knowledge that the places we get it from are usually seven kinds of horrible. They can be owned by bigots, staffed by malicious teenagers (or complete maniacs), and cleaned up by almost no one. And sometimes, things get really weird.

10Chick-Fil-A Gets Homophobic

For most fast-food joints, a customer is a customer. As long as they’re not buck naked or drunk out of their minds, they are welcome to stuff their faces with greasy deliciousness. A fast-food restaurant is a neutral zone—political views or sexual orientation rarely play a part.

Unless you go to a Chick-Fil-A. These days, many view the mere act of eating there as a political statement.

In June 2012, it was revealed that the chicken sandwich chain had made significant contributions to organizations that opposed the LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender) community. The CEO of Chick-Fil-A then made a number of statements that made it obvious that he (and, by extension, his company) was very much against same-sex marriages. This caused an immediate outrage and boycott from the LGBT folks. This, in turn, caused a backlash from conservatives, who went as far as inventing a Chick-Fil-A Appreciation Day to salute the restaurant’s political stance.

The company soon stated that they would leave political conversations to politicians and later ceased all donations to anti-LGBT organizations. Yet the scandal has made its mark. To this day, few pro-LGBT people frequent the restaurant if they have any other options.

9Ajisen Ramen Soup Base Scandal

Most successful fast-food companies have a signature dish (such as McDonald’s Big Mac) or a secret sauce (such as, well, McDonald’s Secret Sauce) that is meant to set them apart from their competition. For Ajisen Ramen, a famous Chinese fast-food chain, that dish was their soup stock. Ajisen Ramen’s menu was based around noodle soup, and their secret was that the stock used for every soup came from “a broth of pork bones simmered to perfection.” That broth was their secret recipe, the entire selling point their empire rested on.

Imagine their embarrassment in 2011, when the media found that their precious soup base was made from concentrates and flavoring powders instead of actual pork bone stock. Their stock (market, not soup) plummeted and customers were revolted.

What’s worse, the company had always claimed that their soups were extremely nutritious, containing “four times the calcium content of milk and 10 times that of meat.” The test sample mentioned in the report was taken from the concentrate instead of actual soup.

Ajisen Ramen is still operational, but their reputation will probably never be the same.

8 Burger King’s Horse Burgers

When we dine in a hamburger joint, our biggest fear is that a disgruntled employee spits in our burger. However, sometimes the foreign and unwanted substances in our meal don’t need help . . . because they’re already there.

When the 2013 horse meat scandal swept through Europe, US-based fast-food companies were left relatively unscathed, save for one or two. Findus (the food company whose beef lasagna served as Patient Zero for the scandal) took the biggest blows. However, Burger King was the company that suffered the biggest embarrassment. Burger King stores in outbreak areas were quickly and aggressively declared 100 percent horse-meat-free by the company. However, despite their claims, testing soon found horse DNA in Burger King hamburger patties that were supposed to be pure beef.

What saved Burger King was their quick reaction: they immediately severed all ties with the meat company that provided the “beef” patties. Then, they gave the public a heartfelt apology and continued business as usual. Although this got them out of trouble, some people feel it was not enough. The company gave very little information to the public, and apparently offered no compensation to the numerous people whose burgers they accidentally horsed up.

7Domino’s YouTube Scandal

Sometimes, all it takes to send a company to crisis is hiring the wrong people. Domino’s Pizza learned this the hard way in 2009, when some of its employees shot a video in which one of them stuck raw ingredients in his nose, and then put them in the food they were preparing for a customer. They put the video on YouTube, where it became an instant Internet hit.

Domino’s quickly located, fired and sued the responsible parties. Other than that, the restaurant chain chose a very poor way to handle a social media crisis: they decided to shut up about the incident completely. The lack of positive media visibility (and the impact of the gross video) soon tore their carefully built brand image to pieces in a matter of days. Although the company took to Twitter and embraced social media soon afterwards, some say the damage still hasn’t quite healed.

6Pizza Hut Delivery

In 2011, a Pizza Hut delivery driver from Iowa briefly became the world’s least favorite person to handle food. When the customer he was delivering to didn’t have enough money for a tip, he decided to leave a little tip of his own and urinated on her front door.

Unfortunately for the driver (and Pizza Hut), the customer was less than pleased with the yellow pool by her front door and decided to go public. Her apartment manager provided a local news channel with surveillance footage of the incident, and it became a popular news story.

Luckily for Pizza Hut, the manager of the restaurant did all the right things. He was very cooperative from the start, actually visiting the customer and viewing the surveillance tapes. He then immediately fired the driver. Later, the driver himself (who was probably feeling very guilty and embarrassed at that point) came to apologize the customer and clean the mess he had made.

5Starbucks Coffee

In Starbucks, everything starts with water. You can’t make coffee (or any other beverage) without it, so it’s extremely important it’s clean.

At least, that’s what you’d think. A Starbucks manager in the business district of Hong Kong had a very different attitude. The water he brewed his coffee with came from a tap in a nearby bathroom.

Although the tap itself had been kept relatively clean, the fact that it had been in a dirty restroom immediately created a scandal. The entire Starbucks franchise in Hong Kong is still in turmoil. Even in many other parts of the world, Starbucks-related Google searches are beginning to turn up unsavory suggestions such as ”Starbucks Toilet Coffee Lawsuit.”

4Subway “Footlongs”

Fast food may be unhealthy. It may sometimes be prepared in unsanitary conditions. But there is one golden rule that must never be broken: there needs to be lots of it. After all, this is the industry that introduced the concept of “super-sizing” meals. At the very least, people expect their food to be as big as the restaurant advertises. A quarter-pounder with a patty that weighs any less would be a tragedy.

Still, some companies see things differently. When an Australian Subway customer decided to measure his “foot-long” sandwich, he found it was quite a lot shorter than the advertised length of one foot (30 cm). Subway Australia tried to explain this as an individual manufacturing error, before finally stating that the “Footlong” is just a name and not a measurement. This was interesting, because the company had always specifically stated the exact opposite.

Meanwhile, an American newspaper found that many stateside Subways were also quietly shrinking their subs. It wasn’t just about the length, either: they were reducing the size of their cold cuts by up to 25 percent, too.

Subway responded to the international criticism by sticking to their guns and claiming that the “Footlong” really is just a descriptive name. Then, they just stopped all communication and started hoping for the crisis to go away. How well this tactic serves them in the long run remains to be seen.

3Arby’s Finger Sandwich

In 2012, an unfortunate Michigan teenager got a taste experience he’s not going to forget in a hurry. He was enjoying a delicious roast beef sandwich at a local Arby’s when he bit into something strange and rubbery. As the boy removed the foreign object from his mouth, he found to his horror it was human flesh. A restaurant worker had accidentally sliced off part of his finger and left his station without telling anyone. The human meat had then somehow ended up in a sandwich that was served to a customer.

Although Arby’s was quick to apologize what it accurately called “an unfortunate incident,” the restaurant’s reputation took a blow.

2McDonald’s And Children

Children are the future, and the future is looking larger than ever. Childhood obesity in first-world countries is higher than it’s ever been. In the United States alone, a third of the children are obese and the situation (along with the health issues that come with it) is not getting any better.

All fast-food companies are happy to serve children, but McDonald’s in particular is a master of targeting children in its advertising. Their Happy Meal (a simple hamburger meal with a toy included) is possibly the best-known kid’s meal there is. McDonald’s is estimated to give away over 15 billion toys per year as part of their cross-promotions with popular toy lines, thus giving the children an early taste of the fast-food nation they will grow up into.

The strange thing is that McDonald’s refuses to admit they’re doing it—seemingly even to their own shareholders. Their shareholders have asked that the company take responsibility of its (presumably not insignificant) part in America’s childhood obesity problem. Yet the McDonald’s board has dismissed the issue, because associating the company with childhood obesity issues would be “unnecessary.”

To be fair, McDonald’s has made some changes to their Happy Meals to make them healthier. They now come with complimentary apple slices and a milk drink instead of a soda.

1Taco Bell

Taco Bell’s history is spotted with embarrassing events that range from slightly awkward to truly terrifying. Their taco shells have been recalled because they were made with genetically modified corn. Their meat has been revealed to be just 36 percent actual beef (the rest is tasteless fiber filler and various seasonings). The company has been linked to multiple food-borne disease outbreaks, including an E. coli outbreak that killed three people and gave 200 more customers the stomach bug of a lifetime.

With the advent of social media, it looks like the company (together with many of its competitors) is heading for even more hot water. In June 2013, a picture of a Taco Bell employee licking a stack of taco shells was posted on the company’s own Facebook page, to the disgust of loyal Taco Bell fans everywhere.

Pauli Poisuo also writes for Cracked.com. Why not follow him on Twitter?

Unsettling as it may be, every person is controlled by psychological effects. Some are common, while others are thankfully rare. Either way, many of these complex processes are strong enough to override logic and empathy.

There are deep roots to why sexists rarely change or certain strangers win trust more easily. As with all mental arenas, things can also get deliciously weird. Science has discovered that humans can psychologically hibernate, that a person’s dark side has a number, and that the trauma of Santa Claus destroys trust in parents.

10 Why Reverse Psychology Works

Parents who use reverse psychology to make kids eat broccoli tap into an interesting psychological phenomenon. It is part of something called “reactance,” which is how easily someone reacts when they feel their freedom is threatened.

That, in a nutshell, is reverse psychology. You make someone think that something valuable is going to be taken away. In a kid’s eyes, broccoli is not valuable. Broccoli sucks. But the ability to choose is priceless. When a parent tells them not to eat the vegetable, choice is removed. That green horror suddenly looks a lot more alluring—eating it returns one’s ability to make choices.

Reverse psychology is not an ironclad form of manipulation. It depends on age and reactivity. Some kids will see right through their parents’ tactics. Others, mostly toddlers and teens, are reactive enough to get duped.

Agreeable adults with calm natures are less likely to be manipulated. Those who are fiery-tempered and emotional are more prone to fall prey to reverse psychology.^[1]

9 Distraction Erases Beauty

Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa hangs on a bare wall in the Louvre. One could be forgiven for thinking the iconic canvas needs more fanfare. However, there exists a reason for the minimalism.

Scientists are starting to understand something that art museums have understood for decades—distraction dulls one’s appreciation of beauty. As is sometimes the case, researchers arrived at a conclusion that ancient philosophers already expressed very well.

Immanuel Kant, an influential philosopher from Germany, once said that beauty is not a trademark of an object but rather subjective to the beholder. In other words, how many pleasing details the eye detects in a painting or another lovely item depends on how conscious the viewer’s thoughts are at that moment. Distraction blocks something in the mind, causing a person to see about 15 percent less beauty.^[2]

8 Familiar Strangers Effect

These days, strangers cannot be trusted on sight. However, a brain quirk works against the rules of safety.

In 2018, scientists found that people trust strangers faster when they resembled someone trustworthy from their past. Even if that “someone” was a beloved sitcom character. Similarly, a stranger resembling an abusive ex-husband or a movie gangster might struggle to win the trust of the wife who divorced her partner and was always creeped out by Al Capone.

Surprisingly, no dead ringers were required to trigger this nearly automatic effect. People judged strangers despite a minimal resemblance to good or bad past experiences. Researchers even discovered that study participants made these calls while unaware of the subtle links.

Volunteers were trained to mistrust certain “partners” on a screen who behaved selfishly during a money game. Even when the thieving characters were digitally morphed, participants subconsciously recognized them and made the choice to stay wary.^[3]

For some reason, this visual system has a bigger say than logic. The latter would dictate that there is no information available about the stranger to classify him as either good or bad.

7 Santa Scars Are Real

A surprising analysis found that there are plenty of mistrustful, angry adults—because Santa Claus was a lie. A large survey found that most children stop believing in Santa around age eight.

They had discovered the truth in different, sometimes bizarre ways. Some were told the truth. Others caught parental Santas in the act or realized that the fable’s facts failed to hold up against science—like flying reindeer and a man who manages to deliver presents to millions in a single night.

Most children survive this disillusionment. However, some develop real trust issues later on. At the core of this bewilderment rests the question, “What else did my parents lie about?”

Seems like no big deal, but this effect flares in some. The survey found that around 15 percent of adults still felt deeply betrayed and 10 percent were downright angry. It would appear that for some, their parents’ attempt to perpetuate a magical tradition is pure trauma.^[4]

6 Future Time Slack

Nearly everyone has experienced the following. A particular day is so full of commitments that it seems logical to reschedule some to a later date. After all, things should be less hectic by then. But then you arrive at said point, and life is as maddeningly busy as it was last week when the item was rescheduled.

This delusion that the future holds more time is called “future time slack.” The term was coined in 2005 when studies showed a curious human reaction. The participants believed that they would have more leeway in their schedules in the coming weeks or months but not money.

Apparently, more time did not equal more money. It could be because time is the primary concern. At the moment of rescheduling, one might not be in dire financial straits but instead uncomfortably strapped for time.

Future time slack is not just about getting backhanded by the things one postpones. Often, a person works hard to clear their coming days to enjoy free time. Unfortunately, this creates the same delusion. Life is unpredictable and busy. Despite the sacrifices to empty a schedule, even holidays are not as free as one imagined.^[5]

5 Invisibility Cloak Illusion

A curious conviction occurs whenever people get together. The “invisibility cloak illusion” happens when people wait in line, work with colleagues, or take the bus with strangers. One notices the mannerisms and details of these fellow passengers and workers while believing that they don’t take the same notice of you.

A 2016 study proved that people watch you more than you know. Participants were asked to wait in a room before an experiment. However, letting strangers sit together in the waiting room was the experiment, although they were only told afterward.

Each participant could describe intricate things that they noticed about the others in the waiting room. But they were convinced that nobody paid them much attention in return.

For some reason, this illusion makes people believe that they are the only ones absorbing information about those around them—kind of like wearing an invisibility cloak. The truth is that nearly everyone in that same room or waiting line also takes account of everyone else in the same studious way.^[6]

4 Transient Global Amnesia

Human memory remains a mysterious thing. One interesting link exists between emotions and memory. More precisely, emotions and other psychological factors appear to play a role in a medical mystery. Called transient global amnesia (TGA), it annually hits less than 10 people in every 100,000.

Amnesia hits out of the blue and wipes months of memories. Those around the victim might be concerned about a stroke or the start of dementia, but TGA lacks the accompanying muscle weakness, slurring, or permanent forgetfulness. In fact, every person with TGA regained their memory in full, and thus far, nobody has ever experienced the phenomenon twice.^[7]

This frightening episode is truly benign without any long-lasting effects. Nobody knows the cause, although researchers have identified possible triggers. They range from strong emotions and stress to people who had sex that wiped their minds. This rare condition remains one of the most mysterious neurological conditions in medical literature.

3 The D-Factor

The G factor measures someone’s intelligence. A bunch of tests leads to a number that can predict a person’s future success, income, and even health.

In 2018, researchers found they could accurately measure a person’s dark side. The D-factor is based on the fact that sadists, psychopaths, and narcissists all have a “dark core” within their personalities. At the very least, despite some differences, all three tend to put themselves first at the expense of other people. This harmful tendency is the D-factor.

To formulate an effective way to measure it, researchers looked at nine dark traits. They used three studies with thousands of participants to gain more information on narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy, egoism, moral disengagement, psychological entitlement, sadism, spitefulness, and self-interest.

This epic amount of data was then analyzed to see if several traits clustered together in a single person. Very often, they did. More importantly, the study successfully designed a test that anyone can take. It measures the D-factor and likelihood of going to the dark side during an ethically questionable situation.^[8]

2 Why Sexists Rarely Change

Most women (and their male friends and family) can attest to the deeply damaging effects of gender discrimination, harassment, and sexual assault. In the past, this was pretty much the gold standard for masculinity.

Science recently confirmed that clinging to this outdated standard causes mental problems for men. A study of 20,000 men found that three traits encouraged a sexist’s higher tendency to harm women, dysfunctional social behavior, and toxic mental health issues. These included dominance over women, ultra self-reliance, and being a playboy.

Since this harmful behavior promotes violence and other unpleasant situations, such men are increasing isolated by society. Most offenders are not likely to change. Seeking help goes against social norms for ideal men to be independent and less emotional.^[9]

The more isolated and angry they get, the more they tend to break down others (such as women) and seek out like-minded men who validate them. It is a vicious cycle.

1 Winter-Over Syndrome

Humans do not hibernate, although something similar manifests in people facing long-term isolation. A 2018 study followed 27 researchers in Antarctica. Their 10-month stay included the dark winter months.

This revealed more about a coping mechanism that most people would never have to call on: winter-over syndrome. A form of extreme psychological hibernation, it develops whenever humans are stuck for long periods of time in situations like Antarctica.^[10]

The research staff had to fill out psychometric questionnaires, keep sleep diaries, and have their emotional health gauged as well as their personal coping strategies. It was not surprising that staying indoors during the winter interfered with sleep and killed their perkiness.

The unexpected part was how everything slowed down. Problem-solving abilities curved downward, and so did depression and denial of the situation’s reality. The last two were expected to rise. This unexpected dip induced indifference that kept worse psychological problems at bay.

There is a caveat: Winter-over syndrome can only develop if someone knows their isolation is not permanent.

There is nothing more American than a hamburger (despite being named after a city in Germany). A fast-food staple, the burger has enjoyed a renaissance of late, being embraced by celebrity chefs like Bobby Flay, who recently began opening Bobby’s Burger Palace restaurants throughout the northeastern US. And why shouldn’t the hamburger be a big deal? It’s delicious.

10 The World’s Most Expensive Burger

Hamburgers don’t tend to be big-ticket items. You can typically get one with fries and a Coke for under $10 at a fast-food place. But some elite restaurants have turned the convention of a cheap burger on its head, using such ingredients as lobster tails, foie gras, and even barbecue sauce made with Kopi Luwak coffee beans (where the beans have first been eaten and then excreted by a civet).

While these establishments are constantly vying over who has the most expensive burger (some of which cost several hundred dollars), it is not likely anyone will soon be beating out the $10,000 USocial.net anniversary burger. Nothing less than a culinary work of art, the burger, which was sold for charity, featured Wagyu beef, truffles, and 24-karat gold leaf. Arguably its most compelling element was sliced Spanish jamón ibérico, made from black Iberian pigs fed a specialty diet composed almost entirely of acorns.

9 The World’s Worst Burger

Certainly, no one would classify hamburgers as a health food, and dietary wisdom dictates that a serving of meat should be about three ounces, or the size of a deck of cards. But one restaurant in Las Vegas, Nevada, shuns such conventions. Offering up what the founder calls “nutritional pornography,” the Heart Attack Grill’s menu includes such cardiovascularly destructive fare as butterfat milkshakes and fries cooked in pure lard. Their signature Quadruple Bypass Burger has been recognized by Guinness World Records as the world’s most calorific burger. The Quadruple Bypass consists of four half-pound hamburgers, three tablespoons of lard, 20 slices of bacon, eight slices of American cheese, 20 slices of caramelized onion baked in lard, eight tomato slices, one tablespoon of mayonnaise, two tablespoons of ketchup, one tablespoon of mustard, and a bun. It contains a staggering 9,982 calories.

The restaurant has a whole tongue-in-cheek hospital motif, with buxom, scantily clad “nurses” acting as waitresses. Diners who weigh more than 350 pounds eat for free. Should you fail to devour your burger in its entirety, the nurses will gleefully paddle your behind.

Unfortunately, patrons of the grill have actually succumbed to cardiac arrest, including unofficial spokesman John Alleman, a daily customer who died of a heart attack at a bus stop in front of the restaurant. Another spokesman, 29-year-old, 6-foot-eight, 575-pound Blair River, died in 2011 of pneumonia, and his death was likely tied to his obesity. Despite these tragedies, the Heart Attack Grill continues to do incredible business in Sin City, and the restaurant has been featured on several food- and travel-related programs.

8 The Oprah Beef Scandal

Virtually no one without control of a standing army and a thermonuclear arsenal has held more sway over our culture than Oprah Winfrey. The so-called “Oprah Effect” has impacted entire industries. In 1996, when she began an Oprah’s Book Club segment, every novel she chose instantly rocketed up the bestseller lists. Another show in 1996 brought her even more infamy.

During a segment about the beef industry, she claimed that she would never eat another hamburger. Beef prices immediately plunged, hitting a 10-year low after two weeks. A group of Texas cattle ranchers sued Winfrey for $10.3 million on the basis of a strange agriculture defamation precedent. In 2002, after four years of litigation, a US District Judge finally threw out all charges against the talk show maven. Perhaps the worst part of the scandal was the emergence of Oprah’s guru, Dr. Phil McGraw, who currently hosts his own show giving out tedious, homespun advice. In an interview after the trial, she claimed that she was still “off burgers.”

7 Monopoly Scandal

The United States’ largest purchaser of beef, McDonald’s, is synonymous with the hamburger. Of course, the company’s vast holdings are less a result of its delicious food than its marketing genius. One such scheme was their Monopoly game. Game pieces affixed to food and drink would either win customers items like free food, or could be collected to win grand prizes like cars and cash. The contest was run by a third-party company called Simon Marketing, whose security chief, Jerome P. Jacobson, skimmed the game pieces for all the best prizes for years. The pieces were redeemed by a large group of associates who would split the proceeds among themselves. Twenty-one employees of Simon Marketing were indicted in 2001 for their role in the scam, which netted them some $24 million.

Perhaps the only good thing to come out of the Monopoly scandal was in 1995, when Jacobson sent a game piece worth $1 million to St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital. Likely realizing that whoever redeemed this prize would be subject to intense scrutiny, he passed it along. Although transferring game pieces was against the rules of the contest, McDonald’s agreed to pay out the prize to the hospital, which treats children with cancer. When it was revealed years later that this was part of Simon Marketing’s scheme, McDonald’s told St. Jude’s that they had no intention of asking for their money back.

While auditing procedures are likely far more strict these days, your chances of winning much more than a free burger playing the McDonald’s Monopoly game are more dismal than you can imagine. According to the company’s website, your odds of winning the $1 million grand prize are approximately one in 3,050,412,898.

6 The First Burger

The hamburger is actually a far more recent invention than most realize. While countless culinary innovators take credit for creating the burger, perhaps the most likely candidate was New Haven, Connecticut lunch-cart operator Louis Lassen. As the story goes, in 1900, Lassen served a ground beef sandwich to a worker on the go, giving rise to the hamburger. The Lassen family is continuing the tradition 113 years later. At Louis’ Lunch, the burgers are cooked in vertical cast-iron gas stoves and served on plain bread; the only condiments available are cheese spread, tomatoes, and onions. Ingredients such as ketchup, mustard, and mayonnaise are strictly forbidden. According to the owners, students from nearby Yale University are often caught trying to smuggle ketchup into the grill. They are politely asked to leave.

5 Veggie Burgers

Veggie burgers are readily available in fast-food franchises in many parts of the world, particularly places like India, which has a large Hindu (who don’t eat beef) and Muslim (who don’t eat pork) population. You can’t even get a hamburger at a McDonald’s in India.

Unfortunately, there is some evidence that veggie burgers aren’t nearly as healthy an alternative to beef as they are made out to be. The soy that is used in veggie burgers is often made with hexane, an air pollutant that is the by-product of refining gasoline. The hexane persists into the food, and it can be bad news. In 2010, a worker at an Apple factory died of hexane poisoning while using the substance to clean touchscreens.

4 Meat Cologne

Even when the fragrance aims to be appealing, perfumes can contain some pretty vile ingredients. Examples include ambergris, a waxy digestive secretion of the sperm whale; castoreum, which comes from a beaver’s anal glands; and hyraceum, which is petrified rock hyrax poop. In 2008, fast-food giant Burger King unveiled their very own fragrance. Dubbed “Flame,” it was marketed as “the scent of seduction with a hint of flame-broiled meat.” The Flame cologne has its very own website, and is available for about $4. Strangely enough, Burger King is not the only restaurant in the cologne business. Pizza Hut also marketed a scent based on fresh-baked pizza dough and herbs.

3 Hundreds Of Cows

Most people probably don’t like to meditate extensively on where their meat comes from. Even the most humane butchering is pretty grotesque. The cow is first stunned (in the past, a sledgehammer was used, but today processing plants generally use captive bolt pistols—the weapon used by Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men) and then suspended by its rear legs. Its throat is slashed and it is allowed to bleed out. Beef is too tough to eat fresh and requires tenderizing, or, for the less genteel, controlled rotting.

While your steak probably comes from a single animal (although there are methods of “gluing” even the most prime cuts together), the ground beef used in hamburgers comes from the toughest and least appetizing portions of the cow. These are mixed communally so that the average four-ounce hamburger you get at a fast-food franchise has, according to one study done in 1998, at least 55 different cows mixed into it. They discovered samples with over 1,000 different cows mixed into a single hamburger. This is particularly concerning because such a cross section of animals vastly increases your chances of contracting a foodborne illness like E. coli.

2 Test-Tube Meat

Many vegetarians make their decision not to eat meat based solely on ethics rather than any disdain for the flavor. The growing of meat in laboratories would certainly alleviate these concerns, but the benefits extend beyond morals. The keeping of animals for meat is an enormous strain on the environment, and with the global population skyrocketing, the demand continues to grow. According to a report published by Stanford University, livestock production occupies more than one-fourth of Earth’s land, and contributes to 18 percent of greenhouse gas emissions attacking the atmosphere. Recent experiments using stem cells from pigs and cows, cultured in a nutrient-rich bath that allows them to grow, have shown much promise.

The burger program is headed up by Dr. Mark Post at Maastricht University in the Netherlands. He has cultivated beef in a laboratory, using thousands of strands and layers stacked together to form a five-ounce burger. Post uses Velcro to flex and “exercise” each strand of muscle to prevent it from wasting away. Although the meat doesn’t contain any fat (which gives beef much of its flavor), Post claims that it “tastes reasonably good.” On August 5, 2013, Dr. Post plans on serving up the results of his experiment to attendees at a London event. For a mere $325,000, you too can taste history in the making. Of course, the implications of this technology far exceed usage in food. One day, it might soon be possible to grow healthy organs or even replacement limbs in laboratories. However, perfecting this technology is sure to be an uphill climb; as with the use of human stem cells, a great deal of fundamentalists will surely call foul in “playing God.”

1 Immortal Burgers

A frequent “experiment” conducted by fast-food critics involves taking a plain hamburger and allowing it to sit out in the open. Astonishingly, even after weeks, the burger doesn’t rot and looks much the same as the day it was cooked. The ostensible conclusion is that the burgers are riddled with such excessive preservatives that they cannot decompose. Surely, anything potent enough to prevent decay for months at a time must have horrifying effects on human organs.

The truth is a little more pedestrian (and certainly friendlier to your liver). Burgers under a certain weight will dehydrate before they can begin to rot or grow mold. Larger burgers, such as McDonald’s Quarter Pounder, generally begin to exhibit a fur of mold before they fully dry out. This experiment can be easily duplicated at home using a control group of homemade burgers, though a collection of mummified sandwiches might turn off houseguests.

Mike Devlin is an aspiring novelist