Even before the humble beginnings of philosophy in ancient Greece, humans have been obsessed with the idea of substances, where one material ends and another begins, and the general building blocks of life. But over the thousands of years that we’ve studied various materials, we’ve developed a good idea of what’s what. With the science of chemistry and the periodic table, we’ve come to figure out and predict how basic substances or materials work.

Some materials have bizarre and abstract traits and are frankly quite weird. Nature seems to operate by strict rules, where things are seemingly predictable and fit wonderfully into neat little explanatory packages. This gives us the ability to categorize things in different ways and understand them for what they are.

Here are 10 absolutely strange materials that have been discovered by scientists throughout the years.

10 Triiodide

While triiodide itself refers to one chemical which can be mixed with many others to create different chemicals, triiodide, short for triiodide ion, isn’t inherently very interesting. It’s often a yellowish substance that turns red when prepared in such a way to create nitrogen triiodide, with the inorganic compound designation of NI.

What makes nitrogen triiodide so special? It’s ridiculous explosiveness.

Most explosives use chemical processes which are quite complex, or heat and combustion. But not nitrogen triiodide, which is explosive on contact. That’s right. Take a simple gram or so of this powder, set it on a table, touch it with nearly anything, and watch the show.^[1]

All that’s required for it to blow up is simple contact, or friction. This material is so unusual due to its volatility that even touching it can cause it to explode.

9 Vantablack

Vantablack is an artificial material that was developed by Surrey NanoSystems. This coating goes on many things, from paint to carbon objects. It’s the material equivalent of a black hole in that it traps light, so much so that three-dimensional objects coated with the material appear to be two-dimensional as the refraction of any light is so heavily reduced.

It holds the world record for the darkest artificial substance and the darkest black you can buy. The material absorbs 99 percent of all light it comes into contact with.^[2]

People even coated a building with it in South Korea to create “the darkest place on Earth” in a mimicry of the deepest recesses of space. The goal was to create an experience of being absorbed into blackness—a deep, dark cloud of black.

Three-dimensional objects coated in Vantablack actually look like shadows from the profile view. Definitely an interesting material, to say the least.

8 Ultrahydrophobic Material

Ultrahydrophobic material isn’t the stuff we buy to coat leather and suede products or the spray coatings that protect our outdoor wood projects from the rain and other elements. An ultrahydrophobic coating actually causes water to encase itself into tiny spheres that look like gemstones or marbles.

It’s so water-resistant that if you sprayed your old windshield with it, you could drive in the rain at up to 64 kilometers per hour (40 mph) and your windshield wouldn’t get wet.^[3] Goodbye, trusty windshield wipers.

In fact, ultrahydrophobic material repels almost all liquids, causing them to shrivel up into little balls that you can even roll around as if they were actual marbles. This material is genius and has a lot of applications, including those for high-tech industries. It’s also ultra-weird.

7 Ferrofluid

Ferrofluids are a type of liquid that can easily be formed into strange shapes without even touching them. Often dark, blackish, reddish, or grayish liquids, ferrofluids act very much like any other liquid when they’re outside the presence of a magnetic field.

The moment the fluids come into contact with a magnetic field, they become highly magnetized, morphing shapes, bending, or pulling. They do everything our usual solid magnets do, only as a liquid state.

This stuff looks like a dark, liquid metal. It can be purchased online or even made with readily accessible Internet instructions. Like so many other wonders of physics, it’s truly an amazing sight to see ferrofluids in action as they respond to the magnetic field and fall right in line with it. Then they disperse randomly once the magnetic field is removed.^[4]

6 Supercritical Fluid

Supercritical fluid is a material created under certain circumstances of temperature and pressure. It suspends the dividing lines of physical properties as we know them. In short, supercritical fluid is a substance somewhere between liquid and gas. It is a mixture of both, and yet it is neither liquid nor gas.

It occurs when any fluid gets heated above its critical temperature and pressure. Critical temperature is the point where a substance has been heated to such a degree that you cannot liquefy it. Critical pressure is the pressure that’s needed to turn a gas into a liquid at a high temperature.

Supercritical fluid is a gas-like substance with highly liquid properties.^[5] If you were to delve into the atmospheres of some planets, like Jupiter or Neptune, you would be immersed in it. It’s a super-freaky version of all liquids . . . or is it a gas?

5 Nitinol

Nitinol is a trade name for nickel titanium, a metal alloy with some extremely unusual (and important) properties. Nitinol is often used in the medical industry, but it has other applications.

The weird thing about this metal is that it’s almost like the liquid metal featured in the movie Terminator 2: Judgment Day in that it can always return to its original shape. Nitinol has superelasticity, or a memory for its original form.

So if you make an object out of nitinol and then bend it completely out of whack, it’ll automatically crawl and form back into its original shape before your eyes (aka pseudoelasticity). These shape memory properties make it both fun and practical.^[6]

Stents are a great application as nitinol can bend within the human body when needed, has the durability of a metal, and can return to its original form every single time after the force which causes it to warp is released. Nitinol’s bending, shape-shifting properties are activated by heat. At some temperatures, it will bend out of its original state. At others, it will return to its original state.

This temperature difference can be controlled within 1 degree Celsius (1.8 °F). From algae that remembers the light shined upon it to nitinol which always remembers its original shape and returns to it under the right conditions, materials with a “memory” are definitely fascinating and weird.

4 Gallium

Gallium is a metallic element with the atomic number of 31, which even more closely resembles the liquid metal from Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Gallium’s particularly strange characteristic is the low temperature at which it liquefies, which is only a tad shy of 30 degrees Celsius (86 °F). That’s close to room temperature in many places.

This metallic element is bright, shiny, and silvery white in color. When you handle gallium, there’s no ambiguity that you’re handling a liquid metal. As a liquid, this metal can be played with—it rolls and forms into various shapes in your hands.^[7]

Gallium has many practical uses, like LED lights, cabling, and pharmaceuticals. It’s an extremely soft metal, even in its solid state. In fact, it’s so soft that you could slice into it with a knife without much resistance at all. If you made a solid sphere, a ball of gallium, and then picked it up, it would melt in your hand. That’s one fascinating metal.

3 Hydrogel

Hydrogels are a fascinating group of substances, not unlike supercritical fluids. However, instead of being suspended somewhere between a liquid and a gas, hydrogels are suspended somewhere between a liquid and a solid.

A hydrogel maintains its shape and doesn’t flow around objects like a solid does, but it bends amazingly like a liquid with an extremely soft pliability. JELL-O is one famous hydrogel that we all know about. It’s a fun snack for people around the world. But there are other types of hydrogels and other uses for them besides foods.

Due to their flexibility and durability, hydrogels are showing great promise in the world of science for biomaterials, which go on or in the human body. Their ability to completely liquefy, fill a space, and then solidify and still be flexible is mind-blowing.^[8]

Hydrogels are a series of polymers that contain both chemical and physical properties which change their state from solid to liquid seamlessly. When heated, the polymer proteins dissipate and travel more freely. When cooled, those same proteins harden again but not quite as drastically as when water hardens into ice. These proteins make hydrogel one of the most unusual feeling and visually entertaining substances.

2 Graphene Aerogel

Graphene aerogel is the lightest material on Earth and definitely the lightest solid material that we know of. It weighs in at just 0.16 milligrams per cubic centimeter, almost lighter than air. Its density is even lower than helium, although slightly higher than hydrogen, the lightest of all the gases.

Graphene aerogel is created by taking a hydrogel and replacing the liquid contents with air, making the substance 99.98 percent air by volume. This is why it’s so light—it’s empty. There aren’t a lot of the dense atoms of a solid or a liquid to weigh it down. As a result, graphene aerogel is the least dense of all known solid materials.^[9]

On top of being used today for many adhesives, coatings, and fillers, graphene aerogel is also being developed as a lightweight material for 3-D printing that produces precise results. The future of graphene aerogel shows much promise, and this substance is going to be a staple of the future for printing items like lightweight coffee cups or even jewelry.

1 Dark Matter

Dark matter is one of the most elusive substances in the currently known universe, and that makes it arguably one of the most fascinating. Dark matter makes up about 27 percent of the physical universe. It cannot be detected by its luminosity, the refraction of light that we use to “see” and detect regular matter with our eyes and instruments.

Instead, dark matter can only be detected by its gravitational pull. We know it’s out there, but we can’t see it. So we can only perceive its presence by its pull on other objects that we can see.

With its existence first hypothesized in the 1970s, dark matter set the stage to explain the mysterious movements of many objects being pulled in its gravitational field—like galaxies which seemed to miraculously escape the gravitational pull of the larger galaxy cluster to which they belonged.

Gravitational lensing occurs when a substance in space distorts the space fabric and “bends” light from behind it. Even though we can’t see dark matter, this is how we know it exists. It bends the passing light rather than emitting or reflecting light.^[10]

For a frame of reference, dark matter makes up about 27 percent of the observable universe, but observable matter only comprises 5 percent of our universe. About 68 percent of the universe is “dark energy,” a mysterious, elusive energy.

This means that about 5 percent of our universe can actually be seen and detected using observation of the actual substance itself. It can only be perceived by its effect on the tiny sliver of the universe we can see. This makes dark matter one of the strangest substances detected by modern science.

I like to write about dark stuff, fun stuff, weird stuff, history, and philosophy. Here’s a fun one about weird and wacky substances.

Just about everyone reading this has likely heard of psychological maladies like obsessive-compulsive disorder and schizophrenia. Conditions such as anxiety disorders and depression are everyday terms. However, there are some strange mental illnesses that you’ve probably never heard of.

Some of these are location-specific and only affect people visiting a place. Others affect anybody but are just as weird. Imagine a disorder that makes a person believe they do not exist, that their house is a clone, or that they are outside their own bodies. You might be surprised that some of these disorders even exist.

10 Jerusalem Syndrome

Jerusalem syndrome is a mental disorder that affects tourists who visit Jerusalem. Sufferers believe they are Biblical characters or are somehow related or affiliated to Jesus.

In one instance, an Irish woman went to a hospital, claiming she was about to give birth to Baby Jesus, even though she wasn’t pregnant. Another man from Canada thought he was Samson and tried to destroy a wall. An Austrian man asked chefs at the hotel in which he was staying to prepare him the Last Supper.

There have also been reports of tourists thinking they are Biblical characters like King Solomon. Others suddenly start giving sermons or just shout on the streets. One notorious case involved a British man who planned to get himself killed by Satan in order to trigger the end of the world.

The syndrome affects about 50 tourists every year, but those are just the ones that are documented. Authorities believe that many more cases actually occur. Interestingly, most sufferers recover from the disorder the moment they leave Jerusalem.^[1]

9 Stendhal Syndrome

Stendhal syndrome (also called Florence syndrome or hyperkulturemia) is a psychosomatic disorder that can affect people visiting art galleries. Sufferers become so overwhelmed by the beauty of the exhibited artworks that they suddenly develop symptoms.

Their hearts beat faster, and they become dizzy and confused. Some behave like lunatics, hallucinate, or even faint. Some sufferers do not need to be in an art gallery for the syndrome to occur. They will exhibit the symptoms when they are in any beautiful environment.

Stendhal syndrome was first noted by author Henri-Marie Beyle (who wrote under the pseudonym “Stendhal”) in his 1817 book Naples and Florence: A Journey from Milan to Reggio. Beyle wrote that he became so overwhelmed by the beautiful ceiling frescoes at the Santa Croce Cathedral in Florence, Italy, that he exhibited some symptoms of the disorder now named after him.^[2]

8 Fregoli Delusion

The Fregoli delusion is a psychological disorder that makes a person believe that other people are actually the same person in disguise. Someone with the Fregoli delusion will say that the differences in others’ clothing and looks are just an elaborate disguise to make the sufferer think the others aren’t the same person.

The disorder is named after Leopoldo Fregoli, an Italian actor known for doing many impersonations. It was first observed in an unnamed patient who believed everybody was one of two actresses called Sarah Bernhardt and Robine. The patient was so convinced that she attacked a stranger she believed was Robine.

It is very difficult or even impossible to convince people exhibiting the Fregoli delusion that they are suffering from a disorder. One ten-year-old sufferer believed everybody he saw was his father in disguise. When somebody pointed out that the nurse could not be his father because she was a woman, he said his father was clever enough to disguise himself and claimed that the doctors could not detect it.^[3]

7 Clinical Lycanthropy

Clinical lycanthropy is a mental disorder that makes people think they are turning into animals, most notably wolves. To adjust to their supposed transformation, clinical lycanthropy sufferers will usually grunt like animals and attempt using their fingers like claws. They will complain of hair growing on their arms and will sometimes mistake their reflection in a mirror for an animal’s.

The first case report was published in 1852, when a man thought he had turned into a werewolf. He believed he was covered in hair and had grown sharp, wolf-like teeth. Both were untrue. He insisted on eating raw meat but did not eat it when it was served because he only wanted rotten meat.

Thankfully, clinical lycanthropy is rare. Only 13 cases of people believing they are wolves have been reported since 1850. However, it jumps to 56 when we consider other cases involving people who thought they’d turned into other animals. Doctors believe some cases have been missed, since psychiatrists will misdiagnose clinical lycanthropy as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or psychotic depression.^[4]

6 Cotard Delusion

Cotard delusion is a mental disorder that makes sufferers think they are dead. They’ll believe they are not in control of their bodies and may even assume they are already rotting. However, some sufferers know they are alive but will wrongly believe that some parts of their bodies are dead or do not even exist.

Cotard delusion is often caused by a traumatic incident like an accident or fainting. Sufferers believe they actually died during the incident. And they will often believe they cannot die again since they are already dead. The disorder was first observed in an unnamed Frenchwoman only identified as Mademoiselle X (depicted above).

In 1880, Mademoiselle X visited Doctor Jules Cotard and complained that she thought she was dead. Doctor Cotard took interest in her disorder and studied it extensively. He called her condition “the Delirium of Negation,” but it would later take his name. Mademoiselle X ultimately died of starvation, as she refused to eat due to the false belief that she did not have a stomach, nervous system, or torso.^[5]

5 Folie A Deux

Folie a deux (French for “madness of two”) is a psychological condition in which the delusions of one person essentially spread to others. Folie a deux can also be called “folie a trois” when it affects three people, “folie a quatre” when it affects four people, or “folie en famille” when it affects an entire family.

Folie a deux was first documented in the 19th century, when a couple named Michael and Margaret thought someone was sneaking into their home and wearing their shoes. They believed this so much that they started convincing themselves that somebody was truly sneaking in.

In another case, three sisters believed some parts of the Bible were wrong and that God wanted them to live in a house that belonged to somebody else. They were arrested after vandalizing the home and held in a cell, where they stripped themselves naked and sang worship songs.

In one recent case that happened in 2016, a couple fled town with their three children over the erroneous belief that somebody was trying to kill them. Two of the three children also believed the story, making it a folie a quatre.^[6]

4 Reduplicative Paramnesia

Reduplicative paramnesia is a rare mental disorder that makes sufferers think their house or another building has been cloned. Sometimes, they believe their house has been disguised to look like another building. Many sufferers believe the hospital in which they are receiving treatment is actually their disguised home.

Sometimes, sufferers wrongly assume something has been taken away from their homes and taken somewhere else. One woman who had a temporal lobe stroke suffered from the disorder after her discharge from the hospital. She claimed that some furniture had been taken from her home to the hospital.^[7]

3 Factitious Disorder

Factitious disorder (aka factitious disorder imposed on self or Munchausen syndrome) motivates people to fake illnesses. Sufferers will often go to extreme lengths to make people think they are truly sick. They will readily add foreign substances like blood to their urine samples and add heat to a thermometer to make people think they have a fever.

In extreme cases, sufferers will injure themselves and even undergo surgery for nonexistent conditions. They usually understand that they’re not sick, but they don’t understand why they are pretending to be sick. Even when they do, they just cannot stop pretending to be sick, even when challenged with evidence proving they’re not ill.

Factitious disorder imposed on another (also referred to as Munchausen syndrome by proxy) is a subcategory of factitious disorder. It involves a person claiming another person is sick. Most of the time, it is usually a parent saying a child is sick. This is just as dangerous, since the parent could injure the child just to prove they are truly sick.^[8]

2 Delusional Parasitosis

Delusional parasitosis is a mental disorder that makes a person think their skin is infected with parasites and animals like lice, fleas, worms, and spiders.

Sufferers will usually scratch their skin until they become injured. More desperate patients will use dangerous substances on their skin just to get rid of the creatures. They’ll even take skin and hair samples and put them under microscopic slides before presenting them to the doctor.

Those affected are so convinced of their delusion that they will confidently explain how the creatures entered their bodies. In some instances, they will even claim that the parasites have crept from their bodies and into their homes.

Delusional parasitosis often affects elderly people and is more common in women than men. It is usually the result of an underlying illness, like an anxiety disorder that makes the sufferer afraid of getting sick. In rarer instances, it is caused by other conditions like schizophrenia and obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Sometimes, it is just the sufferer being paranoid or could be the result of drug abuse or alcohol withdrawal.^[9] Delusional parasitosis can sometimes become folie a deux when a person believes they are suffering from the disorder because their partner is suffering from it. The situation is worsened when the partner reinforces their belief that the nonexistent creatures are really there.

1 Depersonalization-Derealization Disorder

Sufferers of depersonalization-derealization disorder (aka depersonalization disorder) think they are outside their bodies. It can also occur when a person believes the things they see around them do not really exist. Sometimes, they even think their memory does not belong to them.

Some sufferers believe they are floating above their bodies. Others understand they are inside their bodies but will usually consider themselves as more robot than human, since they assume they do not have any control over their actions. They will usually feel that their heads are covered with soft materials like cotton and assume their body parts are bigger or smaller than they appear.

Depersonalization-derealization disorder is more common in people who’ve been through traumatic experiences and can last anywhere from hours to months. Sufferers often have troubled relationships, since they are usually more concerned about their supposed nonexistence than with interacting with their families and friends. They will frequently check themselves and the things around them to confirm that they truly exist.^[10]

Whether we refer to the act of living or to all sentient beings in this world, life has always been a difficult concept for humans to understand. Even when life has preceded us on this planet for 3.5 billion years—and we ourselves have roamed Earth for plenty of millennia—there are many questions about it that we still cannot answer. What is the meaning of life? Is there life after death? These, among many others, are typical questions of any philosophical debate, questions as old as humankind itself.^[1]

But then we have strange questions, unconventional doubts about life that do not usually come to our minds on a normal day. Have you ever wondered what Earth would be like if it were devoid of all life? Then this article is for you. If not, keep reading anyway; some of the answers, or the questions themselves, exposed here will certainly not leave you indifferent.

10 How Much Life Has Ever Existed?

Currently, the human population is slowly approaching eight billion people. That is certainly quite a number, but it does not even compare with the 100 trillion ants under our feet. And it is estimated that, at any given time, there are five nonillion bacteria in the world—that’s a “5” followed by 30 zeros. There is no doubt that there are so many living organisms on Earth that trying to count them all would be an unachievable task. And again, all this is just about the currently existing life-forms. But what about all the life that has existed in the past?

Determining how many creatures could have inhabited Earth throughout the history of the planet is extremely difficult. It is believed that complex life has been around in this world for at least 570 million years. And the fossils we have managed to recover are a minimum percentage compared to the prehistoric remains that are either out of our reach or have been destroyed by geological processes. But using their ingenuity, scientists have come up with a correlation between the number of fossils and the currently known species to estimate the total of life that has ever existed. Today, the experts are pretty convinced that 99.9 percent of all species on Earth are extinct.

This number is understandable, considering that the Earth’s biosphere has suffered five mass extinctions during the last 400 million years. On average, more than 80 percent of all living beings were erased from the face of the Earth in each of these five events. And a significant part of the scientific community believes that today, we are facing a sixth mass extinction. Estimates say that species disappear 100 times faster today than before our existence, and in the last 50 years, humans have eliminated 60 percent of animal life. So, unfortunately for us, death is much more common than life in this world.^[2]

9 Is Life On Earth Of Alien Origin?

Today, most scientists are sure that all life on Earth comes from a common ancestor. This primal being would have been nothing more than a unicellular organism, created by random chemical reactions in the early Earth. However, what scientists do not yet understand is exactly how these processes took place. And all their attempts to replicate the origin of life have failed so far. Perhaps the answer to this mystery could be found in a theory called lithopanspermia.

The theory of panspermia suggests that early life-forms were brought to Earth from somewhere else in the universe, such as nearby planets. Within the same idea, lithopanspermia states that rocky fragments of another world containing microbial life were ejected into space after some kind of planetary impact. Millions of years later, those rocks reached Earth, and the life they carried inside began its evolutionary cycle here. The concept behind panspermia appeared several centuries ago in France, and since then, it has been an object of scientific study, although other theories generate more interest nowadays.

Nevertheless, there are several indications supporting the possibility that lithopanspermia really occurred. Using collision simulations, researchers at Pennsylvania State University have concluded that it is statistically possible that a space rock containing microbes can travel from one planet to another by ejection.^[3] Of course, there is the problem that space is too hostile to allow the survival of life, due to factors such as radiation and extreme temperatures. But we know that there are multiple bacterial species capable of resisting the harshest environments, from the hottest places on Earth to the nothingness of outer space.

In addition, a recent study shows that the main elements that make up life on Earth are common in stars, existing more abundantly toward the center of our galaxy than in our planetary region. In short, the matter we are formed from literally comes from another region of the universe. So life may not be so special across the cosmos after all.

8 Is It Possible To Be Dead And Alive At The Same Time?

The answer to this question has nothing to do with some kind of quantum theory, where someone can be in two states at the same time. Nor does it refer to whether we can be like zombies, the classic description of the “living dead.” We can say that, yes, some creatures seem to be alive and dead at the same time. But everything has to do with the inability of scientists to agree on what exactly differentiates a living being from dead matter.

Some scientists understood that all life-forms must share immutable similarities in their nature and behavior. So in 1997, they proposed a list of seven conditions that something must meet to be considered a living being. Every living organism must have a complex chemical composition and be made up of basic structures called cells. It must be able to grow, reproduce, and respond to external stimuli. The creature must also have a metabolism to produce its own energy and be able to adapt to the environment.

Now let’s consider the case of viruses. Generally, and even from the scientific point of view, viruses are considered to be biological entities—that is, they are living beings. A virus has complex genetic material inside and definitely adapts to the environment. But a virus cannot grow or produce its own energy. (It feeds on the energy already produced by its host.) It also does not reproduce but replicates itself using the cells of the host. In fact, a virus is not even made of a single cell, and it remains to be seen if it responds immediately to external stimuli.^[4] So we know that a virus is alive, but it does not meet most of the requirements to be alive, sharing more similarities with a machine instead.

It happens that many inert objects partially fulfill several of those conditions, too. Even fire could once have become a tricky phenomenon when it came to differentiating it from a true living being. As our knowledge of the elemental processes of life increases, we will be able to make the difference clearer.

7 How Much Does All Life Weigh?

Compared to the rest of our solar system, anyone who sees the Earth from space can quickly notice that it is a planet covered in life. More than 30 percent of the continents of our world are covered by green vegetation. This, along with the blue of the oceans, makes Earth look like a living oasis in the midst of emptiness. But then one might wonder what the real, physical weight that life exerts on our planet is. For obvious reasons, until recently, it was very difficult to estimate the total mass of life on Earth. But studies conducted in 2018 show that even all living creatures put together are negligibly small in comparison to the vastness of our world.

In May 2018, American scientists published a report containing measurements of the mass of all carbon-based life on Earth.^[5] Since all known life-forms are carbon-based, and carbon is an abundant element inside every living being, using it to estimate the total biomass seems appropriate. The results showed that in total, life on this planet weighs at least 550 gigatons of carbon, or, to simplify, 550 billion tons. Considering that the whole Earth weighs approximately 6.57 billion gigatons, that means that all living beings combined account for about one ten-millionth of the total mass of the planet.

As we can see, living nature is just a tiny portion of everything that makes our world. In this estimate, plant life represents more than 80 percent of the total biomass. Meanwhile, humans only represent 0.01 percent among all life. This is surprising, considering that our cities and buildings cover at least three percent of the Earth’s land surface, a huge proportion compared to the effect of other species. That means that although we are few, we are good at what we do, whether it’s something good or bad.

6 Is The Universe Itself Alive?

There are several philosophical theories that point out that the universe is in itself a living entity. For example, hylozoism holds that all matter is alive, while panpsychism is the idea that every object in the cosmos has a certain degree of consciousness. Over time, these theories were left aside, after the acceptance of new concepts such as evolutionism. But now, new discoveries and theories have allowed the idea of a sentient universe to gather strength again.

First, we have the case of some experts who have hypothesized about how consciousness could be an intrinsic part of any existing structure.^[6] British physicist Roger Penrose theorized that human consciousness is the product of quantum processes within small regions of our brain cells. Taking this into account, astrophysicist Bernard Haisch conceived the possibility that “quantum fields”—the elementary structures that make up the universe—are capable of producing consciousness. In other words, any structure in the universe (be it a person or a star) can be sentient, since quantum properties are part of its own nature.

On the other hand, both its very structure and behavior serve as possible evidence that the cosmos really is a thinking entity. According to a 2005 study, the intricate structure of the material universe looks strikingly similar to the neural network in our brains. In addition, it has been known for a long time that the structure of an atom is similar—even in proportional distances—to the planetary arrangement of our solar system. And as if that were not enough, new studies show that certain stars make unexpected corrections in their orbits across the galaxy. More information will be needed to confirm if the latter behavior is common in the rest of the universe, but the idea of a living cosmos is captivating science now more than ever.

5 Is It The Same To Die As To Stop Living?

The short answer is no, it is not the same. Here comes the long answer: The concept of death has constantly changed over the centuries, becoming more accurate as our knowledge and technologies advance. For example, in the 19th century, a person was pronounced dead after simply ceasing to breathe. A hundred years ago, someone was officially dead once their heart stopped beating. And today, we believe that death occurs when our bodies suffer irreversible cell damage—that is, our vital functions can no longer be reactivated.

But even after a person dies and their body begins to decompose, that does not mean he or she is entirely dead. In fact, new research indicates that some processes occurring in a corpse challenge our understanding of death. A group of American and European scientists discovered in 2017 that after certain animals die, many of their cells are still fighting to survive. And they not only remain alive for days after death, but in some types of cells, their activity increases.

Everything points to the fact that, in an attempt to repair themselves, the cells in a dead body accelerate the process by which they transform DNA into instructions to make new proteins. And stem cells in particular are able to continue living not for hours or days but for weeks after the death of the creature. It is understandable if we take into account that every animal is a being composed of multiple populations of different cells. For this reason, some cells are more resilient than others, even after the apparent death of the body. And the same researchers state that this behavior occurs in all multicellular beings, including us.^[7] So it is clear that the line between life and death is much more blurred than we thought.

4 Why Is Life So Diverse?

So far, scientists have discovered and studied nearly two million different living species. Among these, humans are part of a handful of 5,000 known species of mammals. In comparison, we know 360,000 species of plants and one million different types of insects. However, our knowledge about Earth’s biodiversity is very limited, and today, the scientific community believes there could be up to two billion life-forms on this planet. Knowing this and that, as previously mentioned, at this point, almost all life on Earth is extinct, one cannot help but wonder, why is there so much diversity of living beings?

We can say that life has a tendency to continue to multiply, no matter what, even if that means to radically change its nature. Since the emergence of life, the Earth has undergone multiple mass extinctions, hundreds of minor ice ages, and constant fluctuations in the sea level (on the order of hundreds of meters). Yet here we are, and studies indicate that in our time, biodiversity has expanded more than ever, at an exponential scale.

This is primarily due to the fact that every time a cataclysm erases much of life on the planet, survivors tend to adapt to the new environment, resulting in new species.^[8] A clear example is the explosive increase of mammal species after the Cretaceous extinction event, 66 million years ago. It is also well-known that in order for an ecosystem to survive, its different life-forms will have to specialize and help each other. The air we breathe and the food we eat, for example, are conditioned for our consumption thanks to the work of other living beings such as plants and insects. Even forests are more resistant to disasters when they are composed of multiple tree species. So in a few words, try to erase life, and it will grow even more instead.

3 Which Organisms Have The Shortest And The Longest Life Spans?

As we have just seen, life-forms on Earth are so diverse that the concept of a long life varies between species. What can be synonymous with longevity for one creature is only a fleeting moment in time for another. So in the following point, it will be more appropriate if we see some life spans of organisms very different from each other.

Let’s start by looking at the life spans of bacteria. As they do not grow in the way other living beings do, it is difficult to determine the age of a bacterium. But we do have a fairly precise estimate of its reproduction, the generation time. This term refers to the time that passes before a cell multiplies. If we presume that a bacterial population remains stable over time, then a bacterium will live at least as long as its generation time. In this case, the shortest-lived bacterium is the microbe Clostridium perfringens. It is estimated that its generation time is just 6.3 minutes. In the time it takes you to read four points of this list, a Clostridium perfringens has already lived and died.

In the animal world, the mayfly Dolania americana is surely one of the animals that lives the least. If we only consider the adult stage of its life in which the insect is fully developed, D. americana emerges, reproduces, and dies in 30 minutes or less. On the other hand, a clam found in Iceland in 2006 had lived for 507 years and could have lived longer if it hadn’t been killed as a result of being collected.^[9]

Of course, we can’t leave out plants, which we know are among the most perdurable beings in the world. In fact, the oldest-known individual tree is a bristlecone pine from California that is more than 5,060 years old. When the humans of antiquity were beginning to develop writing, this tree was a youngling in its early years. On the other hand, the shortest-lived plants are believed to be the so-called ephemeral plants. Among these, plants of the genus Boerhavia can complete their entire life cycle in less than four weeks.

2 What Would The Earth Be Like If Life Did Not Exist?

So it is true that, in quantitative terms, life is a tiny part of what makes our planet. But it’s one thing to measure living beings according to their mass or volume and quite another to determine the effects these beings produce on Earth. So, what would happen to the Earth if life did not exist? Well, we can be pretty sure that without life, our good blue planet would no longer be good or blue.

The Earth’s atmosphere is 21 percent oxygen, an essential element for life-forms like us. But oxygen is an unstable gas that tends to combine quickly with other elements. Plant life on the surface is what replenishes the atmosphere with oxygen, filtering the gas constantly. If life on Earth did not exist, only small traces of oxygen would remain in the environment, while the atmosphere would be mostly composed of carbon dioxide. By this process, the temperature on the Earth’s surface would end up rising drastically.

In turn, higher temperatures would cause the melting of the polar ice caps and the subsequent rise in the sea level by tens of meters. Without life on the planet, the landmasses would suffer rapid erosion, and the mountainous regions would be seriously affected. After a long time, it is believed that the Earth’s temperature would rise to at least 290 degrees Celsius (554 °F). At this point, the oceans would end up boiling, leaving the planet completely uninhabitable. In a period of millions of years, a thick layer of clouds would cover the planet, aggravating the greenhouse effect and making the Earth look more like Venus.^[10] If this sounds crazy, scientists believe that Venus—the same planet that today is pretty much Hell—once had liquid water and a pleasant temperature on its surface.

1 When Do We Start To Die?

The aging process occurs, in broad terms, because the number of new cells in our bodies is not enough to replace the number of cells that are dying. So when too many cells have died or no longer function, and therefore our organs can no longer function properly, we finally die. In short, we do not begin to age and die as long as our body can maintain a balance in the vitality of its cells. And even in fewer words, death happens when aging becomes too much for us. But then, when do we begin to age?

Certain literary authors and prominent figures have said over time that we begin to die from the moment we are born. That may be a thought-provoking reflection (and a good phrase, of course), but science would say that is not entirely true. For a child to become an adult, countless billions or even trillions of body cells will have to be formed, multiplied, and replaced in the meantime. And during such time, the person does not show tangible signs of aging but becomes more capable both physically and mentally.

In fact, we now know that until around the age of 25, the new cells outnumber or at least equal the number of cells that die in the body.^[11] It is from the age of 25 that the cells begin to die faster than they can regenerate, thus causing our aging. In addition, studies show that at the age of 24, the brain also starts to lose cognitive speed. So aging, the process that eventually worsens to an unsustainable degree and causes our death, begins in our mid-twenties.

Economy student, passionate about Graphic Design, an avid enthusiast of the art of writing.

As soon as humans discovered leisure time, they discovered something else, namely boredom. Clearly in an effort to improve this situation, booze was invented and good times were had by all. Booze, of course, lowers inhibitions and thus usually makes people a lot more talkative and sociable. This combination has led to many fantastic tall tales about the cocktails we know and love.

10 Harvey Wallbanger

The Harvey Wallbanger has an extremely funny name, and that should be a feat in its own right considering the ridiculous names given to some drinks. This cocktail is in essence a screwdriver—a combination of vodka and orange juice—with Galliano, a yellow liqueur, added to the mix. The drink was probably invented in the 50s by a world-champion mixologist by the name of Donato Antone. However, according to the legends it has a much different origin. The stories say there was a dude named Harvey who liked to surf and he would drop into the bar for a couple of quick ones after work pretty much every day. Apparently the guy liked to add Galliano to his screwdriver and would sometimes stumble around the bar smashing into things, especially the wall. The legends say that the drink thereafter became known as a Harvey Wallbanger, quite literally because of Harvey’s drunken antics. It has become associated with the summer months, presumably because of the surfing connection.

9 Bloody Mary

The Bloody Mary is an extremely famous cocktail and needs little introduction. It is often the go-to hangover “cure”, and is generally consumed early in the morning for that purpose. The Bloody Mary has many variations, but they all include vodka, tomato juice, and a selection of spices for flavor. While most people attribute the creation of the drink to a restaurateur in the early 1900s, some people have come up with a much more fanciful explanation. Apparently some people attribute at least the name of the drink to Queen Mary, who was often known by her much more sanguinary nickname due to her brutal attempts to return Catholicism to England—some suggest that the tomato juice is supposed to represent blood. However, there isn’t any real evidence to support this theory.

8 Gin and Tonic

Some of the stranger legends actually turn out to be completely true, and this is one of them. You see, according to the stories, British soldiers fighting in the Indies were constantly dealing with a little problem called malaria, which at the time—or any time for that matter—was not really such a little problem. The British at the time had tonic water that contained a compound called quinine, which was extremely effective at fighting malaria. The only problem was that tonic water tasted pretty much as awful as anything can, so the British soldiers mixed their gin with it to make it palatable. After the war, many British men ordered it upon returning home and a famous cocktail was born. Unfortunately, while there is still enough quinine in today’s tonic water to make it glow blue in direct sunlight, there is not enough of the compound anymore to effectively fight malaria.

7 The Manhattan

The Manhattan, for those of you who aren’t familiar with it, is basically a Martini for those who really like their whiskey over vodka. A Martini usually consists of vodka or gin, vermouth, and is served with an olive. A Manhattan consists of whiskey, vermouth, bitters, and is often served with a maraschino cherry as a garnish. Long before the Second World War, Winston Churchill’s mother lived in the United States and, according to the stories, was celebrating in New York. Supposedly she had quite the sweet tooth and the drink was invented to fit her palate. While the story fits with our love of Winston Churchill and his wacky antics, it unfortunately has no basis in truth. Historical evidence points to his mother being in England at that point, actually pregnant with the future wise-cracking guy we all came to know and love.

6 Irish Coffee

While much cocktail lore is shrouded in mystery, this particular story is probably true, or at least much closer to the truth than many legends. Many people assume that Irish Coffee gets its name because the Irish like to drink, so it seems likely that if anyone were to dump alcohol in their coffee, it would be those drug-addled boozers. However, the Irish in general are much bigger tea drinkers. Long ago in Ireland a flight was delayed and the bartender put whiskey in the coffee of the stranded American passengers, thinking it would warm them up.The passengers were delighted with his creation and wondered if it was Brazilian coffee, to which he retorted that it was Irish. In fact the drink was such a hit with the passengers that word of it was taken back to the United States, where it achieved great popularity. It should be noted, though, that in the original legend whipping cream and sugar are not mentioned, so the cocktail likely went through much more evolution before it reached its current form. Even today it is still evolving as people are more likely to use already whipped cream, as opposed to doing the job by hand to get the right consistency.

5 Mojito

The Mojito is a rum-based cocktail that has long been popular with sailors. The drink makes use of mint leaves by first using a muddler to release their flavor. These mint leaves are then mixed with lime juice, sugar, and soda water. As with many famous cocktails, its origin is shrouded in mystery, but its birthplace was definitely Cuba. One feature the various stories seem to have in common and that makes perfect sense is the Mojito’s ability to help to fight off scurvy, which would explain its popularity among sailors. Long before modern medical science had figured out all that jazz, sailors often had to deal with a scurvy problem, and citrus was one of the best preventatives.

4 Screwdriver

The Screwdriver is a drink that hardly needs any introduction at all. In fact, as a combination of vodka and orange juice, it’s about as simple as cocktails get. However, its origins are not as simple. The most popular story goes that the Screwdriver came to be when miners or other blue-collar workers started mixing vodka and orange juice using their screwdrivers. However, it is hard to be certain whether there is much veracity to this legend. Another story says that the Screwdriver, along with other vodka-based beverages, was first invented and pushed by one John Martin, who was trying to make Smirnoff Vodka a big brand in the United States. Not only is he credited by some with inventing the Screwdriver, but legend says he once filled a tanker with his Screwdrivers and handed them out on Hollywood Boulevard to promote his business.

3 Cosmopolitan

The Cosmo is a vodka-based cocktail perhaps best known for being the drink of choice among the characters on the popular television series Sex and the City. Its iconic place on the show has cemented its reputation as a “girly” drink. However, despite its reputation, it’s hardly one of the fruitiest cocktails the world has ever seen—in essence it’s just vodka and cranberry with triple sec and lime juice to make it more interesting. The legends say the drink was created by the gay community in Massachusetts in the 1970s. However, recipes have been found from long before with slight variations—such as gin instead of vodka—and its true origins are likely to remain a mystery. Still, the strangest truth of the Cosmopolitan is that it would probably never have achieved its status as an iconic cocktail without the television series with which it is associated.

2 Zombie

The Zombie is a drink that doesn’t really have a standard recipe, except for the fact that it usually includes rum and some kind of fruit juice. This is because the drink was originally invented by a man known as Don the Beachcomber, and was so popular that he kept the recipe a closely guarded secret. He told only parts of the recipe to different bartenders, so no one but him knew the entire method to his madness. This secrecy unsurprisingly led to many variations and opinions on the drink, some of them quite vociferous. However, one author believes he has found an original version of the recipe written by its inventor, which utilizes three different types of rum and enough alcohol to make you believe you are a zombie by the time you’ve drunk it. Perhaps with this new-found recipe, the zombies will rise from the earth once more to feast upon the living.

1 Pina Colada

The Pina Colada is one of the most famous cocktails in existence, featuring in a song that anyone reading this can probably sing at least a couple bars from. It is made from pineapple juice, rum, and coconut. What may be more surprising to know is that the all-important third ingredient, cream of coconut, was essentially responsible for the drink. The Pina Colada was more than anything a mark of success for a businessman named Don Ramon Lopez, who owned a company that sold a premade cream of coconut drink called Coco Lopez. He made sure to get the cream of coconut into the hands of as many bartenders as possible and encouraged them to experiment with it. One of the bartenders eventually hit upon the famous combo beloved by so many today and the rest was sweet, corporate history.

For every new follower on Twitter, Gregory Myers will take a shot, but he won’t do it in any way you can prove.

Mental health is one of the most perplexing, fascinating, and concerning issues in modern society. When the human brain malfunctions, it is often a result of complex, interconnected factors involving the whole body. In this fascinating account, we dig deeper and discover some of the most startling, lesser known, and downright weird facts about both well-known and very obscure mental disorders.

10 Schizophrenia Is Connected To The Shape Of Your Mouth

We often put a dividing line between mental health and physical health. Psychiatrists tend to focus on behavior, but a look at physiology might also prove useful in diagnostics. Recent studies suggest that schizophrenia may be correlated with a slightly wider hard palate, which is on the roof of your mouth. What that suggests is that doctors could find ways to look at physical traits to diagnose schizophrenia. Even more importantly, it means that schizophrenia is likely part of a larger developmental disorder than we once thought—one that contains both physical and mental symptoms.

Researchers noticed that these hard palate deformities usually show up in conjunction with mutations and genetic flaws that trigger specific sets of symptoms. Schizophrenia is considered to be an extremely complex illness by the Schizophrenia Association of Canada, which notes the complex, biochemical nature of the illness, and its roots in neurotransmitter and amino acid disruptions. This complexity has led to speculations that schizophrenia might actually be a number of disorders masquerading as a single one.

9 Autism Is Strongly Linked To Seizures

Autism has a history of misunderstandings. In the past, it was considered at different times a type of schizophrenia and the result of neglectful parents. While autism is more clearly understood in the present time, it is still a complex disorder with surprising complications. As a matter of fact, autism might be strongly linked to more serious symptoms than we once thought—while one or two percent of children will statistically experience seizures growing up, up to 38 percent of autistic children are affected by potentially dangerous seizures at some point in their lives.

A prospective study published in the library of the National Institute of Health found that only a third of the children had their first seizure before the age of two. For the rest of them, an epileptic seizure could suddenly occur at any point in life. This work followed the same children for over a decade, and helped to give some credence to the idea that there’s a definite link between autism spectrum disorders and seizures.

8 Shocking Rates Of Mental Illness In Younger Populations

Although it’s not true in all cases, mental illness is often associated with distinctly “unnatural” behavior. However, leading authorities show that being “normal” is less common than we seem to think. According to findings published by the World Health Organization, up to 20 percent of children and adolescents suffer from a mental illness in some form. That’s a surprisingly high number for a population which is usually—and perhaps wrongly—stereotyped as being fit and healthy.

Canadian medical literature notes that young people between the ages of 15 and 24 are most likely to experience mental illness out of any demographic, and mental illness is the second leading cause of premature death or disability in Canada. Commonly reported illnesses include depression, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia. It’s also not uncommon for drug use to trigger a latent mental disorder—or, conversely, for emerging symptoms of a mental disorder to trigger drug use as a form of self-medication.

7 Mental Illnesses Can Destroy Your Body

Mental illness isn’t just a problem with your mind—it can also lead to serious physical diseases. Most concerning are probably the statistics that point to increased rates of heart disease in mental health patients, for example, while anxiety disorders may cause muscle and back problems. Symptoms of anxiety, along with disorders like Tourette’s syndrome, can also cause physical damage from repetitive stress injuries.

A lot of this can be traced back to a neurochemical imbalance. Toxic hormones released by the endocrine system under stress can cause huge amounts of damage to the tissues and organs in your body. According to several studies by psychiatric services, individuals with mental illnesses such as bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, or depression were 2.6 times as likely to develop cancer. On top of that, studies quoted by Johns Hopkins University noted that those suffering from a serious mental illness had a 50 percent greater risk of hospital visits due to injury than the general population, with a 450 percent increase in death rates from injury compared to the general population.

6 Korsakoff’s Syndrome

Mental illnesses often arise from unexpected places. From a medical standpoint, one of the more interesting mental illnesses is known as Korsakoff’s syndrome. This disorder affects memory in a manner similar to Alzheimer’s, and results from a serious deficiency in thiamine, or vitamin B1. The disorder is largely seen as a complication of excessive drinking, which may deplete B1 levels and cause severe cases of nutrient malabsorption. The distress this puts on the brain can cause confusion, slowness of speech, and forgetfulness.

The most bizarre aspect of this disorder, which is associated with greater degrees of brain damage as it progresses, involves confabulation episodes. In other words, people with Korsakoff’s have been observed making up lies and stories for no reason. But they’re not actually lying—they actually believe the fake stories they’re telling. Korsakoff’s syndrome is usually considered a long-term disorder, although acute thiamine deficiency can lead to coma or death if not treated promptly. AIDS and serious metabolic disorders may also cause thiamine deficiency, with equally serious effects.

5 Stress Shrinks The Brain

We tend to think of mental illness as a malfunction, so to speak, and brain injury as a separate, physical problem. But you don’t have to take drugs or experience physical trauma to suffer brain damage. Brain damage may result from excessive levels of cortisol and other toxic chemicals produced by our still-primitive animal body. A large number of animal species, including humans, hold reserves of drug-like chemicals that provide many short-term benefits to survival through their involvement in the fight-or-flight response.

However, long-term stress, or the presence of a stress-inducing mental illness in modern life, can cause chronic, long-term release of these chemicals. Cortisol—the “stress hormone”—can kill brain cells directly, impair general brain function, and even make the brain smaller through cellular atrophy. Researchers have also found that a reduced ability in elderly patients to control cortisol levels may be linked to Alzheimer’s disease because of the neurological degeneration those increased cortisol levels cause.

4 Autism And Physical Development

Autism is usually seen as a stand-alone mental disorder that has long been a source of controversy among medical practitioners. However, autism incidence also shows a surprising correlation to physical factors, such as birth size and head development. Some studies published in the July 2003 edition of the Journal of the American Medical Association indicated that children with autism tend to be born with slightly smaller heads. However, cranial growth and physical brain development rates then overtake the norm until the head and brain are abnormally large for a time.

They also found that certain brain components in autistic children may be larger than those in control groups. Later, the growth catches up, so that autistic adults have a fairly typical brain-to-body proportion—in other words, autistic children often enter life smaller, but grow faster than other children. Physical factors associated with autism aside, the cause of autism is still a mystery. One study suggests that autism rates are higher in US counties with more rainfall. Despite the connection, they still haven’t discovered why that’s the case. It could be something as simple as the fact that with more rain, children spend more time exposed to household chemicals indoors.

3 Depression Is Surprisingly Environmental

Depression is usually seen as some form of internal imbalance of the mind. However, studies suggest that depression in human beings may be profoundly influenced by our living environment. According to a 2011 study in the Nature journal, city dwellers suffer from a rate of depression that’s 39 percent greater than rates of depression experienced by rural dwellers.

Decreased levels of essential fatty acids through dietary factors, such as low fish intake, have also been correlated with depression. In addition, urbanites are 21 percent more likely to have anxiety, while rates of schizophrenia are nearly doubled in cities. Scientists noted that city dwellers had increased activity in the cingulate part of the brain, which affects the ability of the brain to regulate stress. It appears that continued strain from urban environments stresses out the body, leading to mental health challenges in some people.

2 Pure Obsessions

Obsessive-compulsive disorder affects a significant percentage of the population. However, it is likely misunderstood in many cases, because only the visible signs are well known. In fact, OCD is often present in a more insidious form known as pure obsessions, where violent or disgusting thoughts flood the brain and cause significant distress. A person with this widespread—but underreported—form of OCD may experience repeated thoughts that shock even them, and often have to try to “change the channel” mentally to get rid of the thoughts.

This so-called “Pure O” form of anxiety disorder exists where no obsession-related action occurs. It’s usually characterized by something incredibly violent, like a random thought to pull out a knife and stab their coworker. They don’t want to do that, but the thought runs through their heads anyway. Usually, they’re just as disgusted by their thoughts as anyone else would be. At the same time, people suffering from “Pure O” don’t compulsively repeat actions, which is what you usually picture when you think of someone with OCD.

1 Nerve Damage, Mental Health, And Socialization

As we’ve mentioned several times, mental illnesses could be far more physical than once thought. Researchers have already determined that reduced production of myelin, a nerve-protection fiber, is associated with degenerative neurological disorders such as multiple sclerosis. In recent studies at the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, loss of myelin sheathing on nerve fibers has been found to be linked to the development of mental illnesses.

Myelination is a highly physical, electromechanical component of the nervous system. It’s responsible for insulating nerve fibers and allowing efficient transmission of brain signals. While mental health studies often put a lot of attention on the neurotransmitters themselves, it seems that the condition of the “wiring” is also pretty important. Even stranger is the fact that myelin damage may be caused by environmental and social factors. Studies done on mice indicate that myelin production can become impaired as a result of social isolation. The effects are not limited to young mice, either—in the studies, the development and maintenance of myelin levels in adult mice was impaired as well.

Christopher Stephens is a graduate student of science and busy freelance writer and naturalist on Vancouver Island in British Columbia. He is the birding tour leader for Pacific Rainforest Tours and writes for Island Healthworks.

Celebs truly are just like us—in the sense that some of them have incredibly unique names! Just like plenty of people around the world, the parents of many celebrities found some very rare and notable inspirations for naming their unborn babies who would go on to be rich and famous. And these are some of their stories!

In this list, we’ll take a look at the tales of ten celebrities who were named after notable things, people, or places. All ten of these stars were unborn, of course, and at the mercy of their parents’ whims and tastes. But their names were memorable from the get-go based on the inspiration these parents had. And now, after having risen to fame, we all know these stars’ tales of how they got their monikers. Get ready for a strange one!

Related: 10 Of The Most Unflattering Nicknames Given To Royals

10 Rachel Zegler

Rachel Zegler may only be in her early 20s, but she’s already made a major impression on Hollywood. The actress won a Golden Globe for her work in Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story, and in 2023, she starred in Shazam. Maybe it makes sense that she’s spending her life working successfully in front of the camera, though. Because the reason she was named “Rachel” in the first place all came down to her mother being a big fan of television! That’s right: Rachel Zegler is actually named after Rachel Green, the iconic character played by Jennifer Aniston on the long-running television sitcom Friends.

“That is a real fact, and nobody ever believes me,” Zegler told Jimmy Fallon during an appearance on The Tonight Show in November of 2023. “They think there’s no way I’m young enough to be named after Friends, but I am.”^[1]

9 Taylor Swift

Taylor Swift may be the biggest pop star on the planet right now, but she was actually named for an even bigger star who shone brightly long before her birth: James Taylor! Swift’s parents were big fans of James Taylor’s music, and so when they had their daughter in 1989, they decided to name her after the folk-singing sensation.

Years later, in 2015, James Taylor reminisced about how he came to learn that fact. And he was very honored by it! “It’s hugely flattering and was a delightful surprise when she told me that,” James said to the outlet Stereogum that year. “We did a benefit together… before Taylor really took off. But she was playing guitar and singing her songs, and I knew how remarkable she was. She told me that her mom and dad had been really, deeply into my music, and I got a real kick out of the fact that she’d been named after me. Obviously, it wasn’t her choice. It was her mom and dad, but nonetheless, a great connection, I think.”^[2]

8 Selena Gomez

Late in 2020, pop star Selena Gomez popped up on her Instagram account and confirmed to fans that she had been watching the then-popular Netflix series about the late Tejano singer Selena Quintanilla. The first Selena, as she was, took the American Southwest by storm and crossed cultural boundaries with both American and Mexican fans before she was tragically murdered by the director of her own fan club in Corpus Christi, Texas, in 1995. But as it turns out, this second Selena was named in a way to honor the first!

“I wanted to check in and say ‘hi’ and that I have been binge-watching the Selena series on Netflix. It’s so good,” Gomez wrote about the late superstar Quintanilla in her Instagram Story in December of 2020. “She’s such an inspiration. I was named after her, and it’s unbelievable.” It’s pretty amazing to think that a future pop singer would be named after another Latina star, but that’s how it turned out. What are the chances?!^[3]

7 Dax Shepard

Dax Shepard rose to fame on the back of pal Ashton Kutcher when the two did the iconic MTV show Punk’d together in the 2000s. Since then, Dax has taken on a number of film roles in various projects, including a memorable turn in Idiocracy. More recently, his “Armchair Expert” podcast has become one of the more popular audio shows to be streamed, and he interviews all kinds of interesting celebrity guests about all sorts of quirky and fascinating things. But he was destined for fame even before birth—because his parents were already thinking uniquely!

According to Dax’s wife, Kristen Bell, who spoke to People Magazine about her beloved husband a few years back, he was named after the protagonist in author Harold Robbins’ 1966 novel The Adventurers. Kristen went so far as to track down an original copy of that book for one of Dax’s birthdays, too. And then she had family members and friends write messages of love for the star in the book! What a way to honor one’s namesake and recall the inspiration with which his parents picked out his name. Very sweet!^[4]

6 Oprah Winfrey

Oprah Winfrey may be a household name by now and one of the most famous women to ever see her star rise on television, but things didn’t start out that way. In fact, her actual name isn’t even Oprah; it’s actually Orpah! (Notice the alternate spelling—it’s easy to miss!) As the story goes, Oprah was named after Orpah, which is a character in the Bible in the 14th verse of the first chapter of Ruth. Basically, the future TV star-to-be’s aunt Ida named her like that. But then, nobody else in the family could pronounce “Orpah” the right way, and the name quickly reverted to what we know today!

“Originally, I was named from the Bible by Aunt Ida who named me from Ruth, the first chapter at the 14th verse: Orpah,” Winfrey explained in 1983 during the audition tape that would end up earning her a turn on her first-ever morning show in Chicago. “But no one knew how to spell in my home, and that’s why it ended up being Oprah.” It’s funny how fate can be changed on a dime like that, isn’t it? We almost had Orpah Winfrey, but instead, Oprah is one of the most recognized names in all of entertainment media!^[5]

5 Leonardo DiCaprio

Leonardo DiCaprio was still in the womb when his artistically inclined mother decided on what to name him. He’s got an Italian last name, of course, so that was a natural move to give him an Italian-inspired first name, too. But that’s not the exact impetus for calling the child Leonardo. What actually happened is that his mom was at a museum in Italy while she was pregnant with then-unborn Leo. She just so happened to be standing in front of a painting produced by the legendary Leonardo da Vinci when BAM! She felt her unborn son kicking in her belly for the very first time.

DiCaprio’s mom took it as a sign that she ought to name the baby after the iconic painter, and so she did. A few months later, Leonardo DiCaprio was born and entered the world with quite a high-end namesake. Of course, we’d say that the Titanic star did pretty well for himself in carrying on the name from there. But it’s definitely funny and unique to learn that he was named after the painter following such a memorable kicking experience in the hallowed halls of a museum that housed da Vinci’s works!^[6]

4 Ciara

In 2016, the R&B singer Ciara became the face of Revlon cosmetics and fragrances. She was officially named a global ambassador for the company that year, and she was extremely happy about it. But it wasn’t just because she’d inked a big deal with a world-famous brand; it was because she was actually named after a Revlon product by her astute parents when she was still in the womb!

“I’ve been a fan of the iconic Revlon brand my entire life,” football star Russell Wilson’s wife touted in a press release celebrating her move to become Revlon’s global brand ambassador. “In fact, my name comes from the Revlon Ciara fragrance. It was a gift given to my mother from my father, and she fell in love with the scent and the name. It’s incredible to think that after all those years, I would be joining the Revlon family as the newest Global Brand Ambassador.” Amazing to think about how that came full circle, isn’t it? From being named after a fragrance by her mother to several decades later becoming the celebrity that the world associates with the brand!^[7]

3 Lil Nas X

Lil Nas X completely took the entire world by storm when his song “Old Town Road” alongside Billy Ray Cyrus debuted and shot to viral fame. And while he hasn’t been quite able to repeat that success with subsequent music, he has made headlines for plenty of other things. For one, he came out as gay after the song got big, breaking down barriers in the worlds of both hip-hop and country music. But there are even more interesting stories beyond that, too—like how he’s named after a Mitsubishi!

Lil Nas X’s given name is Montero Lamar Hill. When he was born in 1999 in Georgia, his mother was apparently really impressed with the Mitsubishi Montero. She didn’t have one at the time, but she badly wanted the SUV for herself. So she willed it into existence by deciding to name her son after the car model! “It’s slightly embarrassing, but [I’m] not embarrassed,” Lil Nas X explained on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon back in 2021. “So my mom wanted the car, the Montero, and she never got one. It’s a Mitsubishi, so ya, I’m named after a car.”^[8]

2 Winona Ryder

Before Winona Ryder was born, her father and her pregnant mother were passing through rural Minnesota. At one point, they stopped in the tiny town of Winona—which today has a population of just 25,000 people and was even smaller back then. As they were there, Ryder’s mom bent down to pick up a pamphlet about the town that was inside a laundromat where they had been washing some clothes. All of a sudden, her water broke, and she went into labor! They rushed to the hospital, and Winona was born a happy and healthy girl. But they were so amazed at the sudden birth in the tiny town that they decided to honor the village in the only way they knew how: by naming their daughter after it!

“[My mom] bent over to pick up this pamphlet with a girl on the cover, which said The Legend of Winona, and she went into labor,” Winona told Vogue Magazine years later. “I was supposed to be named Laura!” Sure, while Laura Ryder may not have a bad ring to it, the name Winona is unique and beautiful. Seems to us like her parents inadvertently picked a winner with that one!^[9]

1 Jane Fonda

Jane Fonda was named after one of the most famous women to ever live: Jane Seymour, one of the wives of the long-dead King Henry VIII. In fact, Fonda is even distantly related to Jane Seymour, so the name makes some sense in that regard. Fonda revealed as much to late-night television host Jimmy Kimmel when she went on his show in 2015. Her full name is actually Jane Seymour Fonda, and the “Seymour” in her middle name is also a nod to the famous ancient wife who was murdered by her rampaging royal husband!

“She was one of the wives of Henry VIII, and we were related to her, which is how come the ‘Seymour’ appears,” Fonda explained to Kimmel during their interview. When she was a kid, it even went so far that everybody in her life called her “Lady Jane” as opposed to only knowing her by her first name. Now, that’s truly the royal treatment! But as it turned out, Jane flipped that script to become something of a modern-day royal herself—at least as far as Hollywood is concerned!^[10]

We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again: The human brain is amazing. In the words of neuroscientist Vilayanur Ramachandran, it’s a “three-pound mass of jelly you can hold in the palm of your hand,” but it can “contemplate the meaning of infinity, and it can contemplate itself contemplating on the meaning of infinity.” As it’s the most complex organ in our bodies, you can bet there’s no shortage of strange stories about the human brain.

10 Brains On eBay

Here’s a story with all the makings of a Gothic novel, complete with a mental hospital, human organs, and a ghoulish grave robber named David Charles.

Charles didn’t actually dig up any coffins, but he did break into the Indiana Medical History Museum on several occasions. From the 1840s right up to the 1990s, the museum was the site of the Central State Hospital, a psychiatric ward that performed its fair share of autopsies. After the bodies were cut up, the brains were jarred and locked away in a warehouse—a warehouse Charles later slipped into repeatedly.

After pilfering six jars of human tissue, Charles unloaded his goods to an eBay fence who sold them to a San Diego man for $600. The buyer liked “to collect odd things.” He also had a code of ethics. While he didn’t mind breaking federal law by buying human organs, and while he didn’t care about violating eBay policies on body parts, he did have problems with buying stolen property. Neither Charles nor his eBay middleman had the brains to remove the museum labels from the jars.

Figuring something crooked was going on, the San Diego buyer notified authorities. After tracking down the eBay seller, Indianapolis police officers set up a sting operation. The plan was for Charles, who’d recently snatched 60 more brains, to meet up with his eBay buddy at a local Dairy Queen. And on December 16, cops swarmed the restaurant parking lot, successfully bringing down the Indiana Igor.

9 The Cordless Drill Skull Operation

Marian Dolishny was dying. Thanks to a fair-sized tumor, he was suffering epileptic seizures, and if he didn’t do something about it soon, he’d go blind. Unfortunately for Dolishny, he couldn’t just visit the local hospital and schedule an operation. It was 2007, Dolishny lived in Ukraine, and due to a labyrinthine bureaucracy and massive underfunding, the healthcare system was a mess. No one could remove his tumor, and things were looking grim when suddenly an elderly British superhero showed up to save the day.

One of the UK’s best neurosurgeons, Henry Marsh had been visiting Ukraine at least twice a year since the early ‘90s. After meeting people with massive growths on their heads, Marsh realized he couldn’t fly back home and forget what he’d seen. So he sent disused supplies from his hospital in Tooting to Ukrainian doctors. Even better, he started offering his services free of charge.

That’s how Marsh and Dolishny met. But just because the Ukrainian had a great surgeon didn’t mean the operation was going to be easy. Marsh lacked access to the state-of-the-art equipment required for such procedures. However, the best doctors are like musicians—they’re talented, passionate, and can improvise on the fly. Marsh went to a local store and bought a $67 cordless power drill. He then operated with a gadget you keep in your toolbox.

What’s even crazier is Dolishny was awake for the whole thing. No qualified anesthetists were around, so Marsh just used a local anesthetic. And since Dolishny was awake, Marsh talked to him the entire time, making sure he wasn’t screwing up the man’s brain.

Before Marsh could finish the procedure, the drill’s battery died. Where a lesser surgeon would’ve panicked, Marsh kept on working, finishing up with his gloved hands and saving Dolishny’s life.

8 Strange Stories Of Ancient Brains

Your brain is 60 percent fat, and thanks to all that blubber, it’s the first organ to melt away after you die. That’s why archaeologists find so many skulls but so few brains. Most of them liquefied long before we could dig them up.

But every so often, scientists discover a brain dating back several thousand years. For example, the some of the oldest brain tissue ever discovered, around 8,000 years old, was found in eastern Florida, preserved under thick layers of peat. But while they’re not as old as their New World counterparts, the ancient brains of Europe carry much more interesting stories.

Our first macabre tale is the story of the Heslington Brain, the oldest known brain in Great Britain. In 2008, the University of York was expanding its campus when someone stumbled over several pits dating back to the Iron Age. After prodding around, archaeologists found one hole containing a skull, a jaw, and two neck vertebrae belonging to the same deceased Brit. When the skull was opened, scientists found the yellowy, shrunken remains of a 2,500-year-old brain. The muddy environment had kept it safe from decay. Marks on the vertebrae indicate that the body’s owner had been hanged and beheaded, possibly as part of a ritualistic murder.

Only slightly less morbid is the tale of the 4,000-year-old Turkish brain found in the Bronze Age settlement of Seyitomer Hoyuk. This brain looks like a charred log someone pulled out of a bonfire. That’s probably because it belonged to an unfortunate Turk who was minding his or her own business when an earthquake wrecked the entire village, bringing down a rain of rubble. Then, a fire broke out, incinerating everything and boiling said brain in its own juices. But while a bubbling brain sounds disgusting, this rapid evaporation of liquid coupled with nutrient-rich soil and elimination of oxygen via the flames ensured this charbroiled organ survived for thousands of years.

7 Unlocking Lenin’s Brain

Vladimir Lenin was a prolific writer and a serious philosopher. He also successfully overthrew a government and installed himself as unquestioned dictator. But was he a genius? Soviet scientists certainly thought so.

After the Premier died in 1924, Russian researchers were itching to cut open his skull and study his brain. They wanted to show the world Lenin was one of the smartest men on the planet. So after removing the brain, they plunked it in a jar of formaldehyde and stuck it in the V.I. Lenin Institute while they searched for the right expert to examine the organ. Two years later, they decided Oskar Vogt was the man for the job. The only problem was Vogt was German, and the Soviets didn’t want Lenin’s brain leaving Moscow.

In a typical Soviet compromise, officials gave Vogt one little sample to take back home. If he wanted to see the rest of the brain, he had to come to Russia. So for the next several years, Vogt visited the Moscow Brain Institute, but some Soviets weren’t too happy with this foreigner fondling their comrade’s cerebrum. Even worse, Vogt was telling people Lenin’s brain resembled a criminal’s.

Ticked off, the Soviets planned to fly to Berlin and take back the sliver of brain they’d lent the man, but Adolf Hitler fired Vogt from his position before the Russians could get their sample back. Nobody knows what happened to that little piece of Vladimir’s brain.

The Soviets cut the rest up into tiny chunks and dyed the pieces different colors. After the fall of the USSR, Russian scientists released a paper detailing the results of their nearly 70-year-long study. They had found nothing interesting at all.

6 The Woman Who Remembers Everything

Can you remember where you were on a randomly selected date 30 years ago? Say, the afternoon of September 20, 1985? Assuming you were even alive then, chances are good you’re drawing a blank, but Jill Price remembers that day perfectly. She was wearing a big hat and eating garlic chicken with her dad at one of her favorite restaurants. And if you picked some other random day, she could do the same exact same thing because Jill Price remembers everything.

Jill has a rare condition called hyperthymestic syndrome, which gives her a super-powered memory. While scientists are still trying to understand Jill’s mind, they believe her elephantine memory has something do with several areas of her brain that are three times bigger than average.

Thanks to her special brain, Jill can remember most everything that happened between her 9th and 15th birthday. And after that? She couldn’t forget anything if she tried. But strangely, if you asked her to memorize a poem, she probably couldn’t do it. Jill’s semantic memory isn’t all that strong, but her episodic memory, the part that remembers personal events and emotions, is perfect. And that’s actually a big problem.

In addition to remembering cool facts, Jill remembers every terrible event that’s ever happened to her as though it happened yesterday. That’s especially hard when Jill thinks about loved ones who’ve passed away or things people did years ago. “I don’t look back at the past with any distance,” she once said. “It’s like an endless chaotic film that can completely overpower me. And there’s no stop button.”

5 How Hugo Rewired A Man’s Brain

Photo credit: Paramount Pictures

Imagine the world as a flat, 2-D panel. There is no depth perception here. When pouring a glass of water and looking from above, you wouldn’t know it was full until the water spilled over. Trees would be nothing more than flat patterns blending into the background. This is the world Bruce Bridgeman lived in for 67 years until Martin Scorsese changed his life.

Bridgeman is a neuroscientist at the University of California, and until 2012, he was one of the 5–10 percent of the population suffering from stereoblindness, the inability to see three-dimensionally. In Bridgeman’s case, his impairment was caused by alternating exotropic strabismus. In other words, his eyes wandered around independently. Since he could only focus one eyeball at a time, he could never see out both eyes at once, eliminating all depth perception.

Then in 2012, everything changed. Bridgeman and his wife went to see Martin Scorsese’s Hugo in 3-D. Even though it wouldn’t do him any good, Bridgeman bought the glasses and settled in for the picture. And once the film started, images popped out of the screen. Suddenly, everything was vivid and alive. Objects and people actually stood out from the background.

What was even more amazing is when Bridgeman went outside, he could still see in 3-D. The lampposts were no longer part of the background, and a tree was suddenly a “big three-dimensional sculpture.”

Scientists think Bridgeman always had the ability to see 3-D, but his brain just needed a wake-up call. As he stared at the screen for 128 minutes, his eyes focused on the movie, and suddenly his visual cortex just clicked.

Obviously, the 3-D movie cure doesn’t work for everyone. Some need corrective surgery, some spend hours in therapy, and others will never see the world in its full glory.

4 The Man Who Could Only Say One Syllable

Born in 1809, Louis Victor Leborgne struggled with epilepsy for years before things got even worse. At the age of 30, Leborgne lost the ability to speak. He could say just one syllable: “tan.” If you asked for his name, he’d say, “Tan tan.” If you asked him his favorite food, he’d say, “Tan, tan.” If you asked him the time, he’d say “Tan tan,” but he’d show you the correct time using his fingers. Louis Leborgne wasn’t stupid. He just couldn’t talk.

Unable to communicate, Leborgne checked in to a Parisian hospital, where he spent the next 21 years of his life. He morphed into a rather disagreeable person. He’d monosyllabically argue with staff and even steal on occasion. If Leborgne got especially angry, he could toss around a few swear words, though he could never curse when calm and composed.

Things got worse when his right arm and leg suddenly became paralyzed. Frustrated, Leborgne stayed in bed for seven years, and in 1861, he developed a horrible case of gangrene in his right side. Hoping to save Leborgne, the hospital brought in surgeon Paul Broca. The operation came too late, and Lebornge died on April 17, aged 51. However, his brain still had an important part to play in the world of neuroscience.

After examining Leborgne’s brain, Broca discovered a nasty lesion in the frontal area of the left hemisphere, a region later dubbed Broca’s area. After performing additional biopsies on similar patients, the doctor knew he was on to something big. For a while, scientists had been debating whether individual parts of the brain controlled specific functions. Now, Broca had proof that the front left hemisphere was responsible for language.

It also seemed the area was divided into multiple regions serving different functions, like language production and language comprehension. That explained why Leborgne could understand as many words as anyone else though he could only pronounce one.

Broca was right on the money, and his discovery revolutionized neurology. Leborgne’s brain now floats in a jar at the Musee Dupuytren in Paris, where anyone can come and visit it.

3 Brain Teeth And Brain Feet

Early in 2014, a four-month-old Maryland baby made headlines thanks to a rather unusual brain tumor. During an operation, surgeons found the baby had a craniopharyngioma, a growth created by the same cells that make our teeth. There were actual teeth growing in the baby’s brain. Doctors safely removed the toothy tumor, but this wasn’t the first case of its kind.

In 2008, Colorado doctors discovered Tiffinie Esquibel’s unborn baby Sam was suffering from a brain tumor. After inducing labor, the doctors took Sam into surgery, and what happened next sounds like a scene from a horror movie. When Dr. Paul Grabb cut open the tumor, a human foot popped out of Sam’s head. When the surgeons got over their shock, they dug a little deeper and actually found a hand and even a thigh.

Most doctors believe Sam was suffering from a teratoma, a tumor that often produces creepy body parts in places they don’t belong. As awful as that sounds, it’s way more comforting than the other theory doctors considered. A few suspected Sam might have a condition known as fetus in fetu, meaning he might have absorbed a twin in the womb, and his sibling was feeding off Sam like a human parasite.

2 The Man Who Loves Johnny Cash

“Mr. B” is a 59-year-old Dutchman who’s battled severe OCD for 40 years. Desperate for a cure, he agreed to try deep brain stimulation, a treatment involving surgical implants that zap the brain with electric currents.

Just as Mr. B had hoped, the shock therapy worked, greatly reducing his OCD, depression, and anxiety. However, the treatment had a really weird side effect. It turned him into the world’s biggest Johnny Cash fan. Before the surgery, Mr. B was a casual music listener who liked Dutch music, the Beatles, and the Rolling Stones. But after the treatment, Mr. B bought every Johnny Cash CD and DVD he could get his hands on. He won’t listen to anything else.

Scientists know the implants are responsible because every time their batteries start to die, Mr. B stops listening to his Johnny Cash albums. Yet as soon as doctors recharge the implants, he starts walking the line again, devoting himself solely to the Man in Black.

1 The Family That Can’t Fall Asleep

Italian physician Ignazio Roiter married into an old Venetian family, but unbeknownst to the good doctor, there was something horrifying about the clan’s history. Roiter’s first glimpse of the familial terror came in 1973, when his wife’s aunt developed an inexplicable sickness. All of a sudden, she couldn’t fall asleep. Soon, she was stuck in an agonizing limbo between unconsciousness and waking life. Completely exhausted but unable to rest, she lost the ability to walk and gave up on conversation until she died a year later.

In 1979, another aunt died of the same mysterious disease. Suddenly, someone remembered an old grandfather who’d passed away under similar circumstances. Curious, Roiter scoured records at the local church and nearby mental asylum. After finding multiple instances of relatives dying sleepless deaths, he was convinced a genetic disease was at work. And when an uncle named Silvano died of fatigue in 1984, Roiter got a chance to find out for sure.

Roiter took the man’s brain to two American specialists. After analyzing the organ, Dr. Pierluigi Gambetti found the brain was full of tiny holes. According to a second doctor named Stanley Prusiner, a mutant gene had activated a group of misinformed proteins called prions. These rogue molecules took on virus characteristics and started infecting other proteins, turning the brain into a war zone and shutting down important bodily functions like sleep.

There’s no cure for fatal familial insomnia. If that mutant gene activates the abnormal proteins, the carrier is doomed to a sleepless haze. As of 2010, scientists have found at least 40 families battling this illness. Until scientists do cure the disorder, people like Roiter’s relatives will never rest—not until that final big sleep.

Nolan Moore would dance and be merry, his life would be a ding-a-derry, if he only had a brain. If you want, you can follow/friend him on Facebook or send him an email.

Some of the festivals we celebrate today can seem quite extraordinary. Just think about the Spanish festival La Tomatina, which is the biggest tomato fight in the world, or the Mexican Night of the Radishes, which is a night for carving oversized radishes into cool shapes. But even they pale in comparison to some of the bizarre festivals that were celebrated by our ancestors.

10Feast Of Fools

The Feast of Fools was a medieval New Year’s Day celebration that usually started on the first day of the year. It originated from the Roman festival Saturnalia and was popular right until the 16th century.

During this mad New Year’s party, people would elect a Lord of Misrule or a king of Fools. This comic king went by many names, depending on the location of those celebrating. For example, in England he was known as the king of the bean and in Scotland as the Abbott of Unreason. During the feast, people, cross-dressed, sang bawdy songs, drank to excess, and gambled on the church altar.

9Feast Of The Ass

During the middle ages, a church festival known as the Feast of the Ass was celebrated. It was most popular in France, where it was known as “La Fete de l’ane.” The bizarre feast was celebrated on the 14th of January and was a way of honoring the donkey that carried Mary from Egypt.

During the feast, a village girl with a baby in her arms was seated upon a bejeweled donkey and then paraded through town and into a church, where a mock mass was to take place. At the end of the mock mass, the priest would turn to the congregation and bray three times. The congregation would then answer with three hee-haws. In France, the congregation often sang a psalm that praised the donkey as “Sir Ass,” who is beautiful and very brave.

8Festival Of Drunkenness

The Festival of Drunkenness was celebrated during the first month of the Egyptian year. The festival was a way of honoring the Eye of Ra and the myth of the slaughter of mankind as well as a way to supposedly appease Egyptian goddesses such as Sekhmet.

The festival, which was a holy event, involved the participants drinking obscene amounts of alcohol. In fact, most of the time the participants would get so drunk that they would fall asleep in the temple forecourt.

The sleeping celebrants would later be awoken by the sound of drums and music, which supposedly helped them to commune with and worship the goddess. In addition to drinking, the participants danced, lit torches, and engaged in intimate encounters with other celebrants.

7Bals Des Victimes

As the Reign of Terror came to an end, the city of Paris was engulfed in frenzied parties and mad events. The citizens of Paris had survived a period of repression and bloodshed, and they were intent on celebrating that they were still alive.

One of the maddest parties hosted during this time had to be Bals des Victimes, supposedly organized by the surviving aristocrats. Only those who had narrowly escaped the guillotine, or the immediate family members of guillotine victims, were granted access to these balls.

Alcohol flowed freely—the insane indulgences were a way of blotting out the painful memories. Most women wore blood-red ribbons around their necks, and those who had barely escaped guillotine themselves sported short hair cropped in prison. This ragged hairstyle became extremely fashionable and was dubbed la coiffure a la guillotine.

While bals des victimes were certainly the most fascinating, other similar balls that commemorated the reign of terror existed. One of them was bal de la veillee, which was memorable for its meowing concert—a harpsichord was rigged up so that the keys moved metal blades which then struck the tails of several cats. Another one was bals des Zephirs which took place inside a cemetery and involved couples dancing on tombstones.

6Fete Des Pinnes

Fete des Pinnes was a Palm Sunday festival celebrated in the town of Saintes in France. On the day of the festival, small cakes were baked in the shape of phalluses and were attached at the end of palm branches. These palm branches were then carried by women and children in a celebratory procession. Later on in the day, the phallus-shaped cakes were blessed by the priest and were then preserved by the women as sacred amulets.

This celebration was not confined to the town of Saintes, however, but took place all over France. In other parts of the Mediterranean these cakes took on the form of the vagina.

5Festival Of The Boy Bishop

The Festival of the Boy Bishop was a curious festival popular during the middle ages throughout Western Europe. It began on December 6, St. Nicholas Day, when the Boy Bishop or Nicholas Bishop was elected by his fellow choristers.

The Boy Bishop not only dressed as a bishop and sat in the bishop’s actual throne but also assumed a lot of the authority of an actual bishop such as blessing people, preaching sermons, and making visitations to all the parishes in the diocese. The Boy Bishop also had the power to declare holidays and distribute sweets and gifts.

4Beltane

Beltane, the second-most-sacred Celtic festival, celebrated the first day of summer and its life-giving and nurturing fertility. Great bonfires were lit, and cattle were driven between them as a way of blessing and purifying them.

Beltane was also a celebration of the sexual union of the God and the Goddess as well as the creative energies born from their lovemaking. It was believed that these creative energies blessed the land, animals, and people, bestowing upon them health and fertility. Thus, in emulation of the gods, people of the Celtic tribes spent the night making love. And it didn’t matter if the man and the woman knew each other—during the night of Beltane, every woman was a goddess and every man a god.

Occasionally, a May Queen and May King were chosen to take part in erotic roles in an especially sacred way or, to reenact the wedding of the God and the Goddess in a non-sexual pageant before the whole village.

And while today a version of Beltane is still celebrated in some parts of the world, most of its rituals, especially those that concern sexual matters, have been heavily subdued.

3Kronia

Kronia was a Greek festival held after the summer harvest that represented the transition into winter. The festival was named after Titan Cronos, who ruled the universe during the Golden Age of mankind when there was no hunger, death, sickness, social distinctions, or oppression.

Kronia was a reflection of Cronos’s reign in that during the festival, the usual order of society was suspended. Slaves dined and played games with their masters, engaged in noisy street riots, and were served and waited on.

The festival usually ended by bringing out a criminal who was previously condemned to death (and thus represented chaos and disorder), giving him wine, and then slaying him.

2The Cerealia

The Cerealia was an ancient Roman festival dedicated to the celebration of Ceres, the goddess of grain and of agricultural and human fertility. It was celebrated over the course of seven days in April.

According to the Roman poet Ovid, the festival involved releasing live foxes into the Circus Maximus with burning torches tied to their tails. The foxes would publicly struggle to shake off the torches and would suffer a terrible end of being burned to death.

Other festival traditions included girls dressing up in white and carrying torches. This reenacted the search for Proserpine, Cere’s abducted daughter, who was carried off by Hades to the underworld where she was raped and imprisoned.

1Bacchanalia

The Bacchanalia was a Babylonian celebration honoring the birth of Tammuz, the son of Ishtar, the queen of heaven. Bacchus was the god of wine and fertility and was also associated with love, sacred prostitution, and the fertility cycle of nature.

The Bacchus festival was also known as the drunken festival and was widely associated with alcohol, dancing, and sacred sexual orgies for the purification of sin. Indulging in sexual orgies with worshipers was supposed to earn admiration from the gods.

It was expected that every young woman would lose her virginity during this festival in dedication to the great mother goddess. The festival lasted five days, during which time the slaves were emancipated and received total freedom for the duration of the festival.

Laura is a student from Ireland in love with books, writing, coffee, and cats.

While people might worry about the health of organs like the heart, lungs, and liver, not many people think about their eyes. But our vision can be affected by some very strange diseases and conditions indeed.

10Cat Eye Syndrome

An extremely rare chromosomal disease, cat eye syndrome appears at birth and is a lifelong condition. The syndrome was named after its signature symptom—an absence of tissue in the eye, which causes the pupil to narrow and push itself into the iris. However, not all sufferers of cat eye syndrome actually experience this ocular abnormality.

Unfortunately, cat eye syndrome also affects the kidneys, heart, ear, and skeletal system. It may also cause hyperactivity and mild mental disability. The condition can often be detected early on, as it causes growth delays before birth.

Treatment varies depending on the phenotype of the sufferer and the severity of the symptoms. The ocular abnormality cannot be reversed, but eyesight can be improved with glasses or other prescription eyewear.

9Eye Paralysis

In every case of eye paralysis, the eye loses all sensory and motor functions—and it’s a much more common condition than you’d think. It’s usually a symptom of various diseases, such as diabetes, peripheral artery disease, a tumor in the pituitary gland, or a cardiovascular problem. It is also associated with Kearns-Sayre syndrome, which causes pigment to build up behind the eye and comes with a horrible bonus of heart disease. Other signs of Kearns-Sayre are seizures and deafness, which usually strike in late adolescence. In rarer cases, eye paralysis is a side effect of Moebius syndrome, which paralyzes the entire face. Treatment for eye paralysis depends on the underlying cause—if the cause is cured, the paralysis will be as well.

8Hippus

More of a natural occurrence than a medical condition, hippus can be observed in anybody. When you shine a light into a person’s eye, their pupil will enlarge and contract at a slow pace, as it adjusts to the new, brighter environment. This is the pupil’s normal way of reacting. In fact, if hippus doesn’t occur under these circumstances, that may be a sign of medical problems in itself.

But when hippus occurs without the help of light, it can indicate a wide range of conditions, including neurosyphilis and multiple sclerosis. It has also been linked to renal failure and cirrhosis, and even cerebral tumors.

7Eye Tumors

Normally appearing behind your eye, ocular tumors are unpleasant enough to begin with—but are even weirder when they appear on the outside of the eye. These types of tumors, called limbal dermoids, are almost always benign and usually don’t cause any major vision problems, since they rarely cover the center of the cornea. Doctors who have treated limbal dermoids (a typical ophthalmologist may see one or two cases in their lifetime) say that patients often don’t request surgery to have them removed, because the tumors don’t harm them, aside from the possibility of mild astigmatism.

Some limbal dermoids will grow hair follicles, cartilage, and even sweat glands. One anonymous Iranian man had an eye tumor removed after it sprouted several black hairs, which were causing him mild discomfort.

6Ocular Herpes

Ocular herpes is exactly what it sounds like: herpes of the eye. It can be caused by the varicella-zoster virus or by herpes simplex type 1. These are distinct from the virus that causes genital herpes and ocular herpes cannot be sexually transmitted (the majority of people will actually be exposed to some form of herpes during their lifetime, mostly without noticing it). Ocular herpes can appear as a sore or bumps on the eyelid. These sores will usually heal within about a week, but until then they can cause redness, headaches, and photophobia.

More unusually, the virus can also affect the cornea itself, resulting in more severe versions of the usual symptoms. In very rare circumstances, herpes can even appear inside of the eye, causing temporary vision loss.

5Red Eyes In Albinos

Albinism is a condition caused by insufficient production of melanin, the pigment that gives color to your skin and hair. This melanin deficiency also affects the eyes, which can appear red or pink as a result.

Since albinos lack pigment, their eyes aren’t really red. Instead, the iris becomes transparent enough that the blood vessels behind it show through, creating the reddish color. Unfortunately, the lack of melanin means the retina is less efficient at absorbing light. This causes photophobia, an uncomfortable or painful response to bright light, and can lead to eye damage. Albinism can also inhibit the eye’s development and is strongly associated with astigmatism and other vision problems.

4Star In The Eye

Nine months after being punched in the face, an Austrian man went to the doctor complaining of deteriorating vision. When the doctor examined his eye, he was surprised to find a perfect star-shaped cataract. It’s common for cataracts to form after a blow to the eye, since the shock wave can disrupt the structure of the lens, causing it to become opaque in places. The cataract’s unique shape was a beautiful coincidence. Doctors eventually used sound waves to break up the cataract, which was then removed and replaced with an artificial lens.

A much more serious case of a star-shaped cataract occurred in California in 2004. An electrician’s shoulder came into contact with an exposed wire, causing 14,000 volts to course through his body—including his optic nerve. The initial shock of the electricity created the unusual star shapes. The cataracts were eventually removed, but the damage to the optic nerve was unfortunately permanent, leaving the man with limited sight in both eyes.

3Heterochromia

A fairly well known condition, heterochromia is a difference in color between the eyes. Most cases are hereditary, but it can be acquired later in life. Heterochromia itself is fairly benign, although it can be a symptom of an underlying condition like Waardenburg syndrome.

Heterochromia can manifest itself in different ways. For instance, not all heterochromia cases involve two totally different-colored eyes. Some people have two different colors within the same eye—for example, with sectoral heterochromia, you could have two blue eyes, but a quarter of an iris might be red or brown. The third type (other than complete heterochromia, which is described above), features a circular ring of color around the outside of the pupil, and is known as central heterochromia.

2Polycoria

True polycoria is one of the rarest conditions in the world—there have been only a handful of cases in recorded history. Even exactly how it occurs is still unknown. People with true polycoria have two or more pupils in one eye. The pupils are contained in the same iris, but have their own sphincter muscles and are capable of operating independently of each other.

Much more common is a condition called pseudopolycoria. People with this condition simply appear to have two or more pupils. However, the additional “pupils” are merely holes in the iris, lacking a pupillary sphincter, and do not function as true pupils. One Massachusetts woman appeared to have five pupils in one eye. The condition apparently did not cause her any major vision problems, other than mild discomfort in very bright light. Other than mild vision loss, polycoria doesn’t affect the inner workings of the eye.

1Haemolacria

Maybe one of the strangest conditions in medicine, haemolacria is better known as crying blood. In 2009, a teenager named Calvino Inman randomly began weeping blood one day. Reasonably thinking he was dying, Inman was rushed to the hospital and had a CT scan, MRI, and ultrasound. None of these revealed any abnormalities. Today, researchers are still puzzled as to why Calvino keeps bleeding from his eyes.

Another sufferer, Michael Spann, felt a violent pain in his head and suddenly began bleeding from his eyes, nose, and mouth. Ever since then, he has wept blood at least once or twice a week. Spann’s life has been badly impacted: “Any job I get, I lose, because my eyes start bleeding and they can’t keep me on.” Oddly, both Spann and Inman are from Tennessee.

A 2004 study looked at four children with haemolacria, all of whom eventually recovered without any medical treatment. It is unclear what caused Spann and Inman to develop the condition, but Spann at least appears to be recovering—he used to weep blood up to three times a day.

The world of puppies is not restricted to playpens and looking adorable. In recent years, several have made history by just being born. Pups are also handpicked for careers like beetle sniffers or police dogs (because they are clones of the police force’s best dog).

Additionally, charities continue to rescue the offspring of Chernobyl’s abandoned dogs while law enforcement struggles to keep up with drug dealers and burglars wanting puppies for the wrong kind of profit.

10 Tumbles’s Wheelchair

When a litter of puppies was born in 2015, one male was very different. He came into the world healthy and cute, but his two front legs were missing. For some reason, they just never developed.

Despite what most would view as a major physical challenge, his caregivers decided not to euthanize the newborn pup. He was named Tumbles. When the terrier-beagle mix was six weeks old, it became time to make him a little bit more mobile.

In Ohio, Friends of the Shelter Dogs decided that he could do with some wheels. They worked with the Ohio University Innovation Center and designed a small wheelchair to fit Tumbles. After the custom-fit device was 3-D printed, the fluffy puppy was strapped in and he took his first real steps.^[1]

9 Exo-K9 Mask

In 2017, a puppy named Loca had a bad encounter with another dog. The Staffordshire bull terrier, which was around four months old, suffered severe bite injuries to the head and neck. She was rushed to the University of California Davis School of Veterinary Medicine.

The puppy was diagnosed with a fractured jawbone, cheekbone, and severely damaged jaw joint. The effort to heal the pup involved veterinarians as well as engineers. Before Loca’s incident, the vet school worked with the UC Davis College of Engineering to create a very special mask. Called the Exo-K9 Exoskeleton, it is the future of treating facial fractures in pets.

Like a human cast, the Exo-K9 mask works by holding the healing bones in place. However, the mask is 3-D printed to fit each dog’s unique skull shape. A CT scan measured Loca’s head, and the resulting exoskeleton marked the first time that the invention was used on a patient. Within a few months, the staffie’s injuries were on the mend.^[2]

8 Chernobyl’s Puppies

In 1986, the world watched in horror as the greatest nuclear disaster unfolded at Chernobyl. The Ukrainian nuclear power plant melted down and forced workers and locals to flee. Authorities loaded residents onto buses but brutally kicked off any dogs that desperately tried to follow their owners.

Knowing what would probably happen, many owners left written pleas for the military not to kill their animals. However, soldiers went into the disaster zone and shot any animals they could find. People could be extracted, but the authorities had no time for pets and livestock that might be contaminated.

Remarkably, some dogs survived the radiation, soldiers, wolves, and wilderness. They formed packs and raised puppies. Today, hundreds of dogs roam the area and even live inside the power plant.

In recent years, a charity from the United States stepped in and sterilized hundreds of strays. They also captured the first 200 wild puppies in 2018. The pups were quarantined and prepared for adoption in the United States.^[3]

7 The Bug Sniffer

Museums arrange display cases, do research, and wage war with insects. The latter are a silent but devastating problem. Bugs do not care whether artifacts are irreplaceable. They just want to munch on wood, paper, and textiles.

The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston has several protocols in place to battle bugs. In 2018, they acquired another method—and it attracted more attention than some of their art collections. Riley the puppy was not only adorable but also had a weird duty—inspecting incoming artifacts for unwelcome hitchhikers.

The Weimaraner’s training as the “new stuff inspector” would enable the pup to sniff out moths, beetles, and other pests. Should the silvery canine catch a whiff of something, he’ll sit and alert staff to inspect the item more closely.

Weimaraners make excellent drug sniffers or bomb detection dogs, but it is up to Riley to show the world if the breed is suitable for insect inspection as well. If that is the case, more museums could get their own pups.^[4]

6 The Manchester Robbery

In 2018, several men broke into a Manchester residence. It was not a random crime. They knew exactly what they wanted. They found the owner, Leeanne Corbett, at home and demanded the family’s French bulldog puppies. As her three children were present and one robber held a knife to her pregnant stomach, Corbett did not dare resist.

The robbery might have been successful, but the thieves’ idiocy was sparkling. A living French bulldog puppy—emphasis on “living”—can sell for over £1,200 (about $1,500). Instead of waiting until the litter was weaned, they stole the pups at just a day old.

The eight bulldogs had been born four days premature and were inside an incubator, which was also stolen. Several days later, somebody dropped the litter off at a veterinary clinic. Sadly, six puppies had died. Corbett believed that the robbers saw her Facebook post announcing the birth and decided to steal them.^[5]

5 The First IVF Litter

In vitro fertilization (IVF) may be old news with humans, but the fertility technique produced the first litter of puppies in 2015. It could be excused for sounding a bit dull, but this is a great achievement. Researchers have failed since the 1970s to produce such pups.

The recent attempt had to overcome tricky obstacles. Researchers had to carefully harvest eggs at the right time and prepare the sperm for fertilization, something usually done by the female tract.

Using donor material from beagles and cocker spaniels, 19 embryos were created in the laboratory. After being implanted in a surrogate mother, only seven reached full term.

The research was not merely about proving that doggy IVF was possible. Now that the kinks have been ironed out, the technique can be applied in animal conservation. More pups from endangered canine species and rare dog breeds can be born this way than with natural breeding.^[6]

4 Colombian Drug Mules

Some people exploit puppies’ cuteness in the worst way. In 2005, Andres Lopez Elorez fled when around two dozen alleged drug traffickers were arrested in Colombia. He was a veterinarian who worked for the Colombian drug ring.

His role was horrific. Elorez was tasked with preparing puppies to be drug mules. The pups were implanted with liquid heroin and flown to New York on commercial flights. Upon arrival, the drugs were fatally cut from the animals’ abdomens.

Elorez evaded the law for 10 years. But in 2015, he was captured in Spain. The 38-year-old veterinarian was extradited to the United States to face trafficking and conspiracy charges. It remains unknown how many puppies died as Elorez’s drug mules. Ironically, in the initial 2005 raid, 10 puppies were found and one became a narcotics dog in the Colombian police force.^[7]

3 Super Justice Pup

In December 2018, a puppy was born in China. She took her first breath in a Beijing laboratory and was given the name Kunxun. Little Kunxun was a Kunming wolf dog. As the name suggests, they are wolf-dog hybrids and are favored by the police and military.

When the pup turned three months old, she outperformed all others on aptitude tests. It was exactly what her creators had hoped for. Kunxun was a clone. Her “mother” and 99.9 genetic match was a sniffer dog called Huahuangma. The seven-year-old’s nose helped crack several murder cases and made her the pride of the Yunnan Province police.

To train a police dog in China takes five years and around $60,000. Should the pup show Huahuangma’s brilliance, those five years could see a drastic reduction. Indeed, Kunxun’s progress predicts that she would finish her education in drugs and crowd control within 10 months. If Kunxun excels, the project could lead to the mass production of puppies from high-performance cop dogs.^[8]

2 History-Making Clones

In 2015, a boxer named Dylan passed away. His devastated owners approached a unique pet cloning company in Korea. Sooam Biotech Research Foundation had already churned out over 700 copies of people’s pets, but Dylan’s case was different.

The limit for extracting DNA from the donor after death was five days. The boxer had been dead for nearly two weeks. When the British couple plonked down £67,000 ($100,000) per procedure, Sooam gave it a shot.

The company made history when they managed to make two surrogates pregnant, each with a single puppy. Dylan’s owners were present to view the birth of the first via Cesarean section. They wanted to welcome the second pup, too, but the little boxer surprised everyone by arriving a day earlier than expected.

His natural birth went fine. Everyone was happy except the RSPCA. The cloning of pets remains controversial. Such animals have a higher risk for health problems. Cloning also involves painful procedures and high death rates before scientists can replicate a viable clone.^[9]

1 First Identical Twins

In 2015, a South African family noticed that their dog was struggling to give birth. The Irish wolfhound was admitted to Kurt De Cramer’s clinic for a Cesarean section. As he started the procedure, De Cramer noticed a bulge in the uterus. He removed a puppy from the bump. To the vet’s surprise, another sibling sharing the firstborn pup’s placenta.

In humans, this denotes identical twins. Suddenly aware of what he was looking at, De Cramer had his assistants photograph the twins while they were still connected to their placenta. In the meantime, he delivered five more puppies (each with its own placenta).

Although the vet believed that the two pups were twins, others were not so sure. Identical twins are supposed to be mirror images, but the two pups’ white markings were not the same.

However, when they were two weeks old, blood tests and gum swabs confirmed that they were the first identical twin dogs. Their unique white hair could be due to minute genetic differences.^[10]