The Asphyx 1973 This is not a hugely well known film but the ending is ultra creepy. A Victorian scientist and his assistant discover the secret of death: everybody has a kind of personal “death spirit”, the “asphyx”; when somebody is about to die, this “asphyx” comes in to claim his victim. If it can be caught at the right moment, immortality follows! The scientist succeeds in capturing his own asphyx, but when he starts experimenting on his daughter, he accidentally kills her....

Central Sikhote Alin Russian Federation The Sikhote Alin mountain range contains one the richest and most unusual temperate forests of the world. It is a mixing zone between taiga (an area characterized by coniferous forests) and the subtropics where southern species such as the tiger and Himalayan bear cohabit with northern species such as brown bear and lynx. The site runs form the peaks of the Sikote Alin to the Sea of Japan and is important for the survival of many endangered species such as the Amur tiger....

Saint Hildegard Von Bingen 1098 – 1179 Not only was Hildegard Von Bingen considered the mother of opera (because of her Ordo Virtutum) and music, she was a polymath (a person with advanced and broad knowledge – this is like a genius, except a genius usually has mastery of one, not many, subjects). Hildegard was a German abbess, artist, author, counselor, linguist, naturalist, scientist, philosopher, physician, herbalist, poet, activist, visionary and composer....

10 Gnome Road Red Feather Lakes Tucked away between Lake Hiawatha and Lake Apache in Red Feather Lakes, Colorado, there’s a hidden, enchanted trail. The only marker for it is off-road, inside dense clusters of aspen trees. There you can find a rock with the name “Gnome Road” and an arrow painted on it, directing you deeper into the woods. Its elusive fae creatures can be hard to find, but if you’re up for a treasure hunt, you can find figurines of garden gnomes, fairies, elves, pink flamingos and more lounging across boulders, peeking shyly through the eves, and perched on tree branches....

20 Historical Oddities You Probably Don’t Know Another 20 Historical Oddities You Don’t Know 20 More Interesting Historical Oddities The Romans used to use asbestos in their cloths for daily use – such as dish-towels, napkins, and table cloths. Pliny the Elder (a Roman naturalist) said that they could be cleaned whiter than normal cloth by simply throwing them in the fire. He also noted that the slaves who wove the mineral for cloth often suffered from lung disorders....

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....

Those dry, boring characters you learned about in history class liked a good time as much as anyone. In an effort to make sure they were getting to it as often as they could, people throughout the ages have turned to an amazing, and occasionally appalling, array of aphrodisiacs. Here are ten aphrodisiacs from history that you probably don’t want to try at home. 10 Pliny’s Potent Potions Pliny the Elder was a Roman polymath who decided to digest all of human knowledge into a single book....

10 Pueblo BonitoUnited States Located in Northwestern New Mexico, Pueblo Bonito is the largest and most well-known example of a great house (village) built by the ancestral Pueblo people. The village’s construction began in the early part of the 10th century AD and continued for nearly 180 years, reaching a peak of around 800 separate rooms, with some buildings having as many as five stories. It was first discovered in 1849 by US Army Lieutenant James H....

10Greece Held Back The Italian Invasion Seeing how easy Hitler was making World War II look at the start of the war and aching to get in on the action, Italy finally sent an ultimatum to Greece demanding some of their territories. Mussolini probably expected Greece to simply bend over because, honestly, what else were they going to do? Too bad for him, though, the Greek counter-offensive and subsequent victories against Italy turned out to be the first Allied victories over any Axis forces in the war....

The first known recording of a human voice which we have comes from 1860 and is of the French folk tune ‘Au Clair De La Lune.’ The recording was made by a machine called a phonautograph which captured sound and used a moving needle to record the motions caused by noise on paper. The machine was never meant to allow sound to be reproduced but was purely for the study of acoustics....

John Holtum, was a strongman from Denmark who drew immense crowds in cities around the world by perfecting the cannonball catch. He lost a couple of fingers the first time he tried, but he eventually got his technique worked out. With Holtum on one side of the stage and a cannon on the other, an assistant would fire a 50-pound ball which Holtum caught with his gloved hands and chest....

10 The Floating Man Islamic physician and philosopher Ibn Sina (also known as Avicenna) wrote extensively about the soul and intellect, among other topics. His work formed the basis for European philosophy for centuries after his death in the 11th century. In Sina’s work on the concept of self and self-identity, he posed a question that has become known as The Flying Man or The Floating Man: A man is created floating in the air or in a substance that completely isolates him from physical feeling....

Sometimes the motivation for this accelerated creativity is tied to money, which is to be expected considering so many artists, even those who go on to become hugely successful, struggle financially prior to their breakthrough. Here are 10 masterpieces that were churned out super fast. 10 Visage: Head of a Faun Some professional painters have been known to create marketable work in just a couple of minutes, like the record-setting Morris Katz, who came up with a process called instant art....

See Also: 10 Things Everyone Gets Wrong About Addiction 10 Skin Picking Everyone does it, but some do it to an extreme. Those who become addicted to skin picking can cause permanent damage to their tissues and nerve endings. Repeated digging, picking, or rubbing certain parts of the body is called Excoriation Disorder and often stems from a belief that the individual is trying to remove something they see as a blemish....

10 Eugene Robinson In the lead-up to the 2006 Atlantic City mayoral election primary, city councilman and part-time Baptist minister Eugene Robinson decided to back a different candidate than the one supported by Craig Callaway, the president of the city council. The split in their political union happened because Callaway had admitted to taking bribes. Callaway took Robinson’s show of support as a sign of disloyalty. As punishment, he decided to destroy Robinson’s life....

As odd as those may seem, they don’t measure up to other, far more bizarre claims about various celebrities that have garnered popular attention throughout the years. Some of these notions seemingly defy possibility yet are still touted as fact. Whether the following conspiracy theories are true or not is up to the reader to decide. 10 Popular Celebrities Are In The Illuminati The Illuminati have been the butt of much blame throughout the years....

However, there are some people who have decided that many governments are run by people who secretly conspire to destroy the people they’re supposed to care for. The United States government in particular has been accused of many of these strange conspiracies, and will likely continue to be a favorite target of theorists far into the future. 10Tunnels Under Abandoned Walmarts Not long ago, quite a few Walmarts were shut down after it was discovered that all the stores had major plumbing issues....

But not everything works as promised or hoped. Let’s look at some of the not-so-successful ideas of the past that might make us thankful that we can still turn on our televisions. 10 Coal Gas Vehicles With most gas and oil supplies diverted to military use during World War I, an alternative was required to power our beloved autos. Using coal gas technology from the 1800s, fuel was produced by heating coal in enclosed, oxygen-deprived ovens and then filtering before distribution....

Many familiar forms of life emerged then, but it was also a time of evolutionary experimentation. Weird body shapes and forms developed. Many went extinct. In the Burgess Shale of Canada, their fossils remain. This site is scientifically important not only because of its age but because of the types of organisms fossilized there. Most fossils preserve only the hardest parts of an organism, with the soft tissues being lost....

10MERS In South Korea After the MERS epidemic began in South Korea in 2015, the Park Geun-hye government was accused of mishandling the crisis and possibly making it worse. Experts heavily criticized the official lack of transparency and the practice of shuttling suspected infectees between hospitals before putting them in quarantine, putting medical staff and the wider public at greater risk. Some criticized the government’s failure to create a centralized facility to concentrate care for infected patients, which would be more efficient and less likely to cause further spread of the disease....