Over the decades, people have gamed various lotteries to win millions of dollars. Some have done so legally, some definitely broke the law, and others’ methods were in gray areas. One legal tactic of gaming the lottery, for example, is by buying massive amounts of tickets. However, that is not always possible, depending on state

Since the dawn of time, men, women, and children alike have feared that which goes bump in the night. Such fears manifest in varied forms in various locations, but each story is kept alive by the universal bond of storytelling—generation to generation, these stories are told as a rite of passage for those old enough

From the eighth century BC to the fifth century AD, the intertwined cultures of Greece and Rome ruled a great deal of the known world. It was the heyday of the Greco-Roman myths of gods and goddesses, great heroes, and fantastic beasts. It was also the start of attempts to catalog the flora and fauna

It’s absolutely no piece of breaking news that being attractive provides you with quite a few advantages in life. Many studies have shown that attractiveness is, as we’ve always suspected, associated with a better quality of life, and it definitely makes encounters like interviews and court hearings easier to breeze through than for the rest

It is all too easy to stare into the empty depths of the eye sockets of a skull and forget that what you are looking at was once a human being with as rich an inner life as yours. These days, however, in museums, churches, and bizarrely unexpected places, many skulls are being found and

It’s no surprise that life is a bit easier for highly intelligent people, as they’re able to identify and solve life’s problems much more effectively than someone with average or below-average intelligence. Intelligent people are also generally more successful and well-educated, as should be obvious. However, much like all good things, high intelligence comes with

The humble page is busier than it looks. When it is not inflicting small but strangely painful cuts, things get serious at the paper plane championships. Paper folding also has an insane barrier that not even a machine can beat. Peculiar facts aside, paper is a great material for inventors. Recent creations could one day

Potentially deadly incidents and accidents like earthquakes, lightning strikes, and hard falls are not always bad—at least to people who have benefited from them. Over the centuries, people have been cured of illnesses and other medical conditions after experiencing some of the aforementioned incidents and accidents. Their medical conditions ranged from blindness and deafness to

The United Kingdom has such an array of wonderful country parks, forests, and estates that it would be impossible to visit them all in one lifetime. As with all countries, the tales told about some of our dear forests are quite simply . . . petrifying. One would do well to avoid some of the

We all know Mother Nature likes to put us in our place. Earthquakes, tornadoes, and other assorted calamities all serve to keep us in check and knock our human ego down a notch. Sometimes, however, we don’t need the help. Some of the worst disasters in our history can be chalked up to human error.

There are two ways of creating a product. The first is finding a problem and creating a product as a solution. The other is by converting nonproblems into problems and providing the answer. Businesses seem to enjoy the latter business strategy because it allows them to create profitable niche markets. There are lots of goods

By modern standards, life in ancient Rome was awful. Slavery was rampant, health care was very basic, and if you were poor, the only route to a comfortable retirement was 20 years of military service. However, it was still one of the most progressive societies on Earth at the time. When the Populares faction were

Almost halfway through the year, headlines have once again been swarming with an array of fascinating new studies. Scientists from across the planet have been working away to learn more about the bizarre, fascinating world in which we live. This month, a mind-controlled hearing aid has been invented that decides how to act by monitoring

Mass hysteria is a psychological phenomenon which has been documented since the Middle Ages. Political turmoil, environmental stress, fear of the unknown, and the need for social acceptance from our peers can often cause us to behave in an irrational manner, and throughout history, close-knit groups, such as schools and small communities, have experienced inexplicable

Despite a wealth of sophisticated experiments and contributions from some of the greatest intellects of our time, the search for dark matter continues. It might account for a quarter of the energy density in the universe, but to date, all attempts at direct detection have proved fruitless. The enigmatic matter does not absorb or emit

A job is something all of us have to do to get by. Those at the top tell other people what to do. Everyone else has to obey in order to take care of pesky things like rent and food. Not everyone is cut out for all the positions out there, though most of us

Some biologists adore spiders. It’s why they visit the same arachnid for 40 years and why the world recently saw the first trained spider. This spider love has yielded quite a bit of knowledge, but there’s still so much more to learn. These creatures have more mysteries than they have legs. Inexplicable fossilization, producing milk

Trees are everywhere. Though we all know they are alive, we don’t generally think of trees that way; they’re more or less just part of the scenery. Nevertheless, many of us have been scared by a tree at some point or another—one with a sinister shape at night or a face-like feature we didn’t expect

As most of us will have discovered by now, the human body is a marvel. Many of the things it can do seem like magic compared to other life-forms on Earth, and even if extraordinary abilities do exist in nature, they’re often developed as specialized responses to their immediate environments and not as a part

Everyone’s heard of the usual kinds of theft. There are lucrative robberies, like vehicle and identity theft, and the more commonplace pilfering, like shoplifting. According to The National Association for Shoplifting Prevention, more than $13 billion of goods are robbed from various retailers across the United States every year. That’s more than $35 million of

The world is full of derelict buildings, many of which are in a truly dismal state of disrepair and give off an eerie, desolate vibe. Most of us will pass structures of this sort in the town or city we live in on a regular basis without even giving them a second thought, let alone

For many adults, the adventure and excitement of playing in the treetops is a romantic notion of childhood. People remember climbing trees and building secret tree forts high up in the branches during their youth, but only a special few live this reality into adulthood. The motives for living in a tree may vary, but

Many Star Wars fans are not particularly happy about the new movies, and some feel that Disney threw out the baby with the bathwater when it came to the expanded universe. See, before Disney took over, Star Wars had a huge amount of extra material (novels, comics, etc.), referred to as the expanded universe, or

The octopus is one of the most recognizable and intriguing animals on Earth. They pull spectacular escapes and become social media darlings. Like famous people, some individuals even get their own movies and conspiracy theories. They come with mysteries, too. From peculiar mass strandings to dreams revealed on octopus skin, there is still so much

Whether we love it or not, the dominant form of government across the world today is the representative democracy, in which the citizens elect representatives who then use their voice in government on their constituents’ behalf. Representative democracy is found across the world and is broadly similar from country to country. Whether we live in

The story of Bobby Joe Long, aka the Classified Ad Rapist, is a profile in evil. Born into a dysfunctional family and teased mercilessly as a child due to a medical condition, Long would eventually grow up to be a broken, vicious man. During the early 1980s, Long haunted the beaches and hot streets of

No one is saying that Homo sapiens climbed out of their spaceships fully formed on planet Earth one day. We obviously spent a lot of time evolving on Earth. However, scientists have difficulty tracing our most distant origins—that is, our basic building blocks. Even though it sounds straight out of a science fiction movie, it’s

Most of the time, we think of famous people as larger than life. They become idols that we look up to as something beyond human, and we forget what they really are. However, sometimes, you hear about the silliest little personality quirks of famous people. It brings you back down to Earth, reminding you that

Life is full of so many wonderful things. While some articles explore the most fascinating things in our universe that exist to entertain us, in this list, we want to go over some common things that people are convinced exist but actually aren’t real at all (at least the way people generally think). Some of

Most people do not enjoy angry moments. They are usually connected to something bad, like a parking ticket or an argument. But this negative emotion enthralls researchers, who track it in dreams and genes. Anger also has weird side effects, like delusions of intelligence and the slow death of punctuation marks. Then there are the