What happens after we die? Spiritually, who knows. Physically? Your body becomes a festering production line, spewing out more than 400 nasty compounds that would be toxic to your body if you weren’t already dead, as Scientific American explains in this unsettlingly cheery animation.
The best way to catch up with Game of Thrones before Season 4 starts? By watching this amazing supercut of every single on-screen death in the series so far. Made by Digg Video, it’s a bloody gore-y mix of swords, spears, arrows, bare hands, etc. ripping apart flesh and ending human life. There’s a total of 5,179 deaths in the series. Not that much, right?
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Like a landscape of the undead, the woods outside Chernobyl are having trouble decomposing. The catastrophic meltdown and ensuing radiation blast of April 1986 has had long-term effects on the very soil and ground cover of the forested region, essentially leaving the dead trees and leaf litter unable to decompose. The result is a forest full of "petrified-looking pine trees" that no longer seem capable of rotting.
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Hope you’ve enjoyed civilized life, folks. Because a new study sponsored by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center says the world’s industrial societies are poised to collapse under the weight of their own unsustainable appetites for resources. There goes the weekend . . . and everything after it for the rest of our lives.
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While reading Sarah Murray’s excellent book, Making An Exit—a global travelogue that explores rituals of dying around the world—I learned that you can actually be mummified by a private company in Utah. They’re called Summum, they’re based in Salt Lake City, and their process is patented. It involves rubber.
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In an article primarily about the potential folly of holding onto stockpiles of smallpox virus for research purposes—a now-eradicated plague that humans no longer have natural immunity to and that would very likely cause a worldwide catastrophe should it escape from the lab—the BBC includes one awesomely horrible detail. Could the frozen bodies of smallpox victims in Siberia, now thawing because of climate change, re-release the virus into the environment and thus start a global pandemic?
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It may seem impossible at this point, but humans keep enhancing their ability to kill others using guns. Example: the new Advanced Ballistics Concepts’ new Mi-Bullet, a projectile that expands into four connected parts as soon as it’s fired. The mechanism—shown in the video—is very clever, making almost impossible to miss a target.
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As Mexico City archaeologists sort through the surreal array of Aztec sacrificial skulls recently uncovered while excavating their city’s subway system
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This month in Oslo, an architecture student named Martin McSherry presented a controversial idea to a gathering of cemetery and funeral professionals. The topic? His design for a "vertical cemetery" that could, in theory, solve Norway’s growing graveyard conundrum.
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Norway’s got a major corpse problem that isn’t going away anytime soon. Literally—they won’t rot. What’s the culprit behind this profusion of bodies that refuse to take their place in the circle of life? The same thing that’s also working to keep your sandwich fresh: plastic wrap.
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This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
