We humans are meaning-seeking creatures. The question 'why?' has pushed us to explore the mysteries of the universe as well as the depths of our existence. But in the process, we learned that not every revelation brings us peace of mind.
Reddit user Yoloextreme345 made a post on the platform, asking everyone on it, "What is a fact you know off the top of your head (preferably disturbing) that you probably shouldn't?" and people immediately started sharing things they would like to forget.
From ancient funeral practices to modern celebrity lives, here are some of the most popular answers.
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The more the ice caps melt, the higher the likelihood that some ancient bacteria is released and ravages our population.
I said I supported AI overlords. Not bacteria overlords thank you very much
A Jewish doctor treated Hitler’s Mother(The only person Adolf ever truly loved) while she was dying of cancer.
He promised his eternal gratitude to the doctor and even after becoming a pathological anti-Semite and later the Fuhrer, he was true to his word and was adamant the doctor and his family be placed under protection from the purge.
While some may think this an act of genuine kindness, I just think about all the lives lost because Hitler never stopped to think that all Jews were capable of good and not just the one who happened to have been good to him because of immediate proximity..
In ancient Egypt, the deceased bodies of beautiful and high ranking women were left to decay for several days before mummification to discuourage necrophilia by the embalmers.
A woodpecker retracts its tongue and wraps it around its brain to prevent injury when drilling into trees in search of insects,
Humans, being mostly Carbon, can be made into diamonds.
I plan to go the cheaper route and have my ashes be rolled into a glass paperweight. Some day I might even end up on the shelf of a Goodwill for $2.99
Edit: 3000 points has unlocked another, also disturbing fact.
Snow is so sound deadening, that your kid could be building a snowfort, have it collapse, and you wouldn't hear their cries for help. Even worse is when they're tunneling into one of those parking lot plow piles. They won't hear the plow coming.
That reports of child abuse dropped precipitously during the COVID-19 pandemic not because less children were abused but because teachers were unable to see the typical evidence of abuse because most teaching was conducted online.
Humans can live without their stomachs (and no you don’t necessarily need any ostomy bags either).
Ask me how I know…
Never mind, I’ll tell you.
I don’t have one any longer (stomach cancer).
Edit: Thank you kind strangers for the awards. ☺️ Never got one before and now I have two, scratch that FOUR Now
Edit 2:Y’all!!!! You are so sweet and kind. Thank you everyone for the well wishes, kindness and questions.
Please go get genetically tested for these things. So far 4 of the 6 members of my family don’t have stomachs anymore (all this year).
Genetic testing can save your life!
Edit 3: Fun fact: Us ones without stomachs call ourselves seahorses now because they don’t have stomachs either.
I was told by a very senior police officer (a parent of a kid I taught) that it is estimated that 30% of all missing persons reported to police who are never located have been murdered and more often than not they have been murdered by the person reporting them missing in the first place. The police know this, but lack evidence to proceed with prosecutions.
I remember hearing some dude (retired military) on a podcast talk about how fragile our electric grid really is, and if it ever went down some 60%-ish of the population would die in about 2-3 months because nobody knows how to gather food or water anymore.
"Haibo" comrade come to south africa the land of load shedding, and an absolute waste of time government.
Not just that but in a lot of the USA, houses are not well insulated. A loss of power means a house at an unsafe temperature. Somewhere like Arizona, no air con because of loss of power, you could easily get sick from the heat.
This can be easily fixed though. People can but insulation and properly insulate or add extra insulation. But, what to do when the insulation runs out.......
Load More Replies...Quick tip if it comes up: You can purify non-chemically polluted water by sealing it in a clear plastic bottle and leaving it in the sun for about 10-12 hours. That should be long enough for the UV to kill even the tough stuff like giardia.
Adding on, put a few drops of bleach in relatively clean river water and leave them to sit for a few hours and you’ll have clean water. I can also now say I drank from New Hampshire river water and didn’t get sick.
Load More Replies...exept for those 40 + guys in bald eagle shirts who have been planing for the zombie apocalypse for 10 years and know how to survive with just a gun and a cup or some s**t XD.... or people who live in like vermont. its bloody cold there, duno how they do it
But how long will they last in their bunkers till cabin fever sets in? Think of all the people who lost their $#!+ during the COVID lockdowns.
Load More Replies...Precisely. All the taxpayer money being used to subsidize EV purchases, solar panel manufacturers, electric this and electric that should be redirected to the grid. First things first.
Load More Replies...A lot of folks, casual preppers for instance, don't realize just how quickly things will get bad even for folks who planned for it. They often have their methods & supplies but rarely realize just how quickly we'll decimate the wildlife and edible plants. One particular simulation started with the assumption (for demonstration purposes) that only one major city survived per region - NY, Seattle, Oklahoma City, etc. Then showed how as people started foraging for edible plants, hunting/trapping/fishing, anything to get food, within 3 months the animal population within a 100 mile radius was all but gone. Within 6 months, it as 500 mile radius and most plants within that 100mile were also gone, and so on. The rate it expanded slowed down as large amounts of people starved or went nomad, and people went back to small community gardening.
A similar thing happened after the collapse of the Roman Empire in Britain. The population quickly fell to less than 10% of the population density BEFORE the Romans arrived.
Load More Replies...A damaged line can lead to a cascade failure - one grid fails, another one gets overloaded, the next one gets twice the load etc. Happend in 2006 - a powerline in Germany got shut down to let a ship pass below it and that led to a blackout through the whole of northern Europe
I think I have watched enough Naked and Afraid that I could totally make it at least 6 months
You got to love the "If all you have is a hammer, all problems look like a nail" thinking. Some guy that is into "living off the land" sees this as a problem of "gathering" and fails to mention that all of our current society depends on electricity and can only support this many people with it. Even if every person in the world had the skills of people that lived 400 years ago there would be massive starvation and fights over every possible resource.
Everyone should pay attention to having some supplies for power and water outages. I'm not even talking doomsday prepping but having non perishables light and heat sources backup battery a'la pokemon go player and a portable solar panel chrarger if possible. I'm probably forgetting something, but there should be guidelines on gov office etc. sites. Of course eat and replace the non perishables from time to time. But 2-3 months without power would mean a srs situation especially if it's winter and not something I think I have the skills for.
I learned that several years ago when we had a bad ice storm in Oklahoma. We were able to survive in the middle of winter for 10 days without electricity the first time it happened. I know so many people that lost their s**t after a couple of days. My parents were older and grew up in the country in shacks with no electricity so they taught us well in how to survive when s**t happens.
Load More Replies...naaah... that's actually untrue. Like... mabye in really bad places where you really rely on modern tech stuff.. so you alone would be unable to get to the water with bare hands.... Some people would mabye get sick from drinking water witout cleaning it first... But in the end, these former military, that been in bad enviroment caused by constant bullying or being in country where they were considered an enemy are those, who'll intoxicate community around them if something like this happened. in reality majority of people would get together and help each other. Lot of people goes hiking, lot of people go hunting, shishing, lot o people know how to gardening, you'll make a community that would teach others and find a way to survive...
Even if you are a really selfless person, if your kids or loved ones are starving, or they need a medicine and there's only one box left, you'll kill your best friend. Civilization is but a thin layer of paint that barely covers the animals we are. Perhaps in some countries, maybe.... I saw the Japanese queueing peacefully to get food when the earthquake/tsunami destroyed so many homes. If the same happened in my country it would be total chaos. Have you seen how people behave on the first day of the sales? Imagine people's behaviour if, instead of fighting for useless rubbish, they have to fight for the very little food available. I have no faith in humankind.
Load More Replies...There would be a population cull. Only the "useful" (farmers, people who can fix things, people working with livestock/horses etc) would be kept around, most likely.
I have read something similar in a fiction book. And if fiction comes from real life, wth is going to happen?
My parents were older country people that grew up living in shacks with no electricity. Even when I was young and lived on the outskirts of the city we grew our own fruits and vegetables and hunted and fished to supplement our food year round because my Dad worked on oil rigs and as a brick layer and he wasn't always employed. We also had a well water with a manual pump to help with no electricity and a septic tank we could use if our city water and sewer was cut off. We bartered with friends that had farms and my parents had land and had just started to build a house in the country that my Dad designed and we were building ourselves when Dad was killed. I'm the youngest of 13 kids so we sewed and made alot of clothes and household items because money could be pretty tight at times. My Dad refused to buy ANYTHING that we could do ourselves so that meant canning fruits and vegetables, growing our own herbs, etc. Life would be hard but some of us could survive if it s**t goes south.
Our reliance on modern infrastructure is indeed a vulnerability, and it's a stark reminder of the importance of self-sufficiency and emergency preparedness. Let's hope for resilient systems and a well-prepared society. 🌍🔌
Are you kidding me? All the grids across the USA are all connected. You know how much it would take to disable that much power? And how long would it take to restore electricity with it being 60% that's with several companies in several states. Doubt it would be 3 months. Probably one. Also... Pretty sure without electricity your hunting isn't going to be enough for safe food storage. Who knows how to smoke meat without an electric grill. And planting can only be done at certain times. But they have refrigerated trailers where the refrigeration is run by the trucks engine. So a think a lot of generators would be sold and as the fuel to run them.
It really depends on how that "60%" was taken out. If it was the case that overloads simply triggered the shutdown of each segment in turn, then I agree with you that they should be able to get back up and running fairly quickly. On the other hand, if the reason is say a Sun Coronal Mass Ejection that hits the Earth in just the wrong way, that could overload/blow out a massive amount of the high-power transformers. The lead time for them if current (quite small) amount of reserve ones is exceeded is 60 to 70 weeks. And that is only if the places producing everything need to make them still have electricity.
Load More Replies...Don't you grab running water, boil it, and then after it cools down, you can drink it? Even if electricity goes out there's still pots, wood and matches (this is what I know, I could be wrong)
It's not a matter of knowing how to gather food; it's a matter of there being sufficient food. Our harvesting and distribution of food rely on technology. Iron Man killed more people than Thanos, by the way....
People are not the monsters books and movies make us out to be. We would pull together and help each other out it’s in our nature. Some of us know how to live off the land and manage resources and we would share that knowledge. Disasters have happened regularly throughout history and in nearly every case there’s little violence outside of greedy political factions grasping for power.
So the worst blackout in north America lasted a few days. The likelihood of this doomsday scenario is minuscule. .
I'm not sure how long the longest North American power outage was, but here in North Carolina someone shot out a couple of transformers Dec 2nd 2022. We didn't have power until late in day Dec 7th. And we were some of the lucky ones.
Load More Replies...In the US, our electrical grid is extremely fragmented, making it hard to take down all at once.
This is sadly true. I feel like a lot of the population would also go mad. It sad a lot of people don't know how to do a lot of things. It breaks my heart that they got left in a world like this, like that. However they responsible there self off cause some things are important enough to learn and need to be learned. If you don't take time. But the parents are really why's get me. It makes it harder on them usually. And all sad in the end.
Big corporation always calculate wether its cheaper to pay a fine/settlement rather than obey the law.
Elon Musk’s father is currently with and has a child with his step-daughter. He became her step-father when she was about 3
I think I speak with every woman on here: blood stains are easier to get out of fabric than you think they are with very few cleaning materials, provided you get to them quickly enough.
Most arsonists are found masturbating somewhere within a few blocks of their fires
That when you have a headache because you're extremely hungover, it's because your dehydrated brain is shriveling and pulling on the membranes that connect it to your skull.
Once I found that out it's made all of my hangover headaches much worse just thinking about it.
One glass of water between each two alcoholic beverage to stay hydrated. It won't totally stop you from having a hangover (especially if you drink a lot), but it can really help. (Oh, and it won't help with your alcohol level, so please don't use it as a trick to take the wheel...)
One of the most toxic chemicals on Earth is an organic mercury compound. The material safety sheet notes that it has a slightly sweet odor, but at a concentration where the smell is detectable, it is already lethal. That observation came from someone who would inevitably die from accidental exposure.
There was a famous incident of a chemist lady (Karen Wetterhahn) who was running some experiments involving it. I highly recommend the YT video about her by ChubbyEmu. Cliffs Notes version... she was gloved up but spilled a couple of drops on her hand. It went through the gloves and absorbed into her skin, unknown to her. Then she started developing symptoms. As soon as she knew what caused it, and knowing it was a debilitating death sentence, she started documenting every step of her life as it progressed, hoping it would benefit science in the future and people could learn from it. And we did... that knowledge gained was invaluable and heartbreaking.
"If you cannot afford an attorney one will be provided for you" doesnt mean the attorney is free
Edit: Holy s**t I didn't know this was going to catch so many eyes! For clarification this is in the US (suprise suprise) and this is on a state by state basis.
Doctors removed the eyes of Jack The Rippers last known victim in order to check if they could extract an image of the killer.
If you touch something you shouldn't, touch it again in the same place and the police can't get a fingerprint as one distorted the other.
Edit: This is no longer true as technology has solved the "issue". So wear gloves or don't do naughty things without consent.
jokes on them take the finger at the last knuckle you are all good. how do you thnk i'm typing this.
If you skin a person alive and they somehow don't die of shock, they'll actually die due to hypothermia as without skin, they become unable to regulate their core body temperature.
If you’re a cannibal, never eat the brains. Eating brains is how you catch a disease called Kuru. It is 100% lethal.
•A dead body in the beginning stages of decomp smell like wet hay
•if you die alone and become a “bloater” they pop you like a big zit before removal
•the best way to remove frozen brain matter off the sidewalk is a flame thrower
Confessions of an emergency cleanup specialist ♥️😏
Dolphins throw around pufferfish like a volley ball just to play with them. They also get high off their toxins. Talk about a puff and pass.
People dying often smell sweet. Not in a sugary way, but much more in flowery way. It's the decompositions of the body already starting. It can also smell vaguely like alcohol, especially their breath
I can only speak of my dear old cat, not humans. She had a peaceful, slow way to passing, and while it was clear that she is nearing the end, for about a week it was not clear exactly when she would go. Then on her last day I knew immediately that it will be THAT day. She smelled exactly like autumn leaves. Never been near death before, but I guess the knowledge might be stored deeper than personal memories. Sure enough, she did go in about 12 hours. I kept the top I was wearing that day for a long time, because I could smell that autumn scent on it, and it was the last thing she left behind.
I once read that the average person walks past 36 murderers during their life.
Edit: the average American
A perfectly healthy person can have a seizure at any point for no apparent reason.
The human brain has neurons misfire all the time. 99.999% of the time you don't notice because there's no noticeable effect, but if the wrong couple neurons misfire at the same time it can induce a seizure.
Source: happened to me
Also doctors sort of allow everyone one seizure, obviously they investigate the cause of it and reoccurring seizures are treated differently but if they can't fully explain it and it's a one off they just accept it. I discovered this when my son had a seizure as a baby and had to attend their regular "First seizure clinic".
22 U.S. Military Veterans commit suicide each day.
Whilst sad that figure tells you very little. What is it against the “normal” rate in the USA and how much of the population do veterans make up? Whilst 1 is too many 22 a day might not be a particularly high number as the USA has a lot of military and a high population.
A person split in half by the stomach doesn't die instantly. It has some lastly moments of suffering.
Source: a person was hit by a train and split in half in front of me. He took some time to die.
That Robert Pickton, serial killer in British Columbia, used to dispose of bodies at a local fat rendering plant, meaning that many of the products made from that plant, think gummies or anything gelatin related, likely contained human remains.
This is a bit misleading. He had a hog farm and his own processing plant. Some of the bodies were fed to pigs, some were ground up & mixed with the pork meat, etc. Which does mean he could've ground misc. parts up & mixed in with the pig parts to be rendered. But the various stories/explanations come from him, and he claims he was framed, so whatever he says we have to take with a grain of salt. We know very little about what actually happened to the bodies as there's almost no evidence since he'd been working for over 30 years and the previous investigations into him (prior to the final takedown) were bungled pretty badly.
That in ancient egypt it was a regular occasion that all people watched the pharao masturbate in to the nile
A cremation oven is about 1800° F. Lava is about 2000° F. Hawaii has accessible lava.
And it will form a thin, black crust over red hot lava (as it is cooled by the air). The crust is not sturdy enough to hold a human’s weight; meaning if you walk on newer lava fields you could break through and not be found. Source: got to walk on safe week old lava in Hawaii, but the park ranger had to chase a tourist that walked farther out than was safe.
The US military conducted chemical weapons tests on 60,000 US service members during WWII. It was kept secret until the 1990’s and wasn’t widely known until NPR wrote an investigative story on it in 2015.
The body fat of a drowned person turns into a soap-like substance if they stay under water with no air contact
There is a lake in Washington State in the USA that does this. It's called Crescent Lake IIRC. I used to date a guy from Seattle and we did a road trip and bought some books about weird stuff in the state. They said that teenagers from the 60s had been found down there... saponified...
Orcas will slap baby seals 80+ ft into the air with their tails until the seal's skin comes off, and eventually dies. The orcas will then not even eat it after, meaning that they literally just do it for fun.
I've learnt of some uncomfortable facts from some Aztec (Mexica) fammily which has been passed down from generation to generation, though I don't know how true this one is:
During a ritual, Aztec kings used to bring some victims up the tall pyramid so they may be sacrificed to their gods. Typically, these victims were tossed along the side of the very jagged rocks and we're usually found dead at the bottom.
The priests would gather the bodies and cut them up for distribution to the people according to importance, so the king got the best piece and his family and the other priests received some parts, etc. They inevitably ate these pieces as part of their ritual.
Of course they didn't just munch on them, they prepared them like any other meat and usually ate them with soups.
Fast forward to the time when the conquistadores came from Spain. These guys show up not long after some ritual took place, then the Aztecs welcomed them in and shared their food.
You can figure out by now where this is going, these conquistadores ate the soup so they inquired about what it was made of and sure enough they found out.
Although eating human meat was a big no no, the Spaniards actually enjoyed it. So when they inevitably conquered over the Aztecs, they ended up keeping the recipe of that soup. Instead of using human meat though, they used pork since they've said that it tastes similar.
We still eat that today, it's called Pozole (Pozilli).
There are still a few tribes who eat humans, the meat is called long pork because of the similarity in taste. Learnt that from an episode of River Monsters.
Cows can create mummified foetuses inside of their uterus. If the foetus dies and is not retrieved, the body absorbs all the liquids and humidity from the foetus, and what is left is a tiny dried up hard solid mummy of a calf.
19th century murderer William Palmer's last words to the hangman who would take his life were "Are you sure it's safe?"
Charles Dickens called him "the greatest villain that ever stood in the Old Bailey."
4% of people on Death Row are innocent
Even if it was 1% , enough reason to stop it. I've always said that death is a disproportionate punishment for most crimes and too little for others. So no one gets served real justice.
The witch in Hansel and Gretel actually was cooking the two kids correctly, by using low heat cauldron over a long time with fatty meat, cuz she fattened them
Using a dead animal to try and throw off body sniffing dogs is a myth spread around to try and get people to trip up. If there's disturbed ground and some random animal 3-4ft down you can bet your booty that entire areas getting turned over.
Would it not be reasonable just strip the body, remove identifying features- hands, feet, head, body art. And just leave the body in a unfrequented place where animals can easily access it? By the time it gets found it would be scattered and eaten enough to make it impossible to know how the person died or who they vere. Never tested it of course :)
Takes 3hrs for a 180lb human to completely dissolve in a bathtub of potassium hydroxide.
During the Black Death, people would be so infected with the plague that the buboes (those lumps) that you could hear them gurgling with bacteria
Having an erection for 4+ hours can cause gangrene of the d**k which is when tissue is dead or dying due to lack of blood flow or an infection cause by bacteria. This can lead to erectile dysfunction, cosmetic issues, permanent tissue damage, and in worst cases as I've mentioned earlier, gangrene. This situation is called priapism.
Spotted hyena females have "Psuedopenises". Pretty much both sexes have penises, except the female penis replaces the vagina. This means the urethra must be penetrated by a male in order to mate. The pseudopenis also functions as a birth canal. Pretty painful birth if you ask me.
In a study, Female Spotted Hyenas have been seen trying to peg Male Hyenas. Pretty amusing but also disturbing fact.
Special thanks to my 8th grade biology teacher for this mental scar of information.
Edit: Spotted Hyena females have the pseudopenises, not all Hyenas.
This is the only species with worse birth pains than humans. The infant and maternal mortality percentage is in the 20s.
When you cremate someone with a tumor a lot of times the tumor doesn’t burn… it just smolders and smells bad.
If you need a human body to decompose faster, fill the a**s with yogurt. Don't ask how i know, please just google it instead.
Had a school presentation of this, cause it fascinates me while simultaneously horrifies me. The movie The Rock got me interested in finding out how much of it was true.
The VX-nerve agent kills in a brutally painful way.
When you tell a muscle to contract, you send out a chemical (ACh) in said muscle causing it to contract. When you no longer want to tense it, you send out a new chemical (AChE) neutralising the first chemical. The VX-nerve agent prevents this new substance (AChE) from being used to neutralise the first substance (ACh).
In the movie they mention you get spasms strong enough to break your own back, which I don't know if it's true or not, but you will begin involuntarily tense every single muscle in your body (including the diaphragm muscle) with so much force it can tear it's own muscle attachment until you eventually die because you can't exhale.
If you spray mere millilitres of this substance on a door handle, the next person to grab the door handle will die. It was used to assassinate Kim Jong Un's brother Kim Jong Nam, by spraying him in the face with this substance in a regular water spray container. I believe the ones who did this also died from the very minuscule amounts that landed on them as well.
No. Just No. The ladies involved did not perish. 🙄 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Kim_Jong-nam#:~:text=At%20approximately%209%3A00%20a.m.,murder%20of%20Kim%20Jong%2Dnam.
WD-40 rapidly destroys cocaine rendering it chemically unrecognizable. If you ever need to transport cocaine bring a bucket of wd-40 in case you get pulled over
Freddie mercury’s last words were ‘pee pee’ as he needed help going to the toilet
This was an absolutely stupid list and so full of inaccuracies that I just can't even.. I usually refrain from commenting because I once got so many downvotes -> suspended on an innocent comment that I felt bad for days (yes, I know I shouldn't take it personally and blah blah blah but here I am). But I had to comment on multiple stupidities on this list.
Yup. You'll find out a lot of people here don't specifically care about accuracy, reality, measure and argumentation, and will just downvote without commenting to support their opinion. A dude on another recent post just established that 'All museums in Western countries were displaying stolen artifacts" - which a big big exaggeration to say the least. My poor attempt to nuance that was met with mute downvotes (not that I care, it's chill beer evening). But yes, it's more about what people want to believe sometimes here. Sorry you were suspended.
Load More Replies...I'm an interpreter. You wouldn't believe what we learn.
Load More Replies...The amount of time it takes for your brain to receive input from the various senses is less than the amount of time it took for the submersible to implode near the Titanic. That means those poor people down there knew they were in trouble, knew they were probably going to die, and then, just weren't anymore. No pain, no suffering, no knowing what is happening. One instant you're there, the next you're not. It's kind of better that way, I'd say.
If a bear has been eating human flesh, its scat will be white. A bit of knowledge from search and rescue.
Bored Panda should be held responsible for allowing individuals to publish information as fact when there is no evidence to back it up.
Knew about half of these. Of those I do know, you got them all right. Good list. I learnt a lot.
This was an absolutely stupid list and so full of inaccuracies that I just can't even.. I usually refrain from commenting because I once got so many downvotes -> suspended on an innocent comment that I felt bad for days (yes, I know I shouldn't take it personally and blah blah blah but here I am). But I had to comment on multiple stupidities on this list.
Yup. You'll find out a lot of people here don't specifically care about accuracy, reality, measure and argumentation, and will just downvote without commenting to support their opinion. A dude on another recent post just established that 'All museums in Western countries were displaying stolen artifacts" - which a big big exaggeration to say the least. My poor attempt to nuance that was met with mute downvotes (not that I care, it's chill beer evening). But yes, it's more about what people want to believe sometimes here. Sorry you were suspended.
Load More Replies...I'm an interpreter. You wouldn't believe what we learn.
Load More Replies...The amount of time it takes for your brain to receive input from the various senses is less than the amount of time it took for the submersible to implode near the Titanic. That means those poor people down there knew they were in trouble, knew they were probably going to die, and then, just weren't anymore. No pain, no suffering, no knowing what is happening. One instant you're there, the next you're not. It's kind of better that way, I'd say.
If a bear has been eating human flesh, its scat will be white. A bit of knowledge from search and rescue.
Bored Panda should be held responsible for allowing individuals to publish information as fact when there is no evidence to back it up.
Knew about half of these. Of those I do know, you got them all right. Good list. I learnt a lot.