TOP 10

10>Fire or Smoke (1-in-1,116):                                                   Roughly 50%-80% of fire related deaths are due to smoke inhalation rather than burns but together, in the United States, these claims thousands of lives ever year. 9>Assault by Firearm (1-in-325):                                                            In many countries, primarily in Europe, where gun ownership has been outlawed, gun crimes remain fairly low. Other countries, however, have a much higher prevalence of gun violence. Places like Brazil, Colombia, South Africa, Guatemala, and the United States lose billions of dollars and thousands of lives annually due to this problem. 8>Falling Down (1-in-246):   ...

10>You can sweat out toxins:               Sweat consists of water, salt and electrolytes. Because your sweat glands are superficial and only found in your skin, that is all that your sweat will ever consist of. There is no way for any mysterious “toxin” to be released through your sweat. 9> Going out in the cold, especially with wet hair, makes you sick:                                                                        This is wrong. You get sick because of viruses. Viruses do not care about the temperature. Furthermore, your immune system is not significantly affected by the cold because your body maintains a core temperature of about 37C (98.5F). If this drops by even a couple degrees you will get hypothermia and die. The reason more people get sick i...

10 Flores Giant Rat Humans are easily frightened by the tiniest animals: Cockroaches, spiders, and mice seem specifically designed to scare the bejeezus out of us. Some grown men would even prefer to wrestle a bear or take on a pack of coyotes than let a mouse run up the leg of their pants. These men should probably avoid the island of Flores, Indonesia. It’s home to the Flores Giant Rat, which has the single virtue of being too large to fit up your pants leg. This isn’t the kind of rodent to be restrained by mouse traps: its body can reach 45 centimeters (18 in) in length, and that’s before you add its 75-centimeter (30 in) tail. Then the rat  can exceed 1.2 meters  (4 ft). This really is the stuff of nightmares, but at least most of us are physically big enough to fight off a giant rat.  Unfortunately, the rats wouldn’t have been so easy to shrug off for our ancestors:  Homo floresiensis , who shared Flores Island with them around  12,000 years ago ....

10 Arousal And Disgust Sex is an innately disgusting thing. Copious body fluids aside, the mere act of sex is something we would never do if pleasure wasn’t involved. That may be one of the reasons arousal actually inhibits feelings of disgust. “Disgust-induced avoidance” is the scientific term for not wanting to do something gross, like hesitating to drink a glass of water with a large fly floating in it. Normally, you wouldn’t even think about it. When you’re aroused, though, it’s more likely that  you won’t care  and take a big gulp anyway. In a recent study, 90 women were split into three groups: aroused, unaroused, and neutral. Then they were given 16 different tasks that ranged from “disgusting” to “more disgusting”—wiping their hands with a used tissue, reaching into a bucket of used condoms, and yes, drinking from a glass with a dead bug in it. In reality, the bug was fake, and the condoms weren’t actually used—but the participants didn’t know that. The arous...