Animals fatally maul, sting, trample, and chew about a million humans per year. Pretty nice of them, given the numbers on our side—the average of 750 million chickens we kill in the U.S. every month, for instance. In an ideal world, no one would ever get mauled by a bear, or contract rabies from a feral squirrel. But…
Night owls may be more fun at parties, but a preference for staying out late may come with some serious drawbacks, suggests a new study published this week in Chronobiology International. Namely, it might increase your chances of dying early.
Living creatures do amazing things. They grow toward the sun, build cities, lay eggs, and some even bone. But living things must die, and when they do, they tend to get smelly and mushy pretty quickly. But the moments after death, before decomposition, can be amazing in their own right. Scientists have just learned a…
Peter Madsen, an eccentric inventor who gained notoriety for his DIY submarine and mini-rocket projects, has been charged with the murder of Kim Wall, a young journalist that was writing a story about him. After months of shifting stories, prosecutors believe that Madsen intentionally killed Wall and that the act was…
“On an average day, visitors might encounter Dr. Couney’s Infant Incubators, where premature babies were kept alive by novel technology that had yet to be adopted by hospitals,” writes Joanna Ebenstein of the medical miracles once tucked away inside New York City’s most famous amusement park in her new book, Death: A…
Even though Thanos has been trying his damnedest to get her attention for eons, Marvel’s abstract concept of Death’s been spending the bulk of her time lately hanging out with Ben Reilly, Spider-Man’s clone. In this week’s Scarlet Spider, Death visited Ben for a friendly chat about her involvement in the 2016 World…
It used to be that when someone died, their executor would follow a standard roadmap to settle their estate: clean out the house, go through the file cabinets, and file a tax return at the end of the year. Now this wasn’t exactly easy—handling the administration after a loved one’s death can be emotionally and…
In a grisly tale, The New York Times reports Takahiro Shiraishi, 27, was arrested in Zama prefecture, Japan, 30 miles outside of Tokyo, after police found nine severed heads in coolers in his apartment. Shiraishi reportedly used Twitter to find women who’d expressed suicidal thoughts over the service, murdering and…
For most Americans, the options of what you can have done to your body after you die likely seem limited. Cremation, embalming your body and then burying it—there are variations on those themes, but the basics remain. But mortician Caitlin Doughty has spent her life trying to change how we consider death and educate…
Do not lose sleep tonight, the world will not end as the result of some enormous supervolcano eruption in Yellowstone National Park any time soon. But there is a whole lot of other interesting stuff going on there—so maybe it’s worth losing sleep by getting excited about science. Nerd.
Harry Dean Stanton, an instantly recognizable character actor whose career spanned seven decades, died of natural causes in Los Angeles today. He was 91 years old.
Death comes for us all here on Earth at a rate of nearly 7,000 people every hour. Yet, despite its inevitability, most of us know very little about the experience. This is what happens to your body and mind as you slip away—and it’s not as frightening as you might think.
On Monday, reporters were allowed to hear Peter Madsen’s version of the events that led to the death of the journalist Kim Wall aboard crowdfunded submarine, the UC3 Nautilus. At a court hearing in Copenhagen, Madsen claimed that Wall was accidentally struck on the head by a heavy hatch and he maintains that he is…
A stuntwoman riding a motorcycle was killed Monday on the Vancouver set of Deadpool 2.
Homo sapiens have been around for at least a hundred thousand years, and civilization for maybe a few thousand. These timescales are far longer than your minuscule lifespan, but given our 13 billion-year-old galaxy, they’re shorter than a cosmic heartbeat. And unlike galaxies that require a major wallop to tear apart,…
It’s not often that you’ll hear someone thank climate change for something. But today, it seems to have offered some closure on a 75-year-old mystery. So, thanks climate change, at least for this.
We’ve all heard of donating your body to science, but what does it really mean? Let’s talk about what happens when you give your body to further medical research and education. (We won’t be discussing donation of individual organs or tissues, which is covered here.)
The second episode of Orphan Black’s final season crossed a line even I didn’t expect, killing off a fan-favorite character in a cruel, sadistic, and fairly sexist way. I’m still not sure how I feel about it, but it isn’t good.
The country woke up to scary news on Wednesday. A gunman had opened fire on a Congressional baseball practice, injuring House Majority Whip Steve Scalise and several others. A catastrophic fire in London had killed at least six people. And Twitter sponsored trending section had decided to promote a very unfortunate…
On Game of Thrones, death is one of the few things (aside from winter) that the people of Westeros and beyond know that they can rely on. The impermanence of life is one of the fundamental ideas that’s shaped both George R.R. Martin’s books and HBO’s series, but, as is often the case, it can be difficult to recall…
