Everyone knows about Chernobyl and the disaster that caused one of the biggest nuclear accidents in our history. Although the ‘direct’ fatalities only number about 31, estimates place the total amount of victims who died between 9,000 and 27,000 – and that’s not counting the thousands who suffered other effects, including those suffering from birth defects. So what exactly caused this disaster? Well… a lot.

It all started with an experimental test of a voltage regulating system. Everything was planned, with experts in attendance (because why would they have experts working on site?). Unfortunately, the experiment had to be cut short, so they delayed it… for a few hours. Just long enough to put the testing time smack in the middle of the night shift, with no experts. These geniuses, who decided to proceed with the test to avoid delays, initiated the experiment.

Pretty soon warnings started popping up all over the place – but hey, who gives a shite about big warning lights that practically scream “TURN BACK, JACKASS!”? Not these brave souls. Reports actually stated that some of the fail-safe's that were meant to prevent such a disaster had been padlocked to prevent them from engaging – because, again, who gives a shite about safety? Throw in a few more moronic manoeuvres, and you’ve got an exploded reactor on your hands.

Do they evacuate? Nah. Warn the people? HELL no. This is MUTHER RUSSIA. She has no disasters. Thus, on the orders of their superior, Akimov, all the poor buggers just kept working – mainly on clearing up all the debris. Without safety gear. With their hands, actually. Give you one guess who was amongst the aforementioned victims. The residents of the area were only evacuated days later because no one wanted to admit to their major fuckup.

And there you have it. One plague of chronic brain failure, and one giant scar of human stupidity left on the Russian countryside.

2. Just Keep Your Eyes Open – The Titanic

3. No One’s Made This Mistake Before! – Napoleon and Hitler Invade Russia

4. Um, well… Right Now, I Think – The Berlin Wall

5. Not That Way, Idiot! - WWI

6. Ignore The Messenger, I’m Drunk – Battle of Trenton

Every family has one – that brother/aunt/third-cousin-twice-removed that no one talks about. So it is in mythology as well; almost every single one has a deity, in one form or another, that makes one wonder ‘Why on earth did they think this one up?’. From ditzy and utterly pointless, to stomach-cramp inducing disgust, here are:

6 Strange and Disgusting Deities Mythology Could Have Done Without

Although Yhi isn’t much of a creeper, she had her oddities. She opened her eyes, and there was light. Flowers grew wherever she walked. She made insects out of evil spirits and darkness (which explains mosquitoes and flies) and animals from a 'being' in an ice cave. Unfortunately, Yhi wasn’t exactly a student of anatomy.

After having gone home, the creatures she’d created begged her to come back – the problems ranged from missing legs to too many, while others didn’t have fins or wings. Yhi, wanting only to please, smacked on the missing parts – creating kangaroos, wombats and the poor, poor platypus. Man, however, couldn’t be helped, and remained shunned. In an effort to help Man, Yhi decided to create Woman from a flower – to Man’s consternation, who feared his mate would be another disaster. Thankfully Yhi finally got it right.

2. Tlazolteotl, The Goddess of Holy Manure (Aztec)

3. Bakbakwalanooksiwae, God of Rear-end Reincarnation (Native American)

4. Uke Mochi, The Worst Goddess of Food Ever (Japan)

5. Babi, The Very Virile God of the Underworld (Egypt)

6. Shezmu, God of Questionable Liquor (Egypt)

The world is filled with amazing archaeological discoveries that set fire to the imagination. Sometimes these discoveries answer questions and fill out history, other times they leave us asking even more questions than we started out with. But with every unearthed puzzle, we discover more about earth and its vast history. When it comes to Africa and archaeological discoveries, the first thoughts that pop to mind are things like the Pyramids and the Sphinx; it’s only natural, since it is one of the longest running places of excavation in history. But those aren’t the only little treasure troves of ancient historical mysteries that the continent presents. Here are:

6 Unbelievable and Amazing Archaeological Discoveries in Africa

Divided into four large sites across Senegal and Gambia, the stones cover an area of approximately thirty thousand square kilometers. They’re thought to have been built between 300 B.C. and 1600 A.D., and consist of approximately 29’000 stones, 17,000 monuments and 2,000 individual sites – containing graves, pottery shards and megalithic circles. The stones themselves consist of Laterite, a fairly common material in the area, averaging two meters in height and weighing an average of seven tons. According to archaeologists, finding the quality of laterite would have required intricate knowledge of geology, especially since the stones weren’t carved in pieces but rather, like obelisks, hewn out of the rock in solid pieces and dragged to their final locations.

It’s believed that the monuments indicate that a prosperous and organized society existed there, considering the amount of labour it would have taken to construct the circles.

The site in Sine Ngayene is the largest of the four, and several iron smelting sites and quarries were discovered close by. What’s even more interesting was the evidence of hundreds of homes found nearby, and layers of materials that indicate four nearly distinct cycles that create a timeline of events – starting with the most frequent use of the site as a place of gathering and burial, to its decline almost 700 years later.

2. Meroë of Kush; Shendi, Sudan

3. Great Zimbabwe; Masvingo, Zimbabwe

4. The Lalibela Churches; Lalibela, Ethiopia

5. The White Lady; Brandberg Mountain, Namibia

6. 200,000 Year Old Ruins of Bakoni; Machadodorp, South Africa

They say a picture can say a thousand words, but sometimes there are those photographs that say just a little more. They reach right into us and makes us feel or remember something amazing. Sometimes they even mark key points in history, or show us an event or a side of something horrible we might never even have expected seeing. Here are:

6 Amazing Photographs of Unbelievable Moments in History

Although she’s not the first woman to finish the Boston Marathon – that honour belongs to Bobbi Gibb – Katherine was the first to actually sign up for the race and finish with her numbers. She signed up as K.V. Switzer and with the support of her trainer, Arnie Briggs, and her rag tag team of friends (boyfriend Tom Miller and John Leonard), she prepared to tackle the monster of a race. None of the organizers seem to notice that she was a woman right away, and for a while it seemed like the race would pass like it would for any other runner – tiring and painful but uneventful.

Until they passed the press truck. They did notice that number 261 was a woman – like several other men who were quite receptive to the feminine participant – and soon enough questions were being pelted out. By Katherine’s account, most of these questions were antagonistic, trying to write her run off as a short lived publicity stunt – but their questions only served to fuel the determined runner further.

The biggest moment came when race organizer Jock Semple took a personal affront to her participation and yelled out “Get the hell out of my race and give me those numbers!”. He ran after Switzer, going so far as attacking her and trying to pull of her numbers. Briggs tried to fight him off, unsuccessfully, and Switzer’s boyfriend Tom stepped up to the plate, punching Semple’s lights out and the group left him counting stars on the side of the road, proceeding to “run like hell” at Arnie Brigg’s urging.

Switzer did finish the race and made big news – but for her the biggest accomplishment was proving that a woman could run the distance, and deserved the chance to do so.

2. Tutankhamun’s Sealed Tomb; 1922

There have been many books and movies about the supposed ‘Pharaoh’s curse’, but it was all started by the excavation of Tutankhamun’s tomb. When it was discovered the seal was perfectly intact, unbroken for an estimated 3.245 years, and guarded by a clay seal of Anubis – the jackal god entrusted with the protection of the dead. But things got a little strange when they reportedly found a clay tablet that read “Death will slay with his wings whoever disturbs the peace of the pharaoh.”

Although most of the expedition, led by Howard Carter, who opened the tomb lived out their lives, the last survivor dying 39 years later, eight people died in ‘mysterious’ or unorthodox ways. Perhaps it can be contributed to the superstition of the time as well as the interest of the press and several lords and celebrities – like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle himself – but these deaths quickly spawned tell of a curse that afflicted those who opened and thus ‘desecrated’ the tomb.

The first apparent sign of the curse’s activation was the appearance of a cobra, the symbol of the Egyptian monarchy, in Carter’s pet canary’s cage, holding the dead bird in his mouth. This was interpreted as the Royal Cobra breaking into Carter’s home. The first death, however, was of Lord Carnarvon, Carter’s financial backer. He was bitten by a mosquito, cut the bite by accident while shaving, and died from the resultant infection and blood poisoning.

This death was followed by George Gould I, who died from a fever he developed after a visit that same year. Prince Ali Kamel Fahmy Bey was shot by his wife after visiting the tomb, Colonel Aubrey Herbert died from blood poisoning, Sir Archibald Douglas-Reid died of a ‘mysterious illness’, and other deaths include assassination, poisoning, pneumonia, smothering and suicide. Carter himself died of Lymphoma nearly seventeen years later.

The Baby Cage was the brain child of American Emma Read, who patented it in 1922. It wasn’t too popular in the United States though, but in London – where cities were crowded and garden space was scarce – the cage took off in 1937. It became highly popular in the Chelsea Baby Club, and spread out from there. These cages were hung outside of apartment windows – sometimes ridiculously high up – and babies were put into these suspended wire cages to enjoy the smoggy London air out in the open.

Aside from the obvious risk of hanging your infant child outside in a wire mesh cage, the contraption was just that – open wires that did nothing to protect the child from the elements. The gaps in the cage did not protect the child from the sun, wind, bird excrement or anything else the neighbourhood kids wanted to throw at the cage for kicks. Despite these rather glaringly obvious problems, it still took several years for the cage to fall out of favour in the 1940’s – and, to the relief of toddlers everywhere, it never made a comeback.

These days most computers come standard with at least 500 gigabytes of hard drive space, if not starting at a straight out terabyte. Anything less seems almost pointless, considering the average size of files and programs these days – and if you’re going to pay for storage, you either pay for several gigabytes of cloud storage, or terabytes worth of server storage. In fact, for about $5 you can rent 10 terabytes worth of cloud storage. It’s hard to imagine paying $3,200 (or $28,000 in today’s equivalent) to rent only 5MB of storage space… but in 1956, that’s exactly what companies did to lease the amazing, first ever 5MB hard drive from IBM.

One would hope that the price at least included the cost of transportation – unlike the easily portable drives we have today, the IBM 305 RAMAC was a monster and had to be transported by truck or flown out to clients who wanted to use it. Not exactly what one would describe a super computer, but that was exactly how the giant contraption was advertised. Thankfully someone thought that future generations might want to look back and gape at the giant that started it all.

This picture was taken of Mrs. Lucille Chalifoux as she advertised her children for sale; Lana, 6, Rae, 5, Milton, 4, and Sue Ellen, 2, as well as her unborn son Bedford. At the time, Ray Chalifoux was an out of work coal truck driver, and the couple was facing eviction – so, whether in desperation for money (for bingo, later claimed) or to give her kids a better shot at life, Lucille decided to sell her children. Whatever her reasons were, it still sounds like a rather cruel if desperate act.

Only years later is it finally revealed what happened to the children. The least is known about Lana Charnote, the eldest, who died of cancer in 1998. Her son, Timothy Charnote, did reveal that she’d been legally adopted.

RaeAnn, now RaeAnn Mills and the second oldest of the children, began the search for the rest of her siblings. She reveals that she’d been sold for $2 to John and Ruth Zoeteman. When little Milton wouldn’t stop crying nearby, the farming couple took the boy as well. Neither were ever legally adopted, even though their new foster parents did rename them as Beverly and Kenneth Zoeteman. The pair’s story is not a happy one. They were chained up in the barn and used as field workers.

RaeAnn was frequently abused and, in her late teens, she was kidnapped, raped and got pregnant. Her foster parents sent her to a home for unwed mothers, and her new-born daughter was given up for adoption. When she returned she left home for good, but tried to reunite with her birth mother when she turned 21. According to her, Lucille showed no remorse, regret or love at all.

Milton didn’t have it much better – he was frequently beaten to purposely instil fear, and was called a slave by his foster father. Unfortunately, the abuse of his youth resulted in Milton becoming a violent child and he ended up in court where he had to choose a mental hospital or a reformatory. Afraid of the reformatory after hearing horror stories, he chose the hospital instead, where he was diagnosed with schizophrenia and fits of rage. He was eventually released and got married, although he was divorced later on. Of his birth mother, and the one time he met her, Milton says that “she never did love me. She didn’t apologize for selling me. She hated me so much that she didn’t care.”

Sue Ellen was legally adopted, and had a relatively normal upbringing. When she was reunited with her sister she was already well into the last stages of cancer and dying. But, even though she was no longer able to talk, Sue Ellen and RaeAnn quickly bonded. Of her mother, however, she says that “she needs to be burning in hell.”

Only David, who was the unborn Bedford at the time of the photo, holds no grudge against his birth mother. He was legally adopted by Harry and Leulla McDaniel and grew up in Wheatfield, not far from where RaeAnn and Milton were now living with the Zoetemans. He would often ride his bike over to them and free them from their bonds in the barn, before escaping again before he could be caught. He spent 20 years in the military, and although he doesn’t blame his birth mother for her “mistake”, he also had this to say: “She got rid of all us children, married someone else, had four more daughters. She kept them. She didn’t keep us.”

It's hard to imagine the pain that followed the unsuspecting little faces in that photograph.

There are several accounts of what exactly happened on the 25th of December 1914, but how it started doesn’t really matter. What matters is that on that day, the people’s want of peace overcame their leader’s want of war.

The most widespread version of the tale begin with the singing of carols on Christmas eve; “First the Germans would sing one of their carols and then we would sing one of ours, until when we started up ‘O Come, All Ye Faithful’ the Germans immediately joined in singing the same hymn to the Latin words Adeste Fideles. And I thought, well, this is really a most extraordinary thing ­– two nations both singing the same carol in the middle of a war,” said Graham Williams of the Fifth London Rifle Brigade.

The next morning German soldiers came out of the trenches and shouted out seasonal greetings to the soldiers in English. Soon enough Allied soldiers came out to greet them, and the day that followed is still remembered and commemorated today, over 102 years later. Over the course of the day the soldiers exchanged gifts of whatever they had available – cigarettes, food, buttons and hats – and finally had the opportunity to lay their dead, who had been lying in no man’s land for weeks, to rest.

Some of the stories of the day tell of a British soldier getting a haircut from a pre-war German barber. Another tells of a pig roast. Several even tell about impromptu soccer matches – and even though, in many places, the shooting and warring continued, it is the truce of those soldiers that remains remembered to this day. The war would continue and claim millions of lives, but some blame this on their leaders. One veteran goes as far as to claim that “I then came to the conclusion that I have held very firmly ever since, that if we had been left to ourselves there would never have been another shot fired.” Hitler, who was a Corporal at the time, unsurprisingly had a different view of the event, claiming “Such a thing should not happen in wartime. Have you no German sense of honor?” (A testament or foreshadowing, perhaps, of who and what he would later become.)

Whatever the truth of its beginning, or whatever the untold stories of what happened that day, the photo doesn’t fail to convey one of the most remarkable events in human history. War might be universal, but when looking at this photograph, one cannot deny the fact that it shows the human desire for peace as British and German soldiers stand together like old friends.

There are so many different religions across the globe that it’s hard to keep track of them all. Even so, you don’t need to ascribe to any of these religions to hear about some of the more well-known relics. After all, who hasn’t heard about the Shroud of Turin, the Spear of Destiny or the Piece of the True Cross? But then there are those other relics. The strange and bizarre relics that should, preferably, be kept hidden in very deep, dark holes. Here are:

6 Bizarre Holy Relics That Question the Sanity of Religion

No, you didn’t read that wrong. According to Jewish law, all boys must be circumcised on the eighth day following their birth and, just like these boys, Jesus was circumcised as well. Pretty normal practice, as things go. But then, in the year 800, things started to get a little weird. Claimed to have been brought to him by an angel, emperor Charlemagne gave the foreskin to Pope Leo III, who put it in the Sancta Sanctorum in Rome. After it was stolen by a German soldier, the foreskin spent the next thirty years in a prison cell.

When it was finally rediscovered, it proceeded to perform several miracles (including storms and a nice perfumy fog) and was moved to a church in Calcata where it became a must-see for pilgrims. Of course, if Calcata is too off the beaten path for you, you could see (one of) the 18 reported holy foreskins in Auvergne, Chartres, Metz, Hidlesheim, Langres, or the miraculous bleeding foreskin in Antwerp.

Oh, and if you wanted a particularly blessed experience, you were quite welcome to taste the foreskin. Yum.

2. The Virgin Mary’s Breastmilk

You wouldn’t need to look far to find some depiction of the virgin Mary breastfeeding little baby Jesus – this seems the be a very popular depiction of the virgin mother. But did you know that, aside from its nutritional value, Mary’s milk had quite a few miraculous properties as well? After some of her milk reportedly turned a whole rock white, the Church of Milk Grotto was built on the spot outside Bethlehem.

It gets better. After a statue of Mary was challenged to prove she was a mother by Saint Bernard, it came to life and squirted milk into his eye, curing him of an illness. Several vials of her milk were transported across Europe, with over ninety churches claiming to have some of her miracle working statue-milk.

Personally, I’m with theologian John Calvin who said, “Had the virgin been a cow her whole life she could never have produced such a quantity.” How’s that for a holy mental image?

As the story goes, Buddha was cremated and a single canine tooth (or four teeth and three bones, depending on who you ask) was recovered from the ashes of the funeral pyre. No one is sure what exactly happened to these relics, since they weren’t sent to the stupas that were meant to house them. One of the teeth, the left canine, did have an interesting adventure. It was enshrined in the capital, and wherever the capital went, so went the tooth – it was said that whoever owned the tooth had the divine right to rule. Naturally, this resulted in a whole lot of trouble.

Several wars were fought over the tooth, and just as many attempts were made to steal it. At one point the king of Bago, Burma, even offered the Portuguese £50,000 for the tooth. Don Constantine de Braganza considered the offer, but the archbishop and several other religious figureheads convinced the Don to destroy the tooth instead. It was ground into powder and tossed into a river. Unfortunately for the King and the Don, they never had the real tooth; it remained in the possession of the King of Kandy. It’s still housed in The Temple of the Sacred Tooth, in Sri Lanka, where thousands get to see it paraded through the streets once a year – unless, you know, it’s performing another miracle to avoid its own destruction.

Think you can make a lasting impression? You’ve got nothing on the prophet Muhammad, trust me. According to the Muslim belief, wherever Muhammad went his left foot made an impression that wouldn’t go away. In fact, several of these ‘footprints’ have been recovered from across the Middle East and are displayed at mosques and various other religious and historical sites. One even went as far as Istanbul, where it is now displayed in the Topkapi Palace Museum accompanied by a sword, a bow and hair from his beard.

If you ever wanted to follow in the footprints of a religious figure, here’s your chance.

The arm of Mary Magdalene was housed in the abbey of Fécamp, Normandy, as its most sacred relic. In 1190, Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln, wanted to venerate this most precious artefact and, eager to please, the relic was produced by the monks. Hugh immediately opened the silk wrapping so that he could kiss it, but that wasn’t enough for Hughie. First he tried to break off a piece, but when that didn’t work, and desperately wanting to partake of the blessed flesh, the bishop proceeded to gnaw on the relic until he finally managed to bite off two fingers.

His defence? “If a little while ago I handled the sacred body of the Lord with my fingers in spite of my unworthiness, and partook of it with my lips and my teeth, why should I not treat the bones of the saints in the same way – and without profanity acquire them whenever I can.”

How’s that for communion?

In the year 305, St. Januarius was beheaded at the volcanic crater Solfatara. Just after his death a woman named Eusebia saved some of his blood and it is now kept in Naples Cathredal. What makes the blood so special? In 1389 the coagulated blood ‘melted’, becoming liquid again – and it proceeded to do so ever since, three times a year – or when the pope visits. These liquefactions happen on September 19th, which is St. Januarius’ day, December 16th, the day of his patronage of Naples, and on the Saturday before the first Sunday of May, which commemorates the reunification of his blood and his skull. On these days, thousands gather to watch the displayed blood become liquid once more.

Why is it so important? As the story goes, if the blood doesn’t liquefy on any of those days, bad things are on the horizon. Twice in history it failed to do so – in the year 1527, the year of a plague, and in 1980, the year of the massive Irpinia Earthquake in Southern Italy.

It might be just a superstition but why take the chance, right?

At our roots, in our little heart of hearts, humans are a pretty violent race. For every one person seeking that elusive inner peace, you just need to make a stop at the local bar to see the other nine ready to throw it down. Unfortunately, that last bit of caveman instinct isn’t likely to breed out any time soon – which is probably why history is filled with tales of pointless, whimsical and downright idiotic wars. From a mortally moronic mistake to the honour of a captain’s ear; here are:

6 Stupidest Reasons Countries Have Gone To War

Unless taken in moderation, alcohol can lead to several situations where giant neon “I told you so!” signs are warranted. Usually these drunken forays into delinquency rarely lead to the deaths of thousands – unfortunately the Austrians in 1788 weren’t so lucky. The Hapsburg (Austrian) Army was fighting the Turks, and at the time it was quite the random rabble; there were Germans, French, Czechs, Serbians, Croatians, Polish and, of course, Austrians. It was a lost-in-translation disaster in the making.

On 17th September, so the stories tell, the tired soldiers set up camp and cavalrymen were sent on night patrol to keep an eye out for the enemy. They didn’t find any Turks, but they did come across a Gypsy camp. Kindly hears filled with compassion for the exhausted men, the Gypsies plied them with Schnapps. Lots of Schnapps… but not enough. When a group of infantry soldiers tried to join the party, it was the equivalent of sticking a spur under the saddle for the horsemen. Mix alcohol, lack of sleep and men itching for a fight, and you have the makings of an epic brawl.

One of the brawny morons decided to fire off a round, and the night descended into absolute chaos. Cries of “Turks, Turks!” was yelled into and out of the dark, and the brawlers rushed back to camp – they, of course, thought that the Ottoman army was attacking and they’d just been warned. It was too late – the camp was a disaster. And then the tower of Babel collapsed – German officers started yelling “Halt!” to try and bring order to the mess. It must have been one hell of a party, because the non-German soldiers mistook the cries for ones of “Allah!” Every loyal soldier jumped straight into battle… with each other. Even a corps commander went so far as ordering an artillery strike!

It’s not hard to guess what happened next.

Two days later the Turkish army marched into Karansebes, and found it defenceless. The private little war left 10’000 dead in its wake – truly a monument to the virtues of Schnapps.

2. The War of the Wooden Bucket

3. The British/Ashanti War of the Golden Stool

4. The San Juan Island Pig War

5. Jenkin’s Ear War

6. The War of the Fly Swatter