45 Mind-Blowing Facts You Never Knew Existed—Prepare to Be Amazed!

When Constantin Fried was exploring a field near Petershagen-Frille, Germany, he came across a tiny object in the dirt that turned out to be a miniature lock dating back to the Roman era. Made of lustrous gold and measuring in at just over one centimeter across, this lock was likely made during the third or fourth century C.E. Once experts discovered the intricacies of its mechanisms, which remain intact to this day, they were left baffled as to how an ancient artisan was able to create it without modern tools like lights and magnifying glasses. And while researchers believe the lock may have been brought from Rome to Germany by a soldier returning home, then used to secure a chest of keepsakes or a jewelry box, its true origins and purpose remain shrouded in mystery.

Said to produce a sound like the screams of the damned or the “wail of a thousand souls,” the Aztec death whistle is widely believed to have made one of the most terrifying noises in human history. While historians theorize that it may have been used in battle or during human sacrifices, its exact purpose remains mysterious to this day. But now, researchers have used brain scans to unlock the scientific secrets of the whistle’s horrifying sound.⁠
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When scientists played the death whistle for their subjects, fMRI results showed that it triggered the brain’s low-order auditory cortical regions, like those activated by screams or crying babies. However, the whistle also activated higher-order regions like the inferior frontal cortex, which handles complex classification processing. This tells researchers that the Aztec death whistle’s true horror lies in the way it falls into a kind of auditory uncanny valley in which listeners hear its sound as not quite human, while also not quite nonhuman.

In 1980, 19-year-old Jean Hilliard was found “frozen solid” in Minnesota on a -22-degree day. After encountering car troubles, she tried to get help from her friend Wally Nelson but accidentally tripped, fell, and lost consciousness on the way to his home. Nelson, who had no idea that Hilliard needed assistance until he discovered her frozen body near his home six hours later, was sure that she had died — until he saw “bubbles” coming out of her nose.⁠
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Luckily, Nelson acted quickly and took her to the hospital, where doctors were horrified by the extent of her hypothermia. In fact, her skin was reportedly so hard that it couldn’t be punctured with a hypodermic needle. But thanks to heating pads — and, her family says, “a lot of prayer” — Hilliard was awake and talking in just a matter of hours. And her only problem when she left the hospital was her blistered toes. ⁠

In the 1920s, the United States Radium Corporation encouraged its young female workers to use their lips to sharpen the points on the brushes they used to paint watch dials. Little did these women know that this paint was so toxic that it would soon cause them to lose their jaws — and their lives.⁠
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The hundreds of young women who worked in these factories were exposed to so much radioactive radium that they used to come home glowing in the dark. Then they found that the exposure caused their vertebrae to collapse, their jaws to fall off, and their lives to end slowly after agonizing battles with cancer.⁠
And while the men who worked in these factories wore lead aprons to protect themselves from radiation, the women were given nothing. By 1924, after dozens of young women were sick or dead, the United States Radium Corporation fought off lawsuits and bad press by saying the fatalities were from STDs.⁠

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