TOP 10

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 . At around...

10 Pythagoras of Samos Greek Mathematician Pythagoras is considered by some to be one of the first great mathematicians. Living around 570 to 495 BC, in modern day Greece, he is known to have founded the Pythagorean cult, who were noted by Aristotle to be one of the first groups to actively study and advance mathematics. He is also commonly credited with the Pythagorean Theorem within trigonometry. However, some sources doubt that is was him who constructed the proof (Some attribute it to his students, or Baudhayana, who lived some 300 years earlier in India). Nonetheless, the effect of such, as with large portions of fundamental mathematics, is commonly felt today, with the theorem playing a large part in modern measurements and technological equipment, as well as being the base of a large portion of other areas and theorems in mathematics. But, unlike most ancient theories, it played a bearing on the development of geometry, as well as opening the door to the study of mathematics as ...

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 aroused women w...