The history of the seance is one of seeing the sad and vulnerable as an easy business opportunity, adding gauze and then calling it a party.The human race has a conflicting relationship with their mortality. On the one hand, we are endlessly fascinated by and focused on it; on the other, we cannot conceive of a world in which our loved ones, separated by death, are permanently out of reach.

Female lions are normally quick to murder leopard cubs. But new photos from Tanzania show one mother helping out a three-week-old orphan. Though inter-species nursing has been seen in captivity, it is almost never observed in wild large cats. Which is why, when he opened his email earlier this week, Luke Hunter's jaw dropped. Hunter is the president of Panthera, a global wild cat conservation organization. And on his computer screen, he was looking at photos of a tiny leopard cub suckling on a wild lioness.

Discover the shockingly literal and thoroughly disturbing 18th-century medical origins of the idiom "blowing smoke up your ass."Today I Found Out/YouTube “Oh, you’re just blowing smoke up my ass,” is something you might hear someone say when they think you’re just telling them what they want to hear. But in 18th-century England, blowing smoke up your ass was an actual medical procedure, and no, we aren’t kidding. According to Gizmodo, one of the earliest reports of such a practice took place in England in 1746, when a woman was left unconscious after nearly drowning.

From the fortress of an eccentric sewing machine magnate to the lavish palace of love built by a wealthy hotelier, these castles in New York are an homage to the golden age of American industrialism. Oheka CastleHuntington's Oheka Castle is a French Chateau style castle on a massive 443-acre plot. Wikimedia Commons Oheka Castle The sprawling mansion sits atop the the highest point on Long Island in Cold Spring Harbor.

He had a death ray. Source: Gizmodo To put it a bit more accurately, Tesla possessed an intricate design plan for a death ray – a particle beam/directed-energy weapon he named “Teleforce” —that was meant to be used during World War One to wipe out whole armies. He described the invention thusly: “[The nozzle would] send concentrated beams of particles through the free air, of such tremendous energy that they will bring down a fleet of 10,000 enemy airplanes at a distance of 200 miles from a defending nation’s border and will cause armies to drop dead in their tracks.