Greenland is losing ice at a rate 20 percent faster than previously estimated. Wikimedia CommonsGreenland’s Kangerllussuaq Glacier, which has retreated 6.2 miles since 1900. Greenland’s glaciers are melting at a much faster rate than expected — and as a result, the island itself is growing. According to two recent studies — one published in Nature, the other in Geophysical Research Letters — Greenland is gradually gaining height as melting glaciers relieve pressure on the island’s bedrock, allowing it to rise.

Scaphism For sheer, delirious, nauseating horror, scaphism may be one of the worst execution methods ever devised. Practiced by the Ancient Persians, starting around 500 B.C., it saw the victim placed inside a hollowed-out log or narrow boat, their hands and feet tied to each end. The victim was then forced to ingest a mixture of milk and honey until they uncontrollably voided their bowels, at which point their skin was smeared with more milk and honey before they were left exposed in the sun and surrounded by their own feces and vomit.

For 30 years, Boy Scout troop leader and church council president Dennis Rader was secretly the BTK murderer — while looking like the perfect family man to his neighbors in Kansas.Dennis Rader was the president of his church congregation as well as a loving husband and a doting father. Altogether, he seemed to be a reliable and responsible man to all who knew him. But he was leading a double life.

A Canadian First Nations soldier, Francis Pegahmagabow was the best sniper on either side of World War I. But when he went back home to Canada, he still had no rights.Marius Barbeau/Canadian Museum of HistoryFrancis Pegahmagabow was made Supreme Chief of the Native Independent Government in 1943. Francis Pegahmagabow crawled through the trenches of France, survived a chlorine gas attack, and kept fighting after a bullet tore through his leg.

During the reign of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, the gulags imprisoned millions of political prisoners — brutalizing and killing many of them.Library of CongressPrisoners at a gulag camp in Siberia. Date unknown. For decades, a single word could strike fear into the hearts of many Soviet citizens: “gulag.” At its peak from the 1920s to the 1950s, this sprawling network of forced labor camps held millions of political prisoners, rebellious peasants, petty criminals, and ordinary citizens who had been accused of being disloyal to the government.