“Freedom Or Death,” Emmeline Pankhurst Wikimedia Commons One of the leaders of Britain’s suffragette movement, Emmeline Pankhurst visited Connecticut in November 1913. There she delivered her famous “Freedom Or Death” speech, given only five months after her friend and fellow suffragette, Emily Davison, had been killed by King George V’s horse while protesting. Pankhurst had been arrested many times for her activism and was certain she would be locked up again upon her return to England.

After his master John Gray died in 1858, Greyfriars Bobby spent the next 14 years guarding his grave, leaving just once a day to eat. Wikimedia CommonsA granite statue of Edinburgh’s famous terrier, Greyfriars Bobby. The heartwarming story of “Greyfriars Bobby” goes like this: An older Edinburgh man named John Gray became a police nightwatchman in the mid-1850s and chose a watchdog to accompany him on his long, duty-filled nights at work.

How and why many of us still observe one of humanity's oldest rituals.Flickr/Ketzirah Lesser & Art Drauglis Observing the sabbath is one of humanity’s oldest – and on the surface, strangest – rituals. Today, roughly three billion people adhere to one or another religion that teaches them that God has personally mandated vacation time, as if He was a really understanding boss. Humans being humans, some communities have taken the ritual command to observe a day of rest each week to extremes, with some designating entire years as unproductive, while others put a lot of energy into subverting the tradition and getting some work done, albeit by unconventional means.

If you were trying to kill a lot of people (or maybe sneakily kill just one person), you could go with the predictable choices: guns, tanks, poison, and swords. Or, you could get creative. For as long as nations have existed, it seems that governments have been working to figure out the craziest ways to end people’s lives. From cat robots to poisonous umbrellas, here are 21 of history’s most out-there weapons:

Angus Barbieri consumed nothing but vitamins and zero-calorie beverages for over a year while on history’s longest fast — which helped him lose 276 pounds. Find A GraveAngus Barbieri before and after his fast, in which he lost 276 pounds. Angus Barbieri was fed up with being overweight. At the age of just 27, he weighed 456 pounds and struggled with food addiction. So in June 1965, he walked into the Royal Infirmary of Dundee and told the doctors he wanted to go on a fast.