6 Habits You Didn't Know Were Keeping You Alive. We could all probably start making an effort to live more healthily, but most of us either can't find the time or are too busy eating Oreos to walk to the treadmill. Well, in a twist of fate so beautiful you want to make passionate love to it on the couch with the blinds open, science is now claiming that the most seemingly innocent things you do (or did) on a daily basis can be just as good for you as a lifetime of exercise and carrot juice.
Brushing Your Teeth Can Protect You From Heart Attacks Scientists have long suspected that bad oral hygiene and heart problems were somehow connected, though they could never explain it beyond the widely popular "fangletoothed weirdos are the enemies of God" hypothesis. Dental specialists at Bristol University now believe that Streptococcus, a common bacterium responsible for tooth decay, might be the one to blame as they discovered that it also causes blood clots when it enters the human bloodstream.
Just look at this douche. "Wait ... 5 Bad Ideas Humanity Is Sticking With Out of Habit. Humans are funny when it comes to technology. We're eager to adopt new technologies when the difference is trivial, like camping out for days to buy the new iPhone when we still haven't figured out the old one. But at the same time, we also have a way of getting attached to worthless technologies of the past, just because it's too much hassle to change. It turns out old habits die hard. And sometimes, they don't die at all. Quick -- look at the very computer you're reading this on. Depending on your level of geekitude, you probably have a plasma monitor and a system running six terabytes of RAM powered by a flux capacitor.
But in order to communicate with this futuristic device you probably call your Tardis, you're still using an archaic system that hasn't been improved since it was introduced 130 years ago. Why It's Inefficient: Photos.comBesides not being able to take a punch. How did we wind up with this intuition-defying random configuration? Why We're Stuck With It: A.
B. Now what? C. 7 Hotly Debated Movie Questions That Totally Have Answers. If the Internet is to be trusted (and we don't see why it shouldn't be), the best way to solve a movie mystery once and for all is to argue about it incessantly in blog posts, message boards and chatrooms. If you don't believe us, do a Google search for "Inception ending" and see what comes up (we dare you). Or, simply wait 10 minutes after this article is posted and scroll down to see what our own comments section is saying. Some movie and TV mysteries, however, weren't intended to be mysteries at all, and often are just the result of the director getting cute at the last minute. These mysteries are often plainly explained in the script, and while the answers aren't always definite, they are surprising. . #7. The Mystery: In case you forgot, the beginning of Pulp Fiction isn't just John Travolta and Samuel L. And the perfect British spy novel to read on the toilet A posthumous L.
According to Tarantino, it's just a MacGuffin, something to drive the plot along. What the Script Says: #6. . #5. 6 Myths About Famous Places You Believe (Thanks to Movies) Even if you've never left your hometown, you have a mental picture of virtually every famous city in the world. That's what movies are for, right? You'll never go to Moscow, but you know what you'll find there -- huge buildings with onion-shaped roofs and lots of snow.
Well, we're sorry to say that Hollywood really doesn't seem to do all that much homework on some of these locations. That's why you may come away thinking ... Washington, D.C., Has Skyscrapers Getty America's capital turns up in everything from political thrillers to alien invasion movies, yet very few movies are actually shot there. This is why movies get so many little things wrong about D.C. -- people who actually live there can chuckle when The Invasion showcases the capital's many nonexistent newspaper stands, or when Live Free or Die Hard sticks in tollbooths, which the city actually has none of. That's a shot of D.C. in the newest Die Hard film. Here's the thing: There are no skyscrapers in D.C. Via blogs.cornell.edu. 13 Real Animals Lifted Directly Out of Your Nightmares. Nature seems to have a limitless supply of creativity. From giant spiders to gamma ray bursts, nature has gotten more mileage out of the same old material than the writers of The Simpsons.
But sometimes the things she comes up with are so goose-fucking insane they make Crispin Glover look like Jean-Luc Picard. We're talking about creatures that seemed to have abandoned all earthly processes of evolution to achieve pure horror. Like... Deep Sea Hatchetfish A.K.A. the Fish That Will Eat Your Soul Also known as the fish of the damned, it appears the only reason we don't hear their curse-filled lamentations is because they're underwater.
They only grow to be about four and a half inches long, but their bite-sized terror is potent--they hide in the deep during the day, then rise up at night, returning once more to the abyss as day breaks. The Squid with Teeth (Promachoteuthis Sulcus) Looking like a human mouth surrounded by tentacles, this thing could have come straight out of bad horror anime. Why Ebert Is Wrong: In Defense of Games as Art. CoD4 no game had abruptly killed you, the main character, while you played him, and with absolutely no other possible outcome. A lot of people started that level over again. "I did something wrong," they thought. "I wasn't fast enough, there's no way important people just die awfully in the heat of war with no recours-waaaiit a minuteâ¦" I see what you did there. Ebert believes "the real question is, do we as their [games, movies, etc.] consumers become more or less complex, thoughtful, insightful, witty, empathetic, intelligent, philosophical (and so on) by experiencing them?
Rez doesn't just stack up against a classical work of art; it succeeds above and beyond the classical work. "Fuckin'... fuck this thing! As a game, Rez was not great fun--it was a rail-borne "shooter" where you didn't really "shoot" so much as select vast swathes of targets--but its presentation was brilliant. ...and possibly bashes its head in. But why even bother with all of this?
Underdogs of War: 6 Tiny Nations That Kicked Ass. You've got to love the underdog. It doesn't matter who they are or whether or not they're good at all, we just want the little guy to win--because in the real world, he usually doesn't. So today we celebrate these tiny, underdog countries, the Rocky countries, who kicked ass against all odds. Albania Cheats at War... and Kicks Extraordinary Amounts of Ass If you're not familiar with the Balkans, here's a fun experiment that'll give you a quick education. Go to YouTube, and find any video from the region (Albania, or Greece, etc). Something along these lines.
That's the Balkans. And it's been that way for a long time. Waiting for them was a man named Gjergj Kastrioti Skanderbeg--the name alone is so incredibly badass that it will make you shit yourself--who lead a hardened, patriotic army of Albanian resistance warriors all across the countryside, basically fucking up the Ottoman's shit every opportunity he got.
In one battle, he killed 22,000 Turks while losing a mere 2,000 of his own men. The 5 Most Terrifying Jobs in the History of War. We here at Cracked are as guilty as anyone of celebrating badassery in war -- a dude who captures a whole Nazi platoon by himself deserves all the compliments he can get. But you always want to stop short of glamorizing war, so in that spirit, let's count down some of the mind-bogglingly shitty jobs people have gotten stuck with during wartime. Crewman on Board a 19th-Century Submarine The noble dream of sinking an enemy's ship with an underwater boat has been around since Leonardo da Vinci's day. But it wasn't until the Civil War that anyone really pulled off a boat that could submerge long enough to inflict any damage, so the Confederates really thought they had gained an edge over the better-equipped Union when they put the H.L.
Hunley into water. If only they had given it the ability to get back out. Imagine you're a member of the Confederate navy, being asked to try to climb inside this thing for the first time and give it a test run. Safe. Well, accidents happen. It sank again. 5 Retarded Space Travel Ideas (That Might Actually Work) This whole space travel thing has gotten pretty boring ever since we landed on the moon. We can't make it to another planet and none of our ships have lasers. What the hell is the point? But there were some incredibly awesome technologies that never made it off the drawing board. All because we didn't have the foresight, there wasn't enough funding, and they sounded like they were made up by a kindergartner. The Gigantic Space Cannon Gerald Bull was a physics genius, and without a doubt the greatest weapons designer that Canada has ever produced, which may very well be impressive for all we know of Canadian weapon designers.
One of his crowning achievements was the G5 Howitzer, which could launch a shell 30 miles. So he went to work with the American government in the High Altitude Research Project, where he pointed other gigantic guns directly up into the sky and fired objects up to 60 miles high. Above: Gerald Bull Saddam put him to work building his dream. So Why Don't We Have One? The 6 Weirdest Dangers of Space Travel. When mankind finally makes the big leap from Earth to space, it's probably not going to be the time-warping black holes or mouth-raping aliens that do him in. In fact, tomorrow's astronauts will be on the lookout for dangers that are laughably mundane.
For every one dude who gets awesomely exploded by lasers or asteroids, hundreds will die of ... Budget cuts and recession drama may have temporarily shelved America's dreams of a moon colony, but Russia's -- not so much. The word on the street is that Vlad Putin not only wants a permanent Russian base on the moon by 2030 but also wants to harvest helium from our nearest space neighbor. Ambitious? GettyWe're keeping the moon-bots a secret until someone else gets up there. Wait ... Look at the famous footprint Buzz Aldrin left on the moon's surface: It looks like mud.
Now imagine that this cocaine sticks to everything it touches and is so fine that it seeps into your space suit, yet so rough that it scratches your skin like sandpaper. 6 Reasons Space Travel Will Always Suck. We love movies about space, but are continually bored by actual space travel. When's the last time you rushed to the TV to watch a space shuttle take off? No, we all seem to be waiting for the future of space travel to get here, a future of huge, comfortable starships hauling us to other planets where adventure awaits. Hopefully ships with lasers, that can destroy other ships.
Unfortunately, it appears that even for your grandchildren, space travel will really, really suck. Mainly because... There is No Sex in Space The Fantasy: If Battlestar Galactica taught us anything, it's that the starships are like the Love Boat, if it were filled with never ending robot orgies and counterproductive human sexual drama. Places like the cavern o' dicks. The Reality: Let's start with the physical challenges. "I'll take that challenge. " If you somehow are able to achieve a zero-G erection, you'd better damned well make sure you've got multiple forms of birth control in effect.
Dead. A. B. Source. The 7 Most Impressive Examples of Animal Architecture. We have a pretty good idea about what sets humanity aside from the animals. We built the Pyramids, assholes. Well, we hate to break it to you, but animals have been cranking out architectural marvels since humanity was still trying to figure out how pooping works. We're talking about things like ... The Great Wall of Beavers Via Juliux Contrary to popular belief, the Great Wall of China cannot be seen from space. AFPDamn. First discovered by someone messing around on Google Earth, it's the largest piece of animal-built infrastructure on the planet, and according to some science people, it would have taken upwards of 20 years to build, and can be seen in satellite images from 1990. Via telegraph.co.uk Originally constructed to keep out enemies -- like China's Great Wall -- it's now a tourist attraction for humans astonished about how such a huge thing was built by such inferior creatures.
Photos.comNice beaver. Mile-High Termite Megacities Photos.com Photos.com"Is there a problem, asshole?