We’re seeing an experiment in action. Over the past few years, more and more countries and states have been legalizing marijuana, and we’re finally getting to see what effect it really has.

There have been all kinds of predictions. The naysayers have been sure that legalizing pot will all but bring the world to its doom, with drug abuse and crime running rampant. And on the other side, pot advocates have all but suggested that it’ll usher in a new era of peace and prosperity, where mankind finally settles its differences over a toke.

Enough time has passed now, though, that we can pretty definitively say what really happened—and it’s not all what you might expect.

[Read the full article at Listverse.]

At his peak, Isaac Newton had one of the most rational minds in human history. His was a brain unlike any other, one that allowed him to develop the fundamental laws of gravity and physics as well as make significant contributions to calculus, the latter of which he did in less time than it takes most people to learn it.

But every exceptional mind is an unusual one, and none were more so than the mind of Isaac Newton. As Newton’s life dragged on, his grip on sanity slowly started to slip, and his interests twisted away from the scientific and into the mystical.

Newton wrote ten million words throughout his life, but most of them had nothing to do with science. The overwhelming majority of the thoughts he put to paper were about alchemy, prophecies, and ancient mysticism—a strange, little-known side to one of the greatest scientific minds in human history.

[Read the full article at Listverse.]

The first dinosaur bones weren’t found by scientists. They were uncovered thousands of years ago by early men with no way of understanding what they were seeing.

Ancient men stumbled upon fossils just like we do today, and they had to do their best to figure out what in the world they were looking at. Some would see femurs the size of a fully grown man or great rib cages that stretched out as wide as a building.

There are a handful of records that give us a hint into how they made sense of these things—small glimpses into what it would have been like to stumble upon the remains of a dinosaur thousands of years ago.

[Read the full article at Listverse.]

In the 1950s, there was a real danger afoot. The Communists, as our brave senators warned us, had infiltrated the governments of the democratic world. And they’d brought with them their most powerful weapon: the gays.

As Senator Kenneth Wherry told the American people, “Only the most naive could believe that the Communists’ fifth column in the United States would neglect to propagate and use homosexuals to gain their treacherous ends.” We needed a device that could weed out these wily gays from their patriotic hetero peers. Our mission was clear: we needed a real-life, fully functioning gaydar.

The best minds in the world got to work. And they didn’t stop in America in the 1950s—in many parts of the world, our best and brightest are to working to build one today.

[Read the full article at Listverse.]

“What happened to your second wife?” an interviewer once asked Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard.

He was referring to Sara Northrup, the woman who’d been at Hubbard’s side while he developed Dianetics and who later divorced him in a messy, public scandal. The whole world had watched their divorce fill the headlines of every paper. But still, when the question came, Hubbard just smirked and told the interviewer: “I’d never had a second wife.”

It’s an incredibly brazen lie—and a sign of just how much damage Sara Northrup could do to him. Her life is a story that the Church of Scientology is still trying to cover up because the amount of suffering she endured at Hubbard’s hands is nothing short of heartbreaking.

[Read the full article at Listverse.]

In the last 10 years, elephants killed 800 people in the state of Assam, India, alone. Assam is an extreme case, but it’s not the only place where animals are starting to fight back. Over the last few decades, attacks by elephants have been on a steady rise.

According to expert Gay Bradshaw, the animals have just reached a breaking point. They’ve suffered through decades of poaching, culling, and habitat loss, and many have had to watch while their families and babies are killed and severed.

Bradshaw believes that this is a sort of animal revolt—a time when the animals of the wild are turning against their abusers by becoming more aggressive than ever before.

The result has been some absolutely chilling stories of animal attacks. Be warned—these aren’t for the faint of heart.

[Read the full article at Listverse.]