(sighs)
You know, some modes
of death are definitely
worse than others, so we
here at "How Stuff Works"
took it upon ourselves to research
the absolute worst ways to die
so you can avoid them at all costs.
Maybe you think falling
into a volcano filled
with molten lava is a good way to go.
You just plop in, sink,
and disintegrate like that.
Well, you'd be in for a
pretty big surprise, pal.
Because of the relative density of lava,
you would basically hit the surface,
thump on it, and errupt into flames.
We know this thanks to a 2002 experiment
carried out by a researcher
named Richard Roscoe,
who for some reason took
a 66 pound bag of food
and threw it into a volcano in Ethiopia
to see what would happen.
He recorded the results and
found that the bag of food
made a dent in the lava and errupted
into a fountain of flames.
That could have been you.
Being eaten alive by a large
animal would certainly suck.
Some big cats tend to go for your throat
and suffocate you before eating you.
The jaguar crushes the
temporal bones in your skull
disabling your brain and hence killing you
before chowing down.
But not all animals
afford you this courtesy.
Take hyenas, for example.
They pounce on you until you're prone
and then start eating whether
you're conscious or not.
Bears also have the same nasty habit,
which is why one biologist
is quoted as saying,
"Bears don't kill.
"They eat."
But wait, no death
could certainly be worse
than scaphism, aka the tub,
which is an ancient
Persian torture technique
whereupon you're basically put into a tub
with your head and hands sticking out.
The Persians would come along
and douse you with milk and honey
so that you would attract
bugs and stinging insects.
You would also be fed a steady
diet of this milk and honey,
which would give you
irritable bowel syndrome,
which would result in diarrhea,
which would quickly fill up the tub.
This would attract flies,
which would lay eggs,
which of course become maggots.
The maggots would devour
your flesh, eating you alive,
and death, when it finally came,
would come in the form of an infection,
like sepsis or gangrene.
One poor soul was recorded as surviving
the tub for 17 days.
There're probably worse ways to die
than being crushed to death,
but we can't think of too many of them,
and there's actually a
couple ways you can die
from crushing.
Take for example, the crowd crush,
where there's so many people
packed into a small space,
the collective pressure prevents
your lungs from expanding,
and you die standing up of asphyxiation.
Then there's also the good old-fashioned
crushing death via structural
failure of your organs.
Say, for example, the brain.
This was actually a
favored method of execution
in India up until 1947.
The condemned prisoner
was made to put his head
down on a stone, and an
elephant was brought over
to step on his head,
squishing him to death.
I actually feel really
bad for the elephants
in that scenario.
Now that you've heard our top entries,
what way would you least like to die?
Dismemberment, plane crash?
Let us know in the comment section below,
but before you do,
console our original article
for the 10 worst ways to die
on HowStuffWorks.com,
and don't forget to
subscribe to our channel
for more of what the stuff madness.
