Things you didn't know about the dead.

Common facts
When a person dies, hearing is the last sense to go -- the first is usually sight, followed by taste, smell and touch

A human head remains conscious for about 15 to 20 seconds after it has been decapitated

100 people choke to death on pens each year. One is more likely to be killed by a champagne cork than by a spider

Alexander's funeral would have cost $600 million today. A road from Egypt to Babylon was built to carry his body

When inventor Thomas Edison died in 1931, his friend Henry Ford captured his last dying breath in a bottle

6. Over 2500 left-handed people are killed each year from using products made for right-handed people

It takes longer than ever before a body to decompose due to preservatives in the food that we eat these days

An eternal flame lamp at the tomb of a Buddhist priest in Nara, Japan has kept burning for 1,130 years

Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry is the first person to have his ashes put aboard a rocket and 'buried' in space

Japanese factory worker Kenji Urada became the first know fatality caused by a robot in July, 1981, in a car plant.


Via: Medical Insurance

Stuff You Didn’t Know About Death

Nobody has died of old age in the USA for the past half century. That
category of cause of death was eliminated in 1951.

Now everyone must die “from” something.

There is only one real cause of death, oxygen starvation. The cause of
death on death certificates is really the cause of the cause, the cause
of cell death due to oxygen starvation.

The practice of burying the dead goes back at least 350,000 years. A
site in Atapuerca, Spain, 45 feet below the surface, held 27 hominids.
These are likely of the species Homo heidelbergensis, a possible
common ancestor of both Neanderthals and modern humans.

One study turned up at least 200 English euphemisms for death,
including “to be in Abraham’s bosom” and “just add maggots.” I have
no idea if the latter is shortened to JAM, but I would be surprised if I
was the first to notice.

A favourite of Star Trek fans is to “sleep with the Tribbles.”
We all know that bacteria and other microorganisms eat dead flesh,
and TV murder fans know that one kind of fly begins to lay its eggs in
or on the body of a dead person within minutes of death. It seems to
be less well known that the intestinal enzymes that help us to digest
our food when we are alive begin to digest the rest of our body within
three days of death.

Cells that rupture after death become attractive food for bacteria that
live in our gut. (It is estimated that our bodies are really symbionts, as
more microorganisms live within us in symbiotic relationships with our
body cells—we can’t exist without them—than we have of our own
body cells.)

Bodies of people that drown or are thrown into water after being killed,
then remain in that water, become bloated with noxious gas and float
to the surface. This explains why most drowning deaths eventually
produce dead bodies at the surface of the water.

The eyes tend to bulge out with the rest of the bloating, giving rise to
the bulging eyes we see in Halloween masks or scary movies.
While we may think that only pharaohs and rich nobles were
mummified in ancient Egypt, mummification was more popular than
that. During the building of a railway in Egypt during the late 19th
century, unearthed mummies were so common that they were used as
fuel for locomotives.
Every museum around the world who wanted a mummy could buy one
cheap.
During the First World War, Egyptian mummies were shipped to
European countries where they were unwrapped and the cloth used
like paper during the paper shortage. The rest of the bodies were
burned as fuel.

All of our body cells are programmed to commit suicide at the right
time so that they can be flushed and replaced with new cells. As we
age, not enough new cells form and the DNA strands in the cells that
do become shorter. Which DNA information gets lost from the ends of
DNA strands varies, according to recent studies, but you may be able
to make some astute guesses.

Some body cells commit suicide before we are born. If they didn’t, we
would all be born with webbed feet, like ducks (with webbing between
the toes, as a surprisingly large number of people have—about one in
ten). That prehensile tail you have heard about that forms on embryos
during the second trimester is consumed well before the time of birth—
that is, before the embryo is “viable.”

That Massachusetts doctor who weighed a body immediately before
death, in 1907, then weighed it immediately after death, to find that
the difference was 21 grams (which many have since claimed to be
proof of a human soul, or at least the weigh thereof) has been proven
to have been mistaken.

Some people still maintain that the ultimate breath of a dying person is
the one where the soul leaves the body through exhalation.
In 19th century Europe, there were so many claims that living people
were buried alive because attendants thought they were dead that
“hospitals for the dead” were set up to await proof of death (in the
form of putrefaction).

Most of the stories you have heard about scratch marks on the insides
of caskets of people who were dug up days or weeks after death in
North America in past centuries are not true. Most originated in the
days when unmarried women were accused of being witches, burned
at the stake, then buried. Curious folks dug up some and devised the
stories to show that witches really could return from the dead.

More people commit suicide in New York City each year than are
murdered. (When have you read an editorial insisting that something
be done about that? I extrapolate from that statistic (through a
generalization) that more American citizens commit suicide each year
in their own country than are killed in their military in Iraq and
Afghanistan.)

(Source: most of this came fromDiscover, September 2006 issue)
Written by: Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today’s Epidemic Social Problems,
striving to teach the living and stop the killing.
Learn more at http: //billall in.com