Maggie Koerth-Baker is a contributing editor to BoingBoing. This entry was excerpted from the 2010 mental_floss magazine story “The United States of Amazing!”

To conceive, the male grasps the female’s fins with his mouth and uses his two reproductive organs, known as claspers, to get the female pregnant. But this is no gentle act of foreplay. The sharp claspers leave deep cuts and gashes behind the female’s head, which take a week or so to heal. Once that’s over, the female has a glorious 22 to 24 months of pregnancy to look forward to—the longest gestation period of any vertebrate. And when the magical day finally arrives, you’d better believe she’s wondering where the heck her epidural is. Spiny dogfish mommies give birth to as many as eleven 3-ft long pups, each coming out head first. And while evolution has equipped the pups with cartilaginous sheaths on their spines to protect the mother from (further) injury, it still hardly sounds pleasant.

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According to 3 Would-Be Holy Books That Got Left Out of the Bible

Book: The Gospel of the Egyptians
Didn’t Make the Cut: For being a little too ascetic.
Only parts of this Gospel survive, but these bits advocate self-denial and celibacy in order to kill ties to the body, break the cycle of birth, and theoretically return man to a sinless, androgynous state. Sounds like fun. Thankfully, early church leaders weren’t too fond of the idea either; many gospels left out of the Bible share these beliefs. Another thing apocryphal gospels share: Salome. She appears here as one of the women who finds Jesus’s tomb empty on Easter morning.

The Book: Transitus Mariae
Didn’t Make the Cut: Because reunion specials are even less popular than prequels.
Supposedly an account of the death of the Virgin Mary, the Transitus Mariae is only one of many works that tell roughly the same story. Here, the death of Mary leads to an Apostle reunion, as all 12 are transported to her deathbed from around the globe and even from beyond the grave. Jesus, too, puts in an appearance, leading a train of angels from Heaven to receive both His mother’s soul and body. Before the body can be taken up, however, the author fits in a bit of anti-Semitism, having a Jew who dares to touch Mary lose both his hands. Mercifully, the Apostles intervene (possibly remembering that they, themselves, are Jewish) and restore the man’s appendages.

Put Your Trust in Runoff
With the broken canals now repaired, the Salton Sea had no inlet or outlet. Instead, all it’s water came from farm irrigation runoff. At first, nobody saw this as a problem. Then the Sea’s salinity (and pollution levels) started to increase. Turns out, farmers were pulling water from the Sea, putting it on their crops, and letting it flow back in. Each time, the water picked up a little more salt and a few more pesticide chemicals. Eventually, this led to outbreaks of algae, massive fish die-offs, and a salinity level greater than the Pacific Ocean.

Assume You Won’t Have To Deal With More Flooding In the Future
By the 1960s, regardless of its increasingly salty nature, the Salton Sea had become one of California’s busiest tourist attractions and it’s most popular state park. Investors built swanky resorts, but, unfortunately, nobody thought to build flood control systems. Then came 1976, when a tropical storm hit the area, marking the beginning of seven years of extra-heavy rains. Most of the new developments ended up underwater or bankrupt as investors bailed. Worse, increased runoff meant that even more chemicals and salt poured into the Sea. By the 1980s, there was little left of the once-thriving fishing and boating industries. Today, the Sea is home to several half-flooded trailer-park communities and one thriving bird sanctuary. Still ever saltier, it’s expected to lose most of its fish population in the next few years.

YOU WILL NEED
Friends…with benefits
The ability to make new friends when your old ones disappear

Step 1: Pick the Right Crowd
The tiger keelback snake is native to Japan and several other nearby islands, where it’s known for defending itself by spraying a toxin called bufadienolides into the eyes of its attackers. The toxins prevent proper heart function and give the snake a great getaway plan, but for years, scientists suspected that the tiger keelback wasn’t capable of producing bufadienolides inside its own body. The chemical mystery was solved in 2007 when scientists started to take notice of the snakes’ roommates. According to a January 2007 article in Cosmos magazine, almost all the islands where tiger keelbacks live are also home to several species of bufadienolides-secreting toads.

Step 2: Invite Your New Friends To Dinner
That discovery, of course, still left scientists with the question of how the toxins were getting from the toads’ skin into the snakes. Assuming that there probably wasn’t a bunch of teenage, hippy keelbacks slithering around licking the toads, researchers figured the toxin was getting transferred when the snakes ate their amphibious neighbors. It’s a plausible solution, but an odd one. There are plenty of other animals that reuse the venom of another species, but those are almost exclusively invertebrates. It’s not very often that you find backbone-blessed animals engaging in this sort of thing. But, researchers studied the spit of snakes from toad-ed and toad-free islands and found that, amazingly, they were right. In environments where no toads could be found, the snakes completely lacked the bufadienolides toxin.

Poisonous toad: It’s what’s for dinner.

Tip #1: Watch “Seinfeld”
It’s not a common problem, to be sure, but there was one person who almost kicked it following repeated exposure to “man hands” and “the soup nazi.” Back in 1997, a Massachusetts man started inexplicably passing out every time he watched the show. Naturally, after this happened a couple of times, the man became concerned enough to visit a doctor, which was how he ended up watching his next episode with a neurologist chaperone taking notes. Sure enough, one good joke was enough to knock the man out. But (sadly for the neurologist’s professional ambitions) there wasn’t some crazy new disorder at work. Instead, the man turned out to have cholesterol-plugged arteries, which when combined with the (relatively) heavy physical labor of laughing, cut off blood flow to his brain.
Tip #2: Go Crazy
What’s Laughing Psychosis? Picture the Joker from Batman and you’re on the right track. According to Final Exits by Michael Largo, laughing psychosis is a debilitating progressive neurological disorder triggered by an excess of amino acids in the brain. As these amino acids coagulate into a big mass they cause various synapses to start misfiring, leading victims to start laughing for no reason. As the disease progresses, they’ll often wake up in the middle of the night caught in fits of laughter. More than mere chuckles, victims begin to see things that aren’t there and experience a break with reality not unlike what happens to schizophrenics. Naturally, when you hallucinate like that, you’re much more likely to do something that leads to your death. The group most affected by the disorder: Women ages 15 to 30, who have higher levels of estrogen that may help the amino acids to start getting out of control.

Hide It
Although widely beloved as a sort of satirical Santa Claus today, any rational look at the biography of Mark Twain would reveal a very different man. The real Mark Twain was more often depressed than jolly, more bitter curmudgeon than wacky old coot. Then there was the atheism, the temper, and, oh yeah, the fact that he spent his later years surrounded by a flock of adoring underage girls. That last bit wasn’t as bad as it sounds. The girls were always chaperoned and, apparently, the whole thing was on the up and up. But the pictures still look sufficiently suspicious that Twain’s daughter, Clara Clemens Samossoud, kept them out of the public eye as long as she was alive. And that wasn’t all she censored. Clemens Samossoud also forbade the publication of two of Twain’s later books—Letters from the Earth and The Autobiography of Mark Twain. The former, a novel written as a series of letters from Satan to various Archangels, wasn’t published until 1962. Around the same time, Clemens Samossoud approved the publication of five never-before-seen chapters she’d had cut from the Autobiography when it was originally published in the 1930s. What brought on the sudden change of heart? A New York Times story from that fateful year reported that Twain’s daughter was probably attempting to silence Soviet literary critics, who’d attacked her (in particular) and American society (in general) for censoring the books.

Burn It
Really, few historical figures were above leaving behind written material their modern fans might term objectionable. Case in point, George Washington. In George Washington Slept Here, author Karal Ann Marling describes how, in 1925, one of J.P. Morgan’s sons used some of his vast inherited wealth to buy up and then destroy several “smutty” letters attributed to our nation’s founding father.

YOU WILL NEED

One At a Time
Frank Lloyd Wright, the man who revolutionized American architecture, was equally, uh, revolutionary, when it came to his love life. In 1889, he married Catherine Lee Clark Tobin and set about raising a family of six with her. However, that version of his personal life came to an abrupt end in 1909, when Wright went on an extended vacation to Berlin, Germany—with Margaret Cheney, the wife of a client, in tow. The pair spent more than two years in Europe before returning to Chicago and starting a new life as man and wife (though not legally, as Catherine refused to grant him a divorce). That second coupling would only last until 1914, but, to be fair, its end wasn’t Wright’s fault. That year, a disgruntled member of the family’s hired help set the Wrights’ house on fire after locking all but one door. As the former Mrs. Cheney, her two children, and two other guests fled the fire, the workman axed them to death. The freak incident plunged Wright into depression bad enough to distract him from his work, but not bad enough to keep him from hooking up with another woman less than a year later. He spent seven years with that woman, Miriam Noel, before finally getting his divorce from Catherine in 1922. He married Noel the next year. But, by 1924, Miriam left him, an event from which Wright quickly recovered by falling in love with a Yugoslavian ballerina named Olga Hinzenberg. Amazingly, this relationship managed to last to the end of the architect’s life in 1959.

Simultaneously
While Wright cornered the market on serial sort-of monogamy, fellow architect Louis Kahn kept a slightly busier schedule. Beginning around the early 1950s and until he died in 1974, Kahn kept three different sets of women and children, only one of which he was actually legally wed to. Despite the fact that this was pretty much an open secret in architecture circles, his New York Times obituary famously listed only his wife and her daughter as survivors, leaving out his other two children (and their mothers) entirely.