Experts have revealed the top five worst ways to die, complete with detailed explanations of how you would meet your grisly end. From falling in a lift to a giant star collapsing, these are some of the most unusual but horrific deaths imaginable.
Paul Doherty, a senior scientist at San Francisco's Exploratorium museum, and freelance writer Cody Cassidy dedicated two years to researching the world's most fascinating ways to pass away. In a Reddit Q&A, Doherty shed light on the science behind these gruesome deaths.
If you find yourself in a free-falling lift, Dr Doherty advises lying flat on your back to spread G forces evenly. If standing upright, your organs might continue dropping inside your body even after the lift stops. At the bottom of the Mariana Trench, you would drown before reaching crushing depth, but if you survived, air pockets in your nasal cavity, throat and chest would collapse inward, leaving you to be consumed by bone-eating snot flowers.
Near a neutron star, extreme gravity would rip you apart: if your head points toward the star, tidal forces would tug it more strongly than your feet. The star's magnetic field, a hundred billion times more powerful than Earth's strongest magnets, would distort your atoms into thin cigars and break all molecular bonds, turning you into a plasma cloud. A hit from the Large Hadron Collider would likely be lethal, unlike the weaker accelerator that hit Russian scientist Anatoli Bugorski in 1978, which paralysed one side of his face.
If you were to leap through a hole drilled pole to pole through Earth, you would burn to death before reaching the core, which is hotter than the surface of the sun. The pressure and density of air would double every 15,000 feet, cooking you long before you reached the centre.
