Top Ten Things You Didn't Know About Death

Not intending to be unnecessarily morbid we bring you the "top 10 things you didn't know about death."***

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

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

3. 100 people choke to death on pens each year. One is more likely to be killed by a champagne cork than by a spider

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

5. 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

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

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

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

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

***Note: some of these look suspiciously like urban legends but what top ten list doesn't have a few thrown in for good measure?

Source: ShortText.com