Being the stubborn bastard that it is, life has still somehow found a way to persevere in the hellish environment of Rio Tinto. Anaerobic extremophile bacteria have been found to thrive in its waters, the conditions of which are so out of this world that NASA is collecting samples of these bacteria to simulate searching for life on other planets. Meanwhile, we now know what it would look like if the Earth was to get into a knife fight.

This is totally happening all the time, as the lakes, rivers, and coastal areas of China are rife with sewage, chemical pollutants, and fertilizers.

It's not just China, either. Although Qingdao's algae flood seems to be an annual fixture these days and remains the worst of the bunch, these giant algae attacks are getting more and more frequent in other areas, too. This shit has happened in the Chesapeake Bay, Lake Erie, and the freaking Gulf of Mexico, among other places. Meanwhile, the good people of Qingdao are trying to make the best of a bad situation by practicing their Swamp Thing imitation whenever the algae days roll around.

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A moment later, his smiling severed head rolls away.

In a scheme that seems less like a business plan and more like misguided Minecraft enthusiasm, they actually started shaping all that excess sulfur into blocks and stacking them into giant pyramids, much like the Egyptians did. The pyramids are still technically ziggurats and well under construction, but they have already reached massive proportions. There's about 15 million tons of sulfur, just sitting there. The biggest pyramid is already 60 feet tall and has a quarter-mile base. To put those numbers in perspective, here's a chart comparing the Pyramid of Giza to the greatest of the Alberta constructions:

Andrew David Thaler/Southern Fried Science

Although it's still in its initial stages, the Alberta structure is already larger in volume than the Great Pyramid, and it's growing all the damn time.

The low price of sulfur makes it cheaper to store it than to sell it, which means those piles aren't going anywhere in the foreseeable future. On the bright side, Canadian pharaohs have never had an easier time picking out burial sites.

But when it comes to piling up mountains of unwanted shit, it's hard to top ...

That's poop. All of it.

The U.S. beef industry is the largest in the world, but because of that it's also the world's largest cow-shit producer. Most people realize that cows poop and that the meat industry is raising a lot of these delicious crap machines. What almost all of us actively forget, however, is how much poop just one cow is able to produce, let alone the gazillions we turn into value meals every year. The end result is measured in very literal metric shit tons.

Stanley Howe
Poop. All poop.

It's estimated that just 3,500 cows can produce 40,000 tons of crap each year, which is on par with the amount produced by a small city. Keep in mind, though, that most feedlot operations are much, much bigger than that. The cattle feedlots outside Greeley, Colorado, alone can hold tens of thousands of cows and produce more poopy waste than the cities of Denver, Boston, Atlanta, and St. Louis combined. So they just go "fuck it," and pile the shit up. Occasionally the piles burst into flame, too -- the methane is very combustible, and one shit fire at a feedlot near Milford, Nebraska, burned for months before firefighters could extinguish it.

And because man-made burning cow poop mountains aren't terrifying enough, there's also the slight matter of rain. Since the piles are kept out in the open, rainwater turns their runoff into a vast diarrhea flow that has to be diverted into specially constructed areas called "lagoons."

Keith Myers/Kansas City Star
Pooooooooooooop.

So ... is this some kind of stained-glass thing we found on Etsy? Or maybe those are blue marbles stuck into a honeycomb, as part of somebody's art project?

Nope and nope! That is honey, produced by bees in exactly the same way honey is normally produced. It's what they use for making said honey that's causing the freaky colors. In 2012, beekeepers in Northern France went to check on their hives and discovered something truly terrifying (well, more terrifying than the giant, wriggling horror-mass of bees that is their daily life). In addition to the typical amber-colored honey, the bees were gleefully making red, green, purple, and even blue honey. Like so:

Vincent Kessler/Reuters
Possibly some sort of pride thing.

After immediately surrendering to the bees, French health inspectors launched an investigation into the cause of this mystery. Were the bees some new strain of mutant X-bees? Or maybe the queen bee just decided she wanted a change in decor?

The answer was even stranger: The bees had skipped the whole "pollen from flowers" thing in the honey-making process and collected surplus M&M shells from a nearby factory instead. Worker bees normally go to great lengths to collect pollen, but sometimes they find alternatives that are closer to home. In this case, the bees had located a plant that was processing waste from a candy factory that produced M&M's. The waste, specifically the colored candy shells, was kept outside in open containers, which the bees promptly started stealing and incorporating into their honey.

Vincent Kessler/Reuters
Thankfully, the surrounding areas did not contain any Sriracha factories.

Sadly, the world will never find out how "naturally" produced M&Ms taste like, as the presumably additive-ridden honey was immediately labeled unfit for human consumption. Farmers had to get rid of their entire stock, putting the country's already-struggling honey industry in even more jeopardy. That is despite the fact that approximately 90 percent of the people reading this just want to know what it tastes like.