Real-life bad guys understand that dry, drawn-out political subterfuge is much cheaper and more effective than a clone army. Then, occasionally, some crackpot leaps straight off the pages into our world, with brazen, insane and often ridiculous plans for world domination that grant him comic book supervillain status.
DO NOT BE AFRAID TO GO TO THE HOSPITAL IF YOU ARE SICK. Nothing you will read in this article is suggesting that it's just better to nurse your horrible infection back to health in the comfort of your own garage.
Your nearest drugstore is full of completely fake pain remedies, from shoe magnets to magical ground-up shark bones. But while these new age medicines are little more than placebos, science has found a whole lot of unexpected -- and downright weird -- ways you can control pain without ever swallowing a pill.
There have been brilliant rebels who put their own world-changing ideas on the line, only to end up like Doc Brown in his alternate timeline: humiliated, ridiculed, ignored and/or straight driven to insanity.
Science fiction has had some stunningly accurate premonitions. And we're not talking about broad predictions, here. No, this stuff is impressively accurate.
A big chunk of the world economy runs on human weakness. Peer pressure, vanity, insecurity, the fact that we just cannot resist the sight of melted cheese. There are some other, much weirder scientific principles that factor into what you buy. You might not know about them, but the people selling you things sure as hell do.
