From getting hitched to saving the environment, here’s proof you can still be a busybody long after you kick the bucket.

1. Get Married
Death is no obstacle when it comes to love in China. That’s because ghost marriage—the practice of setting up deceased relatives with suitable spouses, dead or alive—is still an option.

Ghost marriage first appeared in Chinese legends 2,000 years ago, and it’s been a staple of the culture ever since. At times, it was a way for spinsters to gain social acceptance after death. At other times, the ceremony honored dead sons by giving them living brides. In both cases, the marriages served a religious function by making the deceased happier in the afterlife.

While the practice of matchmaking for the dead waned during China’s Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s, officials report that ghost marriages are back on the rise. Today, the goal is often to give a deceased bachelor a wife—preferably one who has recently been laid to rest. But in a nation where men outnumber women in death as well as in life, the shortage of corpse brides has led to murder. In 2007, there were two widely reported cases of rural men killing prostitutes, housekeepers, and mentally ill women in order to sell their bodies as ghost wives. Worse, these crimes pay. According to The Washington Post and The London Times, one undertaker buys women’s bodies for more than $2,000 and sells them to prospective “in-laws” for nearly $5,000.

2. Unwind with a Few Friends
Today, most of us think of mummies as rare and valuable artifacts, but to the ancient Egyptians, they were as common as iPhones. So, where have all those mummies gone? Basically, they’ve been used up. Europeans and Middle Easterners spent centuries raiding ancient Egyptian tombs and turning the bandaged bodies into cheap commodities. For instance, mummy-based panaceas were once popular as quack Medicine. In the 16th century, French King Francis I took a daily pinch of mummy to build strength, sort of like a particularly offensive multivitamin. Other mummies, mainly those of animals, became kindling in Homes and steam engines. Meanwhile, human mummies frequently fell victim to Victorian social events. During the late 19th century, it was popular for wealthy families to host mummy-unwrapping parties, where the desecration of the dead was followed by cocktails and hors d’oeuvres.

3. Tour the Globe as a Scandalous Work of Art

Beginning in 1996 with the BODY WORLDS show in Japan, exhibits featuring artfully flayed human bodies have rocked the museum circuit. BODY WORLDS is now in its fourth incarnation, and competing shows, such as Bodies Revealed, are pulling in $30 million per year. The problem is, it’s not always clear where those bodies are coming from.

Dr. Gunther von Hagens, the man behind BODY WORLDS, has documented that his bodies were donated voluntarily to his organization. However, his largest competitor, Premier Entertainment, doesn’t have a well-established donation system. Premier maintains that its cadavers are unclaimed bodies from mainland China. And therein lies the concern. Activists and journalists believe “unclaimed bodies” is a euphemism for “executed political prisoners.”

The fear isn’t unfounded. In 2006, Canada commissioned a human rights report that found Chinese political prisoners were being killed so that their organs could be “donated” to transplant patients. And in February 2008, ABC News ran an exposé featuring a former employee from one of the Chinese companies that supplied corpses to Premier Entertainment. In the interview, he claimed that one-third of the bodies he processed were political prisoners. Not surprisingly, governments have started to take notice. In January 2008, the California State Assembly passed legislation requiring body exhibits to prove that all their corpses were willfully donated.

4. Fuel a City
Cremating a body uses up a lot of energy—and a lot of nonrenewable resources. So how do you give Grandma the send-off she wanted and protect the planet at the same time? Multitask. Some European crematoriums have figured out a way to replace conventional boilers by harnessing the heat produced in their fires, which can reach temperatures in excess of 1,832 degrees F. In fact, starting in 1997, the Swedish city of Helsingborg used local crematoriums to supply 10 percent of the heat for its Homes.

5. Get Sold, Chop Shop-Style
Selling a stiff has always been a profitable venture. In the Middle Ages, grave robbers scoured cemeteries and sold whatever they could dig up to doctors and scientists. And while the Business of selling cadavers and body parts in the United States is certainly cleaner now, it’s no less dubious.

Today, the system runs like this: Willed-body donation programs, often run by universities, match cadavers with the researchers who need them. But because dead bodies and body parts can’t be sold legally, the middlemen who supply these bodies charge large fees for “shipping and handling.” Shipping a full cadaver can bring in as much as $1,000, but if you divvy up a body into its component parts, you can make a fortune. A head can cost as much as $500; a knee, $650; and a disembodied torso, $5,000.

The truth is, there are never enough of these willed bodies to meet demand. And with that kind of money on the mortician’s table, corruption abounds. In the past few years, coroners have been busted stealing corneas, crematorium technicians have been caught lifting heads off bodies before they’re burned, and university employees at body donation programs have been found stealing cadavers. After UCLA’s willed-body program director was arrested for selling body parts in 2004, the State of California recommended outfitting corpses with bar code tattoos or tracking chips, like the kinds injected into dogs and cats. The hope is to make cadavers easier to inventory and track down when they disappear.

6. Become a Soviet Tourist Attraction

Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin wanted to be buried in his family plot. But when Lenin died in 1924, Joseph Stalin insisted on putting his corpse on public display in Red Square, creating a secular, Communist relic. Consequently, an organization called the Research Institute for Biological Structures was formed to keep Lenin’s body from decay. The Institute was no joke, as some of the Soviet Union’s most brilliant minds spent more than 25 years working and living on site to perfect the Soviet system of corpse preservation. Scientists today still use their method, which involves a carefully controlled climate, a twice-weekly regimen of dusting and lubrication, and semi-annual dips in a secret blend of 11 herbs and chemicals. Unlike bodies, however, fame can’t last forever. The popularity of the tomb is dwindling, and the Russian government is now considering giving Lenin the burial he always wanted.

7. Snuggle Up with Your Stalker
When a beautiful young woman named Elena Hoyos died from tuberculosis in Florida in 1931, her life as a misused object of desire began. Her admirer, a local X-ray technician who called himself Count Carl von Cosel, paid for Hoyos to be embalmed and buried in a mausoleum above ground. Then, in 1933, the crafty Count stole Elena’s body and hid it in his home. During the next seven years, he worked to preserve her corpse, replacing her flesh as it decayed with hanger wires, molded wax, and plaster of Paris. He even slept beside Elena’s body in bed—that is, until her family discovered her there. In the ensuing media circus, more than 6,000 people filed through the funeral home to view Elena before she was put to rest. Her family buried her in an unmarked grave so that von Cosel couldn’t find her, but that didn’t stop his obsession. Von Cosel wrote about Elena for pulp fiction magazines and sold postcards of her likeness until he was found dead in his Home in 1952. Near his body was a life-size wax dummy made to look just like Elena.

8. Not Spread an Epidemic
In the aftermath of natural disasters such as tsunamis, floods, and hurricanes, it’s common for the bodies of victims to be buried or burned en masse as soon as possible. Supposedly, this prevents the spread of disease. But according to the World health Organization (WHO), dead bodies have been getting a bad rap. It turns out that the victims of natural disasters are no more likely to harbor infectious diseases than the general population. Plus, most pathogens can’t survive long in a corpse. Taken together, the WHO says there’s no way that cadavers are to blame for post-disaster outbreaks. So what is? The fault seems to lie with the living or, more specifically, their living conditions. After a disaster, people often end up in crowded refugee camps with poor sanitation. For epidemic diseases, that’s akin to an all-you-can-eat buffet.

9. Stand Trial
In 897 CE, Pope Stephen VI accused former Pope Formosus of perjury and violation of church canon. The problem was that Pope Formosus had died nine months earlier. Stephen worked around this little detail by exhuming the dead pope’s body, dressing it in full papal regalia, and putting it on trial. He then proceeded to serve as chief prosecutor as he angrily cross-examined the corpse. The spectacle was about as ludicrous as you’d imagine. In fact, Pope Stephen appeared so thoroughly insane that a group of concerned citizens launched a successful assassination plot against him. The next year, one of Pope Stephen’s successors reversed Formosus’ conviction, ordering his body reburied with full honors.

10. Stave Off Freezer Burn
At cryonics facilities around the globe, the dead aren’t frozen anymore. The reason? Freezer burn. As with steaks and green beans, freezing a human body damages tissues, largely because cells burst as the water in them solidifies and expands. In the early days of cryonics, the theory was that future medical technology would be able to fix this damage, along with curing whatever illness killed the patient in the first place.

Realizing that straight freezing isn’t the best option, today’s scientists have made significant advances in cryonics. Using a process called vitrification, the water in the body is now replaced with an anti-freezing agent. The body is then stored at cold temperatures, but no ice forms. In 2005, researchers vitrified a rabbit kidney and successfully brought it back to complete functionality—a big step in cryonics research. (It may help in organ transplants someday, too.) But science has yet to prove that an entire body can be revived. Even worse, some vitrified bodies have developed large cracks in places where cracks don’t belong. Until those kinks get worked out, the hope of being revived in the future will remain a dream.
从结婚到保护环境，有证据显示：人死后很久，还可以做到很多事情。

1，结婚

在中国，死亡从不是爱情的阻碍。那是因为，鬼婚也是一个选择，找到合适的配偶建立鬼婚关系，亦 生亦死。鬼婚第一次出现在2000年前的中国传说中，从而成为一种文化产物。有时，这可以使终生未嫁妇女死后获得社会认可。有时，有些家庭用活的新娘去祭奠死去的儿子。这两种情况下，婚姻起着一种宗教作用，使死者死后生活更幸福。

20世纪60年代后期文化大革命期间，实行鬼婚的情况减少。据官方报告，鬼婚阻碍发展。现在的目标是，给死掉的单身汉一位妻子，最好是即将死去的女子。但在一个男性死亡和存活数量少于女性的国家，缺少女性死亡新娘导致了自杀现象，2007年，广泛报道农村男性杀害妓女、家庭主妇、精神失常的妇女，以便把她们卖做鬼新娘。更糟的是，有人为犯罪行为付账。据华盛顿邮报和伦敦时报，某位承办人以2000多美元买进妇女尸体，又以近5000美元卖给预期的姻亲。

2，与朋友娱乐

现今，大多数人都把木乃伊当作稀罕、珍贵的人工制品，然而对于古埃及人来说，木乃伊就像手机那么普通。因此，所有的木乃伊都在哪里？他们都已被挖掘干净。欧洲人和中东人花了数世纪的时间寻找古埃及坟墓，把包裹着的木乃伊卖做廉价商品。比如说，用在木乃伊身上的万灵药曾像假药那么盛行。在16世纪，法国国王弗朗西斯一世用大量木乃伊来防御，类似攻击性的多样维他命。其他干尸（主要是动物尸体），成为家庭和蒸汽机的燃料。与此同时，人类木乃伊也是维多利亚时代社会大事件的牺牲品。19世纪后期，一些贵族家庭常举办拆解木乃伊的派对，用鸡尾酒和开胃菜亵渎遗体。

3，环球展览可耻艺术

起源于1996年日本的人体世界展，以赤裸人体为特色，震惊世界博物馆。人体世界现在位于第四阶段，而由此竞争的展览（如揭露人体），每年吸引30，000，000人。问题是，无法确定这些人体来自于哪里。

甘瑟.凡.哈根斯博士，人体世界的幕后人，称遗体是自愿捐赠给他的组织的。而他的最大对手，派瑞娱乐却没有完善的捐赠系统。派瑞认定，尸体来自大陆无人认领的遗体，。这引起了关注。积极分子和记者相信，无人认领的遗体是一种对执行死刑的政治犯的影射。

这引起了恐慌。2006年，加拿大出具一份人权报告，称中国的政治犯被执行死刑后，其器官可能被“捐赠”给患者移植。2008年的2月，ABC新闻的发布会上，一名前中国公司雇员称，该公司供应给派瑞娱乐。在采访中，他说三分之一他处理过的遗体是政治犯。不出所料，各政府开始关注这件事。2008年1月，加利福尼亚州公民大会通过立法，要求所有的展示遗体须证明是自愿捐赠的。

4，城市燃料

火葬一具遗体要用很多能量以及不可再生的资源。那你要怎样给你祖母一个她所希望的告别仪式，同事还要保护地球环境呢？这可是多重任务！一些欧洲殡仪馆找到了方法，用火产生的热量来代替传统的锅炉，这样可以达到超过华氏温度1832度。事实上，自1997开始，瑞典城市赫尔辛堡用当地的殡仪馆供应10%的家用能量。

5，像便利商店般的出售

出售遗体总是一项有利可图的投资。在中世纪时期，盗墓者寻找坟墓，把他们挖掘到的卖给医生或科学家。而当美国的遗体和人体部件已相当明显时，这就没什么稀奇了。

如今，系统是这样运行的：由各所大学经营的自愿捐赠遗体计划，把需要遗体实验的研究者与遗体联系到一起，因为遗体和人体部件不能合法买卖，供应遗体的中间商就可以以运输和处理为由，大开其口。运输一整具尸体可以进账达1000美元；如果把尸体分解出售，可以从中盈利一大笔。一个头可卖到500美元，膝盖650美元，分解的躯干可以卖到5000美元。

事实是，从没有足够的尸体满足市场需求。为赚取殡仪事宜外的钱，腐败现象滋生。过去的若干年，验尸官因偷取眼角膜而降职，有人发现殡仪馆工作人员在尸体火化前偷取其头部，遗体自愿捐赠计划的大学雇员窃取尸体。在加州大学洛杉矶分校的资源捐赠主管因窃取遗体部件被捕之后，加利福尼亚州建议为遗体配备条形码编号的纹身或追踪芯片。这是希望，尸体丢失时，更方便追踪和寻找。

6，成为苏维埃一处旅游胜地

俄罗斯革命家弗拉基米尔.列宁希望自己死后被葬在自家的墓园。而列宁1924年死的时候，约瑟夫.斯大林坚持要把列宁的遗体放在红场公开展示，以创造不朽的共产主义遗迹。结果，成立了一个名为"生物结构研究机构“的组织，，为防止列宁遗体腐化。这一机构并非玩笑，一些苏联专家花了超过25年的时间，为保护列宁遗体而奋斗。今天科学家，仍用这种方法，其中包括仔细检测气候、一周两次的养生和润滑处理，与半年一次的药草和化学物质。然而，名声不像遗体那般永存。参观墓地不再盛行，因此俄罗斯正负正考虑让列宁重回理想墓地。

7，与偷窥者靠近

弗罗里达州，一名名叫“伊莲娜. 荷优斯”的在1931年死于肺结核时，她被他人当作滥用对象的人生就此开始。他的爱慕者是一名X光的技术员，名叫考恩特.卡尔.凡.科赛尔，付钱为她做香薰处理，为她安置墓地。1933年，狡猾的考恩特偷取伊莲娜的遗体，并将其藏在他的家中。连续七年，他忙于保存她的遗体，使用挂钩金属丝、磨具蜡和巴黎石膏代替她的肉体。他甚至还和伊莲娜的遗体睡在一张床上，一直到伊莲娜的家人发现这件事。在之后的媒体见证会上，超过6000人在伊莲娜入土安息之前，前来她的葬礼。她的家人把她安葬在无名的墓地，不让卡尔再找到，但是这并不能阻止他的爱慕。科赛尔曾在通俗小说杂志上写过关于伊莲娜的文章，卖伊莲娜喜欢的明信片，直到他1952年死于家中。在他的遗体旁边，放了一具和伊莲娜真人大小的蜡像。

8，不会传播传染病

在一系列的自然灾害（如海啸、水灾、飓风）之后，遇难者的遗体很可能被埋或全部烧掉。这样的话，可以防止疾病的传播。而根据世界卫生组织，尸体会引来谴责。结果是，比常人相比，自然灾害的遇难者不可能隐藏传染病毒。而且，绝大多数病原体无法在尸体内存活。总的来说，世界卫生组织称，尸体不应该因病毒爆发而被指责。那么，是什么传播病毒的呢？这过失似乎在于活着的人，更可能的是人的生存条件。疾病过后，人们通常挤在卫生条件较差的帐篷。这对于传播病病毒来说，这就雷同于病毒的“自助餐会”。

9，受审讯

公元897年，教皇斯蒂芬一世指控前任教皇福尔摩赛作伪证和违反教规。问题在于，教皇福尔摩赛已于九年前死亡。斯蒂芬着眼于小细节，通过挖掘前任教皇的遗体，包揽皇权，审讯。接着，他继续像一名实行者般反复检查遗体。那场景如大家可以想象的。事实上，斯蒂芬教皇如此疯狂的举止，反而引发关注此事的居民对他发起暗杀计划。下一年，斯蒂芬教皇的继承者之一颠覆了对福尔摩赛教皇的定罪，命人安葬了他。

10，避免冷冻库燃烧

全球的人体冷冻办法中，遗体不再冰冻。理由是什么呢？冷库燃烧。和牛排和青豆一样，把遗体冰冻起来会破坏其组织，主要因为破裂的细胞会凝固、膨胀。在人体冰冻处理的早些时候，理论上是医学研究可以弥补细胞的破裂，随同医治任何可以导致病人死亡的疾病。

意识到直接冰冻处理并非是最好的选择，现在科学家已经在冷冻方法上取得进步。使用，所谓的“玻璃化”人体内的水分会被抗冷冻剂所代替。遗体会保存在低温状态下，而非放在冰里。2005年，研究家将一只兔子的肾脏变成玻璃状，后又成功地让之恢复功能，这在冷冻法研究过程中是重要一步。（也许还能对器官移植有所帮助。）但是科学还有待证实，整具遗体能不能复生？更糟糕的是，一些玻璃状态的遗体在不该出现裂缝的地方，却有了裂缝。除非能解决这些难题，否则将来遗体复生的希望还是无法实现。