While he promptly dropped dead, the spectacle of one of the world's most grueling races was born.

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The most notorious case of overdoing it: a 24-year-old man who dropped dead after playing Internet games for 86 hours nonstop.

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Within weeks, every one of these bugs will have dropped dead.

ECONOMIST: Cicadas in Illinois

If you dropped dead, you heirs got a big check (One of the most ingenious marketing ploys in history was to call it life insurance rather than death insurance).

FORBES: Phantom Income From Life Insurance

When his mind wandered, the virtual characters dropped dead.

ECONOMIST: Monitor

Usefully, he includes a short history of pension provision, short because in the bad old days there was not much need for pensions: people generally worked until they dropped dead at an early age.

ECONOMIST: The history and future of pensions

Trim, fit, full of life, he was midway through a doubles tennis game, casually walking with his partner from one end of the court to the other, when he dropped dead from a heart attack.

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Almost immediately his mother-in-law unexpectedly dropped dead.

ECONOMIST: Literary history: Murderous man | The

The skies above Earth are now littered with the debris of dead satellites, bits of old rockets and the odd tool dropped by a spacewalking astronaut.

ECONOMIST: A satellite that tidies up after itself

Listen to my Morning Edition piece to hear how Charles Darwin and his butler dropped asparagus into a tub and how Darwin and his oldest son studied dead pigeons floating upside down in a bowl to test ideas about evolution.

NPR: Charles Darwin and the Racing Asparagus