Researchers just discovered the culprit behind the Great Plague of Britain, which claimed one-quarter of the country's population more than 350 years ago.

While excavating the plot for a new east-to-west tube station underneath Liverpool Street in London's Shoreditch neighborhood, archaeologists uncovered the remains of more than 3,000 people in what they determined was a mass grave that potentially included victims of the Great Plague of 1665.

It is the UK's biggest archaeology project in history.

The positioning of the bodies and the estimated timing of their burials suggested to experts that they were victims of a sudden, untimely death.

Researchers have been running detailed tests on the remains for years, and finally got the results of a DNA test of some of the victims' teeth. The culprit? Yersinia pestis, a bacteria known to cause the plague.

Archaeologists say the mass grave, called the "Bedlam graveyard" after the nearby Bethlem ("Bedlam") Royal Hospital, was used for nearly 200 years beginning as early as 1569. In addition to serving as a public graveyard for Londoners who could not afford a costly church burial, the grave site was likely also used as an overflow cemetery when existing sites had filled to capacity. This can happen during times of war or mass illness, such as a plague.

Crossrail, a subsidiary of Transport for London, has been deploying archaeologists to the site for more than a decade and has, along with the London Metropolitan Archive, enlisted a small group of volunteers from the area to compile a register of the names and backgrounds of the people buried there.

After discovering the remains, archaeologists and osteologists worked together to ensure that the teeth of the victims were carefully removed so they could be sent off for DNA analysis.

"The best thing to sample for DNA is the teeth; they're like an isolated time capsule," lead bone researcher for the project Michael Henderson, of the Museum of London Archaeology, told the BBC.

And sure enough, in five of the 20 skeletons they tested from the Bedlam burial pit, the scientists found preserved DNA signatures distinctive of the plague bacteria Yersinia pestis.

Researchers still do not know why the Great Plague was the last major outbreak of plague in the UK, but they hope to find answers to these and other questions as they continue to study the genomes of the bacteria.

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Dying isn't always an Earth-friendly business.

Decomposing bodies in coffins buried in the ground can emit large amounts of methane, a harmful greenhouse gas.

That, along with the formaldehyde that's used to get the body preserved for burial makes for not-so-sustainable burial practices.

And while the vast majority of people opt for either traditional burial or cremation, there are other ways to be memorialized that do less damage to the planet.

1. Turn your body into a tree

Developed by Italian designers, this sustainable burial practice will turn your remains into tree food. Anna Citelli and Raoul Bretzel, the creators of Capsula Mundi (pictured here) want to change the way Italy buries its loved ones with their pod-like design using eco-friendly materials.

You're buried inside a biodegradable egg-shaped pod while in the fetal position. When you're buried, a tree gets planted on top. Then the idea is that as the pod begins to decompose, the body can turn into minerals that feed the tree. Bretzel and Mundi hope to change the traditional cemetery into a "sacred forest."

2. Use dry ice 

Traditionally, families burying their loved ones will have them embalmed, so that the decomposing process doesn't start right away. Usually, this is done with formaldehyde, a known human carcinogen (which, of course doesn't affect those being embalmed, but rather those doing the embalming).

Instead, some people are turning to dry ice (frozen carbon dioxide) as a way to keep bodies preserved until they are interred. This keeps the body from decomposing without needing embalming, though you do have to change out the ice every day. Though carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, the amount released from the dry ice used in body preservation is a pretty small percentage of overall CO2 emissions.

3. Furnish your home with a shelf that doubles as a coffin

Instead of using your wooden coffin only as your final resting place, William Warren had the idea of making a set of shelves that can be converted to a coffin when the time is right. This upcycled version makes the wood useful for longer, and as Warren remarks on his website, "the wood will colour, the surfaces will mark and stain and over the years and the furniture will become a part of you." Warren designed the shelves and debuted them at the 2005 London Design Festival, though you can ask him for directions on how to may your own set of shelves-turned-coffin.

Plus, you get the added fun of telling all your guests about it while giving them a tour of your house and seeing their bewildered expressions.

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Texas became the latest state Mondayto implement a controversial new rule requiring fetal remains be buried or cremated, rather than disposed of as medical waste, which reproductive rights advocates say imposes an unnecessary restriction and cost on abortion providers.

The measure is set to go into effect December 19 and requires all hospitals, medical facilities, and abortion providers to dispose of fetal remains through cremation or burial, rather than in a sanitary landfill, regardless of the length of the gestation period, reported the Texas Tribune.

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• Alkaline hydrolysis liquefies the body using water and lye. 
• It's considered a "greener" approach to burial than cremation.
• While it hasn't caught on widely yet, some consider it the burial method of the future. 

When it comes to putting loved ones in their final resting places, our choice has long been whether to bury a body or cremate it. 

But a third option has been gaining attention recently: Alkaline hydrolysis, which involves dissolving a body in a liquid solution. The process leaves behind bones that can be ground into ash using much less energy than cremation.

Though it sounds a bit gruesome, the approach offers many benefits.

"This by far is the most environmentally friendly choice" Dean Fisher, director of the Donated Body Program at UCLA told Wired.

While alkaline hydrolysis has been used by some medical schools, it's not something you'll find at most funeral homes. It's more commonly used to dispose of animals, though some places, like the Anderson-McQueen funeral home in St. Petersburg, Florida are doing it commercially.  

How alkaline hydrolysis works

The process begins with a cadaver and ends with liquid and bones, which are then ground into ash.

The body is placed into a sealed chamber that's then filled with a solution of potassium hydroxide, also known as lye, and water. The chamber is heated to about 300 degrees Fahrenheit, and the potassium hydroxide gets moved around for a few hours to dissolve the body.

"What we're doing is we're actually taking the natural process of decomposition and we're speeding that up," Fisher told Wired. "What happens is that it dissolves the body over the course of a three to four hour timeframe, and then the fluid goes over to the accumulation tank." Bones and any prosthetics the person may have had remain on the tray when the chamber is opened back up.  

The Associated Press has described the liquid result as a "brownish, syrupy residue." After it's drained, the bones are dried out and ground down into calcium phosphate ash. Because the bodies have been donated to science in Fisher's facility, the department scatters the ash into the ocean. When the process is done commercially, the ashes can be returned to the family. 

A replacement for cremation?

Having a body cremated may seem like a sustainable burial, but in most cases it's not great for the environment. In cremation, everything is burned into ash, including bone and medical implants. That can lead to the release of harmful pollutants. In the UK, for instance, cremation contributes to 16% of all mercury pollution. And as The Atlantic has reported, cremation takes about two SUV-tanks worth of gas to cremate a single body. Alkaline hydrolysis, on the other hand, requires only an eighth of that energy, Gizmodo reports.

A traditional burial can affect the environment as well, since embalming chemicals can leach into the ground where a person is buried. Alkaline hydrolysis doesn't require such chemicals, however. Places that do it commercially have also said the process isn't more expensive than cremation, NPR reported in 2011. 

There have been legal roadblocks that have kept alkaline hydrolysis from catching on, though. According to Wired, only 14 states have legalized the process, and there are often concerns from environmental protection agencies that the liquid disposal could leach toxins into environment. 

Nonetheless, alkaline hydrolysis offers new, greener, alternative to burial practices that haven't changed in centuries.

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• Most Americans have previously accepted a limited set of options for their burial, but that's changing.
• Americans are becoming more willing to embrace new funeral and burial practices.
• Laws are changing to allow a growing variety of practices.

What do you want to happen to your remains after you die?

For the past century, most Americans have accepted a limited set of options without question. And discussions of death and funeral plans have been taboo.

That is changing. As a scholar of funeral and cemetery law, I’ve discovered that Americans are becoming more willing to have a conversation about their own mortality and what comes next and embrace new funeral and burial practices.

Baby boomers are insisting upon more control over their funeral and disposition so that their choices after death match their values in life. And businesses are following suit, offering new ways to memorialize and dispose of the dead.

While some options such as Tibetan sky burial– leaving human remains to be picked clean by vultures – and “Viking” burial via flaming boat– familiar to “Game of Thrones” fans – remain off limits in the U.S., laws are changing to allow a growing variety of practices.

'The American Way of Death'

In 1963, English journalist and activist Jessica Mitford published “The American Way of Death,” in which she described the leading method of disposing of human remains in the United States, still in use today.

She wrote that human remains are temporarily preserved by replacing blood with a formaldehyde-based embalming fluid shortly after death, placed in a decorative wood or metal casket, displayed to family and friends at the funeral home and buried within a concrete or steel vault in a grave, perpetually dedicated and marked with a tombstone.

Mitford called this “absolutely weird” and argued that it had been invented by the American funeral industry, which emerged at the turn of the 20th century. As she wrote in The Atlantic:

“Foreigners are astonished to learn that almost all Americans are embalmed and publicly displayed after death. The practice is unheard of outside the United States and Canada.”

Nearly all Americans who died from the 1930s, when embalming became well-established, through the 1990s were disposed of in this manner.

And it’s neither cheap or good for the environment. The median cost of a funeral and burial, including a vault to enclose the casket, was $8,508 in 2014. Including the cost of the burial plot, the fee for opening and closing the grave and the tombstone easily brings the total cost to $11,000 or more.

This method also consumes a great deal of natural resources. Each year, we bury 800,000 gallons of formaldehyde-based embalming fluid, 115 million tons of steel, 2.3 billion tons of concrete and enough wood to build 4.6 million single-family homes.

Mitford’s book influenced generations of Americans, beginning with the baby boomers, to question this type of funeral and burial. As a result, demand for alternatives such as home funerals and green burials have increased significantly. The most common reasons cited are a desire to connect with and honor their loved ones in a more meaningful way, and interest in lower-cost, less environmentally damaging choices.

The rise of cremation

The most radical change to how Americans handle their remains has been the rising popularity of cremation by fire.

Cremation is less expensive than burial and, although it consumes fossil fuels, is widely perceived to be better for the environment than burial in a casket and vault.

Although cremation became legal in a handful of states in the 1870s and 1880s, its usage in the U.S. remained in single digits for another century.

After steadily rising since the 1980s, cremation was the disposition method of choice for nearly half of all deaths in the U.S. in 2015. Cremation is most popular in urban areas, where the cost of burial can be quite high, in states with a lot of people born in other ones and among those who do not identify with a particular religious faith.

Residents of western states like Nevada, Washington and Oregon opt for cremation the most, with rates as high as 76 percent. Mississippi, Alabama and Kentucky have the lowest rates, at less than a quarter of all burials. The National Funeral Directors Association projects that by 2030 the nationwide cremation rate will reach 71 percent.

Cremation’s dramatic rise is part of a huge shift in American funerary practices away from burial and the ritual of embalming the dead, which is not required by law in any state but which most funeral homes require in order to have a visitation. In 2017, a survey of the personal preferences of Americans aged 40 and over found that more than half preferred cremation. Only 14 percent of those respondents said they would like to have a full funeral service with viewing and visitation prior to cremation, down from 27 percent as recently as 2015.

Part of the reason for that shift is cost. In 2014, the median cost of a funeral with viewing and cremation was $6,078. In contrast, a “direct cremation,” which does not include embalming or a viewing, can typically be purchased for $700 to $1,200.

Cremated remains can be buried in a cemetery or stored in an urn on the mantle, but businesses also offer a bewildering range of options for incorporating ashes into objects like glass paperweights, jewelry and even vinyl records.

And while 40 percent of respondents to the 2017 survey associate a cremation with a memorial service, Americans are increasingly holding those services at religious institutions and nontraditional locations like parks, museums and even at home.

Going green

Another trend is finding greener alternatives to both the traditional burial and cremation.

The 2017 survey found that 54 percent of respondents were interested in green options. Compare this with a 2007 survey of those aged 50 or higher by AARP which found that only 21 percent were interested in a more environmentally friendly burial.

One example of this is a new method of disposing of human remains called alkaline hydrolysis, which involves using water and a salt-based solution to dissolve human remains.

Often referred as “water cremation,” it’s preferred by many as a greener alternative to cremation by fire, which consumes fossil fuels. Most funeral homes that offer both methods of cremation charge the same price.

The alkaline hydrolysis process results in a sterile liquid and bone fragments that are reduced to “ash” and returned to the family. Although most Americans are unfamiliar with the process, funeral directors that have adopted it generally report that families prefer it to cremation by fire. California recently became the 15th state to legalize it.

Going home

A rising number of families are also interested in so-called “home funerals,” in which the remains are cleaned and prepared for disposition at home by the family, religious community or friends.

Home funerals are followed by cremation, or burial in a family cemetery, a traditional cemetery or a green cemetery.

Assisted by funeral directors or educated by home funeral guides, families that choose home funerals are returning to a set of practices that predate the modern funeral industry.

Proponents say that caring for remains at home is a better way of honoring the relationship between the living and the dead. Home funerals are also seen as more environmentally friendly since remains are temporarily preserved through the use of dry ice rather than formaldehyde-based embalming fluid.

The Green Burial Council says rejecting embalming is one way to go green. Another is to choose to have remains interred or cremated in a fabric shroud or biodegradable casket rather than a casket made from nonsustainable hardwoods or metal. The council promotes standards for green funeral products and certifies green funeral homes and burial grounds. More than 300 providers are currently certified in 41 states and six Canadian provinces.

For example, Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, the historic New York cemetery made famous by Washington Irving, is a certified “hybrid” cemetery because it has reserved a portion of its grounds for green burials: no embalming, no vaults and no caskets unless they are biodegradable – the body often goes straight into the ground with just a simple wrapping.

Clearly Americans are pushing the “traditional” boundaries of how to memorialize their loved ones and dispose of their remains. While I wouldn’t hold out hope that Americans will be able to choose Viking- or Tibetan-style burials anytime soon, you never know.

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If you walk down Victoria Street in London on a beautiful, sunny afternoon, you'll find dozens of picnickers sitting in Christchurch Gardens.

Some will be suited up in jackets and ties, clutching briefcases in one hand and local supermarket sandwiches in another. Others will be tourists taking a moment to rest their wary bones before heading down the road to visit Parliament Square or Westminster Abbey. And then there are 'the loungers'—youths sprawled out on bed sheets, iPods blasting in their eardrums, books pushed up to their noses.

Most if not all of these people will be unaware that they are sitting atop a 17^th-century plague pit.

'Death is all around us' is not just a turn of phrase. It's an actual fact, at least for those living in London. When the bubonic plague swept through the city in 1665, over 100,000 people perished.

Those more poetically inclined might say these people 'disappeared' off the face of this Earth, as if by magic. But the truth of the matter is that they didn't disappear. They suffered excruciating and agonizing deaths, and left behind thousands upon thousands of stinking, rotting corpses in the wake of their collective demise.

Where, exactly, did these bodies go?

Well, for starters, they were buried in Christchurch Gardens, and other areas of London which could accommodate burial pits in the 17^th century. You can find them dotted all around the city, in places you wouldn't expect because modern constructions like supermarkets, theaters and apartment buildings make it difficult to imagine a time when most of London was blissfully devoid of concrete structures. There are plague pits located in Vincent Square, Holywell Mount, and Knightsbridge Green—to name but a few. You can even find the remnants of one beneath Aldgate Underground Station. [For a comprehensive list, click here].

At first, those who died from the plague were laid to rest in churchyards, like the 'ordinary' dead. But as more and more people succumbed to the disease, the churchyards became overcrowded. On any given day, there could be as many as 300 deaths in a single parish. The poorer areas of London—where people were crammed together in terribly unhygienic conditions—were hit hardest. Even today, you can see the effects of the plague in Clerkenwell and Southwark, where the churchyards are above street level due to the number of bodies buried beneath.

The epidemiology of the disease contributed to the problem—something I discuss in detail in Episode 2 of Under The Knife. Plague is caused by a bacterium called yersinia pestis, and takes three forms: bubonic, pneumonic and septicemic. All three are highly contagious, though pneumonic is the worst since the bacterium is concentrated in the lungs which causes the victim to cough violently, spreading the disease to anyone in close proximity. Under the Plague Orders of 1666:

[I]f any House be Infected, the sick person or persons [shall] be forthwith removed to the said pest-house, sheds, or huts, for the preservation of the rest of the Family: And that such house (though none be dead therein) be shut up for fourty [sic] days, and have a Red Cross, and Lord have mercy upon us, in Capital Letters affixed on the door…¹

In a period when the law dictated that you be literally shut up in the house where someone else had contracted a deadly disease, it is easy to understand how so many people perished so quickly.

At this time, funeral processions and other public gatherings were also suspended in a futile attempt to stop the spread of plague. In some parishes, people would come rumbling through the streets at night with large carts to collect the dead.

Burials of plague victims were almost always done at night under the new regulations. This was done, again, to help control the spread of disease, as far less people would be out wandering the streets at midnight than would be at midday.

In the wake of this disaster, emergency pits were dug to dispose of the dead. Not only was this the quickest way to bury plague victims, but it was also the cheapest as many families were not able or willing to contribute to the cost of burial during this crisis.

In Daniel Defoe's Journal of a Plague Year, he describes one such pit.

A terrible pit it was, and I could not resist my curiosity to go and see it. As near as I may judge, it was about forty feet in length, and about fifteen or sixteen feet broad, and at the time I first looked at it, about nine feet deep; but it was said they dug it near twenty feet deep afterwards in one part of it, till they could go no deeper for the water…²

Mass graves were never dug in London outside of epidemics, and contrary to popular belief, the dead were not thrown into them haphazardly. Excavations reveal that bodies were laid out in a respectful, orderly fashion. Nor can we assume the land used to bury plague victims was unconsecrated.

The lack of documents on this issue is probably symptomatic of the fact that these pits came about at the height of the epidemic, when mundane tasks like record-keeping were not at the top of anyone's 'to-do' list.³

It's worth noting that burial pits in London were born out of necessity and not purely as a way of segregating infected bodies from non-infected bodies, like in many European cities. In 1630, Florence banned the burial of suspected plague victims in the city, insisting instead that they be buried 'in the countryside far from the high roads, a hundred arms'-lengths from the houses'. In Paris, those who died from plague were allowed to be buried in churchyards, but not the church itself. In one instance, a young man was dug up several months after he died (when the danger of infection had passed) and reburied in his ancestral chapel alongside his other kin.⁴

So, who was given the grisly task of burying these plague-riddled bodies in the 17^thcentury? Well, it's difficult to know. Undoubtedly, local gravediggers took on some of the work. Also, people who had contracted and survived the plague might perform these grim duties, as the job could be quite lucrative. That said, officials knew how high mortality rates were amongst gravediggers and sometimes withheld payment while still expecting service. In Montelupo, Italy, two gravediggers were tortured after they threatened to begin burying plague victims in the mayor's front garden because they hadn't been paid. When the mayor himself perished from the disease, they gladly buried him!⁵

Today, we know of 35 plague pits located in London. Some have been excavated; some we know about because of contemporary sources. The majority of these sites were originally on the grounds of churches, but as the death toll rose, pits were also dug in fields surrounding the city.

The truth is that the total number of plague pits could easily be in the hundreds given the number of people who died during the epidemic. Sadly, we'll never know. Many of these burial pits are lost to history, much like the names of the thousands of people who perished during the Great Plague.

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1. The National Archives, London. Orders for the prevention of the plague, 1666 (SP29/155 f.102).
2. Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year (Penguin Classics edition, 1986), p. 246.
3. Vanessa Harding, 'Burial of the Plague Dead in Early Modern London', in Epidemic Disease in London, ed. J.A.I. Champion (1993), pp. 53-64.
4. Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris. MS Fr 32589 (extracts from parish registers of Saint André des Arts): burials on 5/11/1580, 15/9/1591 (exhumed and reburied 2/4/1592), 23/8/1606, 1/7/1628. Originally quoted in Harding, 'Burial of the Plague Dead'.
5. Joseph P Byrne, Encyclopedia of Black Death (2012), p. 166.

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The mystery behind several "vampire" burials in Poland has been solved.

People who were buried with sickles (curved, sharp farming knives) around their necks, or rocks at their jaws, to prevent their corpses from reanimating were natives to the area in which they were buried, according to a new study.

The fact that all the people buried as vampires were local suggests they may have been felled by a cholera epidemic that swept through the region, said study co-author Lesley Gregoricka, a bioarchaeologist at the University of South Alabama. [7 Strange Ways Humans Act Like Vampires]

Tales of vampires

Tales of the dead coming back to life have truly ancient roots, going back to the ancient Egyptians, Greeks, Babylonians and beyond, said study co-author Tracy Betsinger, a bioarchaeologist at the State University of New York at Oneonta.

For all these stories of the dead coming back to life, "the word collectively used is a 'revenance,'" Betsinger told Live Science.

Tales of vampires have circulated in Eastern Europe since at least the 11th century, and newspaper accounts have described alleged vampires since the 17th century. For instance, in 1725, an Austrian official recounted the story of Serbian peasant Petar Blagojevic, who was said to have killed nine villagers in his area before people staked him through his heart. Vampire lore at this time didn't require blood sucking as an integral feature; instead, the undead could slay living people with just a glance.

In ancient lore, a person was at risk of becoming a vampire after death if he or she was unbaptized, died a violent death, was the first one killed in an epidemic or was an outsider from another local, Gregoricka said.

Notions that vampires drank blood may have arisen during plagues and epidemics, when corpses would often lie exposed and decomposing for long periods of time.

"People were up close and personal with death at this point, but didn't have a good way to explain what was happening," Gregoricka told Live Science.

For instance, the body tends to bloat after death from bacterial-produced gases. This pressure in the lower body, in turn, forces blood up from the lungs, into the esophagus and then through the mouth, which may have led villagers to believe the corpse of a person who was waiflike and frail during life was fat from feasting on blood, she said.

Vampire burial

Gregoricka and her colleagues analyzed bone fragments from the Drawsko cemetery, a Polish site where vampire burials were found. The cemetery dates from the 17th to the 18th century, the researchers said. Some people at the site were buried with sickles under their necks or rocks under their jaws, to prevent them from reanimating. (The sickles were intended to decapitate the people if they tried to rise from the grave, while the rocks pinned their jaws shut so they weren't able to feed on the living, Gregoricka said.)

The researchers then took a closer look at 60 of the 333 burials from the site, six of which were "vampire" burials intended to prevent a corpse from reanimating. The team analyzed the ratio of strontium isotopes (versions of the atom with different numbers of neutrons) in the skeletons. Because each location has a unique ratio of these isotopes, and people's bodies naturally take the elements up from the environment, analyzing strontium isotope ratios can reveal where a person is from.

Contrary to the initial hypothesis that the "vampires" were immigrants, the team actually discovered that all of the vampires were locals.

Since none of the "vampires" showed signs of a violent death or severe trauma, the team speculates that the vampires were perhaps the first people felled in one of the cholera epidemics that swept the area during the time. People could die of cholera in days or even hours, Gregoricka said.

"If something kills you very quickly, it's not going to leave a mark on the bone," Gregoricka said.

As a follow-up, the researchers want to conduct more chemical analyses to see if they can learn more about these villagers. The findings were published today (Nov. 26) in the journal PLOS ONE.

Follow Tia Ghose on Twitter and Google+. Follow Live Science @livescience, Facebook& Google+. Originally published on Live Science.

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Someone who dies in Mississippi this year is far more likely to be buried than someone who dies in Oregon.

We looked at data from the National Funeral Directors Association's 2015 projections for burial rates and cremation rates in each state. Nationally, the Association projects that cremations will outnumber burials in the US: 48.2% of this year's deceased will be cremated, as opposed to 45.8% being buried.

On the state by state level, cremation is much more popular in the West. In Nevada, 77.8% of bodies are projected to be cremated. Meanwhile, burials still predominate in the Appalachian South.

Here's a map showing the geographical variance in funeral types. States that are purple have higher burial rates than cremation rates, while orange states have higher cremation than burial rates. Darker states have bigger percentage point differences between burial rates and cremation rates:

And here's a chart showing burial and cremation rates in each state, ordered from where cremation is most likely to least likely:

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Dying isn't always an Earth-friendly business.

Decomposing bodies in coffins buried in the ground emit large amounts of methane, a harmful greenhouse gas.

That, along with the formaldehyde that's used to get the body preserved for burial makes for not-so-sustainable burial practices.

And while the vast majority of people opt for either traditional burial or cremation, there are other ways to be memorialized that do less damage to the planet.

1. Turn your body into a tree

Developed by Italian designers, this sustainable burial practice will turn your remains into tree food. Anna Citelli and Raoul Bretzel, the creators of Capsula Mundi (pictured here) want to change the way Italy buries its loved ones with their pod-like design using eco-friendly materials.

You're buried inside a biodegradable egg-shaped pod while in the fetal position. When you're buried, a tree gets planted on top. Then the idea is that as the pod begins to decompose, the body can turn into minerals that feed the tree. Bretzel and Mundi hope to change the traditional cemetery into a "sacred forest."

2. Use dry ice 

Traditionally, families buring their loved ones will have them embalmed, so that the decomposing process doesn't start right away. Usually, this is done with formaldehyde, a known human carcinogen (which, of course doesn't affect those being embalmed, but rather those doing the embalming).

Instead, some people are turing to dry ice (frozen carbon dioxide) as a way to keep bodies preserved until they are interred. This keeps the body from decomposing without needing embalming, though you do have to change out the ice every day. Though carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, the amount released from the dry ice used in body preservation is a pretty small percentage of overall CO2 emissions.

3. Furnish your home with a shelf that doubles as a coffin

Instead of using your wooden coffin only as your final resting place, William Warren had the idea of making a set of shelves that can be converted to a coffin when the time is right. This upcycled version makes the wood useful for longer, and as Warren remarks on his website, "the wood will colour, the surfaces will mark and stain and over the years and the furniture will become a part of you." Warren designed the shelves and debuted them at the 2005 London Design Festival, though you can ask him for directions on how to may your own set of shelves-turned-coffin.

Plus, you get the added fun of telling all your guests about it while giving them a tour of your house and seeing their bewildered expressions.

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The ritual of burying a dead body is so deeply ingrained in religious and cultural history that few of us take a moment to question it.

But when you dig into the statistics, the process of preserving and sealing corpses into caskets and then plunging them into the ground is extremely environmentally unfriendly.

Toxic chemicals from the embalming, burial, and cremation process leach into the air and soil, and expose funeral workers to potential hazards. And maintaining the crisp, green memorial plots is extremely land-and-water-use heavy.

For this reason, scientists and conservationists have been looking into more eco-friendly ways to die.

"The best way is to allow your body to feed the earth or ocean in a way that is sustainable for future generations," Susan Dobscha, a professor of marketing at Bentley University and editor of an upcoming book about the green-burial industry, called "Death and a Consumer Culture," told Tech Insider via email.

Here are five reasons why modern burial practices are bad for the environment, along with some safer, more natural and conservation-focused alternatives.

The embalming process is toxic.

Embalming is the process of pumping a chemical cocktail of formaldehyde, phenol, methanol, and glycerin into the body through an artery to delay the body's rate of decay. This could be used for display purposes during funerals, long-distance transportation, or for use for medical or scientific research. It is also said to give the body a life-like appearance for public viewing.

Formaldehyde is a potential human carcinogen, and can be lethal if a person is exposed to high concentrations. Its fumes can also irritate the eyes, nose, and throat. Phenol, similarly, can irritate or burn the flesh, and is toxic if ingested. Methyl alcohol and glycerin can irritate the eyes, skin, nose, and throat.

According to an article published in the Berkeley Planning Journal, more than 800,000 gallons of formaldehyde are put into the ground along with dead bodies every year in the US. That's enough to fill one and a quarter Olympic-sized swimming pools each year.

Many materials go into a burial.

According to the Berkeley Planning Journal, conventional burials in the US every year use 30 million board feet of hardwoods, 2,700 tons of copper and bronze, 104,272 tons of steel, and 1,636,000 tons of reinforced concrete.

The amount of casket wood alone is equivalent to about 4 million acres of forest and could build about 4.5 million homes.

Memorial parks use a lot of space and resources.

After a body is sealed in a hardwood or metal casket, it is often placed in a thin concrete vault, which is then placed in a "memorial park."

These parks generally have sprawling, pristine lawns that require a ton of water, chemical fertilizers, and pesticides to keep them a vibrant green. These chemicals can seep into water supplies or harm wildlife, such as bees.

They also use up a ton of land. If you added up the entire square footage of all the cemeteries in the US, according to Dobscha, it would measure 1 million acres of land.

On Wendesday, workers on a century-old water main in New York's Washington Square Park uncovered a roughly 200-year-old burial vault containing the remains of at least a dozen people, according to Fox News.

The workers were renovating the infrastructure for the Department of Design and Construction (DDC), which is installing catch basins, sewer manholes, and traffic lights in the area, reports DNAinfo.com.

The vault measured eight feet deep, 15 feet wide and 20 feet long, as noted by Newsday.com.

Antrhopologists and archaeologists will be called to identify and analyze the remains, but for now construction plans will continue around the site.

As the findings may be historically significant, the area around the vault has been blocked off. A spokesman from the DDC told DNAinfo.com they were "re-designing the work to accommodate findings of importance."

"Working together with the Landmarks Preservation Commision, DDC will evaluate the extent and significance of the vault and its contents," said Commissioner Feniosky Peña-Mora in a statement.

The find was unexpected, but not altogether surprising, considering that Washington Square Park, like many New York parks, was a burial ground in centuries past.

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The ancient Greek Cynic philosopher Diogenes was extreme in a lot of ways.

He deliberately lived on the street, and, in accordance with his teachings that people should not be embarrassed to do private things in public, was said to defecate and masturbate openly in front of others.

Plato called him “a Socrates gone mad.”

Shocking right to the end, he told his friends that when he died, he didn’t want to be buried.

He wanted them to throw his body over the city wall, where it could be devoured by animals.

“What harm then can the mangling of wild beasts do me if I am without consciousness?” he asked.

What is a dead body but an empty shell?, he’s asking. What does it matter what happens to it?

These are also the questions that the University of California, Berkeley, history professor Thomas Laqueur asks in his new book The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains.

“Diogenes was right,” he writes, “but also existentially wrong.”

This is the tension surrounding how humans treat dead bodies. What makes a person a person is gone from their bodies upon death, and there’s really no logical reason why we should care for the empty container—why we should embalm it, dress it up, and put it on display, or why we should collect its burnt remnants in an urn and place it on the mantle.

Humanity’s answer to Diogenes, Laqueur writes, has largely been “Yes, but…” People have cared for the bodies of their dead since at least 10,000 B.C., Laqueur writes, and so the reason for continuing to do so is a tautology: “We live with the dead because we, as a species, live with the dead.”

And the fact that we do so, he argues, is one of the things that brings us as a species from nature into culture. (The taboo against incest is another example.)

Despite the rationality of Diogenes’s logic, it’s unthinkable that we would just throw the corpses of our loved ones over a wall and leave them to the elements. Dead bodies matter because humans have decided that they matter, and they’ve continued to matter over time even as the ways people care for bodies have changed.

Laqueur’s book makes this argument with a dense, detailed sketch of a relatively small slice of time and space: Western Europe from the 18th to 20th centuries.

The story begins with churchyards, which “held a near monopoly on burial throughout Christendom … for more than a thousand years, from the Middle Ages to the early 19th century and beyond in some places.” People would be buried (and generally had a legal right to be buried) in the yard of the church of the parish where they lived (or in the church itself if they were wealthy or clergy).

This was a messy business. The yards were constantly being churned up as new bodies were buried, and they got lumpy. There weren’t many grave markers, and if there were, they were likely to read “here lies the body,” not a particularly personal epitaph.

“The churchyard was and looked to be a place for remembering a bounded community of the dead who belonged there,” Laquer writes, “rather than a place for individual commemoration and mourning.”

Though bodies were jumbled together in churchyards in a way that it made it almost impossible to find any one individual, there was some method to their arrangement: They were buried very deliberately along an east-west axis to line up with Jerusalem to the east, the direction from which the resurrection was expected to come.

John Calvin, the Protestant theologian, thought the very act of burial showed faith in a corporeal resurrection.

In the early 19th century, the dominance of churchyards began to wane, for a number of reasons. They were crowded, for one. Rotting bodies piled up in churchyards and church vaults also produced the kind of odor you might expect, and activists began to argue that they were unsanitary.

But Laqueur points out that churchyards had always been crowded and smelly, and “for centuries the smell … was tolerable.” The rise of cemeteries as an alternative to churchyards, Laqueur writes, was really part of a massive cultural shift, one that owed a lot to the .

During and after industrial revolution, unpleasant things of all kinds were being removed from people’s sight. Butchers and slaughterhouses delivered meat while keeping the blood behind the curtain; London constructed a massive sewer system, getting people’s waste off the streets and out of the River Thames.

With this as the backdrop, it stands to reason that people might want the dead bodies out of their cities as well—while they didn’t pose a real public-health threat, people successfully argued that they did, and that was enough.

The first great cemetery of the West was Père-Lachaise in Paris, built by Napoleon, and it inspired the building of others in Copenhagen, Glasgow, and Boston, among other cities. Unlike churchyards, these cemeteries were stand-alone places for the dead, open to the public and largely separated from the crowded areas of cities.

They were also disassociated from religion. “To some degree this is about the rise of negative liberty: the right to a grave in a neutral civic space irrespective of one’s beliefs or lack of beliefs, and the right to a choice in rituals of burial,” Laqueur writes.

The waning dominance of the Catholic Church had a lot to do with that. Burying bodies right by the church would remind people on their way in to pray for the dead as a way of helping those souls stuck in purgatory. But many Protestant reformers rejected the idea of purgatory, and argued that the dead did not need the prayers of the living.

The focus of cemeteries was not, as it had been in churchyards, on a community of faithful dead, but on remembering the individual.

It allowed for families to be buried together, which hadn’t really been possible in the tangle of the churchyard.

Cemeteries allowed for gravestones, monuments, epitaphs. Carving in stone is a powerful metaphor for permanence, even it's just wishful thinking.

“It was a place of sentiment loosely connected, at best, with Christian piety and intimately bound up with the emotional economics of family,” Laqueur writes.

“In it, a newly configured idolatry of the dead served the interests less of the old God of religion than of the new gods of memory and history: secular gods.” Cemeteries allowed for gravestones, monuments, epitaphs, the carving of names in stone.

This provides a little insurance against the fear of death—that one’s name, at least, will outlast them. Carving in stone is a powerful metaphor for permanence, even if it’s just wishful thinking.

The advent of cremation as a popular practice took some of this enchantment away from the dead body. But while in some ways people who opted for cremation were finally recognizing the body as a shell, just like Diogenes said, deference towards bodies was often just replaced by deference to its ashes.

Ashes are scattered, interred, and revered in many ways, just as bodies are. And cremation has obviously not completely replaced burial by any stretch.

If care for the dead is one of the quintessential things about being human, fear of death is another. Being the only animal with constant awareness of its own mortality has significant effects on how humans behave.

Often, according to terror-management theory, the thought of death will lead people to seek out and to value more highly things that they think will bring them immortality, in the metaphoric sense. Living on in the memories of others would do the trick, even though we must on some level know is only a reprieve against eventually being forgotten.

On this matter, Laqueur turns to the 17th-century poet John Weever:

Every man, Weever writes, “desires a perpetuity after his death.” Without this idea “man could never have awakened in him the desire to live in the remembrance of his fellows.”

And without it, human life in the shadow of death would be unbearable and unrecognizable: “the social affections could not have unfolded themselves un-countenanced by the faith that Man is an immortal being.” Our love for one another differs from the love animals might feel for one another in that an animal perishes in the field without “anticipating the sorrow with which is associates will bemoan his death,” whereas we “wish to be remembered by our friends.”

Naming the dead, like care for their bodies, is seen as a way to keep them among the living. And maybe it is a way around Diogenes.

So yes, Diogenes, the body is technically nothing once void of its soul, or consciousness, or however one conceives of the essence of a person. We get it. But it’s a physical emblem of that person, and in caring for it, we offer the person’s memory a chance to linger, as we hope our own will.

Even if physical death is quick and final, social death takes time. And through communal effort, people offer each other the chance for their names to last a little longer on Earth than their bodies do.

“There is also another way to construe the dead,” Laqueur writes: “As social beings, as creatures who need to be eased out of this world and settled safely into the next and into memory.”

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Sure, most people end up in one nice, consolidated grave. But these five generals were not “most people”:

1. Gen. “Mad” Anthony Wayne’s skeleton and flesh were buried 400 miles apart.

When Isaac Wayne arrived at the Army blockhouse in Erie, Pennsylvania, he expected to exhume his father’s bones and take them the 400 miles back to his hometown of Radnor, Pennsylvania for re-burial. His father was Gen. “Mad” Anthony Wayne, a Revolutionary War and Northwest Indian War hero.

When the remains were exhumed, the body was found to be in good condition despite 12 years having passed since Gen. Wayne’s death in 1796. Isaac’s cart was too small to move a complete body though, and so Isaac had the body dismembered and the flesh boiled off of it. Then, he took the bones the 400 miles back to Radnor. The boiled flesh and the tools used in the “operation” were reburied in Erie.

2. Lt. Gen. Richard S. Ewell was buried 640 miles from his leg.

A Confederate leader in the Civil War, Lt. Gen. Richard S. Ewell was seriously injured at the Second Battle of Manassas. His leg was amputated and buried in a local garden. Ewell returned to combat after a one-year convalescence and was taken prisoner near the end of the war.

He returned to private life before dying of pneumonia in 1872. He was buried in Nashville, Tennessee, 640 miles from his leg.

3. Maj. Gen. Daniel E. Sickles’ leg is in the Smithsonian.

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Cremation's biggest selling point has to be its versatility.

Sure, it's better for the environment than burials and loads cheaper, but no other form of post-death care lets people give their families a cherished memento or shapeshift into their favorite things.

Maybe it's a children's toy or a line of cocaine cut with a father's remains.

Ashes can end up in some pretty strange places.

Renato Bialetti, coffee pot entrepreneur

You might not know the name, but you've almost definitely seen the design.

Renato Bialetti helped popularize the eight-sided Moka pot his father invented in 1933 but which initially flopped.

Bialetti recently died at 93 years old, with a final wish that his ashes be buried in the same pot he helped revive.

Walter Morrison, Frisbee inventor

Why mourn your father's death when you could just toss him around post-mortem?

When Walter Morrison died in 2010, his family cremated him and turned him into the very toy Morrison invented in 1955, then under the name Pluto Platter.

It would later become one of the most successful toys of all-time under the new name adopted by Wham-O: the Frisbee. 

Fred Baur, Pringles can innovator

Fred Baur didn't invent the Pringle, but he did have the ingenious idea to stack them.

Baur came up with the idea while working at Procter & Gamble in the 1960s. He was an organic chemist and food storage technician (awesome title), and he loved his insight into chip stacking so much that he requested his ashes be stored inside a Pringles can when it came time.

In 2008, when Baur died at the age of 89, his family split the remains between a traditional urn and the late inventor's greatest creation.

Spring Grove cemetery in Cincinnati, Ohio is slated to open a "green burial" section — the first of its kind in the region, according to a blog post by the Heritage Universalist Unitarian Church.

(The cemetery asked the church to take down its blog post, but you can read an archived version online here.)

While the definition of a "natural" or "green" burial varies, the general idea is to allow the body to recycle back into the earth naturally.

Green burials usually forgo chemical preservatives, such as formaldehyde (used in the embalming process), or unnecessary materials, such as metal (for caskets) and concrete (for burial vaults).

Jerry Wantz, vice president of operations at the cemetery, told Tech Insider that they don't have any specific details on the plot at the moment, and that they'd be making a more official announcement in the summer.

Either way, this marks a big step forward in the natural burial movement — and environmental stewardship. Here's why.

An outdated tradition

The ritual of burying a dead body is so deeply ingrained in religious and cultural history that few of us take a moment to question it.

But when you dig into the statistics, the process of preserving and sealing corpses into caskets and then plunging them into the ground is extremely environmentally unfriendly.

Toxic chemicals from the embalming, burial, and cremation process leach into the air and soil, and expose funeral workers to potential hazards. And maintaining the crisp, green memorial plots is extremely land-and-water-heavy.

For this reason, scientists and conservationists have been looking into more eco-friendly ways to die.

"The best way is to allow your body to feed the earth or ocean in a way that is sustainable for future generations," Susan Dobscha, a professor of marketing at Bentley University and editor of an upcoming book about the green burial industry called, "Death and a Consumer Culture," told Tech Insider via email.

The embalming process is toxic

Embalming is the process of pumping a chemical cocktail of formaldehyde, phenol, methanol, and glycerin into the body through an artery to delay the body's rate of decay. This could be used for display purposes during funerals, long-distance transportation, or for use for medical or scientific research. It is also said to give the body a life-like appearance for public viewing.

Formaldehyde is a potential human carcinogen, and can be lethal if a person is exposed to high concentrations. Its fumes can also irritate the eyes, nose, and throat. Phenol, similarly, can irritate or burn the flesh, and is toxic if ingested. Methyl alcohol and glycerin can irritate the eyes, skin, nose, and throat.

According to an article published in the Berkeley Planning Journal, more than 800,000 gallons of formaldehyde are put into the ground along with dead bodies every year in the US. That's enough to fill one and a quarter Olympic-sized swimming pools each year.

Burials waste a lot of materials

According to the Berkeley Planning Journal, conventional burials in the US every year use 30 million board feet of hardwoods, 2,700 tons of copper and bronze, 104,272 tons of steel, and 1,636,000 tons of reinforced concrete.

The amount of casket wood alone could build several thousand 2,400-square-foot single-family homes.

Half a billion people are going to die in the next decade — and we can't keep cramming their caskets into the Earth.

Every year, tens of millions of the 7.4 billion people on Earth will die.

Some will be cremated, and millionswill be buried in the ground, accompanied by pounds of steel, wood and toxicembalming fluid.

As the population on Earth grows, so too does the one right below its surface — rendering the ground useless for new growth.

The question is this: Are traditional burials selfish? 

"Americans are funny about feeling like they own a 4-by-8 plot for eternity," Kate Kalanick, executive director of Green Burial Council, said in a phone interview Wednesday. "In an environmental sense, traditional burial is selfish for the impact it has. I don't think people really think about how their death affects the land or our world."

Let's break down the numbers. Traditional caskets are hundreds of pounds of wood, metal and whatever cushioning goes inside. Ronald Reagan's casket — a big mahogany tank of a box — allegedly weighed 400 pounds. Burial vaults, the enclosures that barricade each casket from the elements, can be around 3,000 pounds of cement, sometimes steel. For embalming, it seems the golden rule is one gallon of fluid per 50 pounds of body. Add it all up and you've got around two tons of material per body — plus a few gallons of an occasionally hallucinogenic embalming juice — chilling in the earth forever.

Now zoom out. For all of the 7.4 billion people breathing on the planet right now, there are around 15 dead and buried beneath them. The Population Reference Bureau estimated 107 billion people have, ever, roamed the planet, Live Science reported. We don't know exactly how many of those dead people had traditional burials. But even if 10% of them were buried in a cement-tombed, mahogany casket, that's still a colossal amount of shellacked, nonbiodegradable, poisonous crap going in the ground every year.

Here's the deal: Every body decomposes eventually; all the casket, cement enclosure and formaldehyde do is slow down the process. But sooner or later, the whole body — even the gallons of toxic, carcinogenic embalming fluid — end up in the water table of whatever place they're buried.

Despite the downsides of burial, not everyone wants to be cremated. Plus, there's plenty of evidence suggesting the energy it takes to burn a body down wreaks significant damage on the environment.

If we're going to put bodies in the ground, we need smart ways to do it. That's where organizations like Kalanick's Green Burial Council come in.

The burial of the future: The idea of a green burial is to make as little an impact on the natural environment of the burial site as possible.

"Green burials negate that environmental selfishness," Kalanick said.

Green burial grounds look a lot like the land did before it got filled up with bodies. The headstones are often rocks or trees indigenous to the landscape. There's no cement vault. The casket is biodegradable and the embalming fluid is plant-based. 

"If you look out across the site, it would look like a field or a wooded area," Kalanick said. "It all depends on the natural landscape. But they aren't maintaining the grass with chemicals."

There's even a green way to get cremated. Jose Vazquez is an architect and designer who created the Spíritree, an urn that takes the ashes of someone and turns them into a seeding ground for a new tree. 

The problem with traditional cemeteries is you can't do anything else with the land once bodies are under the ground, Vazquez said over the phone. 

"The idea of my product is this continuation through nature," he said. "You become a memory through a tree. The whole forest could be the collective memory of loved ones."

A whole forest of grandparents sounds like the beginning of a horror movie. But at least it's a horror movie that provides oxygen to people walking through the woods. And it's less scary than all of those "dead" cemeteries that are a few hundred years old, turning into eyesores in middle-of-nowhere, Nevada.

Funeral trends are changing. Thanks to a recent shift in the funeral industry, new cemeteries won't be taking up more and more of the Earth's surface.

At least that's according to Julie Found, funeral director of Found and Sons Funeral Home in Fredericksburg, Virginia. She said cremation is more common than it once was, cutting down on the amount of space your body occupies after death.

"I think traditional burials — the embalming, the casket, visitation — are, for lack of a better word, dying," Found said in a phone interview March 29."It's a weird time in the funeral industry. The public ... doesn't see the reasoning in paying $10- to $15,000 to bury a person in a cemetery."

The environmental impact is starting to make a difference too, Found said — especially when the younger generation takes over their families' funeral homes.

"The older generation, the people burying their parents right now, still don't feel that impact," Found said. "But my generation is concerned with the environment."

Here's a weird proposition: Young folks need to get less precious about how we treat our dead. Yes, loved ones need to be memorialized. But who's to say thousands of pounds of metal and wood is still the best way to do it?

Maybe now it's about letting their bodies become part of the land. Or turning them into trees. Because while a haunted forest grown out of your mom's side of the family sounds frightening, it's a hell of a lot less scary than a corpse- and chemical-addled Earth where nothing new can grow.

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The body of the man behind the mass shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, has been buried in a South Florida cemetery, and the family members of people buried near him aren't happy about it.

Omar Mateen was interred at the Muslim Cemetery of South Florida outside Miami, several news outlets including the Orlando Sentinel reported.

Mateen was fatally shot by the police during the massacre at Pulse nightclub that killed 49 people earlier this month.

The grave is unmarked, and media outlets learned of the burial only by checking death records.

One man said he was considering having his wife exhumed and moved to another cemetery.

"I don't see her resting in peace among people like that," Andrea Wade, whose wife is buried 30 yards from Mateen, told NBC News.

Others objected to Mateen's burial on religious grounds.

"He's claiming he's a Muslim," Sultan Mamun, whose father is buried at the cemetery, told NBC News. "But we don't believe he is a Muslim because our religion doesn't permit killing."

Mohammad Dandia, who works at the cemetery, called Mateen's actions "horrendous" but wouldn't judge whether the decision to bury him there was right or wrong.

"He has to be buried somewhere, right?" he said, according to South Florida's WPLG.

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Imagine that instead of burying your loved one in a coffin, you dressed them in a garment that ate away at their remains, leaving almost no trace in the dirt where they once laid.

It might sound a little horrifying, but one startup is banking on biodegradable "burial suits" as the future of green funerals. The suits use mushrooms and other organic compounds to decompose and wipe toxins in the human body.

Jae Rhim Lee, CEO and cofounder of Coeio, launched the company in 2015 after years of research on mushrooms and funeral practices. She set out to create a coffin-killer that would reduce the harmful effects of burials on the earth.

Our bodies contain heavy metals, pesticides, and all the chemicals we ingest while living. When we die, we're pumped full of formaldehyde to prevent decomposition. Those toxins then seep into the earth when we're buried.

Considering the lasting impact of traditional funerals, many are turning to "green burials" as an environmentally friendly alternative. A 2015 survey by the Funeral and Memorial Information Council showed 64% of participants expressed an interest in green funerals, up from 43% in 2010.

The organic cotton suit by Coeio comes embedded with a mixture of mushrooms and organic materials in the fabric. The mushrooms release enzymes that break down molecular bonds, turning toxins into simpler, less dangerous chemicals. Together, these ingredients aid in decomposition, work to neutralize toxins found in the body, and transfer nutrients to plant life.

Lee explains that when she was a child, her grandmother died of a stroke, and her mother never really recovered from the shock. Lee learned to fear death.

"I think a lot of us are scared of death. We don't talk about it. We don't plan for it," Lee tells Tech Insider. "It hurts us even more."

When she got older, she started to wonder how she might be able to transform our relationship with death, and plan for it in a way that provides some benefit to the environment. The idea for the "burial suit" was born.

Five years and three major redesigns later, the suit looks like a black rain jacket with white plant roots growing up the collarbone and sleeves. It lays flat, so that a caretaker can lay a body on top of it, fold the front, and button it up the sides with relative ease.

The pattern on the fabric is inspired by mycelia, the thread-like masses of fungi that grow underground, delivering nutrients across almost every square inch of earth and allowing plants to "talk" to each other. Lee says she incorporated the design as a reminder that we are a part of earth's biology.

Each suit costs $1,500, which Lee says makes it price-competitive with the average casket.

A deceased person wearing the burial suit doesn't need a coffin. But if the idea of being so exposed six feet under seems a little creepy, Coeio also makes a burial shroud with more coverage and a casket liner for prospective customers.

No one has yet been buried in the company's burial suit, though many have volunteered their bodies for research on the suit's potential. The Mountain View, California-based company will start testing the suit using human cadavers and pig parts in Texas and Canada in August.

Lee is hopeful that innovative design can promote a greater acceptance of death. If people can reframe death as an extension of life — with bodies becoming plant food, or just part of the Earth — it might not be as intimidating.

"Accepting death is such a critical part of living life better," she says.

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Researchers just discovered the culprit behind the Great Plague of Britain, which claimed one-quarter of the country's population more than 350 years ago.

While excavating the plot for a new east-to-west tube station underneath Liverpool Street in London's Shoreditch neighborhood, archaeologists uncovered the remains of more than 3,000 people in what they determined was a mass grave that potentially included victims of the Great Plague of 1665.

It is the UK's biggest archaeology project in history.

The positioning of the bodies and the estimated timing of their burials suggested to experts that they were victims of a sudden, untimely death.

Researchers have been running detailed tests on the remains for years, and finally got the results of a DNA test of some of the victims' teeth. The culprit? Yersinia pestis, a bacteria known to cause the plague.

Archaeologists say the mass grave, called the "Bedlam graveyard" after the nearby Bethlem ("Bedlam") Royal Hospital, was used for nearly 200 years beginning as early as 1569. In addition to serving as a public graveyard for Londoners who could not afford a costly church burial, the grave site was likely also used as an overflow cemetery when existing sites had filled to capacity. This can happen during times of war or mass illness, such as a plague.

Crossrail, a subsidiary of Transport for London, has been deploying archaeologists to the site for more than a decade and has, along with the London Metropolitan Archive, enlisted a small group of volunteers from the area to compile a register of the names and backgrounds of the people buried there.

After discovering the remains, archaeologists and osteologists worked together to ensure that the teeth of the victims were carefully removed so they could be sent off for DNA analysis.

"The best thing to sample for DNA is the teeth; they're like an isolated time capsule," lead bone researcher for the project Michael Henderson, of the Museum of London Archaeology, told the BBC.

And sure enough, in five of the 20 skeletons they tested from the Bedlam burial pit, the scientists found preserved DNA signatures distinctive of the plague bacteria Yersinia pestis.

Researchers still do not know why the Great Plague was the last major outbreak of plague in the UK, but they hope to find answers to these and other questions as they continue to study the genomes of the bacteria.

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