Turkish leaders reacted with outrage this week after Pope Francis referred to the mass killings of Armenians by Ottoman Turks during World War I as “the first genocide of the 20th century.” Turkey recalled its Vatican envoy, and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan warned the pope “not to repeat his mistake,” saying, “It is not possible for the Turkish Republic to […]
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Representatives from eight rural Colorado counties began making plans to form a breakaway state, North Colorado, to escape the state’s gun-control laws and oil-industry regulations. “This is not a stunt,” said Weld County Commissioner Sean Conway. “Our very way of life is under attack.”
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A family of Norwegian bears broke into a holiday cabin and threw an epic, alcohol-fueled party. The cabin’s owner, Even Nilsen, returned to the cabin to find that the bears had eaten all the food and bitten into more than a hundred cans of beer, sucking down the contents. One bear evidently became so intoxicated that it passed out on […]
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It turns out that there’s strong evidence to suggest that at least one kind of dolphin sound, studied extensively over the past decade, does function as a kind of referential symbol. Dolphins use distinct “signature whistles” to identify and call to one another. Each dolphin is thought to invent a unique name for itself as a calf and to keep […]
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As the population ages and lives longer, dementia has become one of the country’s most expensive medical conditions, with $109 billion in direct medical costs in 2010, a new RAND study found. The medical cost of dementia exceeds that of both heart disease, at $102 billion, and cancer, at $72 billion.
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Yearly odds of a U.S. student being killed at school: 1 in 3 million
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The sicker the oceans get, the more of their habitable regions vanish. Loss of aquatic habitats is mirroring the earlier pattern on land, which began with the Industrial Revolution and continues today.
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People who say they are unaffiliated with any religion constitute nearly 20 percent of the American public, making them almost as numerous as Catholics, who accounted for 22 percent of participants in a new Pew Research Center study released Oct. 9. The survey of 2,973 adults conducted this summer found people who say they are atheist, agnostic or “nothing in […]
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Percentage of American 16- and 17- year-olds who use text messaging who say they do so while driving: 34 Percentage of adults who do: 47
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Percentage of Americans and Chinese, respectively, who believe their government is “on the side of average citizens”: 12, 80 Who believe their government is “on the side of corporations”: 73, 17
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