Baluchistan, Pakistan A massive earthquake in Pakistan’s province of Baluchistan killed hundreds of people and created a new island off the coast. The magnitude-7.7 tremor flattened entire mud-brick villages. Troops deployed to fight an insurgency of separatist Baluchis were on hand to help rescue people, but the affected area is so huge that it will take days to reach some […]
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As humans get older, our brains shrink by about 15 percent, making us vulnerable to memory loss, dementia, and depression. But the brains of our closest relatives, chimpanzees, stay the same size throughout life, a new study has found. And while 50 percent of Americans over 85 suffer from Alzheimer’s, elderly chimps appear to have no similar problems. “The million […]
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If you are broke and hungry on Thanksgiving Day, George Dimopoulos will feed you. No charge. If you are lonely, he will hug you. Also no charge. Then he will feed you. Dimopoulos owns George’s Senate Coney Island, along Haggerty Road next to a nine-hole golf course in Northville. He also owns three other George’s Senate restaurants and, come to […]
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■ Raimundo Arruda Sobrinho has been writing poetry for most of his life, but because he was living on the side of the road in Sao Paulo, Brazil, only a few passersby ever read it. That changed when one of those readers, Shalla Monteiro, created a Facebook page to share Sobrinho’s poems with the world. The page attracted some 40,000 […]
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A town council in North Carolina rejected plans to rezone land for a solar farm after residents voiced fears it would cause cancer, stop plants from growing and suck up all the energy from the sun. Two citizens reportedly made the allegations at a Woodland Town Council meeting in Northampton County, northeastern North Carolina, on Wednesday. Bobby Mann said the […]
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They may not crow about it, but if you get on the wrong side of them, they’re not going to forget it in a hurry. Crows have an excellent memory for human faces, a study has revealed. They can tell the difference between a friendly face and a dangerous one, and can warn each other which is which. And the […]
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Few people have traveled to the South Pole since Roald Amundsen and Robert Falcon Scott reached the bottom of the world in the austral summer of 1911-12. Fewer still stay for the six months of darkness in the winter at the South Pole. The first crew to winter at the South Pole was in 1957, but only 1,267 people have spent the […]
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Astronomers have discovered two clouds of gas some 12 billion light-years away that appear to preserve the primordial conditions of the universe in the minutes after the big bang. The clouds contain just hydrogen and its isotope deuterium, making them “the first examples to fit precisely” into what scientists think the early universe was like, University of California astronomer Jason […]
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Human-like sounds made by a captive beluga whale suggest that cetaceans could learn to mimic our voices, and perhaps even converse with us. Researchers at the National Marine Mammal Foundation first noticed in the 1980s that one of their whales was attempting to copy the speech patterns of his handlers and they began recording his human-like vocalizations. Recently, they analyzed […]
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Residents of shorelines previously damaged by Hurricane Sandy turned to a cheap and plentiful resource to help them rebuild: discarded Christmas trees. The storm washed away miles of sand dunes, which protected the coast from flooding by serving as a buffer against wind and waves. Volunteers in New York and New Jersey piled thousands of the trees on top of […]
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