■ Residents of New York City’s SoHo neighborhood are now paying a delivery service $100 for a single “Cronut”— a trendy new combination of a croissant and donut.The line at the bakery that makes the coveted pastries begins forming at 5 a.m., with a limit of two per customer. So Premium Cronut Delivery sends employees to stand on line.The price […]
Read more
Scientists have long laughed at astrology’s underlying premise—that celestial events can influence human emotions and behavior. But a series of new studies has produced evidence that at least one kind of astronomical event—solar flares—may, in fact, affect human beings. Periodically, the sun erupts with large storms that hurl waves of electromagnetically charged particles into space, altering Earth’s own magnetic field. […]
Read more
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 […]
Read more
The two most Earth-like planets ever found have been spotted in a single solar system 1,200 light-years away. Astronomers monitoring data from the Kepler spacecraft said the two worlds, dubbed Kepler 62e and Kepler 62f, were the two outermost planets circling a star about a third dimmer and smaller than the sun. Both orbit within the habitable zone within which […]
Read more
One violent movie does not a mass killer make, said Peggy Noonan in The Wall Street Journal. But the pornographic violence that now fills popular films has “the cumulative power to desensitize and destabilize” impressionable minds. Disturbed young men like James Holmes, the accused Aurora, Colo., killer, may be unable to process the nihilistic, sadistically violent world of movies like […]
Read more
Of the world’s billion Internet users, one in three logs on in English. That’s no surprise. The technology got its start in the U.S., most Web pages are English, and more than 60 percent of the U.S., Canadian, U.K., and Australian populations are online. But China is catching up. The number of Chinese speakers using the Internet is five times […]
Read more
■ Colorado marijuana entrepreneurs have installed the first public vending machine to dispense weed-laced edibles. Only licensed medical marijuana cardholders can buy pot brownies and similar snacks from the giant green dispenser, but company owner Stephen Shearin says of his weed-dispensing machine: “I don’t think we’ve dreamed what it can do yet.”
Read more
■ A Brazilian school is teaching kids proper English by asking them to correct erroneously worded tweets by their favorite celebrities. The school asks its preteen students to point out grammar and spelling errors to the likes of Justin Bieber, Paris Hilton, and Charlie Sheen. In April, Bieber tweeted, “That was a long bus ride. But we here.” Maria, 9, […]
Read more
The meteor fallout may have stopped, but conspiracy theories are still raining down on Russians, said Alexander Malyshev. The 10-ton rock that screamed through the atmosphere over Chelyabinsk last week was captured on many of the dashboard cameras that are so ubiquitous in Russia to guard against police corruption and document traffic accidents. So there’s lots of footage of the […]
Read more
THE UNIVERSE IS A LOT OF THINGS, BUT EASY TO understand isn’t one of them. Take the fact that more than 80% of its mass is missing. Galaxies spin so fast, they would fly apart if the gravity of some unseen mass weren’t keeping them intact, sur rounding them like a glass paperweight encasing a butterfly. Cosmologists have been trying […]
Read more