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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Kindergartner’s ABCs Help Save Dad’s Life A New Jersey kindergartner is being credited for saving his father’s life — and it’s because he knows the alphabet. Five-year-old Nathaniel Darcy Jr., who attends Newark’s North Star Public School, was on his way home from buying new school shoes when his father got violently ill behind the wheel of their car. Nathaniel’s […]
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Scientists have made an astronomical declaration, stating that there is likely ten times the amount of galaxies in our universe than originally expected. The previous amount was believed to be about 200 billion, but now it is believed to be much more. According to astronomers from the University of Nottingham, we are just beginning to learn exactly how vast our […]
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Just eight months ago, 6-year-old Emma Whitehead was gravely ill with leukemia and running out of options.Two rounds of chemotherapy had already failed, and a bone marrow transplant was no longer possible, The NewYorkTimes reports. So her parents opted for an experimental therapy developed at the University of Pennsylvania that aimed to enlist Emma’s own immune system in the fight […]
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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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If thinking about your own death freaks you out, there may be over-the-counter solution. A new study shows that the main ingredient in Tylenol, acetaminophen, can help calm existential dread in the same way it reduces the physical pain of a headache. To get volunteers worried about their own mortality, University of British Columbia researchers asked them to watch scenes […]
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■ South Central Los Angeles is more famous for drive-by shootings than well-kept gardens, but one native son is getting locals to trade their sawed-off shotguns for shovels. Ron Finley, who styles himself the “Gangsta Gardener” is encouraging Angelenos to cultivate vegetable and fruit gardens in vacant lots in deprived neighborhoods. He has co-founded a charity, L.A. Green Grounds, to […]
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A year ago, 37-year-old Australian truck driver Bill Morgan was crushed in a car accident and came close to dying. When his luck finally changed after winning a car on a scratch-off lottery ticket, the local media wanted to air his story. Well, it was during that reenactment that he got another surprise. The ticket he was scratching was yet […]
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■ When Phoenix police officer Natalie Simonick saw 18-year-old Christian Felix out after dark in March, she suspected he was violating curfew. But Felix told her he was walking six miles home from his job at McDonald’s, as he had missed the bus and didn’t own a bicycle. Simonick was so impressed with the teen’s work ethic that she decided […]
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Meditation doesn’t just improve mental and physical health in the present. It also slows the aging process, and can help meditators stay mentally sharp into old age, a new study has found. Once people reach their mid- to late 20s, their brains begin to lose volume and weight, which can eventually result in the loss of some functional ability. But […]
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