■ A star college athlete has turned down a chance at sporting glory to donate bone marrow to a stranger. Cameron Lyle, a shot-putter at the University of New Hampshire, added his DNA to the federal bone marrow registry two years ago and promptly forgot about it. But this month, he discovered his marrow matched that of a 28-year-old leukemia […]
Read more
CHIAYI COUNTY, Taiwan – Budai, a township in southwest Taiwan, has built a church in the form of a giant high-heeled shoe, made of metal and blue glass tiles, seeking to attract more tourists to the area. It is mainly used for weddings by locals. The structure is some 17 meters (55.77 ft) tall at the highest point, the heel. […]
Read more
Riesel, Texas: A group of young Texas boys helped to keep an elderly woman out of jail by mowing her unkempt lawn which had grown way above what city code allows. Suttle says she never received the notice to appear in court regarding her lawn. As a result, Riesel police issued a warrant for the arrest of the 75-year-old property […]
Read more
Two NASA probes that spent last year orbiting the moon have returned stunning new geological maps that could help explain how it, Earth, and other planets in our solar system formed. The probes, named Ebb and Flow, flew identical orbits just miles above the moon’s surface to measure its gravity field. Slight disruptions in their paths—caused by the push and […]
Read more
Supermassive black holes that have escaped their host galaxies may be wandering the universe alone. Intriguing new observations i by NASA’s Chandra X-ray telescope have | revealed what appears to be a supermassive | black hole being “kicked out of a galaxy at enormous speed,” Francesca Civano of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics tells Space.com. Astronomers observed two distinct light […]
Read more
■ Brazilian taxi driver Adilson Luiz da Cruz often finds lost phones and forgotten umbrellas in his cab, but last week he hit the jackpot: 40 tickets to the World Cup. Despite his lifelong dream of going to the tournament, plus the thousands of dollars he could have earned by scalping the tickets, the cabbie didn’t hesitate to do the […]
Read more
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 […]
Read more
A homeless panhandler, Billy Ray Harris who returned a diamond engagement ring accidentally thrown into his change cup has had his generosity repaid many times over. Sarah Darling of Kansas City, Mo., mistakenly gave her ring to Billy Ray Harris last week, and he happily returned it the next day when she retraced her steps. Since Harris’s good deed hit the […]
Read more
When Chinese fisherman CaiTu hauled in a 200-pound, 100-year-old sea turtle, he knew he had to do the right thing and release the endangered animal. The decision wasn’t easy: Cai could have earned two months’ wages by selling the delicacy to a restaurant, where it would have been made into soup. “I looked into that turtle’s eyes and saw something […]
Read more
Only 1 in 10,000 people have absolute or “perfect” pitch, the ability to hear a tone and tell what note it is. This unusual ability is acquired early in life, typically learned during training at about four to six years of age, and there are no records of adults acquiring the ability. But a new study shows that people who […]
Read more