■ A high school baseball team in Sacramento was practicing last week when they heard desperate cries for help. A teenage girl had been pinned underneath a car in the Valley High School parking lot. Without prompting, the 30-strong team quickly lifter the four-door sedan off the injured girl, allowing coaches Troy Quirillo and Brett Sawyer to pull her to […]
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As an evolutionary strategy, the evolutionary roots of monogamy have long puzzled scientists: When a male pairs off for life with one female, he limits how many offspring he can produce, thus reducing his chances to pass on his genes. Few species are monogamous, yet 5 percent of mammal species are, including wolves and beavers—and about a quarter of primates. […]
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■ 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 […]
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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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Mike Carmichael simply wanted to do something weird when he and his 3-year-old son slapped a coat of blue paint on a baseball in 1977. The central Indiana resident stuck with painting the ball, which grew large enough to make it into the Guinness Book of World Records in 2004. At that time, it was 9 feet (2.7 meters) across, […]
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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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■ The 15-year-old son of an accused mugger met this week with his father’s alleged victim to make amends. Christian Lunsford sought out Tona Herndon—who had her purse snatched while visiting her late husband’s gravesite in Bethany, Okla.—after learning that his father, Shane, had been arrested for the crime. The teenager met with Herndon to apologize and give back $250 […]
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You won’t believe what actually controls the Internet… The entire internet is controlled by seven actual, physical keys. Four times a year since 2010, a highly secure ritual known as a key ceremony takes place that involves 14 people, 7 keys, and the secret information about what actually controls the Internet. The people conducting the ceremony are part of an […]
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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 […]
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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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