■ A World War II veteran was able to hear a symphony he wrote 67 years ago for the first time, when the U.S. Army Orchestra premiered it in Washington, D.C. Retired Col. Harold Van Heuvelen, 93, was inspired by his experiences as a soldier to write a symphony in 1945, but it languished on the shelf for decades and […]
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Tired of exercising to shed excess pounds? Scientists at Harvard University may have discovered a way to help you lose weight—just by taking a pill. The human body has two kinds of fat cells: white cells, which store excess calories in the form of flab, and brown cells, which burn energy to produce heat. “What we wanted to do is […]
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Jackson, Miss. Belated ratification: Mississippi officially ratified the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery—148 years late. The approval came after University of Mississippi medical professor Dr. Ranjan Batra watched the Oscar-nominated film Lincoln, and began looking into whether the state had ever endorsed the end of slavery. Batra discovered that by December 1865 the measure had been ratified by the three fourths […]
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Researchers have discovered a new map of the octopus genome that is so strange that it could actually be an “alien”. The first whole cephalopod gene sequence shows a striking level of complexity with 33,000 protein-coding genes identified – more than in a human. Not only that, the octopus DNA is highly rearranged – like cards shuffled and reshuffled in […]
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Feeling itchy from a sunburn, a bug bite or some other skin irritation is miserable, but the pleasure you get from scratching it isn’t just the absence of pain. It feels legitimately good to scratch, and the reason is fascinating. A 2008 study at Wake Forest University hooked people up to a MRI scanner and monitored brain activity when they […]
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Britain’s “decayed seaside resorts” have become a dumping ground for society’s outcasts, said Libby Purves. Towns like Blackpool, Margate, and Clacton-on-Sea were holiday destinations for generations of English families. But they began to decline in the 1970s, when package tours abroad became cheap and popular. Housing prices fell, and authorities began seeing the towns as places to warehouse people difficult […]
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A tiger briefly escaped from a Kansas circus and gave a patron quite a scare when it wandered into the ladies’ room. Jenna Krehbiel had just finished watching the big cat show and went into the bathroom, not knowing one of the cats had gotten away from its handlers. “You don’t expect to go in a bathroom door, have it […]
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China’s wealth gap has widened so much that the country now one of the most unequal outside of sub-Saharan Africa. A respected Chinese institute found this week that China’s Gini coefficient, a number that represents income inequality, has soared from 0.41 a decade ago to 0.61 today. Anything over 0.5 is considered to be destabilizing, and South Africa, where opulent […]
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Valletta, Malta Traffickers drown refugees: As many as 500 people, including scores of children, drowned off the coast of Malta when human traffickers rammed one of their boats. The traffickers had taken the group—which included Syrians, Palestinians, Egyptians, and Sudanese—by boat from Egypt and passed them to increasingly smaller boats during the journey. When the exhausted refugees refused to board […]
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Marijuana may now be legal in Colorado, said Jordan Weissmann, but do purchasers really know what they’re buying? New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd highlighted that problem last week by describing what happened when she went to Denver to sample edible marijuana. Dowd ate too much of a weed-laced candy bar, which had no dosing instructions, and spent eight hours […]
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