Could obesity be treated as a form of drug addiction? A new study suggests that some overweight people may be addicted to eating in the same way that, say, a cocaine addict craves another hit of his favorite drug. Researchers at Yale University gave a small group of young women questionnaires to determine their levels of food addiction. Then they […]
Read more
Africa’s lions are dwindling toward extinction at an alarming rate, Duke University researchers say. Using new high-resolution satellite data from Google Earth, they’ve discovered that the savanna habitat that lions need to survive has shrunk by 75 percent over the past 50 years and is far more fragmented than conservationists previously realized. Over the same period, the lion population is […]
Read more
Luckily for most of the U.S., the likelihood this eruption would happen is pretty low: about one in 100,000 any given year. If it did happen, it would be pretty devastating, though. “Thinking about a Yellowstone super eruption is like imagining a large asteroid hitting the Earth,” says Jacob Lowenstern, a research geologist with the USGS and Scientist-in-Charge of […]
Read more
Researchers using a high-tech aerial mapping technique called LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) revealed contours hidden by dense foliage. They may have found tens of thousands of previously undetected Mayan houses, buildings, and pyramids in the dense jungle of Guatemala’s Petén region. The researchers believe that there were millions more people living there than previously thought. The estimate is that […]
Read more
People living in Changchun, northeast China’s Jilin province have called for old public toilets that were partly converted into a restaurant to be put back to their original use, according to chinanews.com. “Why can’t we use this public toilet? I have to climb up six flights of stairs back home to use the toilet,” a senior resident surnamed Zhao said. […]
Read more
Suddenly everyone wants to be low-caste, said Badri Narayan. It used to be considered an extreme disadvantage to be in one of India’s oppressed castes or indigenous tribes. But decades of affirmative action and quota systems have changed all that. Now, many lower-middle castes are agitating to be reclassified as “more backward,” in effect “struggling to move down the ladder […]
Read more
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 […]
Read more
A man snorkeling in the Colorado River near the Arizona and California border sent authorities on a hunt after he alerted them to what appeared to be “skeletal remains” at the bottom of the river. After he called police in Arizona, authorities launched a search for the remains on Monday, and divers from the Buckskin Fire Department swam down to […]
Read more
A research group tested a group of about 125 cyclists aged between 50 and around 80 – ¾ of the group were male and ¼ were female. They did not study any people with high blood pressure, alcoholics, smokers, or any other health problems. Another group of non-exercising adults aged between 50 to 80 and 20 to 36 underwent tests […]
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