Poland is giving up the liberties it fought so hard to gain, said Jacek Zakowski. There was “no coup, no fanfare, no lofty ideas or slogans.” But slowly and incrementally, our own democratically elected government has been passing law after law restricting our freedoms. In the past six months, we’ve granted the government permission to track us through our cellphone […]
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Possibly in the next 40 million years Mars may develop a ring around it. NASA says that it is quite possible because the moon Phobos of Mars is getting closer to the planet. It is on a collision course where instead of it colliding with the planet it will break up and make a ring around it. Another theory is […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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It was in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age that the modern concept of celebrity was born, said George Packer. But if the worship of gaudy wealth and fame began in The Great Gatsby era, we’ve taken it to new, “perverse” heights in 21st-century America. Today, celebrity demigods dominate every field: There are celebrity chefs, bankers, computer engineers, chief executives, hip-hop […]
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Plenty of research has proved that meditation and yoga can lower blood pressure, improve mood, counter stress, and benefit your mental and physical health. Now a new study has shown for the first time that these ancient centering practices can actually affect your genes, turning beneficial ones on and harmful ones off. Researchers analyzed the genes of 26 volunteers who […]
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A beluga whale has decided that it doesn’t want to leave a Norwegian port. It has decided that humans are something to play with. Russian Spy Whale On the harness there was an inscription – Property of St. Petersburg. A Russian spy whale? Since beluga don’t usually like being around humans it was very strange to spot this one outside […]
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