■ South Central Los Angeles is more famous for drive-by shootings than well-kept gardens, but one native son is getting locals to trade their sawed-off shotguns for shovels. Ron Finley, who styles himself the “Gangsta Gardener” is encouraging Angelenos to cultivate vegetable and fruit gardens in vacant lots in deprived neighborhoods. He has co-founded a charity, L.A. Green Grounds, to […]
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We invented plastic to make our lives better but the dependence on plastic has caused an environmental crisis. Will we be able to reduce our use before it’s too late? Your day has begun by turning off the alarm of your cell phone, you have brushed your teeth, brushed and combed your hair, gotten dressed, grabbed a juice bottle, water […]
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The rate of girls and young women causing self-harm is on the rise starting with girls as young as 10 years old. These women and girls are taking more pills, cutting themselves, poisoning, and other forms of self-harm. This rate in 2014 was 6.4% of 16 to 74-year-olds up from 2.4% in 2000 in a study from Lancet Psychiatry. Very […]
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Public urination is a problem in most major cities of the world, but now another town is using technology to “pee back” the perpetrators, so to speak. Authorities in the St. Pauli district of Hamburg, Germany, had the walls in this well-known red light district sprayed with a super-hydrophobic nano-coating which is so water repellent that, as tech website gizmag.com […]
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A scary new trend among college students combines starvation with binge drinking, says TheAtlantic.com. Researchers say “drunkorexia” now affects as many as one in four college students, who diet all day so that they can drink at night without gaining weight. In one recent study of 22,000 students at 40 universities, those who reported working out or dieting to shed […]
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In southern Australia, it’s raining spiders. Spiders can ride the wind using an ingenious migration technique known as ballooning. Residents of Goulburn, Australia, received a startling demonstration of the phenomenon last week, when hundreds of thousands of tiny spiders descended from the sky on gossamer parachutes. “The whole place was covered in these little black spiderlings, and when I looked […]
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Russian orphanages are a scandal, said Jennifer Rankin. State institutions house nearly 400,000 children, a population larger than many cities. But less than one third of these children are actually orphans. Many “fall into the system when their parents, often fighting a losing battle with alcohol or drugs,” lose their parental rights. Even more of them—nearly half the total—have disabilities, […]
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The Republicans have a euphemism for undocumented workers— illegals — said Peter Beinart. With a tone of disgust, that single, dehumanizing noun has become the GOP presidential candidates’ preferred way to describe the millions of human beings picking our produce, cooking our food, cutting our lawns, and watching over our kids. It’s “the latest in a long line of euphemisms […]
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Researchers have found some 200 million termite mounds that stretch for thousands of miles across northeastern Brazil. The area measures 88,000 square miles an area larger than the state of Minnesota. They stand about 10 feet tall, about 30 feet wide, and may be up to 4000 years old. The only way to see these mounds is by using a […]
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■ A Missouri couple have used their record lottery winnings to improve their hometown. Mark and Cindy Hill have spent chunks of their $293 million fortune on the town of Camden Point buying it a new firehouse and baseball field, refurbishing the town’s waste-water system, and topping up the high school scholarship fund.The Hills’ gifts amounted to 25 years of […]
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