Overdoses of prescription painkillers have become one of the leading causes of death among women. More women now die from overdoses of prescription pills like OxyContin, Vicodin, and Percocet than from cervical cancer, homicide, or street drugs such as heroin and cocaine, a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows. “We need to better understand how […]
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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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■ A 96-year-old Indian man has been declared the world’s oldest father after his wife bore a son last month—the second in two years. Ramjeet Raghav, a farmer in a village about 30 miles from Delhi, said the doctors who delivered the healthy boy in a nearby hospital were surprised when he told them he was the father. “I think […]
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Getting enough sleep may help you maintain good health. That may sound fairly simple, but most people don’t get enough sleep. A survey of over 30.000 people in England found that the people that got the right amount of sleep were happier and healthier. The researchers found that even though they had enough sleep they may not have had a […]
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Long ago, in the largest canyon system in our solar system, vibrations from “marsquakes” shook soft sediments that had accumulated in Martian lakes. The shaken sediments formed features that now appear as a series of low hills apparent in a geological map based on NASA images. The map was released today by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). This map of […]
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■ A Virginia teenager was booted out of her prom after fathers acting as chaperones complained that her sparkly mini-dress would “cause the young men at the prom to think impure thoughts.”The 17-year-old had made sure the dress met Richmond Homeschool Prom’s regulations for length. But she said dads who were “ogling” her as she danced suddenly sent a security […]
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Facebook can make you unhappy. Researchers texted study participants five times a day with questions about their social-networking activity and how they felt, and found that Facebook visits directly correlated with negative emotions, such as depression and loneliness. While Facebook seems to fulfill “the basic human need for social connection,” says University of Michigan social psychologist Ethan Kross, it can […]
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Supermassive black holes that have escaped their host galaxies may be wandering the universe alone. Intriguing new observations i by NASA’s Chandra X-ray telescope have | revealed what appears to be a supermassive | black hole being “kicked out of a galaxy at enormous speed,” Francesca Civano of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics tells Space.com. Astronomers observed two distinct light […]
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Joining the U.S. would be a net loss for Canada— even if it made us Canadians richer, said Conrad Black. It’s not that the idea of a merger, currently touted by journalist Diane Francis in her book Merger of the Century, makes me “tremble with patriotic loathing”—after all, I once suggested that joining the U.S. would be preferable for English […]
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It has been reported that there is a decline in male fertility in a study conducted between the years 1973 and 2011 that involved over 43,000 men from North America, Europe, New Zealand and Australia. Since it only takes one sperm to make a baby the decline is in quantity – men produce over a million – but not in […]
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