A body of water

■    Tourists at a Los Angeles hotel were distressed to learn they’d been drinking, bathing, and brushing their teeth with water from a rooftop tank in which a dead body had been decomposing. The body was discovered by a maintenance worker who was trying to figure out why the water pressure was so low. “The water did have a funny […]

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Neanderthals—the other white meat

Neanderthals, a sturdy hominid species closely related to Homo sapiens, lived in Europe for about 270,000 years until humans arrived on the continent, about 30,000 years ago, at which point they quickly disappeared. The latest theory for their puzzling extinction is that humans exterminated, and maybe even ate, their Neanderthal cousins. French anthropologist Fernando that the bacterial disease was present […]

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Why insomnia makes you eat

The less sleep you get, the more likely you are to be overweight. Now, The New York Times reports, scientists have discovered one reason why: Sleep loss causes changes in the brain that make you crave high-calorie foods and weakens your willpower to resist them. Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, scanned the brains of volunteers while they looked […]

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Indian state requires candidates to own a toilet before they can run in village elections

Authorities in an east Indian state have made it mandatory for candidates contesting village elections to have a toilet in their home as part of a move to improve sanitation in the country, a senior official said. On Wednesday, the Bihar state assembly passed an act mandating that candidates must confirm that they have a toilet inside their home in […]

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Sodas speed up aging

Drinking sugary sodas has been proved to lead to obesity, diabetes, and heart attacks. Now researchers have found evidence that the drinks could also speed up the body’s aging process. One of the signs of the aging process is that the caps on the end of people’s chromosomes, known as telomeres, tend to shrink. When scientists at the University of […]

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Here come the killer robots

If you think drone warfare has created some tricky moral dilemmas, said Robert H. Latiff and Patrick J. McCloskey, just wait until we start sending robotic soldiers into battle. Early prototypes of robots that can hunt down and destroy enemies with ferocious firepower are in development, and “what now seems like the stuff of Hollywood fantasy is moving toward realization.” […]

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A rodent as big as a buffalo

Modern-day mousetraps wouldn’t stand a chance against the supersize rodents that roamed South America about 2 million years ago, National Geographic reports. A giant ancestor of the guinea pig, Josephoartigasia monesi weighed more than 2,000 pounds and stood 5 feet tall, roughly the size of a modern buffalo. Because the critter also sported foot-long buckteeth, University of York scientists wanted […]

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