■ A police station in northern France is storing so much seized marijuana that officers are getting high off the fumes. “The odor is really strong” said one officer. “After a day, you are stoned.” About 88 pounds of weed has piled up at the Roubaix station because of a strike at the agency that is supposed to dispose of […]
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Researchers have discovered a new map of the octopus genome that is so strange that it could actually be an “alien”. The first whole cephalopod gene sequence shows a striking level of complexity with 33,000 protein-coding genes identified – more than in a human. Not only that, the octopus DNA is highly rearranged – like cards shuffled and reshuffled in […]
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■ A Georgia college student faked his own kidnapping to avoid telling his parents he was flunking English. After receiving the F grade, Aftab Aslam, 19, texted his parents on behalf of a group of make-believe abductors, warning them not to call police or he would be killed. He camped out for eight days but came home when the weather […]
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“Trainwreck” hilariously depicts some sobering news: Alcohol consumption is on the rise among educated professional women. And in a high-pressure culture where workdays can end in rounds of drinks, collegial boozing is creating some tricky situations. For the young creatives at one Washington, D.C.-based marketing agency, grabbing a beer together is as typical as a group coffee run. And on […]
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Germans are sending their aging parents abroad, said Anette Dowideit. With pensions flat and nursing costs rising, families often can’t afford to put Grandma in an elder-care program close to home. So over the past decade, they have turned to countries where such services are much cheaper— mostly in former Eastern bloc states like the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, and […]
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Studies have shown that cockroaches break wind on the average of every 15 minutes. Even after death they will continue to release methane for up to 18 hours. In a global scale, insect flatulence is estimated to account for 20% of all methane emissions. This puts the cockroach as one of the biggest contributors to Global Warming.
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A crew of goats brought in to devour invasive plants at a popular park in Oregon’s state capital, Salem, have been fired because they ate indiscriminately, cost nearly five times as much as human landscapers and smelled far worse, a city official said on Friday. The 75 billy and nanny goats were supposed to eat Armenian blackberry and English ivy […]
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“Losing is good for you,” said Ashley Merryman. But as your children return to school and fall sports, they are stepping back into a fantasyland where everybody is a winner and everybody gets a trophy. “Trophies were once rare things,” but manufacturers now churn out $3 billion worth of them a year. In one California youth soccer league, every player […]
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This pesticide – chlorpyrifos – was banned by the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) about 20 years ago for indoor use and was in the process of banning it for outdoor use when Dow Chemical made a million-dollar donation to President Trump’s inauguration committee, they reversed their decision. These toxic chemicals have been known to cause brain damage, low IQ’s, lung […]
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■ 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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