Let it be known that you should enjoy your cup of joe now because it may become extinct due to climate change. Coffee beans need a certain type of climate to grow. Some of the coffee bean areas in Madagascar and Tanzania are disappearing due to climate change, deforestation, and disease. Wild coffee extinction is definitely a possible outcome. The […]
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Russian teens are killing themselves en masse, and the authorities “seem oblivious,” said Alexander Tretyakov. The country has long had one of the world’s highest teen suicide rates, and in the past decade it’s gotten worse. Thousands of teens have joined “suicide forums” on Vkontakte, the Russian equivalent of Facebook. There they share stories of abuse and desperation and trade […]
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Budapest Power grab: In the face of mass protests and international condemnation, the Hungarian parliament has overwhelmingly passed 15 pages of amendments to the country’s 1-year-old constitution that practically abolish all judicial checks on the government. The amendments retroactively restore a number of controversial laws that were passed by the right-wing Fidesz government but subsequently ruled unconstitutional by the courts. […]
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Thomas Moore a fifth grader from Maryland decided that he wanted to help cancer patients by donating his hair. It took him two years to get it long enough to donate. The longer his hair grew he had to keep it in cornrows to help it stay nice and tame. After a while the braids started to hurt his head, […]
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Bulgarians hate old people, said Ruslan Jordanov. I’m not kidding. In a recent survey, 58 percent of Bulgarians surveyed admitted to disliking the elderly, making them even more reviled than the Roma—quite a feat in Bulgaria. No wonder “nobody ever gets up to give them a seat on the tram.” Long ago, our society revered grandparents as fonts of wisdom. […]
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An enormous iceberg in Antarctica has killed off 150,000 penguins and threatens to wipe out an entire colony, which has become trapped and unable to reach food. A study by researchers from New Zealand and Australia said only about 10,000 Adélie penguins have survived after an iceberg – labelled B09B – grounded in a bay in 2010. The grounding, at […]
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The Japanese are working themselves to death. Labor activists have been trying to draw attention to the problem of karoshi, or death from overwork, for decades. Reliable statistics can’t be found, because it’s hard to prove causation in the case of someone who, say, worked 36 hours in a row several times in the same month and then died of […]
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If you take Acetaminophen for pain you may also be dulling your empathy. Over 50 million people take acetaminophen for their pain every week, but it may also dull your sensitivity to others pain and distress. After taking 1000mg of acetaminophen students were given eight articles to read about very sad family situations. In this study they showed very low […]
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On the mountainous outskirts of Shenzhen, a fast-growing mega-city in China, the largest waste-to-energy plant in the world is on the horizon. You can bet that this disk-shaped trash-burning plant isn’t going to do any wonders for China’s notoriously bad air quality. It’s projected to burn 5,500 tons of trash per day — one-third of the waste Shenzhen produces. But the alternative […]
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It is finally here – the Male Contraceptive Pill. Male Birth Control Pill Expected to Start Human Trials in 2022. The new non-hormonal pill was 99 percent effective at preventing pregnancy in mice. The male birth control pill could offer a more flexible option for men while also reinforcing two important facts: that men and women are both responsible for […]
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