Residents of rich countries are more likely to be affected by depression than those who live in poorer nations. That’s the startling conclusion World Health Organization researchers reached when they interviewed nearly 90,000 people in 18 countries about their mental health. France and the U.S. were the most depressed; 21 percent of French people and more than 19 percent […]
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Luckily for most of the U.S., the likelihood this eruption would happen is pretty low: about one in 100,000 any given year. If it did happen, it would be pretty devastating, though. “Thinking about a Yellowstone super eruption is like imagining a large asteroid hitting the Earth,” says Jacob Lowenstern, a research geologist with the USGS and Scientist-in-Charge of […]
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Feeling itchy from a sunburn, a bug bite or some other skin irritation is miserable, but the pleasure you get from scratching it isn’t just the absence of pain. It feels legitimately good to scratch, and the reason is fascinating. A 2008 study at Wake Forest University hooked people up to a MRI scanner and monitored brain activity when they […]
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Juba, South Sudan Army rapes, murders: South Sudanese soldiers have been gang raping young girls and then burning them alive, according to a new United Nations report. The army is trying to terrify the entire civilian population into fleeing rebel-held areas so that the rebels will have no support base. One survivor described how he hid in a river when […]
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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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An expedition team in Antarctica has successfully cleared away layers of thick ice from inside the hut of the famous Australian explorer Sir Douglas Mawson, revealing a century-old frozen bowl of peas, books on the shelves, candles, matches and “old-style woolen underwear”. The team used picks and chainsaws to remove the ice that had filled the main living quarters used […]
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India has been told that it cannot go ahead as planned with its ambitious plan for a huge expansion of its renewable energy sector, because it seeks to provide work for Indian people. The case against India was brought by the US. The ruling, by the World Trade Organization (WTO), says India’s National Solar Mission − which would create local […]
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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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Nature films and science documentaries usually portray Antarctica to be nothing but the most cold, isolated, almost anti-social continent on earth — at least if you’re not a penguin — but life at McMurdo Station disproves that. The 2011-2012 Antarctic southern summer season is now alive and kicking (after numerous delays), and “Mac Town” (as the residents of McMurdo call […]
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Global life expectancy has risen by more than six years since 1990 as healthy life expectancy grows; ischemic heart disease, lower respiratory infections, and stroke cause the most health loss around the world. SEATTLE — People around the world are living longer, even in some of the poorest countries, but a complex mix of fatal and nonfatal ailments cause a […]
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