Cool

89-year-old Californian gets to graduate

■ Don Miyada was just a month shy of graduating in 1942 when he was pulled from school and sent to an internment camp in Arizona along with 17,000 other Japanese-Americans. Miyada received his diploma in the mail, but he ...

Our sun’s hotter sister

Stars are not born alone. Rather, they emerge from clouds of gas and dust in groups of up to 10,000, then slowly scatter through space. For the first time, astronomers have identified a star that came from the same solar ...
Deep space

Astronomical Declaration

Scientists have made an astronomical declaration, stating that there is likely ten times the amount of galaxies in our universe than originally expected. The previous amount was believed to be about 200 billion, but now it is believed to be ...

When spiders fall from the sky

In southern Australia, it’s raining spiders. Spiders can ride the wind using an ingenious migration technique known as ballooning. Residents of Goulburn, Australia, received a startling demonstration of the phenomenon last week, when hundreds of thousands of tiny spiders descended ...

Lottery winners give back

■    A Missouri couple have used their record lottery winnings to improve their hometown. Mark and Cindy Hill have spent chunks of their $293 million fortune on the town of Camden Point buying it a new firehouse and baseball field, ...
Mapping the infant universe

Mapping the infant universe

Mapping the infant universe is no easy task. New data from the European Space Agency’s Planck satellite is giving astronomers their most complete look yet at the very earliest moments of the universe. Planck, which measures microwave radiation, has created ...

Study: Painkillers Dull Pleasure

Every week, more than 50 million Americans take acetaminophen, the active ingredient in Tylenol and many other popular painkillers, to ease their aches and pains. But a new study has revealed that the drug also dulls emotions—including happiness. Prior research ...

Watching paint dry leads to Guinness world record

Mike Carmichael simply wanted to do something weird when he and his 3-year-old son slapped a coat of blue paint on a baseball in 1977. The central Indiana resident stuck with painting the ball, which grew large enough to make ...

Most of us are parking the wrong way

AAA says more than 76 percent of U.S. drivers are parking the wrong way. "U.S. drivers most frequently park their vehicle by pulling forward into a parking spot ... a riskier practice that driving experts warn leaves pedestrians more vulnerable." So ...

Could we talk with whales?

Human-like sounds made by a captive beluga whale suggest that cetaceans could learn to mimic our voices, and perhaps even converse with us. Researchers at the National Marine Mammal Foundation first noticed in the 1980s that one of their whales ...