Crack cocaine is one of the most addictive drugs because of its strong, quick-onset high that lasts minutes, leaving users wanting more. Less addictive drugs are not necessarily less dangerous. Opioid pills, for example, can be gateway drugs to heroin.
Read more
A ladder might be installed near the peak of Mount Everest. Authorities in Nepal say the ladder would provide a shortcut over a steep cliff, and thus ease congestion near the 29,035-foot-high summit of the world’s tallest mountain.
Read more
259 – Number of U.S. military active-duty suicides in 2013
Read more
Sorry, science-fiction fans: Time travel is impossible. That is the sobering conclusion, anyway, of a Hong Kong-based team of physicists. They found that the maximum speed of a single photon, the basic unit of light, “obeys the traffic law of the universe,” Agence France-Presse reports. The photon cannot go faster than the speed of light—186,282 miles per second—and thus provides […]
Read more
A specimen of the world’s largest flower, the titan arum, is about to bloom at the U.S. Botanic Garden in Washington, D.C. To attract carrion insects, the flower emits a stench botanists likened to “a very dead elephant.”
Read more
Almost one in three Americans has been arrested for a crime other than a traffic violation by the age of 23, according to a new study of 7,335 young people. The 30 percent arrest rate, sociologists said, reflects a more aggressive societal attitude toward such crimes as vandalism, underage drinking, drunken driving, shoplifting, and drug possession.
Read more
Percentage of U.S. women prisoners who are mothers of young children: 61
Read more
A Paralympic medal winner who spent half her life in a wheelchair has made a miraculous recovery, and now hopes to represent her country in the Olympics. Monique van der Vorst had been paralyzed from the waist down since the age of 13, and won two silver medals as a hand-cyclist in the 2008 Paralympic Games. But the 27-year-old Dutch athlete […]
Read more
“Yes, we did produce a near-perfect republic. But will they keep it? Or will they, in the enjoyment of plenty, lose the memory of freedom? Material abundance without character is the surest way to destruction.” – Thomas Jefferson
Read more
Timeliness, after scientists unveiled an atomic clock so accurate that it won’t lose or gain a single second in 15 billion years, which is roughly as long as the universe has existed.
Read more