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.
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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.
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259 – Number of U.S. military active-duty suicides in 2013
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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 […]
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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.”
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Percentage of U.S. women prisoners who are mothers of young children: 61
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“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
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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.
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About a dozen inmates die behind bars each day, or about 4,400 jail and prison inmates each year. In jails, suicide is the leading cause of death.
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Percentage of the average “knowledge worker’s” time that is spent reading and writing emails: 28
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