Facts & Trends

A Chinese fishmonger found a 3-pound live bomb inside a squid he was cutting up.  Police took the squid away and blew it up in a controlled explosion ...

The U.S. now has 2.3 billion square feet of self-storage space, constituting more than 7 square feet for every citizen ...

An Icelandic public broadcast station aired 24 hours of live sheep birthing, part of its “slow TV” campaign, which also featured chess, knitting, and wood-burning ...

A wild rhesus macaque who’s stalked Tampa Bay for three years bit and scratched an elderly woman.  “He gets up in my tree and starts shaking it because he wants to be fed,” said Jeff Seilbach, a neighbor of the ...

Men kick friendship around like a football but it doesn’t seem to break. Women treat it like glass and it goes to pieces ...

Gallup ranked 143 countries by how great a share of respondents said they had recently had positive experiences such as laughter or enjoyment. A sampling, from greatest to least: 1 - Paraguay 8 - Costa Rica 15 - U.S. 134 ...

A record 38 million people were displaced in their own countries at the end of 2014, according to the Norwegian Refugee Council. Here’s a sampling: Syria - 7.6 million Colombia - 6 million Democratic Republic of Congo - 2.8 million ...

Percentage of the world's 25 largest news organizations that have been targeted by state-backed hackers: 84 ...

"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 ...

Mercury, the closest planet to the sun, has blistering 800-degree temperatures at its equator—but its poles are full of ice. New data from NASA's Messenger spacecraft, which began orbiting Mercury last year, has revealed that as much as a trillion ...