Facts & Trends

American men are weighing in at an average of 196 pounds—16 pounds more than in 1990, a new Gallup survey has found.The average weight for women jumped 14 pounds—to 156 pounds— over the same period. Gallup estimates 62 percent of ...

When communities like San Francisco and Seattle began banning plastic bags, said Ramesh Ponnuru, it seemed like a public-spirited thing to do. But' benign-seeming laws often have unintended consequences— and the plastic-bag ban is now producing a sickening result. The ...

The graduating class of 2015 is the most indebted in history, owing a total of $56 billion in student loans.  About 71 percent of college students graduating this year took out loans, at an average of $35,051 each.  In 1996, ...

Delhi’s air now contains twice as much toxic matter as that of notoriously smoggy Beijing. The health impact has been disastrous, with children in Delhi now three times as likely as others in India to develop severe lung disorders ...

Number of U.S. police officers who have been prosecuted in the past decade for shooting someone in the back: 28 Number convicted: 6 ...

Parts of the Northeast received up to 18 inches of snow over Memorial Day weekend.  Snow blanketed parts of Vermont, New Hampshire, and upstate New York ...

Ripley’s Believe It or Not! museum is already home to an artist’s rendition of da Vinci’s “The Last Supper” made from burned toast, and now comes a recent version by Laura Bell of Roscommon, MI — da Vinci’s masterpiece made ...

Children and young adults who are bullied are more than twice as likely to consider suicide and two and a half times as likely to try to kill themselves, a new study has concluded—and those taunted online are even more ...

Americans own nearly 300 million firearms, a new national study found.  This translates to nearly nine guns for every 10 people, a per capita ownership rate nearly 50 percent higher than any other country's ...

. . . a reptile experience, after a Michigan firefighter who’d handled snakes as a teen ran into a burning home and carefully rescued a 6-foot-long python.  None of the other firefighters “wanted anything to do with it.” ...