The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria and its supporters produce as many as 90,000 tweets and other social media posts every day. The U.S. State Department is now assigning 80 people to counter ISIS’s propaganda on Twitter and Facebook.
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2,500 – Number of U.S. military dogs on duty worldwide $2,000,000 – Amount the U.S. spent on developing a robotic mule
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It turns out that there’s strong evidence to suggest that at least one kind of dolphin sound, studied extensively over the past decade, does function as a kind of referential symbol. Dolphins use distinct “signature whistles” to identify and call to one another. Each dolphin is thought to invent a unique name for itself as a calf and to keep […]
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To delay aging, spend more time standing up. That’s the surprising conclusion of a new study by Swedish scientists, reports The Daily Telegraph (U.K.). Researchers at Karolinska University Hospital in Stockholm took blood samples from a group of sedentary, overweight men and women, all 68 years old, and measured the length of their telomeres—caps on the ends of DNA that […]
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12-year-old Jaxxyn Wood of Kentucky stayed up to 3 a.m. playing computer games and smelled an electrical fire in the kitchen. He woke his family and got all nine people to evacuate, thus saving their lives.
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A New Zealand man showed up at a hospital emergency room with a live eel in his rectum. The man gave no explanation as to how the wriggling creature ended up where it was, but doctors were apparently able to remove it without complication. “The eel was about the size of a decent sprig of asparagus,” said a hospital employee, […]
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In 2012, some 2.9 million adults and teens tried an illicit drug for the first time. More than 80% of them used pot. Among all pot users, 40% take the drug 20 or more days a month. Two states have legalized it for recreational use.
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The pollster Ipsos MORI put the question to people in 20 countries. Here’s a sampling of how many said yes:
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Percentage of Americans and Chinese, respectively, who believe their government is “on the side of average citizens”: 12, 80 Who believe their government is “on the side of corporations”: 73, 17
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Chance that a Russian believes the sun revolves around the earth: 1 in 3
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