Calorie Information
Chance that an American fast-food customer uses posted calorie information to make food buying decisions: 1 in 6
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Cost of Tobacco
$15.6 BILLION – The amount of money Quebec Justice Brian Riordan ruled three tobacco companies must pay to more than 1 million smokers in Quebec who have become ill from tobacco use or say they can’t quit smoking. The companies said they would appeal the ruling.
Read moreWeight Gain In America
The average American woman now weighs 166.2 pounds, about the same as the average American man weighed in the early 1960’s. Over the same time period, U.S. men have gained nearly 30 pounds, from 166.3 in the ’60’s to 195.5 today.
Read moreDriving Days
The riskiest hour of the week for fatal traffic accidents is 2 a.m. to 3 a.m. on Saturday. The safest day for driving: Tuesday.
Read moreObese Americans
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 Americans are either overweight or obese.
Read moreU.S. Shark Attacks
52: Number of unprovoked shark attacks in the U.S. last year (compared with 20 elsewhere in the world). None were fatal. 28: Number of attacks in Florida, the most of any state. Runners-up were Hawaii (seven), South Carolina (five), California (four) and North Carolina (four). 65%: Percentage of attacks involving surfers (or people doing other board sports); 32% involved swimmers. The rest involved […]
Read moreSlow TV
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.
Read moreBritish Accent
A British accent is the most attractive in the world, according to a poll of 11,000 people in 24 cities around the world. An American accent came in second, followed by Irish and Australian. French, once considered the language of love, finished in fifth place.
Read moreStairway to heaven
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 moreTime travel
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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