A new wave of demonstrations across Australia is planned for June after the government of Western Australia moved to close remote Aboriginal settlements, saying it could no longer afford to subsidize communities plagued by social problems such as alcohol and drug abuse.
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Number of times guns are used in self-defense each year in the U.S.: 180,000
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Colony collapse disorder, the mysterious scourge that has been killing off honeybees since 2005, has suddenly become a lot more deadly. This past winter, as many as half of all hives succumbed to the disorder—up from one third annually in recent years, and between 5 and 10 percent when hives were healthy. “It is a catastrophe in progress,” beekeeper Steve […]
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On the 35th anniversary of its launch, the Voyager 1 spacecraft is close to becoming the first man-made object to escape our solar system. The spacecraft—run by a 1977 computer 100,000 times less powerful than an iPod Nano—is currently 11.3 billion miles away. In 2004, Voyager 1 entered the turbulent boundary zone beyond Pluto, where solar winds encounter plasma pushing […]
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For every deceased person who is buried, four are now cremated.
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A new study has calculated that there are 5.25 trillion small and large pieces of plastic, weighing a total of 269,000 tons, floating in the world’s oceans
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A British woman has abstained from smiling for the last 40 years in an extreme attempt to ward off wrinkles. Tess Christian, 50, told the Daily Mail that she adopted a permanent poker face as a child to prevent laughter lines around her mouth, eyes, and forehead. “My dedication has paid off,” she said. “I don’t have a single line […]
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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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Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched India’s first air-quality index in April, but pollution will keep growing unless India stems coal production, which Modi has pledged to double by 2020.
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What’s most important—and troubling— is the decades-long, systemic expansion of the economic distance between the richest of the rich and the poorest of the poor, and the long, backward slide for the majority of those in-between.
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