■ Cara Jumper, 10, expected a fun day with her grandpa at the family fishing hole in South Carolina. But when Coy Jumper suffered a stroke and fell into deep water, the petite girl found herself leaping to his rescue and saving him from drowning. Cara then had to drag her 230-pound grandfather a quarter mile through the woods, get […]
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To the surprise of doctors, new research on acupuncture has found that the ancient Chinese healing technique provides real pain relief. Acupuncture involves sticking needles into specific points in the body that Chinese healers believe contain unseen energy pathways; the needles supposedly stimulate the flow of “qi,” or energy. Western medicine has viewed these claims with deep skepticism, contending that […]
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Human-like sounds made by a captive beluga whale suggest that cetaceans could learn to mimic our voices, and perhaps even converse with us. Researchers at the National Marine Mammal Foundation first noticed in the 1980s that one of their whales was attempting to copy the speech patterns of his handlers and they began recording his human-like vocalizations. Recently, they analyzed […]
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■ The 15-year-old son of an accused mugger met this week with his father’s alleged victim to make amends. Christian Lunsford sought out Tona Herndon—who had her purse snatched while visiting her late husband’s gravesite in Bethany, Okla.—after learning that his father, Shane, had been arrested for the crime. The teenager met with Herndon to apologize and give back $250 […]
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■ When Paula O’Brien met Abbey Donohoe at a party in Davenport, Iowa, in 2009, people said they looked like sisters.They hit it off despite an 11-year age gap, and became Facebook friends. But a chance posting by O’Brien this month clued Donohoe into a remarkable coincidence—the two are in fact aunt and niece. O’Brien noted the birthday of her […]
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Mayo Sleep Clinic in Arizona surveyed 150 patients about sleep habits Found those who sleep with pets ‘feel more safe and secure’ But 20 per cent say sleep interrupted by ‘wandering or whimpering’ Animal lovers have been warned for years that having a pet in the bedroom may affect their sleep. Dogs and cats snore, fidget, wake up […]
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If you work at a desk, you should get up on your feet for at least two hours a day to avoid the serious health consequences of prolonged sitting, a panel of scientists has recommended.The average office worker sits for 10 hours a day, then heads home to spend the evening glued to a television or computer screen. A growing […]
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All the gold on Earth was forged in the collisions of massively dense stars billions of years ago. Astronomers have come to this conclusion after observing and analyzing the afterglow of a crash between two neutron stars in a galaxy 3.9 billion light-years away that yielded a hoard of gold likely equal to the mass of 20 Earths. “At today’s […]
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Supermassive black holes that have escaped their host galaxies may be wandering the universe alone. Intriguing new observations i by NASA’s Chandra X-ray telescope have | revealed what appears to be a supermassive | black hole being “kicked out of a galaxy at enormous speed,” Francesca Civano of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics tells Space.com. Astronomers observed two distinct light […]
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Stars are not born alone. Rather, they emerge from clouds of gas and dust in groups of up to 10,000, then slowly scatter through space. For the first time, astronomers have identified a star that came from the same solar nursery as our sun, some 4.5 billion years ago. This stellar relative—located 110 light-years away in the constellation Hercules—is hotter […]
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