■ A Brazilian school is teaching kids proper English by asking them to correct erroneously worded tweets by their favorite celebrities. The school asks its preteen students to point out grammar and spelling errors to the likes of Justin Bieber, Paris Hilton, and Charlie Sheen. In April, Bieber tweeted, “That was a long bus ride. But we here.” Maria, 9, […]
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Nobody Wanted To Help This Paralyzed Pup. But Then A Model Spotted Him Crawling Along A Beach. A relaxing walk along the beach is supposed to be a holiday highlight. However, for one vacationing model, it turned into a heartbreaking encounter. The paralyzed pup that was dragging his back legs across the ground to get to her seemed to be […]
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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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In southern Australia, it’s raining spiders. Spiders can ride the wind using an ingenious migration technique known as ballooning. Residents of Goulburn, Australia, received a startling demonstration of the phenomenon last week, when hundreds of thousands of tiny spiders descended from the sky on gossamer parachutes. “The whole place was covered in these little black spiderlings, and when I looked […]
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Roger Pasquier hunts for coins on NYC sidewalks and keeps track of how much he finds. He discovered an odd consequence of everyone having a smartphone: people don’t pick up change on the sidewalk anymore. From 1987 to 2006, he averaged about fifty-eight dollars a year. Then Apple introduced the iPhone, and millions of potential competitors started to stare at […]
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Since the late 1990s, when they began decoding the human genome, scientists have believed that 98 percent of DNA is “junk,” with no function. But new research shows that most of this genetic material serves as switches that turn genes on or off, which could explain why some people predisposed to certain diseases get them, while others don’t. Our genome […]
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New images of a galaxy located 60 million light-years from Earth have revealed that / it’s a cannibal. Composite pictures from the La Silla Observatory in Chile show that the NGC 1316 galaxy is strewn with dust N and small star clusters, space debris that astronomers say is the remains of another galaxy that was swallowed up by the black […]
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■ 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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Of the world’s billion Internet users, one in three logs on in English. That’s no surprise. The technology got its start in the U.S., most Web pages are English, and more than 60 percent of the U.S., Canadian, U.K., and Australian populations are online. But China is catching up. The number of Chinese speakers using the Internet is five times […]
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THE UNIVERSE IS A LOT OF THINGS, BUT EASY TO understand isn’t one of them. Take the fact that more than 80% of its mass is missing. Galaxies spin so fast, they would fly apart if the gravity of some unseen mass weren’t keeping them intact, sur rounding them like a glass paperweight encasing a butterfly. Cosmologists have been trying […]
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