They may not crow about it, but if you get on the wrong side of them, they’re not going to forget it in a hurry. Crows have an excellent memory for human faces, a study has revealed. They can tell the difference between a friendly face and a dangerous one, and can warn each other which is which. And the […]
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Few people have traveled to the South Pole since Roald Amundsen and Robert Falcon Scott reached the bottom of the world in the austral summer of 1911-12. Fewer still stay for the six months of darkness in the winter at the South Pole. The first crew to winter at the South Pole was in 1957, but only 1,267 people have spent the […]
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Astronomers have discovered two clouds of gas some 12 billion light-years away that appear to preserve the primordial conditions of the universe in the minutes after the big bang. The clouds contain just hydrogen and its isotope deuterium, making them “the first examples to fit precisely” into what scientists think the early universe was like, University of California astronomer Jason […]
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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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Residents of shorelines previously damaged by Hurricane Sandy turned to a cheap and plentiful resource to help them rebuild: discarded Christmas trees. The storm washed away miles of sand dunes, which protected the coast from flooding by serving as a buffer against wind and waves. Volunteers in New York and New Jersey piled thousands of the trees on top of […]
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Riesel, Texas: A group of young Texas boys helped to keep an elderly woman out of jail by mowing her unkempt lawn which had grown way above what city code allows. Suttle says she never received the notice to appear in court regarding her lawn. As a result, Riesel police issued a warrant for the arrest of the 75-year-old property […]
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Miami South Florida is battling a growing infestation of one of the world’s most destructive invasive species: the giant African land snail. At least 1,000 of the snails are being caught each week \ in Miami-Dade County, and a total of 117,000 of the mollusks have been caught since September 2011. They can grow as big as a rat and […]
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■ 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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■ When Phoenix police officer Natalie Simonick saw 18-year-old Christian Felix out after dark in March, she suspected he was violating curfew. But Felix told her he was walking six miles home from his job at McDonald’s, as he had missed the bus and didn’t own a bicycle. Simonick was so impressed with the teen’s work ethic that she decided […]
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■ When Lindsay Crumbley Scallan lost her underwater camera in the waters off Maui, Hawaii, in 2007, she figured her precious vacation photos were gone forever. But six years later, Scallan’s camera washed up on a beach over 5,200 miles away inTaiwan, with its memory card intact. Scallan was identified after pictures of her from the camera were shown on […]
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