Just eight months ago, 6-year-old Emma Whitehead was gravely ill with leukemia and running out of options.Two rounds of chemotherapy had already failed, and a bone marrow transplant was no longer possible, The NewYorkTimes reports. So her parents opted for an experimental therapy developed at the University of Pennsylvania that aimed to enlist Emma’s own immune system in the fight […]
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American culture is sick, and secularism is the cause of our disease. That, said Steve Chapman, is the contention of religious conservatives like presidential candidate Rick Santorum, who insist that feminists, liberals, and gay marriage have undermined traditional morality, and that only a return to our Christian roots will cure what ails us. But all evidence suggests that this view […]
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Let it be known that you should enjoy your cup of joe now because it may become extinct due to climate change. Coffee beans need a certain type of climate to grow. Some of the coffee bean areas in Madagascar and Tanzania are disappearing due to climate change, deforestation, and disease. Wild coffee extinction is definitely a possible outcome. The […]
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■ A World War II veteran was able to hear a symphony he wrote 67 years ago for the first time, when the U.S. Army Orchestra premiered it in Washington, D.C. Retired Col. Harold Van Heuvelen, 93, was inspired by his experiences as a soldier to write a symphony in 1945, but it languished on the shelf for decades and […]
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Mysterious radio signals from space have been known to repeat, but for the first time, researchers have noticed a pattern in a series of bursts coming from a single source half a billion light-years from Earth. Fast radio bursts, or FRBs, are millisecond-long bursts of radio waves in space. Individual radio bursts emit once and don’t repeat. But repeating fast […]
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“This is the worst shelter she had ever seen,” Clare Forndran, media director for Dog Tales Rescue and Sanctuary. More than 250 dogs were squeezed into a space designed for about 70. “Dogs were literally fighting over a loaf of bread,” Forndran said. “There were more rats than dogs.” Eden couldn’t choose which dogs would have a chance at new […]
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If you go to the beach this summer you may come home with some bacteria from the water. Studies show that the water may be contaminated with all sorts of unsafe bacteria. Before rainwater can be absorbed by the ground or evaporated back into the air it travels down to the ocean waters through sewer pipes where it can pick […]
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Too much alone time can kill you. A study conducted by Brigham Young University found that isolation and loneliness are as bad for a person’s health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day or being an alcoholic. Researchers examined data from 35 years’ worth of studies on loneliness, and after accounting for participants’ socioeconomic status, age, gender, and pre-existing health conditions, […]
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A BBC poll surveyed more than 26,000 people around the world to rate their perception of 16 countries and the E.U. Here’s the ranking for nations viewed as “mainly positive.”
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Human beings appear to be genetically engineered to be happiest and healthiest when we spend a lot of time selflessly helping others—and unhealthy when we’re mostly devoted to self-gratification. That’s the eye-opening conclusion of University of North Carolina researchers, based on a study of 80 volunteers. The study subjects were asked how often they felt hedonic pleasure—the kind of happiness […]
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