Pompey the Great’s soldiers were bone tired. For most of 65 BCE, Roman legions marched around the southern edge of the Black Sea as they battled the local ruler, Mithridates VI of Pontus. Then, something magical happened: The exhausted troops discovered a stockpile of honeycombs strewn across their path, and they fell upon the sticky treats like hungry bears. But […]
Read more
The eight-hour work day is becoming obsolete, as companies pressure employees for “productivity”—that is, long work days. But employees ‘may pay the ultimate price for overworking, a new British study finds. Researchers followed more than 7,000 healthy, middle-aged U.K. government employees for roughly 12 years and discovered that those who reported clocking 11-hour days had a 67 percent higher risk […]
Read more
Baluchistan, Pakistan A massive earthquake in Pakistan’s province of Baluchistan killed hundreds of people and created a new island off the coast. The magnitude-7.7 tremor flattened entire mud-brick villages. Troops deployed to fight an insurgency of separatist Baluchis were on hand to help rescue people, but the affected area is so huge that it will take days to reach some […]
Read more
A woman in El Paso, Texas has been arrested after trying to rob a jewelry store disguised in a black trash bag. Noemi Duchene and Luis Del Castillo arrived at Estate and New Jewelry store, where a security camera captured footage of Duchene, now referred to as “The Wheelchair Bandit” exiting a wheelchair covering her head and upper body with a […]
Read more
Astronomers have spotted the most enormous black holes ever detected, inspiring new theories about how such pockets of extreme gravity form. Together, the two objects, which are roughly 300 million light-years away, have more mass than 30 billion suns, University of California at Berkeley astrophysicist Chung-Pei Ma tells the Associated Press. “They are monstrous,” she says. The smaller of the […]
Read more
Pet stores in China are struggling to meet demand for the country’s latest animal craze—chow dogs dyed black-and-white to make them look like pandas. “Ten years ago the natural instinct of a Chinese person was to eat a dog,” said pet-store owner Hsin Ch’en. “Now we are like Westerners and want one as a companion.” Hsin said the panda dogs […]
Read more
■ Brazilian taxi driver Adilson Luiz da Cruz often finds lost phones and forgotten umbrellas in his cab, but last week he hit the jackpot: 40 tickets to the World Cup. Despite his lifelong dream of going to the tournament, plus the thousands of dollars he could have earned by scalping the tickets, the cabbie didn’t hesitate to do the […]
Read more
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 […]
Read more
If you want to go for a walk but don’t want to go alone, you can call Chuck McCarthy and he will come walk with you for $7 a mile. While you are walking you have someone to talk to that will listen and you don’t need a leash. Since he is an underemployed actor, he thought “what can I […]
Read more
The Flint water crisis. A health catastrophe uncovered by a doctor at the Flint, MI Public Hospital. Dr. Mona as she is referred to is also a professor at Flint, MI state university’s College of Medicine. Call it fate, but Dr. Mona was in the right place at the right time when she discovered the horrific safety hazards posed by […]
Read more