A helium balloon launched by a British schoolboy was discovered in Australia after making an incredible 10,545-mile journey across the world. Joshua Blackaby, 6, from Alvaston, England, released a balloon tied to a letter in December as part of a school project. Three months later, his family received a note from a girl named Millie, informing them that she’d found […]
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Researchers have discovered a new map of the octopus genome that is so strange that it could actually be an “alien”. The first whole cephalopod gene sequence shows a striking level of complexity with 33,000 protein-coding genes identified – more than in a human. Not only that, the octopus DNA is highly rearranged – like cards shuffled and reshuffled in […]
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■ An Australian groom showed up so drunk for his wedding that a minister refused to perform the ceremony and his furious fiancee broke up with him. When Jacob Brookes, 41, allegedly stumbled into the church still drunk from his bachelor party, the reverend tried to walk out—prompting a scuffle that led to Brookes’s arrest. Brookes denied being intoxicated. “I […]
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Inhabitants of towns in the Heilongjiang area of China reported three UFOs tumbled from the sky on Friday morning, as per the China News Service. The roundabout, metallic articles collided with the ground of two provinces after “villagers heard…a tremendous piercing sound, and after that a few villagers saw a major fireball” that in the long run fell in a […]
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Jackson, Miss. Belated ratification: Mississippi officially ratified the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery—148 years late. The approval came after University of Mississippi medical professor Dr. Ranjan Batra watched the Oscar-nominated film Lincoln, and began looking into whether the state had ever endorsed the end of slavery. Batra discovered that by December 1865 the measure had been ratified by the three fourths […]
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PANAMA CITY, Fla. (AP) — A former waitress has settled her lawsuit against Hooters, the restaurant that gave her a toy Yoda doll instead of the Toyota she thought she had won. Jodee Berry, 27, won a beer sales contest at the Panama City Beach Hooters. She believed she had won a new Toyota and happily was escorted to the […]
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“Man charged with throwing alligator into fast food restaurant”, read the headlines when this Florida fast food restaurant got a customer it wasn’t expecting who tossed a live alligator through a drive-thru window. Joshua James, 23, of Jupiter, Florida, had wanted to play a practical joke on a friend working at the Wendy’s restaurant in Royal Palm Beach when he […]
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Neanderthals, a sturdy hominid species closely related to Homo sapiens, lived in Europe for about 270,000 years until humans arrived on the continent, about 30,000 years ago, at which point they quickly disappeared. The latest theory for their puzzling extinction is that humans exterminated, and maybe even ate, their Neanderthal cousins. French anthropologist Fernando that the bacterial disease was present […]
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Prison officials in Tennessee say an inmate escaped from jail by smearing himself in grease and squeezing between the bars of his cell. Kristopher White, 23, is 5-foot-11 and 165 pounds, yet he managed to writhe his way between bars that were only four and a half inches apart. White then scaled a barbed-wire fence and led police on a […]
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BERLIN (AP) — German police have arrested five South Koreans on suspicion of murder following the death of a relative in an exorcism ritual in the city of Frankfurt, prosecutors. Officers discovered the body of the 41-year-old woman in a hotel room when the suspects called a priest after it became apparent that the victim had died, prosecutor Nadja Niesen […]
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