A crew of goats brought in to devour invasive plants at a popular park in Oregon’s state capital, Salem, have been fired because they ate indiscriminately, cost nearly five times as much as human landscapers and smelled far worse, a city official said on Friday. The 75 billy and nanny goats were supposed to eat Armenian blackberry and English ivy […]
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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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A 12-year-old Florida boy was arrested after stealing an 89-year-old man’s car after telling the man he needed to check his tires. The boy, who St. Petersburg authorities say has been arrested at least 20 times, is allegedly seen on surveillance footage approaching a car while on his bike. The brazen boy then jumps into the driver’s seat of the elderly man’s car and […]
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More than 850 million people around the world—one in nearly seven—don’t have enough to eat. Although current global food production is sufficient to feed everyone, the number eating less than the minimum the human body needs—an average 2,100 calories a day for adults—now grows by more than ten million a year, mostly in the poorest nations. Countries with unstable food […]
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Young people who are randomly stopped for questioning by the police—even if they’ve done nothing wrong—are more likely to engage in criminal behavior later than those who aren’t stopped, a new study has found. University of Missouri researchers say that “stop-and-frisk” programs intended to deter crime may actually create more criminals. Researchers followed 2,600 students for seven years and recorded […]
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Second-generation biofuel made from natural grass species challenges ethanol derived from maize crops as the US seeks to reduce its fossil fuel use. LONDON, January, 2016 – In tomorrow’s world, it won’t be just the corn on the great American plains that is as high as an elephant’s eye. It will be the elephant grass as well. To deliver on […]
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Feeling itchy from a sunburn, a bug bite or some other skin irritation is miserable, but the pleasure you get from scratching it isn’t just the absence of pain. It feels legitimately good to scratch, and the reason is fascinating. A 2008 study at Wake Forest University hooked people up to a MRI scanner and monitored brain activity when they […]
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A wild elephant went on a rampage in a village in India’s eastern West Bengal state on Wednesday, damaging around 100 structures, villagers said. Video taken in the village of Ektiasal showed the beast wandering around and knocking over flimsy huts. The elephant strayed into the village early in the morning and woke up villagers with its roaring. “The elephant […]
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Researchers have identified a new mechanism that drives the development of form and structure, through the observation of artificial materials that shape-shift through a wide variety of forms which are as complex as those seen in nature. It’s curious to observe such life-like behavior in a non-living thing – in many cases, artificial objects can look more ‘alive’ than living […]
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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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