Facts & Trends

On the 35th anniversary of its launch, the Voyager 1 spacecraft is close to becoming the first man-made object to escape our solar system. The spacecraft—run by a 1977 computer 100,000 times less powerful than an iPod Nano—is currently 11.3 ...

For every deceased person who is buried, four are now cremated ...

A new study has calculated that there are 5.25 trillion small and large pieces of plastic, weighing a total of 269,000 tons, floating in the world's oceans ...

A British woman has abstained from smiling for the last 40 years in an extreme attempt to ward off wrinkles.  Tess Christian, 50, told the Daily Mail that she adopted a permanent poker face as a child to prevent laughter ...

A specimen of the world’s largest flower, the titan arum, is about to bloom at the U.S. Botanic Garden in Washington, D.C. To attract carrion insects, the flower emits a stench botanists likened to “a very dead elephant.” ...

Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched India's first air-quality index in April, but pollution will keep growing unless India stems coal production, which Modi has pledged to double by 2020 ...

What's most important—and troubling— is the decades-long, systemic expansion of the economic distance between the richest of the rich and the poorest of the poor, and the long, backward slide for the majority of those in-between ...

Baby Boomers who frequently used recreational drugs like marijuana and cocaine in their youth are now turning back to drugs like Oxycontin for relief of age-related pain and illness. As a result, the fatal-overdose rate for people ages 45 to ...

Children and young adults who are bullied are more than twice as likely to consider suicide and two and a half times as likely to try to kill themselves, a new study has concluded—and those taunted online are even more ...

Portion of Americans who live in areas harmful levels of air pollution: 1/2 Number of the top five most polluted cities in the country that are in California: 5 ...