Facts & Trends

Percentage of countries worldwide in which girls outperform boys in academic   achievement: 70 ...

It turns out that there’s strong evidence to suggest that at least one kind of dolphin sound, studied extensively over the past decade, does function as a kind of referential symbol. Dolphins use distinct “signature whistles” to identify and call ...

Annette Fredskov, of Naestved, Denmark, ran 26.2 miles every day for a year, despite having multiple sclerosis. She marked the anniversary of her daily feat with a double marathon two weeks ago, running over 52 miles in just over 10 ...

Amount for which the owner of happybirthday.com is attempting to sell the domain name: $2,000,000 Amount for which he sold sex.com in 2010: $13,000,000 ...

A Canadian man nearly blew off his own head while trying to kill a mouse with a rifle.  Dale Whitmell, 40, tried to crush the scampering rodent with the butt of his rifle, but when he slammed the weapon on ...

After decimating the Tanzanian elephant population, poachers have now killed half of the elephants in neighboring Mozambique in just five years.  A survey by Mozambique’s government and the U.S.-based Wildlife Conservation Society found that the herd has shrunk from 20,000 ...

Sorry, science-fiction fans: Time travel is impossible.  That is the sobering conclusion, anyway, of a Hong Kong-based team of physicists.  They found that the maximum speed of a single photon, the basic unit of light, "obeys the traffic law of ...

A Tennessee woman was banned from her lifelong church after she refused to publicly condemn her lesbian daughter.  The Ridgedale Church of Christ said it was exiling Linda Cooper for the sin of condoning homosexuality.  "They're exiling members for unconditionally ...

Danielle Shea, 22, was charged with trying to cancel Quinnipiac University’s graduation ceremony by calling in a bomb threat.  Shea, police said, didn’t want her parents to find out she had dropped out and was pocketing their tuition money ...

Heat and acidity are also bad for coral reefs, which have declined by 40% in some areas since the 1970s.  Coral organisms reproduce just once a year, making it hard for reefs to bounce back ...