Facts & Trends

Visiting your doctor for an annual physical examination might actually have a negative impact on your health, WebMD.com reports. Danish researchers analyzed studies involving 183,000 patients and found that those who received regular checkups were no less likely to die ...

California firefighters spent two hours extracting a naked woman from a chimney after she tried to sneak into her ex-boyfriend's home at 5 a.m.  The 35-year-old took off her clothes in the hope it would help her fit down the ...

Toxic air pollution in the Indian capital of Delhi has given some 2.2 million children irreversible lung damage, according to a 2010 study from the Kolkata-based Chittaranjan National Cancer Institute that surfaced this month. The report has raised fresh concerns ...

As diabetes rates rise worldwide, so does the illegal trade in human kidneys.The World Health Organization estimates that 10,000 black-market operations a year are being performed in places like China, Pakistan, and India, as doctors transplant kidneys purchased from poor ...

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 ...

A Pennsylvania girl's Sweet 16 party was ruined after her celebration was showered with poop, apparently dumped from a passing airplane.  Jacinda Cambray and 40 guests were partying in her family's backyard when the brown liquid began raining down.  "We'd ...

Percentage of the average “knowledge worker’s” time that is spent reading and writing emails: 28 ...

People who say they are unaffiliated with any religion constitute nearly 20 percent of the American public, making them almost as numerous as Catholics, who accounted for 22 percent of participants in a new Pew Research Center study released Oct ...

More than 1 in 10 Americans used marijuana 2012. But pot isn't gaining users as fast as heroin or LSD. Nor is it the most addictive drug ...

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 ...