Facts & Trends

Percentage of Americans and Chinese, respectively, who believe their government is “on the side of average citizens”: 12, 80 Who believe their government is “on the side of corporations”: 73, 17 ...

Total number of passenger planes that have gone missing without a trace since 2000: 10 ...

Pope Francis accidentally cursed in Italian while delivering his weekly blessing at the Vatican, using the word cazzo, the equivalent to the F-bomb, rather than caso, which means “example.” ...

An astonishing 40,000 Americans are injured each year by their toilet bowls ...

The Economist Intelligence Unit ranked more than 130 cities from most to least expensive, according to a survey of prices across 160 goods and services. Here’s a sampling: 1 - Singapore 2 - Paris 9 - Seoul 22 - New York ...

Jamie Fox, a 22-year-old from Great Britain with a degree in music, was given a job as a human scarecrow on a farm.  Fox will make $400 a week scaring off partridges by playing an accordion, ukulele, and cowbell ...

The almost-bankrupt Italian city of Naples began DNA-testing dog feces on its poop-covered sidewalks, so it can prosecute residents who don’t pick up.  “I know some people find it funny that with all the problems the city has, we would focus ...

Number of reported cases in the past decade of an Antarctic fur seal having sex with a king penguin: 4 Then eating it: 1 ...

All fruit isn’t created equal when it comes to preventing diabetes. A Harvard University study that tracked the diets of more than 185,000 people over 12 years shows that eating strawberries, oranges, peaches, plums, and apricots has no impact on ...

The rate of U.S. diagnoses for melanoma, the deadliest form of skin cancer, has doubled in the past 30 years, from 11.2 cases per 100,000 people in 1982 to 22.7 cases per 100,000 in 2011, according to a Centers for ...