Elephant slaughter

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 in 2010 to just over 10,000 animals today.  “This decline is due to rampant elephant poaching in the country’s most important […]

Read more

Time travel

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 the universe,” Agence France-Presse reports.  The photon cannot go faster than the speed of light—186,282 miles per second—and thus provides […]

Read more

Standing Up For Your Family

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 loving their children,” said Cooper’s gay daughter, Kat.

Read more

Abstinence From Smiling

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 lines around her mouth, eyes, and forehead. “My dedication has paid off,” she said.  “I don’t have a single line […]

Read more

To Delay Aging, Spend More Time Standing Up

To delay aging, spend more time standing up. That’s the surprising conclusion of a new study by Swedish scientists, reports The Daily Telegraph (U.K.). Researchers at Karolinska University Hospital in Stockholm took blood samples from a group of sedentary, overweight men and women, all 68 years old, and measured the length of their telomeres—caps on the ends of DNA that […]

Read more

Why There’s a Skyscraper in the Amazon

The $9 billion, 1,000-ft. (305 m) Amazonian Tall Tower Observatory—now the tallest structure in South America—recently entered the final stages of construction. It will be inaugurated in August and fully operational by 2017. Here’s what Brazil and Germany, which co-funded the project, are hoping it will accomplish: Gather data The tower’s height and state-of-the- art instruments will enable scientists to […]

Read more
1 … 21 22 23 24 25 … 34