One year after Boko Haram abducted 276 Christian teenage girls from a northern Nigerian boarding school, authorities are no closer to finding them—and more have been taken. Amnesty International said this week that the Islamist group has captured at least 2,000 women and girls since the start of 2014. Those who escape say they were raped in forced marriages and trained […]
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Share of the world’s wealth that will be held by the richest 1% across the globe by 2016, according to a report from the antipoverty charity Oxfam: 50%
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Average cost of a hospital stay in the United States: $12,000 In Germany: $5,000
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15,654 – Total known land area, in square miles (40,544 sq km), of U.S. nuclear-weapon bases and facilities 2 – Minimum number of people required to authorize a U.S. nuclear attack
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The average American woman now weighs 166.2 pounds, about the same as the average American man weighed in the early 1960’s. Over the same time period, U.S. men have gained nearly 30 pounds, from 166.3 in the ’60’s to 195.5 today.
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The Dutch city of Utrecht will give unconditional monthly payments of about $1,000 to select citizens starting in January 2016 to see whether “basic income” can work as a means of welfare. Various other governments have resorted to unusual handouts to achieve certain ends: DUBAI City officials tried to boost public transport in November by raffling off prizes, including 8.8-lb. […]
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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 […]
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Timeliness, after scientists unveiled an atomic clock so accurate that it won’t lose or gain a single second in 15 billion years, which is roughly as long as the universe has existed.
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The five most popular names for baby girls in 2014 were (in order) Emma, Olivia, Sophia, Isabella, and Ava, according to the U.S. Social Security Administration. For boys, the most popular were Noah, Liam, Mason, Jacob, and William.
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Portion of the Indian Ocean that is underexplored by scientists because of pirates: 1/4
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