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1. Bike vs. Car vs. Pedestrian

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2. Top 10 Misused English Words

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3. Why is America the ‘no-vacation nation’?

Let’s be blunt: If you like to take lots of vacation, the United States is not the place to work.

Besides a handful of national holidays, the typical American worker bee gets two or three precious weeks off out of a whole year to relax and see the world — much less than what people in many other countries receive.

And even that amount of vacation often comes with strings attached.



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4. 10 Scientist Rock Stars

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5. MI6 Hacks Al-Qaeda Website, Replaces Bomb Recipe with Cupcake Recipe

When followers tried to download the 67-page colour magazine, instead of instructions about how to “Make a bomb in the Kitchen of your Mom” by “The AQ Chef” they were greeted with garbled computer code.

The code, which had been inserted into the original magazine by the British intelligence hackers, was actually a web page of recipes for “The Best Cupcakes in America” published by the Ellen DeGeneres chat show.

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6. Top 10 Activities Seldom Seen Outside Gym Class

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7. Weird News of the Week: Contortionist Thief Hid In Suitcase to Raid Baggage On Board Spanish Airport Bus

Officers, alerted to a series of thefts on the service between Girona airport and Barcelona in northeastern Spain, said the man’s accomplice would zip him inside the bag, load it into the baggage compartment, and then board the bus.

During the 90 minute journey, the flexible felon would emerge, squirm around the hold, rifle through the bags of his more conventional fellow passengers looking for their valuables and then get back inside his suitcase. The haul included laptops and a GPS unit.

One victim became suspicious when she saw the apparently anxious accomplice rushing to retrieve his suitcase, and then proceed to have a conversation with it.


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8. 10 Mysteries With A Logical Explanation

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9. Has ‘Run’ Run Amok? It Has 645 Meanings . . . So Far

One three-letter word does much of the heavy lifting in the English language. The little word “run” — in its verb form alone — has 645 distinct meanings. Simon Winchester, author of The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary, explains the rise of “run” and the decline of a formerly rich word, “set.”

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10. America’s Coolest Houses

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11. Thomas Edison Also Invented the Concrete House

Afficionados of modern poured-concrete design were in for a rude awakening last month when they heard NJIT Assistant Professor Matt Burgermaster’s presentation at the 64th annual meeting of the Society of Architectural Historians. “Edison’s ‘Single-Pour System’: Inventing Seamless Architecture” illustrated how Thomas Edison invented and patented in 1917 an innovative construction system to mass produce prefabricated and seamless concrete houses. Typically most people associate this style of architectural design and type of building technology with the European avant-garde of the early 20th century.

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12. Image of the Week: The original design of Mount Rushmore



The presidents were to be depicted from head to waist, but the sculpture was scaled back due to insufficient funding.

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13. How To Become A Morning Person

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14. Cowboys and Pit Crews

Two million patients pick up infections in American hospitals, most because someone didn’t follow basic antiseptic precautions. Forty per cent of coronary-disease patients and sixty per cent of asthma patients receive incomplete or inappropriate care. And half of major surgical complications are avoidable with existing knowledge. It’s like no one’s in charge-because no one is. The public’s experience is that we have amazing clinicians and technologies but little consistent sense that they come together to provide an actual system of care, from start to finish, for people. We train, hire, and pay doctors to be cowboys. But it’s pit crews people need.

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15. Infographic of the Week: Which dictator killed the most people?

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16. Why the Super-Rich Only Drink Coke

What isn’t so clearly defined is the origin of the bias against Pepsi. The rich don’t seem to like it, but when I asked people why, I received wildly varying explanations for its second-class status. One guy said it’s because Pepsi implies pedestrian Midwestern tastes (even though the drink hails from upstate New York). Another said he didn’t know why Pepsi is considered déclassé, but then confidently observed that top Pepsi executives themselves feel that it is. They don’t even want to suffer the embarrassment of ordering it in front of their well-to-do friends.

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17. The 10 Costliest Floods in American History

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18. Mosquitos Prefer Beer Drinkers

Mosquitoes don’t bite you for food, since they feed off plant nectar, Conlon explains. Females suck your blood to get a protein needed to develop their eggs, which can then send more pesky insects into the world to annoy you.

But keep this in mind when you’re outdoors this summer: Mosquitoes are more attracted to people after they drink a 12-ounce beer. It could be that people breathe a little harder after a cold one or their skin is a little warmer, suggests Conlon. But that won’t stop him from having a brewski, even though he considers himself a mosquito magnet.


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19. Top ten new species

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20. Do Prisoners Really Spend All Their Time Lifting Weights?

The Supreme Court ruled on Monday that crowding at California prisons constitutes cruel and unusual punishment, and ordered the state to reduce the number of inmates by more than 30,000. An outraged Justice Scalia dissented, noting that many of the released prisoners “will undoubtedly be fine physical specimens who have developed intimidating muscles pumping iron in the prison gym.” Do people really get super-buff in the slammer?

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21. The Thirteen Worst Cities for Your Skin

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22. HistoricalLOL of the Week

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23. It’s Not OK to Eat That: Mold Goes Deeper than the Surface

Most of us have done it at least once, you see the smallest spot of mold on the crust of a loaf of bread, and you figure that if you just cut that little part off then there’ll be nothing to worry about. The problem here is that the mold we see on food is really just surface spores. Like plants, mold has roots and branches—and they travel deep

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24. Hit Movies That Became Broadway Flops

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25. Where Prisoners Can Do Anything, Except Leave

It is not uncommon for armed inmates to exercise a certain degree of autonomy in Venezuela’s penitentiaries. Prisoners with BlackBerries and laptops have arranged drug deals, abductions and murders from their cells, the police say, a legacy of decades of overcrowding, corruption and insufficient guards.

But San Antonio prison, renowned on Margarita Island as a relatively tranquil place where even visitors can go for sinful weekend partying, is in a class of its own.


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26. How does cling wrap cling?

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27. Better Book Titles of the Week: Bram Stroker’s Dracula

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28. How-To of the Week: Estimate How Much Money’s in Your Change Jar (Without Counting)

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29. The cost of being on ‘American Idol’

Once chosen for the top 12, Idol contestants are provided room and board, although the accommodations have varied widely from season to season.

“There have been years where they want to show it on the air so they put them up in mansions in the Hollywood hills; other years, they’ve put them up in this apartment complex that’s not seen on the air,” says Rushfield. “It’s nothing fancy, but it’s not squalor. They have roommates all the way through, and when their roommates get cut, they consolidate them to save on the rooms.”

(Via: Neatorama )

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30. 8 Animal Myths Dispelled

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31. British Ph.D. candidate puts “homicide studies” into practice

Sometimes reality is far in advance of satire when it comes to absurdity. The results, however, are not always funny. If a satirist had come up with the idea of a violent criminal who had spent time in an asylum being admitted by a university to its doctoral program in “homicide studies,” thereafter turning into a serial killer, that satirist would have been denounced for poor taste. But this is precisely what a British university did recently. A man with a long history of criminal violence became a serial killer while working on a Ph.D. thesis at the University of Bradford, the subject of his thesis being the methods of homicide used in the city during the nineteenth century. He himself used methods more reminiscent of the fourteenth.

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32. The 10 Most Spectacular Butterflies in the World

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33. The US Navy SEALs Obstacle Course (Helmet Cam)

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