1. The Story of Everything
2. Nine Things Successful People Do Differently
3. The Saddest Movie Scene of All Time
In 1979, director Franco Zeffirelli remade a 1931 Oscar-winning film called The Champ, about a washed-up boxer trying to mount a comeback in the ring. Zeffirelli’s version got tepid reviews. The Rotten Tomatoes website gives it only a 38 percent approval rating. But The Champ did succeed in launching the acting career of 9-year-old Ricky Schroder, who was cast as the son of the boxer. At the movie’s climax, the boxer, played by Jon Voight, dies in front of his young son. “Champ, wake up!” sobs an inconsolable T.J., played by Schroder. The performance would win him a Golden Globe Award.It would also make a lasting contribution to science. The final scene of The Champ has become a must-see in psychology laboratories around the world when scientists want to make people sad.
5. A Real Society of Super Sleuths Who Solve Unsolved Crimes
Vidocq Society meetings – billed on its website as ‘Cuisine and Crime-Solving’ – now take place in Philadelphia on the third Thursday of every month; members gather beneath the electric chandeliers of the wood-panelled Downtown Club to have lunch and, afterwards, to help find a solution to a cold-case homicide. With 82 full, and more than 100 associate, members – a mix of men and women who must be invited to join by a committee – the society is a voluntary brains trust of retired and working criminologists.Over the years membership has been drawn from the entire spectrum of judicial and crime-fighting institutions: from the local district attorney’s office to Interpol; from Philadelphia’s medical examiner to renowned FBI profilers. The society boasts members from 17 US states and 11 other countries around the world.
(Via: Neatorama )
6. Ten Unbelievably Strange Units of Measurement
7. Weird News of the Week: Dad sleeps, lets son, 8, drive on I-12
State police said they received a call shortly after 6:30 a.m. Saturday about a green Chevrolet pickup truck driving erratically on the interstate in Livingston Parish. The caller told police that a child appeared to be the driver of the pickup.Troopers stopped the vehicle, and they said a boy was driving the truck while his father, Billy Joe Madden, 28, of Hattiesburg, Miss., slept in the passenger seat.
Police said that Madden’s 4-year-old daughter was riding in the backseat.
8. World’s 50 most delicious foods
9. Up to 70% of British men are ‘related’ to the Egyptian Pharaoh Tutankhamun
A Swiss genetics company has claimed that up to 70 per cent of British men are related to the Egyptian Pharaoh Tutankhamun.Scientists at Zurich-based DNA genealogy centre, iGENEA, say they have reconstructed the DNA profile of the boy Pharaoh based on a film that was made for the Discovery Channel.
The results showed that ‘King Tut’ belonged to a genetic profile group, known as haplogroup R1b1a2, to which more than 50 per cent of all men in Western Europe belong, indicating that they share a common ancestor.
10. Photo Essay of the Week: What kids of the world eat at school
11. Invasion of the Viking women unearthed
So much for Hagar the Horrible, with his stay-at-home wife, Helga. Viking women may have equaled men moving to England in medieval invasions, suggests a look at ancient burials.Vikings famously invaded Eastern England around 900 A.D., notes Shane McLeod of the Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies at the University of Western Australia in the Early Medieval Europe journal, starting with two army invasions in the 800’s, recounted in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles. The Viking invaders founded their own medieval kingdom, ‘the Danelaw’, in Eastern England.
12. Image of the Week: Cheetah vs. Porcupine
13. The £10,000 week-long vehicle ‘spa’ that leaves super-cars as good as new
For most people washing your car involves a bucket of soapy water, a sponge and chamois leather.But for some drivers with top of the range sports cars that simple method just doesn’t cut it.
Now though, those owners can treat their Ferrari, Lamorghinis and Aston Martins to ultimate all-star treatment - a £10,000 ‘car spa’ which is the world’s most expensive car wash.
14. 9 Easy Ways to Create Ideas
15. Rinderpest, a Centuries-Old Animal Disease, Is Vanquished
On Tuesday in a ceremony in Rome, the United Nations is officially declaring that for only the second time in history, a disease has been wiped off the face of the earth.The disease is rinderpest.
Everyone has heard of smallpox. Very few have heard of the runner-up.
That’s because rinderpest is an epizootic, an animal disease. The name means “cattle plague” in German, and it is a relative of the measles virus that infects cloven-hoofed beasts, including cattle, buffaloes, large antelopes and deer, pigs and warthogs, even giraffes and wildebeests. The most virulent strains killed 95 percent of the herds they attacked.
16. Infographic of the Week: If the world’s population lived in one city . . .
17. You Are What You Eat - a series of portraits made by examining the interiors of refrigerators in homes across the United States.
18. 15 Kid’s Books You Need To Read
19. Time Travel Impossible, Say Scientists
Hong Kong physicists say they have proved that a single photon obeys Einstein’s theory that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light — demonstrating that outside science fiction, time travel is impossible.The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology research team led by Du Shengwang said they had proved that a single photon, or unit of light, “obeys the traffic law of the universe.”
20. Ten Perfect Moments in the History of Editing
21. Why Do People Eat Less When They Have Big Forks?
Larger portion sizes usually mean we eat more food, but according to new study in the Journal of Consumer Research, bigger bites lead to eating less — in restaurant settings.The authors conducted a field study in a popular Italian restaurant. They used two sizes of forks to manipulate bite sizes and found that diners who used large forks ate less than those with small forks.
22. HistoricalLOL of the Week
23. Are Cancers Newly Evolved Species?
Cancer patients may view their tumors as parasites taking over their bodies, but this is more than a metaphor for Peter Duesberg, a molecular and cell biology professor at the University of California, Berkeley.Cancerous tumors are parasitic organisms, he said. Each one is a new species that, like most parasites, depends on its host for food, but otherwise operates independently and often to the detriment of its host.
24. The movie plots that technology killed
25. Air Force Pilots Have Anti-Freeze in Their Blood and the Air Force Doesn’t Know Why
The Air Force recently noticed that some of their F-22 Raptor fighter pilots were acting erratically, specifically, they were acting drunk. But sozzled they weren’t, instead it’s been revealed that anti-freeze, oil fumes and propane invaded their blood.
27. Better Book Titles of the Week - E.M. Forster: A Room with a View
28. How-To of the Week: Make Paper Planes
29. MIT Students Install 10,000 Revolutionary Solar Bottle Lamps in Manila Slums
Currently, millions of Filipinos live without any kind of light source at all, but a band of resourceful MIT students have begun changing that. The students found that a one liter plastic bottle filled with bleach water and installed on top of a metal roof is a surprisingly simple way to light homes that have neither electrical connectivity nor natural lighting. The plastic defracts light and pushes it to every corner of a small slum house instead of beaming it onto one area like a typical lamp might. As part of their Solar Bottle Project, the organization Isang Litrong Liwanag, which means “A Liter of Light,” has already installed 10,000 of these ridiculously basic but amazing lamps throughout Manila.
30. 10 Things You Shouldn’t Keep in Your Wallet or Purse
31. Mild Soap and Water Is Better for Your Wounds than Peroxide or Alcohol
Most people aren’t afraid to use rubbing alcohol or hydrogen peroxide to disinfect a wound when they get a cut. According to WebMD however, using peroxide on a wound can actually harm the tissue around it and delay the healing process. This is just one first aid fallacy they’re out to debunk.
32. Are We Actually Getting Better at Chess?
33. Snake on a Car
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