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1. Medieval IT Support

(Via: Kevin DeYoung )

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2. The Top 10 Books Lost to Time

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3. What’s the Median Income for a Fashion Model in the U.S.?

The median income across America in 2009 for a model was $27,330—income that includes no benefits.

The average magazine shoot pays about $100 a day. For appearing on the cover of Vogue a model gets an additional $300.

Payment for walking in a Fashion Week show in London is $500.


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4. Question of the Week: Did Americans in 1776 have British accents?

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5. Does Every Professional Need a Coach?

Not long afterward, I watched Rafael Nadal play a tournament match on the Tennis Channel. The camera flashed to his coach, and the obvious struck me as interesting: even Rafael Nadal has a coach. Nearly every élite tennis player in the world does. Professional athletes use coaches to make sure they are as good as they can be.

But doctors don’t. I’d paid to have a kid just out of college look at my serve. So why did I find it inconceivable to pay someone to come into my operating room and coach me on my surgical technique?

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6. Famous Quotes That Were Never Said

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7. Weird News of the Week: $1.25 Million Worth of Cocaine Washes Up on Cape Canaveral Military Beach

More than $1 million worth of cocaine washed up on a beach that’s part of the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. The 55 pounds of yayo was found not far from a launching pad used to send Delta II rockets high into the atmosphere. The discovery ensures that, well, someone won’t be snorting his/her way high into the atmosphere.


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8. 4 Forensic Psychology Studies That Will Save You From Stupidity

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9. The Search for a More Perfect Kilogram

The official US kilogram—the physical prototype against which all weights in the United States are calibrated—cannot be touched by human hands except in rare circumstances. Sealed beneath a bell jar and locked behind three heavy doors in a laboratory 60 feet under the headquarters of the National Institute of Standards and Technology 20 miles outside Washington, DC, the shiny metal cylinder is, in many ways, better protected than the president.

“Everything is a potential contaminant,” says Patrick Abbott, a NIST physicist responsible for maintaining it. “There are hydrocarbons on people. There’s water in the air.”



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10. The Most Underrated Jobs

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11. Twitter tweets our emotional states

A new study in the journal Science examined the contents of more than 500 million tweets sent in 84 countries over two years, looking for signs of good moods and bad. It found what a lot of us could tell by looking at our own lives.

Optimism is reborn with each new day and slowly erodes as we work, study and go about our quotidian affairs. Our mood lifts as we head home to friends, family, entertainment and beer. Our outlook tends to be sunnier on weekends. And speaking of sun, when it starts to pile up in the spring or disappear in the fall, that affects our mood, too.

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12. Image of the Week: Dante’s Inferno Sand Sculpture



After seeing him compete on the Food Network Challenge Show, Ray was contacted by a professional sand sculpting company and invited to Jesolo, Italy to take part in their yearly sand sculpting project for the holidays. Though Ray had never sculpted in sand, he took the opportunity that was offered. In November 2008, Ray traveled to Jesolo and created his first sand sculptures. He did so exceptional, that he was invited back the following summer where he participated in bringing “Dante’s Inferno” to the beach and was given the most pivotal sculpture of the show.



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13. Top 10 Legendary Giants

A study at the University of the Basque Country reveals a link between the sexist attitudes of mothers and that of her sons and daughters. Published this month in the magazine Psicothema, the results also link gender and the family’s socio-economic and cultural level to sexism.

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14. Mothers Are the Most Responsible in Transferring of Sexist Attitudes, Study Suggests

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15. 10 Things You Didn’t Know About Witness Protection

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16. What would really happen if you nuked a volcano?

Internet lore and science fiction tales suggest that dropping a nuclear weapon on an erupting volcano would halt the eruption. But would that really be the case?

Would it just make the eruption worse by opening up more magma tubes? Would it alter the lava flows? Would it send reverberations through the earth’s core and crack the world in half (as suggested by the 1965 classic, Crack in the World)? Since no country is likely to drop a nuclear bomb on a volcano in the near future (well, at least Italy and the U.S. didn’t take that train of advice with Mount Etna), let’s take a look at the possibilities for what might really happen, to the best of our scientific knowledge.


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17. Infographic of the Week: Handy Flowchart for Choosing Among NPR’s Top 100 Science Fiction and Fantasy Books

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18. The Dead Sea Scrolls Are Online In High-Definition

The Israel Museum welcomes you to the Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Project, allowing users to examine and explore these most ancient manuscripts from Second Temple times at a level of detail never before possible. Developed in partnership with Google, the new website gives users access to searchable, fast-loading, high-resolution images of the scrolls, as well as short explanatory videos and background information on the texts and their history. The Dead Sea Scrolls, which include the oldest known biblical manuscripts in existence, offer critical insight into Jewish society in the Land of Israel during the Second Temple Period, the time of the birth of Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism. Five complete scrolls from the Israel Museum have been digitized for the project at this stage and are now accessible online.

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19. 20 Uses for Honey You Never Thought Of

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20. Americans Get a Personal Letter in the Mail Once Every Seven Weeks

Despite those who would hate to see Saturday mail delivery stop, most of us probably won’t mind: your postman is carrying fewer and fewer personal letters in this age of email. Today Americans on average receive only one personal letter every seven weeks, a decrease from one every two weeks back in 1987, the AP reports. An important caveat is that holiday and birthday cards are not included as personal letters.

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21. 15 Terrific Towering Tree Houses

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22. HistoricalLOL of the Week

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23. Wasabi-Spraying Fire Alarm Is Made for the Hard of Hearing

If you think that being hit in the face with a super-spicy wasabi mist is necessarily a bad thing, think again. A team of researchers from Japan’s Shiga University of Medical Science has invented a smoke alarm designed to wake up the hard of hearing in case of fire by pumping the mist into the air.

In testing, the device woke 13 out of 14 subjects within two minutes. And now it’s been recognized for the stroke of unusual genius that is, with the 2011 Ig Nobel Prize in Chemistry. The Ig Nobels are awarded annually to achievements “that first make people laugh, and then make them think,” in the same categories as their more serious namesake, the Nobel Prizes.



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24. Unusual Ways to Die Through the Ages

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25. Learning ‘Klingon’ helps man deal with dyslexia

Jonathan Brown, 50, of Furzton spent 12 years learning the fictional language of the alien race from Star Trek films.

Then, after being appointed as the lead “linguist” on a CD for others wanting to learn it, he found a different way of dealing with words.

He said: “It helped me identify my problem and found a way of working with my dyslexia.”


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26. Top 10 Unnervingly Large Invertebrates

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27. Better Book Titles of the Week - William Shakespeare: Antony and Cleopatra

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28. How-To of the Week: Become a Backyard Astronomer

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29. Scientists use “dirt DNA” to gauge biodiversity

If you were asked to classify every species of vertebrate living in a given environmental niche, how would you go about doing it? For years, ecologists have risen to this task by resorting to brute force — tracking, trapping, and tagging individual animals to extrapolate species population data.

But scientists have now shown that there may be an easier way: just ask the earth. Researchers have recently revealed how easy it is to gain accurate insight into an area’s biodiversity by simply searching the soil for traces of animal DNA.

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30. 10 Fascinating Kidnappings

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31. One number unites anything that flies or swims

There are similarities in the way a bird flies through the air and a dolphin swims through the water. And yet how do you compare the flap of a butterfly to the enormous movement of a blue whale? The best way, it turns out, is with their respective Strouhal Numbers.

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32. Top 10 Female Adventurers

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33. Prostate Surgical Robot Can Peel the Skin off a Grape

(Via: Geekosystem )


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