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For 50 years, "harm" under the Endangered Species Act meant destroying the habitat animals need to breed, feed, and shelter.
Trump cites a Supreme Court dissent that lost 6–3 to gut endangered-species protections
The Orange Menace claims his administration restored the Endangered Species Act to the meaning Antonin Scalia "explained." Scalia explained it in a dissent. The Supreme Court's 6–3 majority upheld the…
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That memory boost from one of the largest multivitamin trials came to about a quarter of a word on a 20-word recall test. Porter does say a few supplements earn their keep: psyllium husk, creatine, and vitamin D through the dark UK winter months.
A dietitian's verdict: multivitamins are useless
Dietitian Josie Porter, author of How Not to Take Supplements, sized up ten popular supplements for the Guardian. One of the largest multivitamin trials found a memory improvement in older…
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Cataloguers first noted these "unusual symbols" in the 18th century but couldn't read them.
The oldest known two-part music was written around the year 900
Polyphonic music has two or more melodic lines running at the same time, and the earliest known written example is a short piece in praise of Saint Boniface, composed around…
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The same New Jersey department also tried an officer standing on a bench in a t-shirt reading "NOT A COP." No word on that day's numbers. New Jersey fines now reach nearly $800 for repeat offenders in the leafy town of Dunellen, population 7,637.
Cop dressed as shrub catches 74 texting drivers in 6 hours
A cop in suburban New Jersey stood in a ghillie suit against foliage to catch unwary drivers fooling around on their phones. They found a perfectly leafy tree on the…
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He was outspent 11 to 1 and faced roughly $65 million in outside money. The AP and NYT haven't called it yet, and his campaign is already fundraising off a "We won" email while he sits about 2% ahead with 90% counted.
NBC News: Abdul El-Sayed wins Michigan Democratic primary
Abdul El-Sayed, a progressive candidate running in Michigan's Democratic Primary, has defeated centrist Congresswoman Haley Stevens and will face Republican Mike Rogers this fall. Stevens, supported by the party's establishment,…
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The tour drifts drone-style over the rooftops, past the Rostra, whose speakers' platform was decorated with the prows of captured enemy ships. It also visits the Tullianum, a dark underground prison you can still enter today for ten euros.
Fly over ancient Rome as it looked in the second century
Manuel Bravo makes video tours of ancient places, and his "Virtual Rome" reconstructs the city as it stood in the second century AD, when its buildings were at their height.…
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The tool records text as it's typed, which it rates as stronger evidence than an uploaded snapshot. Reed's public proof page for his novel Understudy already holds 11 sealed versions.
The startup selling proof that a human wrote your manuscript
Unpublished author Dylan Reed created a service that cryptographically seals manuscript drafts as evidence that a human wrote them. Vellumproof stamps each version with the time, then cryptographically links it to its predecessor.…
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Nanit's CTO wants to mine a baby's motion patterns to predict personality years later, offering the example that fidgeting might have "predicted" an introverted kid.
Baby monitors now want to predict who your kid will become
Nanit's flagship product is a camera bolted above a crib, logging the exact moment a baby's eyes open and close and scoring each night's sleep from zero to 100. The…
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The barrels China stopped buying, about 5 million a day, equal a quarter of what the closed Strait of Hormuz removed from supply.
China cut its oil imports in half. No one knows why.
When Iran shut down the Strait of Hormuz five months ago, experts predicted oil could spike to $150 or $200 a barrel. It has barely topped $100. According to Rogé…
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He traces diner booths back through railway dining cars to church pews, and calls diners "America's secular churches," where "every man is a success" and "equal among eaters." A hot slice with ice cream ran him $4.
An Englishman ate his first pecan pie and fell for American diners
British writer Henry Oliver had his first slice of pecan pie in a Bethesda, Maryland diner, and came away amazed that Americans eat this well every day. In The Common…
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Anna King's Ring camera caught the whole thing. The retired Army captain, who earned a Bronze Star in Iraq, had posted signs in her yard reading "National Guard Stop Being So Embarrassing." Her lawyers say that's why the troops targeted her.
National Guard troops entered a Purple Heart veteran's yard, zip-tied her, then charged her with assaulting them
Three Idaho National Guard troops entered Purple Heart veteran Anna King's Washington, D.C., front yard, wrestled her to the ground, and zip-tied her hands. She was later charged with assaulting…
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He impersonated a real Concord Theatricals executive, Billie Davis, in one of the texts, demanding the role of Rocky be recast with a male actor. Police traced the anonymous texting app to his IP address, and he admitted it.
Rocky Horror Show musical director sent threats to self to end production and avoid cast drama
You'd think someone involved in The Rocky Horror Show couldn't get enough drama. But the musical director of a production in Vermont got so fed up with cast theatrics that…
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A Park Service engineer had documented the peeling eight days before Hearn ever visited the pool, and no government witness could tie him to the damage. Trump's response involved a furious tangent about cameras that move and produce tapes.
"It was vandalism!" cried Grandpa Pudding Brains after his DOJ blamed his contractor's shoddy installation
The DOJ dropped its case against former Olympian David Hearn, citing the terrible work of Trump's handpicked contractor. Pirro's office said a Park Service engineer had documented peeling eight days…
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Ray Bradbury's "There Will Come Soft Rains" is set today, August 4, 2026, in Allendale, California. A voice-clock chirps the time, the stove makes breakfast for eight, and the house keeps running for a family that's no longer there.
A 50-year-old short story written for today
This just in from reader Theophrastvs: "here's a portentous calendricular note/post for today (only) Bradbury ~May 1950 wrote a short story about robotic assistants doing the daily choirs for an…
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A few dozen products were set into solid clear-plastic blocks and sliced through the middle, so every internal part is visible at once. Dieter Rams designed hundreds of the pieces on display, from wood-cabinet radios to epilators and toothbrushes.
A German strip mall hides a museum of Braun's design history
The BraunSammlung is a museum of Braun's industrial design in Kronberg im Taunus, up one flight in a building Atlas Obscura describes as a German strip mall. Braun's headquarters is…
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The diameter came out about a foot too wide, so Dave Johnson added an extra wrap to keep it from looking squat. The Saanen goats moved in fast: one kid climbed to the top at two days old, then cried because coming down is harder than going up.
The world's largest goat tower was built by accident
The Tower of Baa-Goat is a 31-foot brick tower in Windsor, Illinois, with a ramp spiraling up the outside of it, and goats live in it. Dave and Marcia Johnson…
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An intelligence officer emailed military analysts asking for "creative and unconventional ways to pressure and punish Iran." Sources say bombs alone won't reach Pickaxe Mountain and other sites buried deep underground, even with America's most
U.S. Central Command asks for ideas on beating Iran
With president Donald Trump's war with Iran quagmired (media lost count weeks ago of the number of times we've won or that a deal is near; he's called off "major"…
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One of the four cameras was shot from church property while services were underway, investigators say. He's held on $40,000 bond, running as an Independent against Rep. Tim Burchett for a safe seat.
Congressional candidate arrested after Flock surveillance cameras shot at
A congressional candidate in Tennessee shot at four Flock cameras there, say authorities, and got four charges of felony vandalism in return. Adam Lee Heimerman, 37, of Lenoir City, shot…
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He handed 90 recordings to Internal Affairs as an official complaint, believing the department would act. Instead he faces up to 13 years in prison. The DA calls it a warning against recording without permission. His lawyer calls it retaliation.
16 felony charges for LAPD officer who recorded colleagues making racist, sexist and homophobic remarks
When Los Angeles Police Department officer Daniel Flores recorded his colleagues making racist, sexist and homophobic remarks, the only thing he used it for was an official complaint to LAPD's…
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Sailors passed these off as basilisks, the mythical creature that killed anyone who looked at it, so no one could describe what one really looked like. That made the fakes an easy sell.
These little dragons are dried rays, cut and folded by hand
A Jenny Haniver is a dried ray or skate reshaped by hand until it looks like a small dragon or a demon. They go back to the sixteenth century, when…
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Eleven of the 50 fonts come from Glenn Chappell, who co-wrote FIGlet, the early-1990s Unix program these were made for. Typing a character plays a tone, deleting plays a lower one, and copying a block sets off a chime. MIT-licensed, and free to use.
Type a word, get it back in 50 ASCII art fonts
Lokesh Dhakar's ASCII Today renders your text as big block letters made out of slashes, pipes, and underscores — the kind that head old README files and source-code comments. When…
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Sealed until noon on May 28, 8113, the vault includes seed samples, an electric toaster, a bottle of Budweiser, and voice recordings of Popeye the Sailor Man and a professional pig caller.
This 1940 time capsule came with its own windmill
Thornwell Jacobs, the president of Oglethorpe University in Georgia, worked out that 6,177 years had passed since the start of the Egyptian calendar, and decided to aim the same distance…
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Before invoking his supposed scientific expertise, Kennedy had already accused Bash of talking nonsense, being fooled, and repeating information "like a parrot." He runs HHS, where he was put in charge of scientists rather than counted among them.
America's health secretary borrows scientific credentials he does not have
Conspiracy theorist and roadkill enthusiast RFK Jr. told CNN's Dana Bash she probably could not understand his argument because she was not a scientist. "Well, you're not either," she replied.…
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Every clothing label had been cut out. He carried no wallet, money, or ID. The pathologist found advanced prostate cancer and bone tumors, and no painkillers of any kind in his system. He was buried in an unmarked grave in Sligo, Ireland.
A man spent three days erasing himself on camera, then died on a beach
On June 12, 2009, a man checked into a hotel in Sligo, Ireland under the name Peter Bergmann and a nonexistent Austrian address. He paid cash every night. Over the…
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In 2016, documentary maker Dean Jefferys went out at night hunting toads in Sonora and ended up staring down the barrel of a gun. Weeks earlier, an American woman on the same search had been kidnapped.
The world's only psychedelic animal lives in a cartel zone
The Sonoran Desert toad is the only animal known to make a psychedelic. Its glands secrete 5-MeO-DMT, the compound users call the God molecule. The toad exists only in Sonora,…
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AP-NORC put his approval at 33% and CNN at 34%, matching his career low in their polling. His response was to point at taxes, employment, the border and foreign policy as proof that better numbers must exist somewhere.
Grandpa Pudding Brains says his "REAL Polling Numbers" are his best ever
Citing many imagined achievements, the Orange Menace insists he is the most loved, most worshipped person ever. The available numbers are less celebratory. AP-NORC found 33% approval, while CNN found…
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About 1 in 10,000 hydrogen atoms is deuterium, and those heavier isotopes raise water's freezing point by roughly 0.001 degrees Celsius. Harmon Craig at Scripps proposed the ocean-average standard in 1961, and it defined the kelvin until 2019.
The world's most precise water costs $120,000 a gallon
A 5-milliliter ampoule of the world's most precise water sells for $159 — about $120,000 a gallon, Signore Galilei writes. It is Vienna Standard Mean Ocean Water (VSMOW), and labs…
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The allegations include Miller pouring hot water on his wife, pointing a gun at her head, and possibly breaking their 2-year-old daughter's collarbone. The divorce was filed in August 2024, but the senator only went public this Sunday.
Bernie Moreno "held his breath" for two years before warning Congress about Max Miller
United States Senator for the state of Ohio Bernie Moreno says he lived in fear for his granddaughter's safety whenever Rep. Max Miller had custody of her. Moreno spent those…
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Sue a bank for closing your accounts over "woke" politics, and the bank might just tell the court its anti-money-laundering team spent months finding transaction patterns flagged by federal banking guidance. Capital One never called it laundering.
Trump Org's "woke debanking" lawsuit produced an anti-money-laundering filing
Trump's family business sued Capital One for allegedly closing its accounts over "woke" politics. Capital One responded by telling the court about its anti-money-laundering team's findings. Capital One has not…
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