The lights are up. The studio audience has taken their seats. Who's ready for another round of "Guess which beloved corner of your childhood is steeped in thick, syrupy racism?" Today, we turn our loving gaze to L. Frank Baum, the creator of the magical land of Oz.
Read More
In a classic case of "your scientists were so busy wondering if they could, they didn't bother to ask if they should," Spotify has released a number of playlists and podcasts for dogs who are left alone at home all day.
Read More
"Portrait of a Lady," by Gustav Klimt, features a brown-haired woman against a green background. Her face is a graceful contradiction, almost dead-eyed yet expressive. But it vanished in February 1997. That is, until the lady turned up nearly 23 years later.
Read More
Marina Chapman, by her own account, has had a roller coaster of a life. Hers is the sort of story that one might point a cynical finger towards -- a tale of a woman that really was raised by capuchin monkeys.
Read More
Imagine just going about your lazy Sunday morning when suddenly, your phone receives a message. Not just any message, mind you -- a cell phone alert from your country's officials, warning about an "incident" at a nearby nuclear plant. Well, that just happened in Canada.
Read More
According to a study published in the February 2020 edition of Advances in Atmospheric Sciences, 2019 was a big year for warming up the oceans, with their temperatures reaching record highs.
Read More
According to the University of Sydney, those Australian wildfires have now claimed the lives of a billion or more native animals.
Read More
It's a series of events drenched in intrigue and deception, greed and subterfuge. It is the tale of America's most iconic eatery, McDonald's, getting taken for a multi-million dollar ride. And like most stories about families being torn apart, it all starts with Monopoly.
Read More
According to the National Parks Service, the area now known as Yellowstone National Park has been home to humans for more than 11,000 years, with the Shoshone Tukudeka tribe making use of the land long before Europeans. Who was the first outsider to look out upon the majesty of Yellowstone?
Read More
As of the Australian continent continue to be decimated by ongoing wildfires, people from across the globe are kicking in to provide displaced wildlife with fashionable knitwear.
Read More
If you've ever visited Yellowstone, you'll be aware of its two main features. First: signs warning against dangerous behaviors. Second: next to every one of those signs, there are tourists doing exactly what the signs say not to. Here's the truth about Yellowstone's geyser-related deaths.
Read More
A woman in Jakarta has opened her home to more than 250 stray cats, which is wonderful news for the cats, but terrible news for her chances of ever smelling like anything other than ammonia again.
Read More
Scientists have just found a mineral in a meteorite never before seen in nature, according to CNN. Here's the story of a little mineral called Edscottite.
Read More
Who knows why you're hellbent on nabbing the world's biggest flower? Maybe you need to apologize to your significant other for making the world's biggest mistake. But here it is. Meet Rafflesia arnoldii, heavyweight champion of the world of flowers.
Read More
In a big win for countless financially-strapped young adults across the nation, the University of Phoenix has agreed to cross out $141 million in student loan debt, reports NBC News.
Read More
Emotional support animals have become a bit of a sticky subject. Recognizing how sticky things have become, an Arizona man set out to make them even stickier by registering the sweetest of all animals -- bees. The craziest part? It actually worked.
Read More
In 2017, "Science Guy" Bill Nye joined the ant-Mickey Mouse Club and jointly filed a $28 million lawsuit against Disney. Per the LA Times, in December 2019, a court allowed the case to proceed. Here's why Nye wants to throw the book at Disney.
Read More
John Davison Rockefeller was basically Daniel Plainview in that he was an oil man who had zero qualms about drinking your milkshake. And crossing him meant there would be blood. The owner of Standard Oil and founder of the University of Chicago became the world's first confirmed billionaire in 1916.
Read More
Though he's toyed with the idea in the past, it seems that billionaire Michael Bloomberg, a one-time Republican is actually running for president in 2020 as a democratic candidate. How does the richest man in New York and the ninth richest man in America spend his money?
Read More
In November of 2019, Bill Gates managed to make the leap from second to first place on the list of the richest people in the world, with wealth valued at $110 billion. But what does he actually spend all those billions money on?
Read More
If you own one of those L.A. party scene cats that loves to get wild, you're no doubt aware of the drug menace ensnaring so many of today's most promising cat youth. Catnip: the jazz cigarettes of feline culture. Here's what happens if your cat has too much catnip.
Read More
For many cat owners, there are three unavoidable constants in life: Death, taxes, and the fact that their feline friend will try to drink from the sink whenever it gets a chance. Let's find out why cats like to drink from a sink!
Read More
If whales didn't exist, Jonah might have had to spend three days in the belly of an obese goldfish, which sounds super cramped. If these gargantuan animals vanished from existence, the world -- and the ocean -- would be in much worse shape.
Read More
"Mouth-fighting" sounds like one of the oddly violent sports metaphors people use in reference to French kissing. But here the term describes battles between tiny underwater worms that live off the coast of Japan which produce one of the loudest, least affectionate sounds in the ocean.
Read More
These days, $1 billion has become chump change to today's richest people. As their wealth continues ballooning, the world may soon see its first trillionaire, horrifyingly enough. Who's it going to be?
Read More
It probably won't come as a surprise that dogs and humans have a lot of genetic overlap. Seattle Pi writes that humans and dogs share about 84 percent of their DNA. Presumably that number is far higher for canines like McGruff the Crime Dog. But that's just the nature of living things.
Read More
It's tough to say how smart raptors were. There's no way to experience their behavior first hand, and intelligence is a spectrum. While velociraptors may not have been great at math, they might have excelled in sculpting or theological studies. But were they smarter than dogs?
Read More