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“Men in Black” was flickering on the screen, and Laura Cossolotto and her husband were enjoying a rare night at the movies in their home town of Centerville, Iowa, when her brother-in-law rushed into the darkened theater.
Every child learns this sad and basic truth about nature: The snake eats the rabbit.
But in the southernmost part of the Florida Everglades, things have taken a really wild turn. Pythons and anacondas are eating everything. The most common animals in Everglades National Park — rabbits, raccoons, opposums and bobcats — are almost gone, according to a study released Monday.
The golden orb spider (Nephila madagascariensis) spins a unique silk, naturally gold in color. Last week, it made a memorable debut in the fashion world.
London’s Victoria and Albert Museum put on display a remarkable cape woven from silk extracted from about 1.2 million female spiders in the highlands of Madagascar, an island off Africa’s southeastern coast. The project was the work of English textile expert Simon Peers and U.S. designer Nicholas Godley. For three years, dozens of workers collected spiders every morning and harnessed them 24 at a time into special “milking” contraptions that allowed workers to extract their silk. The museum notes that it takes about 23,000 extractions to create one ounce of silk thread.
The search for life on distant spheres has turned up some hopeful results lately. No little green men yet, but for the first time scientists know for certain that planets are abundant in the universe. And some of them might make our planet look like an underachiever.
No medical mystery is more challenging than a fever of unknown origin. An FUO is defined as an elevated body temperature that lasts for three or more weeks without an explanation, according to Marvin M. Lipman, Consumer Reports’ chief medical adviser.
THE QUESTION Acne has no definitive cause but an array of suspects, including hormones, heredity, stress, chocolate, makeup and more. Should being overweight be added to the list?
THIS STUDY analyzed data on 3,655 teens, 18 and 19 years old. About 13 percent of the girls and 14 percent of the boys had acne. About 10 percent of the girls and 15 percent of the boys were overweight, with a body mass index (BMI) of 25 or higher. Girls who were overweight were twice as likely as other girls to have acne. For boys, no link was found between weight and acne.
In this article, Tom Vanderbilt hits the road and tests a self-driving car: a fully autonomous vehicle that can pilot itself with more precision and efficiency than any human driver. He says the car, which is being developed by Google, provides a smooth and safe, if slightly surreal, ride, even at highway speeds, by using a laser-driven rooftop sensor and a GPS tracking system. “We are driving close to 70 mph with no human involvement, on a busy public highway, — a stunning demonstration,” he marvels. Established car companies — BMW, Mercedes, VW and Audi among them — are polishing up their own models.
People who complain about some of the racier content on YouTube are often told that the sheer rate at which that content is uploaded makes it impossible to moderate. That claim would seem to be more than borne out by the figures released recently by Google, YouTube’s owner.