A New Lord Of The Rings Movie Is In The Works, Written by Stephen Colbert

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This is not a drill. Warner Bros. has announced that Stephen Colbert, one of the most famously devoted Tolkien fans on the planet, is developing a brand new Lord of the Rings film alongside his son and screenwriter Peter McGee. The announcement dropped in a video that opened with director Peter Jackson himself teasing a […]

A Teen Just Solved A Huge Microplastic Problem

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Mia Heller is 18 years old, lives in Warrington, Virginia, and has invented a water filter that removes 96 percent of microplastics from drinking water using a magnetic oil and a clever self-recycling system she built herself in her garage and kitchen. The idea started when her local newspaper reported that her neighborhood’s water was […]

Science Just Explained Why Music Makes You Feel Closer To People

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Most people feel it but cannot fully explain it: the way a song playing in a room seems to pull people closer together, the way a shared playlist can make strangers feel briefly like they know each other. A new study from Yale School of Medicine has now provided one of the clearest biological explanations […]

Who Invented The 60-Minute Hour And Why It Was Genius

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Every time you glance at a clock, you are using a mathematical idea invented more than 4,000 years ago, and most people have never stopped to wonder why. The reason there are 60 seconds in a minute and 60 minutes in an hour has nothing to do with modern science and everything to do with […]

The Monarch Butterfly Population Just Jumped 64 Percent

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Every winter, millions of monarch butterflies make one of the most extraordinary journeys in the natural world, traveling up to 2,800 miles from Canada and the United States to cluster on oyamel fir trees in the mountains of central Mexico, their wings blanketing the forest in a sight unlike anything else on Earth. For years, […]

She Beat Cancer And Then Adopted A Hawk

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When the first Covid lockdown arrived, most people tried baking sourdough or following along with an exercise video. Candida Meyrick did something rather more unusual: she adopted a Harris Hawk fledgling, and the decision changed her life in ways she is still discovering. Candida, who had come through breast cancer treatment five years earlier, was […]

Speed-Dating For Friends Is Here: Speed-Friending

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America is in the middle of what researchers are calling a friendship recession, and the numbers behind it are striking. In 1990, about 3 percent of Americans said they had no friends at all. Today that figure has grown to somewhere between 12 and 20 percent, a shift that scientists say carries real health consequences, […]

The 2028 LA Olympics Just Revealed Its Official Look

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The countdown to Los Angeles 2028 just got a lot more colorful. LA28, the organizing committee for the 2028 Summer Olympics, has unveiled the official visual identity for the Games — and it’s a breathtaking love letter to Southern California. Dubbed “LA in Full Bloom,” the design concept is inspired by the California superbloom, a […]

Dog Finds A Message In A Bottle That Crossed The Atlantic From Canada

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On a wildly stormy morning on a beach in northeast Scotland, a dog named Maggie was doing what dogs do best: sniffing everything in sight. Her owner Mike Scott, a photographer who walks his dogs at St Cyrus in Aberdeenshire almost every day, noticed Maggie circling a dark glass bottle washing up from the waves. […]