One moment you're enjoying a nice cold treat with your two closest friends. The next, you're doubled over in pain as a thunderous pain claps your temples. Unfortunately, you're not Harry Potter sensing Voldemort, you've just got brain freeze. What is this scourge of summertime snow-sweets?
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Pop culture throws out some fairly fruit-loopy notions when it comes to space. Setting our space pop-fear aside, what's the real scoop on asteroids?
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We humans love to break records, and messing with gravity seems to be one of our species' odd and enduring obsessions. But what would happen if we decided to take things to the next level by convincing every human on earth to jump at exactly the same time?
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Spiders are really terrifying creatures. Here are creepy, true stories about giant spiders. Welcome to your spider nightmare.
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The human race has an odd relationship with the battered, lonely space-bauble lazily circling our planet. It means many different things to our species. But setting our love affair with Earth's largest natural satellite aside, what would happen if it weren't there?
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We love bees. We love them so much that Jerry Seinfeld made a movie about them. The industrious little bugs generate the world's supply of honey and inspire folksy art the world over, but they're also a vital part of both our ecosystem and our economy. Without them we'd be in a sea of troubles.
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Spiders aren't the kind of critters you can easily sneak up on, and for the 75 percent of our species who find spiders repugnant or terrifying, it's often this constant watchful alertness they find most disconcerting. So that leads us to the slightly weird question: do spiders sleep?
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Getting struck by lightning is less like being pelted with fast food and more like being punched with Thor's hammer. So let's take a look at how Mother Nature's hammerfist works and what would happen if it hit you. Spoiler alert: nothing good! But possibly not anything necessarily deadly?
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These days, the word "daddy" followed by "long-legs" sounds more like a description of Jeff Goldblum than a colloquial title for a kind of arachnid. The truth is, everything you think you know about these eight-legged fellows -- like the "fact" that they're crazy poisonous -- might be wrong.
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Antarctica has a ton of frozen treasures waiting to be discovered. Here are some of the craziest frozen treasures found in Antarctica.
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The sun is the yeast which allows the dough of life to arise, without which humanity would never have bred. It comprises over 99.8 percent of all mass in our solar system, which formed around it about 4.6 billion years ago. So what will happen when our heavenly benefactor dies?
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When you wake up, step outside, and take your first full breath of the outdoors, you hope and pray that the air is clean.
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Mosquitoes, those flying, buzzing, blood-sucking harbingers of itchiness. Here's the real reason mosquitoes love you so much.
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It's rare, but sometimes paleontologists find really cool dinosaur remains that are nearly perfectly preserved and tell an amazing story.
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Weather radar allows us to predict and interpret all kinds of weather conditions. But weather radar can get confused and doesn't always make sense.
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A zombie apocalypse could be fun, if it goes the way that TV shows and movies imagine it. But the thing about enjoying a zombie apocalypse is you'd have to survive the zombie apocalypse first. Here are a whole bunch of reasons you wouldn't survive a zombie apocalypse.
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Snake Island is home to one of the deadliest snake species in the world and oh yeah, there are literally thousands of these golden lancehead snakes on Snake Island. Also Snake Island is a mere 110 acres, so the density of golden lanceheads on Snake Island is pretty darned high.
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We humans have done a lot on the Earth, although not every other species would agree we've done all good things.
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Infertility is devastating and life-altering. But in-vitro fertilization (IVF) is a complicated procedure. Here are times that fertility clinics goofed up.
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California is earthquake country. It's only a matter of time before the Big One strikes. Here's what we know about California earthquakes.
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This Pennsylvania town was once an ordinary slice of Americana, but these days, the ghostly ruins of the so-called 'real Silent Hill' has no zip code, no stores, and almost no people. Here is the story of Centralia, the town that sits atop an underground inferno that could rage for centuries.
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The rise of human beings was largely due to luck. What if we had come up a little earlier or other terrifying creatures had lasted longer?
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Humans have a tough time adjusting to new technologies. That's certainly proven true for smartphones and screens, as anyone who can afford to has been staring at a screen for the last decade-ish. Here's what we know about headlines suggesting people are growing horns because of their phone use.
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TV meteorologists handle all kinds of inclement situations. But there is a limit. Get your umbrella ready, because these presenters lost it on live TV.
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Are antibiotics going to stop working? Will the wealthy abandon Earth for floating luxury space colonies? Are robots going to start controlling our minds?!
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A yearslong drought can devastate communities and ecosystems, but it can also reveal long-forgotten secrets.
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High-speed rail in the USA hasn't made a lot of progress in the last 50 years. Here's why the U.S. doesn't have a high-speed rail network.
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