* Scientists recreate four-billion-year-old proteins—though there's no way of knowing how accurate they are. * Family farms aren't exactly disappearing—like industrial farms, they're just exploding in size. * A new paper posits a formula to determine whether a country's livestock
* Idaho grocery chain WinCo called WalMart's "worst nightmare" because it provides health-care plans and pensions to most employees. * Economist challenges conventional wisdom about pregnancy. * Economists say with sad certainty that yes, first-born girls do cause divorce. * Photo essay from a week in the life
* China’s big airports have the worst delays in the world, with only 18% of flights from Beijing departing on time. * North Carolina has one of the U.S.'s highest unemployment rates, but its lawmakers are more worried about banning Sharia law. * Email service reportedly used by Snowden
At one school, the popular girls were called the “chicken patties,” but the jocks were just the “jocks.” How teenage crowds get named.
* Poll shows 40% of white and 25% of non-white Americans only have friends within their own race. * Oprah Winfrey informed she can't afford Switzerland's more expensive handbags. * Business owners in Russia have a better chance of ending up in the penal colony system than common
* Research around H5N1 was cloaked in secrecy, now scientists propose more transparent—and more dangerous—H7N9 studies. * Mention a foreigner under surveillance in an email or text and the NSA is going to be tracking you. * Gupta: "Why I changed my mind on weed." * As e-cigarettes catch
* Why the U.S. lost Yemen to al Qaeda: "Faulty assumptions and a mistaken focus paired with a resilient, adaptive enemy." * The current wave of U.S. drone strikes in Yemen could be creating more enemies than they're killing. * This is the greatest Craigslist Missed Connection
A literary gumshoe visits St. Petersburg to track down the so-called “ninja of Russian verse,” Elena Shvarts, who died in 2010 leaving almost nothing behind.
* Chinese scientists show bird flu has spread among people and is indeed contagious, "although only slightly." * Small-town police officer commended for insisting to call a child-on-child shooting "negligent," not "accidental." * Drill music brings fame to young rappers while Chicago becomes the
Facts should be the oxygen of journalism.
