Even though it erupted for the first time in more than a century on August 6, shooting boulders up to one-meter-wide into the air, Mount Tongariro, which sits on New Zealand's North Island, is perhaps best known as the neighbor of Mount Ngauruhoe, the stand-in for the fictional Mount Doom in Peter Jackson's award-winning Lord of the Rings trilogy. Tongariro came to life again earlier this week when a five-minute eruption shot ash, smoke, and gas 4km into the sky. The eruption, which was follow... Read More
Led by Gino Fornaciari, the director of the University of Pisa's pathology museum, a team of Italian researchers have exhumed the bodies of Giovanni de' Medici (also known as Giovanni dalle Bande Nere for the black mourning bands he wore following Pope Leo X's death) and his wife, Maria Salviati. Buried in the Medici Chapels in Florence, Giovanni was a member of the wealthy Florentine Medici family, but also one of the most celebrated mercenary soldiers of the Renaissance. Fornaciari's team is... Read More
Our modern-day version of Thanksgiving in the United States is commonly traced back to a 17th-century feast in Plymouth, Massachusetts, that was held in celebration of a good harvest. There was plenty of food for everyone then, and there's plenty of food now—perhaps too much. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Americans end up throwing away 35 percent of the turkey (not including bones) they buy for holiday gatherings. "We love to have the big feast at holiday time," Dana G... Read More
After a long and successful run, the Discovery Channel has canceled Dirty Jobs, the show Brian Stelter in the New York Times called "a forerunner to the genre of weird-workplace reality television that now flourishes on cable." Mike Rowe, the show's creator, executive producer, and host since 2003, announced the news in a piece on the Huffington Post. "Dirty Jobs is a very personal show, and it's difficult for me to imagine a future that does not involve exploding toilets, venomous snakes, mis... Read More
For the fourth consecutive year more Americans are traveling 50 miles or more for the Thanksgiving holiday, according to AAA. "We are on a slow climb back," said AAA New York spokesman Robert Sinclair Jr., referring to the severe economic downturn in 2008 that led to a 25 percent decline in holiday travel. "It's a climb, but it is a slow one, and perhaps not enough for people to really make a significant commitment to travel."
Most of the nearly 44 million Americans who are traveling for the ... Read More
