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There's Another Orange Alligator Roaming the Carolinas

Orange alligator spotted in Calabash, N.C. https://t.co/cUXPioiAZK#WCYBpic.twitter.com/KfnBQegjVI— News 5 WCYB (@news5wcyb) February 21, 2017Earlier this month, a community in South Carolina started...

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Seattle's Jade Vine Is Almost as Cool as a Corpse Flower

Last year, as corpse flowers stunk up conservatories around the country, Seattle's specimen, Dougsley, committed an embarrassing gaffe: it failed to bloom. After opening up only halfway, the massive...

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The Shy Edwardian Filmmaker Who Showed Nature's Secrets to the World

The Balancing Bluebottle wasn’t exactly a hit when it first premiered at the Palace Theatre in London in autumn 1908. The star of this short silent film was a common fly turned circus performer, filmed...

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Found: The Fossil of a Giant, Extinct, 400-Million-Year-Old Worm

In June 1994, some fossils from Ontario's Kwataboahegan Formation—a cross-section of earth that is hundreds of millions of years old—were recovered, and, for the next several years, stashed at the...

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How Sears and Montgomery Ward Changed American Shipping

A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail.Package delivery is a well-tread art at this point, and one that didn’t come to...

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A Waitress Casually Dragged a Massive Lizard Out of a Restaurant in Australia

Maybe it’s a cliché, but in Australia, sometimes you can’t even enjoy a nice meal without a giant lizard barging in. Luckily, there are fearless waitresses like Samia Lila who will take care of that...

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The Politics of Sunbathing on Human Remains

Most people don't go to the beach expecting to find human remains in the sand, but that's exactly what happens relatively frequently at Raisins Clairs Beach in Saint François, Guadeloupe. Over the past...

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Found: Strange Graffiti on 4 of Washington's Most Famous Monuments

Over President’s Day weekend, a crowd gathered at the National Mall in D.C., and around 11 p.m. one of those people was defacing national monuments. Park police discovered strange graffiti first at the...

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Listen to the Call to Prayer in Countries Around the World

If you were standing by the Lion’s Gate, in the Old City walls of Jerusalem, you might hear this call to prayer:If you were standing in New Delhi, more than 3,000 miles away, you might hear this one,...

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Seeds From Syria Are Returning to the Svalbard Vault

In 2008, when the Norwegian Government and the Global Crop Diversity Trust teamed up to open the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, they thought they were planning far ahead. The vault—essentially a massive...

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Busted for Driving With a Ferret Around Your Neck

Last week, police in Edmonton set aside 24 hours to conduct a crackdown—dubbed the "Big Ticket Event"—on dangerous driving. Their efforts resulted in 2,442 citations for traffic violations, all...

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Help This Computer Program Draw the World's Freakiest Felines

Okay total creepy uncanny valley time but #breadcat#edges2catspic.twitter.com/i3ALRn9yFD— Ivy Tsai (@ivymyt) February 21, 2017For years, computers have provided humans with an endless supply of...

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Touring a Deserted, Dystopian Mall in Pennsylvania

When the Century III mall in the south of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania opened in 1979, it was the third-largest enclosed shopping center on Earth. With three stories and over 200 stores, it was the place...

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When the NSA Feared Psychics Could Make Cities Lost in Time and Space

A version of this story originally appeared on Muckrock.com.A classified government document opens with “an odd sequence of events relating to parapsychology has occurred within the last month” and...

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A Newly Identified, Tightly Packed Solar System Harbors the Best-Ever...

This afternoon, an international team of scientists announced the discovery of not one, not two, but seven roughly Earth-sized exoplanets closely orbiting a dwarf star called Trappist-1. The discovery...

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Found: A Secret Gas Pump Hidden by a Mexican Altar

The Virgin of Guadalupe is sometimes called the “Patron Saint of Mexico,” and devotional altars to the holy woman can be found all across the country. But now she might also be referred to as the...

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Found: The Location of London’s Oldest Mosque

In London, the first ever mosque built explicitly as a house of worship was the Fazl Mosque in Southfields, which opened in 1926. But decades before, an immigrant from South Africa opened the city’s...

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Keeping the Art of Knot Tying Alive

As new technologies revolutionize and streamline our lives, more and more traditional crafts are falling by the wayside or becoming the domain of hobbyists. Among those that were once ubiquitous, but...

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In 1914, Feminists Fought For the Right to Forget Childbirth

When Charlotte Carmody went to speak about twilight sleep, she brought her “painless baby" with her. In churches and in department stores across the United States, in front of crowds of women who had...

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Lady Jane Franklin, the Woman Who Fueled 19th-Century Polar Exploration

On the Scottish island of Unst, boatmen once told stories of an English widow who journeyed out to a tiny, rocky islet on the northernmost point of the British Isles. Lady Jane Franklin would gaze...

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