Author: Kamal
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The Recession’s Domestic Toll
The situation looks bad from the outside: Record foreclosure rates, a national unemployment rate hovering around 10%, and the average length of joblessness at its highest level since 1948. But inside, behind closed doors, many American families face a more private destructive force: 1.3 million women and 835,000 men are physically abused by an intimate…
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Organ Donation: The Ultimate Gift from the 1960s
The ’60s gave us sex, drugs, rock & roll, and one giant leap for mankind, but the decade left us another legacy that may prove more important—organ donation. Throughout the 1960s, the medical field was taking its own “small steps,” removing the first kidneys, hearts, lungs, and livers from cadavers and implanting them into patients whose…
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Behind the Numbers: Death by Cow
Which is deadlier: a cow or a triathlon? From 2003 to 2007, the US Department of Labor recorded an average of 21.6 cattle-related deaths per year, for a total of 108. Compare that to an average of 5.1 deaths per year caused by triathlons, or 14 deaths in 2.75 years. Getting within kicking range of…
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Strange ways to die
Will your death make the headlines? Only if you were highly successful in life—or if you’re singled out for the oddity of your demise. Your odds of dying from a rat bite (likely due to a resulting case of rat bite fever) are 1 in 299,400,000. Just one person in the US died this way in 2006.…