Horses aren’t as closely related to many of their horned kin as one might think to look at them
The Straight Dope
Posted inExtras
Why does lethal injection go wrong so often?
The irony here is that the earliest advocates of chemical execution actually got the idea from animal euthanasia
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Has human evolution stopped?
Humans may already be developing resistance to HIV and other viruses
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Are there better ways out of a burning building than the stairs?
Building safety is one field where disruption matters less than incremental improvement
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What countries accept political refugees from the U.S. on short notice?
The election of an unqualified bully as chief exec won’t in itself do the trick
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Why don’t we bomb Afghanistan’s poppy fields?
The Taliban is bad at lots of things—teaching little girls to read, for instance—but they were very good at terrifying their constituents into abandoning the drug trade
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Can pets taste flavor?
Taste starts with the tongue, and the number of taste buds varies drastically among species
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Did DNA cause humans to migrate around the world?
However it may affect people’s conduct, the 7R allele isn’t scattered evenly worldwide
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Why don’t Americans eat more offal?
Paleo-diet supporters stress offal’s high protein content, but it’s an uphill battle
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Why so many crazy theories about blood type?
No one knows for sure: five magic words that will forever summon swarms of crackpots from dankest cyberspace
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How long have adult diapers been around?
Ancient medical tomes reveal that folks have always sought means of keeping their downstairs dry
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Did America know FDR couldn’t walk?
And then, once Roosevelt was elected, his disability was, for the most part, no longer under discussion. How’d he manage it?