People have long been known to willfully pull out their own hair owing to anxiety, but it’s widely believed that chronic stress can cause inadvertent hair loss as well.

BIG QUESTIONS
The unfortunate and untimely death of a young Foreign Service Officer in a suicide bombing on April 6 in Afghanistan’s Zabul province has drawn attention to the careers of U.S. diplomats.
Musical power couple Beyoncé and Jay-Z jetted down to a tropical and somewhat-forbidden destination last week for their fifth wedding anniversary: Cuba. Because of travel restrictions to the country, the couple’s trip raised the eyebrows of some U.S. lawm
It's amazing that we ever got along without "OK." But we did. Until 1839.
At one time or another, though, we’ve all been the emotional drunk, a condition typically marked by ill-timed espousals of affection (or reprisal), acute introspection, and an incontrollable urge to cry in the middle of a crowded bar.
If you're a kid learning how to write, English spelling can seem like a cruel prank.
Whatever significance the number nine had to the phrase, it doesn’t seem to have always been specific to clothing.
When I was a little dinosaur fan, all I wanted was a pet dinosaur. An Apatosaurus would have been choice—big enough to be impressive, but not especially likely to eat me. But that’s never going to happen. As much as I hate to say that science will never s
It's time to pull out those calculators and do the math with the density and volume to determine the total water content of the cloud.
Before it was called PBR or even Pabst, the official beer of hipsters, old blue collar Wisconsinites and Frank Booth was brewed under the name Best Select, starting in 1875.
Close perusal of a Wonder loaf’s list of ingredients reveals some 29 tongue-tying components, while the whole grain loaf has five or six, none over two syllables. So why are more heavily processed foods and those with more ingredients typically less expen
Travelers to Chicago may experience the wind gusts that come off Lake Michigan, get tossed around a bit and think, “So this is why it’s called the Windy City.” The nickname, which dates back to the late 1870s, is deceiving because, literally, Chicago is a
In truth, not much. The primary ingredient to both, not surprisingly, is sodium chloride. In fact, the U.S. government requires that any food-grade salt be a minimum of 97.5 percent pure, so any type of salt you consume in the U.S. (and most developed cou
In 1996, the cicadas of Brood II (the “East Coast Brood”) swarmed the northeastern United States and then disappeared almost as quickly as they came, leaving only their eggs and molted exoskeletons behind. Once the eggs hatched, the new generation of cica
Reader Gabrielle wrote in to ask: “Can a pope be ousted? And has it happened before?”
The best early ‘90s children’s bookshelves were full of books about child detectives, including Cam Jansen, the fifth grade super-sleuth with a photographic memory. She was called “Cam,” short for “camera,” because she would close her eyes and say, “cli
Large animals tend to live longer than smaller ones. But this isn't the case for most breeds of dog. What gives?
He wasn’t a Star or a Blackhawk or a Bruin, but the cartoonist did make some important contributions to the American sport of ice hockey.
For every world religion, there is a place to worship. For Christianity, there are a confusing variety of names for these places, which are frequently—but incorrectly—used interchangeably. Church, chapel, and cathedral are the trio of terms most commonly
Despite the notion of horses as pets and companions, horsemeat is widely and willingly consumed in countries ranging from Mexico to China to Italy. So how, exactly, did eating horsemeat become taboo for the rest of us?
There are millions of people, even in the mostly monolingual US, who speak more than one language at home. Competence in three languages is not unusual. But what about 10, 20, 30, 100 languages? What's the upper limit on the number of languages a person c
Despite urban legends claiming that waking a sleepwalker will send them into shock or give them a heart attack, it’s pretty much harmless. While you can wake them up, you probably shouldn’t, and that’s for both your benefit.