検索キーワード： 著者 "Dan Lewis" すべてのカテゴリー

At a few hundred dollars a ton, scrap metal is decently valuable – and it's most certainly a good source of extra revenue for those who run body shops, construction sites, junkyards and the like. And if you're a thief, it's also a pretty good thing to steal – not only is the demand for scrap metal rather robust (therefore making it pretty easy to find a willing buyer), but scrap metal also looks like any other metal, making tracing it back to its true owner very difficult.

If you don't know who Taylor Swift is – well, you may just be the last person on the planet who can lay claim to that. The 25-year-old singer-songwriter is as big of a superstar as they come.

When you place a telephone call, magic happens. You hit some buttons, the phone makes some noises, and then the machines take over.

In 1985, a Michigan woman named Christine Tallady gave birth to a son. She was in her early 20s and unwed at the time, and, not ready to be a full-time parent, contacted an adoption agency.

Every four years, the Summer Olympics captures the world's attention. And every four years, athletes with various disabilities compete in a companion event called the Summer Paralympics.

As of this writing, the Gobi Desert in northern China/southern Mongolia encompasses about half a million square miles (about 1.3 million square kilometers) – and that's "as of this writing" because the Gobi Desert is growing.

Let's say you are a musician. You work hard for a year writing and producing (and singing, of course) a new album, and, when you finally release it, buyers rush to the store with their money in hand.

CTRL+ALT+DEL ["CONTROL-ALT-DELETE"], a familiar keyboard command, first became commonly used in the 1990s when it was generally used by anyone with Microsoft Windows-based computer. When things went wrong, the computer froze up or the dreaded "Blue Screen of Death" appeared – simultaneously striking these three keys on one's keyboard was often the best route to recovery.

The term "government bailout" emerged in the collective consciousness in 2008, when the US government threw gobs of money at big banks, insurance companies and the automotive industry, all in hopes of propping up businesses. The term "too big to fail" was a part of that conversation – many economists and politicians believed that if major companies in those sectors were to go under, the general economy would fall down the sinkhole after them.

"Don't scream if you meet a cow. If she sees you first, she will run/Don't undertake a long ride if you are not confident of performing it easily/Don't contest the right of way with cable cars/Don't emulate your brother's attitude if he rides parallel with the ground"—those four "don'ts" are from the now-defunct New York World newspaper.

In 1983, a woman named Rita Quintero was found in a small Kansas town, wearing eccentric clothing and rummaging through trash cans for her next meal. Officials approached her, aiming to take stock of the situation, but Quintero appeared uncooperative.

By many estimates, the world's Jewish population hovers around 14 million. Most of those people – around 12 million – live in either the United States or Israel.

Southwest Airlnes was founded in 1967 by Rollin King, an investment consultant, and Herb Kelleher, an attorney. Kelleher served as the company's CEO from 1981 until 2001 and oversaw many different initiatives over his tenure.

Richard Feynman was one of modern history's greatest scientists. A well-respected academic, Feynman won the Nobel Laureate in Physics in 1965 and later served as a member of the commission that investigated the Space Shuttle Challenger explosion.

It began in 1997. Grocery stores in Bucks County, Pennsylvania – about 45 miles from Philadelphia – were all reporting the same things to their distributors: loaf after loaf of Friehofer's brand bread, destroyed.

Libraries are, increasingly, more than just books—they're repositories of information, and all that knowledge is made open to the public. You can scan decades-old magazines now stored on microfiche, check out CDs and DVDs (and even vinyl and VHS tapes, if you have a device that can play them), and you can surf the internet with reckless abandon.

Coffee has a pretty distinctive aroma – for many people, the smell alone can help them wake up, although it likely leads to a craving for a cup. And for that very reason, especially if you're Starbucks, Tim Horton's or Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf, the aroma of coffee can be a pretty powerful tool.

If you're a professional writer, having command of homophones – two or more words with the same pronunciation but different meanings and/or spellings – is critical. Sure, the occasional error is okay, but if you write sentences like "The boy's ants new the write weigh two go," you're probably not going to keep your job for too long.

The Mexican state of Chiapas (officially the Free and Sovereign State of Chiapas) is located in the nation's south, bordering Guatemala and the Pacific Ocean. Among the many indigenous people of the area are the Tzotzil, who are about 300,000 strong and live primarily in a municipality known as San Juan de Chamula (known simply as Chamula).

Every so often, the Roman Catholic Church has to choose a new pope – and it's a big deal when that happens, capturing the attention of millions of people (even non-Catholics) around the world. The meeting, called a "papal conclave," has a procedure which has been around for centuries.