Friday the 13th is here: how traditions around the world shape fear of this day Today, 13 February 2026, falls on a Friday, a pairing that, in many Western cultures, carries an air of unease. For some it is a joke; for others, a genuine source of anxiety. The date has inspired secret societies, horror…
A congregant of the Re’ese Adbarat Debre Selam Kidist Mariam Church, an Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo church, stands during a service, in Washington, D.C., April 5, 2025. (AP Photo/Jessie Wardarski, File) Singapore has been named the world’s most religiously diverse country in a sweeping study of 201 nations, reflecting how evenly its population is spread across…
Between 2010 and 2020, the religiously unaffiliated grew by 270 million to 1.9 billion, rising to 24.2% of the global population. Nearly a quarter of the world’s population now identifies with no religion, according to the latest analysis from the Pew Research Center’s Pew-Templeton Global Religious Futures project. Drawing on more than 2,700 censuses and…
Christianity declined in the West, losing followers, while sub-Saharan Africa grew rapidly, becoming the region with the largest Christian population/ saintandrewpasadena For nearly two millennia, Christianity expanded outward from a small Jewish sect in the eastern Roman Empire to become the world’s largest religion. Imperial endorsement in the 4th century, medieval missionary networks across Europe…
Michael Jordan’s post-race gesture toward a child at Daytona 500 sparks heated debate online/ X The Daytona 500 was meant to be a milestone moment for Michael Jordan and his NASCAR team. Instead, a brief interaction during the celebrations has become the centre of attention. Jordan attended the race to support driver Tyler Reddick, whose…
FILE – Jesse Jackson joins the crowd before the start of the world welterweight championship bout between Floyd Mayweather Jr., and Manny Pacquiao in Las Vegas on May 2, 2015. (AP Photo/Isaac Brekken, File) The Rev. Jesse Jackson, one of the most recognisable figures of the American civil rights movement and a former presidential candidate,…
Psychrobacter SC65A.3 is a 5,000-year-old cold-adapted bacterium resistant to multiple modern antibiotics/ AI Illustration A team of Romanian researchers has identified a bacterium preserved for roughly 5,000 years inside an underground ice deposit that can already withstand multiple modern antibiotics. The organism, recovered from Scărișoara Ice Cave in north-west Romania, survived frozen conditions for millennia…
Nick Fuentes is a 27-year-old far-right provocateur, livestreamer, and ‘Groypers’ leader courting controversy online. Nick Fuentes is 27 years old and, depending on the source, either a marginal provocateur inflated by spectacle or one of the most disruptive figures in American far-right politics. Over the past decade, he has built a loyal online following, founded…
ChatGPT serves 800–900 million weekly users, but OpenAI burns around $17 billion annually, far exceeding subscription revenue from 35 million paying users./ Pexels If you’ve ever typed “please” or “thank you” into ChatGPT, you may have contributed, very marginally, to OpenAI’s electricity bill. Earlier this year, a social media user asked how much money the…
Jesse William Lazear/ PBS On 25 September 1900, Dr Jesse William Lazear died of yellow fever in Cuba. He was 34 years old. He left behind a wife in Maryland, a one-year-old son, and a newborn daughter who would never meet him. Lazear was not a reckless thrill-seeker or a fringe experimenter. He was a…
