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As Halloween is winding down and the decorations are being put away until next year, visitors to the witch capital of Salem, Massachusetts might be surprised to discover that there were never any witches executed there at all.

Michelle Delio writes in wired.com that 300 years ago, those witches were actually tried 5 miles away. Despite this, Salem has built an entire tourist industry around the incident, which occurred in 1692, when a group of young women claimed they were being bewitched by their neighbors.
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We’ve always been told that we are what we eat, but in the future, we’ll be told what to eat based on what we are, genetically. “…You may in the future choose your breakfast cereal based on your genes,” says geneticist Peter Singer. “It is hypothetical today but possible that if you have a particular gene, you will be advised to use a cereal that decreases your chance of heart disease and avoid another that would increase the chance of colon cancer.”
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New Delhi, India has been declared a Monkey-Free zone, because the critters have been causing such havoc there. They’ve overrun government buildings; bitten, robbed and tormented the workers; and ransacked the files. They’ve taken down power lines, banged on office windows and screeched at visitors. It’s gotten so bad that citizens there have filed a lawsuit demanding that the Supreme Court step in and protect them.

But how are they going to do it? In the past, they’ve tried blasting them with ultrahigh frequency loudspeakers. They tried to deport them, but no one else will take them. They tried patrolling the streets with fierce-looking primates called langurs, but the monkeys simply avoided them.
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A rejected lover’s “broken heart” can feel as painful to the pain center in your brain as an actual physical injury. Psychologist Jaak Panksepp says, “Throughout history poets have written about the pain of a broken heart. It seems that such poetic insights into the human condition are now supported by neurophysiological findings.”
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