Natasha Frost

If you have money weighing down your pockets, here’s an unusual investment proposition: a Chinese company that makes brick and hauls waste is diversifying into the famously opaque Old Masters market, and selling shares in some of the most valuable pieces of fine art available. For a small sum, you may soon be able to own a small piece (or maybe more, depending on the depths of your pockets) of a $75 million painting the company says is by Michelangelo—via 7.5 million shares of the company offered at $10 apiece.

In the weeks since British backpacker Grace Millane, 21, went missing while on vacation in New Zealand, a local story has gone round the world—and all the way back again. Millane’s disappearance first made international headlines in early December, compounded by the later discovery of her body on Sunday (Dec. 8). Now, a 26-year-old New Zealand man has been charged with her murder and is awaiting trial. Google may be breaking New Zealand law by disseminating his name to New Zealanders via email.

If you’re heading to the UK for the holidays, there hasn’t been a better time to put your spending money in sterling for a while.

British prime minister Theresa May decisively won a vote of no-confidence brought by her own party today. The embattled leader, who has been managing the almost impossible task of seeing through Brexit, secured 200 votes, with 117 against her. She needed at least 159 votes from Conservative MPs.

A problem: America faces a pension crisis of fearsome proporations. To solve it, states need money, and fast. A possible solution? Legal marijuana—and the greened-out greenbacks it brings to state coffers.

About 2,000 years ago, in a Roman shrine not far from what is now Oxfordshire, England, an 18-inch copper-alloy and lead statuette of the Roman goddess of wisdom surveyed the scene with silver eyes. The shrine no longer exists—the figure of Minerva, on the other hand, spent hundreds of years buried in a nearby field.

Eighty years ago, scientists thought a giant spinning centrifuge machine was the best way to slow down the aging process. Sound crazy? Well, today’s stem-cell treatments would probably have seemed no less remote in the 1930s.

A global war on truth is afoot. In Donald Trump’s view, it pits the American people versus their enemy: journalists, and the “fake news media.” For Time magazine, and many others, it’s journalists who are the guardians of truth, safeguarding it from an onslaught of alternative facts and misinformation.

It’s a dish, as the old joke goes, to die for. Fugu, also known as pufferfish, is a Japanese delicacy that comes seasoned with an outside chance of death.

Many millennia ago, in around 2000 BC, a gaggle of nomadic desert herders spent their downtime in a way that will feel familiar to many modern families: They sat down together, and played a board game.

You may know it as a bum bag, a travel pouch, a belly bag, a belt bag, or even a butt pack. But whatever you call it, the fanny pack is having a moment.

Federal prosecutors recommend that Michael Cohen receive a “substantial prison sentence” for an array of greed-motivated crimes. The former lawyer for Donald Trump “repeatedly used his power and influence for deceptive ends,” they said in a court filing released today (Dec. 7).

Altria Group Inc., the US maker of Marlboro cigarettes, is moving into the pot sector,  paying $1.8 billion for a 45% stake in Canadian cannabis firm Cronos, according to reports from Bloomberg.

In 1926, whisky makers at Scotland’s Macallan Distillery took a Spanish-made oak cask, filled it with Oloroso sherry, to absorb the flavors, emptied it, and then filled it with a clear, pre-maturation whisky, known as “new make” spirit. Then they waited. And waited, and waited.

It was one of the most incredible moments in the history of women’s sports—or it should have been.

If the approximately 3.7 million EU citizens currently living freely in the UK want to remain after Brexit, they will face a series of bureaucratic hurdles as they apply for “settled status.”

Some underwater snapping sounds are obvious—the jaws of a shark, the movements of a pistol shrimp, maybe even a parrotfish having a snack. Now scientists are adding a more surprising culprit to the list: plants. Incredibly, photosynthesis seems to have a snap all of its own.

FGV Holdings Berhad isn’t having a great week.

Michael Cohen, the former personal lawyer to Donald Trump, pled guilty today to yet another criminal charge: lying about Trump’s business dealings in Russia. The charges were issued by the office of special counsel Robert Mueller, who is investigating Russian meddling in the 2016 US presidential election.

Unemployment is the lowest it’s been in 50 years, at a national average of 3.7%, according to new data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In Hawaii, it’s even lower: 2.3%. More incredibly, that’s actually an increase on the state’s April and May low of 2%.

As our access to knowledge has expanded, so have our outlandish predictions for how we will learn in the future. Few educational experts would have scored an A+ when it came to their starry-eyed prophecies about the classrooms of tomorrow: We still haven’t worked out how to beam books into our brains, but at least electrical-stimulation therapy hasn’t become commonplace in classrooms.

Ladies, if he never calls you back, stands six-foot-four, weighs over 3,000 pounds, and answers to Knickers, he’s not your man—he’s one of Australia’s largest castrated bulls.

She’s the daughter, advisor, and representative to a US president who wants to place a 10% tariff on iPhones. He’s the CEO of Apple. Rarely do Ivanka Trump and Tim Cook run in the same circles, but on Tuesday (Nov. 27) both found themselves in Wilder, Idaho.

Once upon a time, about 36,000 years ago, colossal unicorns frolicked across the Siberian plains. They were huge—3.5 metric tons apiece—with a single horn protruding majestically from between their ears. They were also exceptionally ugly. Forget Lisa Frank pictures or Starbucks’ unicorn-themed Frappuccinos; Elasmotherium sibiricum, or the Siberian unicorn, as it’s sometimes called, looked much like today’s living rhinos, but larger, shaggier, and with a decidedly larger horn.