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Mascot Madness
This weekend marksthe pinnacle of college basketball as the Final Four battle to determine the last team standing. Thewomen’s side features theUCLA Bruins,Texas Longhorns,South Carolina Gamecocks, andUConn Huskies, while the men’s teams are theFlorida Gators,Auburn Tigers,Duke Blue Devils andHouston Cougars. Although you can’t control the action on the court, you can determine which mascot is best by voting in ourMarch Madness Mascot Challenge.
Vote Today to Determine the Last Mascot Standing
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How March Madness Made College Basketball an American Obsession
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Behind the Headlines
A technology titan celebrates its golden anniversary, and a giant life-saving rat sets a world record.
On April 4, 1975,Bill Gates andPaul Allen, twoboyhood friends from Seattle, founded Microsoft, deriving the name from the wordsmicrocomputer andsoftware. Their first success that year was in convertingBASIC, a popular mainframecomputer programming language, for use on an early personal computer,the Altair. In 1980IBM askedMicrosoft to create theoperating system for its firstpersonal computer (pictured below), and the rest is history.
Rats that save livesYou may be familiar withbomb-sniffing dogs and dolphins, but a giant rat? Ronin, aland mine-sniffing rodent, recently located his 109th land mine, landing theAfrican giant pouched rat intoThe Guinness Book of World Records as the most successful mine-detection rat in history, according to Belgian nonprofit APOPO. Also known as theGambian pouched rat (pictured below), these rats arein high demand in Asia and Africa, where land mines kill or maim thousands of people each year. They can cover more ground than humans and because they’re relatively small, there’s no worry that they will set off a land mine.
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