Scientists have determined that humans can detect ten basic smells:

While tandem wakeboarding with his girlfriend Brynn, Matthew Gencarella decided to take the plunge and ask her to marry him right there and then.

Thirteen people were shot Thursday night at a park in Chicago, including a three-year-old boy who was shot in the head. Twelve of the 13 victims remain hospitalized, including five in serious or critical condition, with the 3-year-old the most seriously injured.

Sigh. Rohan Dawkins, 21, of Delray Beach, Florida went to a GameStop store on Tuesday to pick up his copy of Grand Theft Auto V. Dawkins, who attends a special needs transitional program for adults during the week, had been saving money from his weekend job at Home Depot to purchase the game. Over the past several weeks, he’d been regularly stopping by the store to pay for it in $10 to $20 installments.

A morbidly obese two-year-old from Saudi Arabia is now the youngest person in the world to have undergone gastric bypass surgery. The child weighed 72.7 lbs and had a body mass index (BMI) of 41 when he had the surgery in 2010.

Mark Kessler, the Pennsylvania police chief who recently filmed a video in which he said, "Fuck all you libtards!" while wearing a shirt that read, "Liberals take it in the ass," is reportedly on the chopping block in his small town of Gilberton. The AP reports that Gilberton officials "intend" to can Kessler, a gun enthusiast who once shot himself in the hand while off-duty in a bar. Kessler, who was also accused of improperly using a state program to get discount tires for his car and badmouthing other officials, said this decision is "no surprise."

A five-month-old baby boy was killed on Wednesday night at the Alicante-Elche Airport in Alicante, Spain after his mother, identified as American, placed the baby’s carrier on a baggage belt for oversized luggage.

Two parents have filed a human rights complaint against the Hartford school system after their 12-year-old daughter was forced to participate in a slavery reenactment on a class trip. Last year, Sandra and James Baker of Farmington, Connecticut sent their daughter, then a student at Hartford Magnet Trinity College Academy, on a four-day class trip to the Nature's Classroom program in Charlton, MA.

A Democratic congresswoman fed up with the anti-food-stamp rhetoric of her Republican colleagues took those lawmakers to task today using some high quality props.

Welcome to Thatz Not Okay, a regular column in which I school inquiring readers on what is and is not okay. Please send your questions (max: 200 words) to caity@gawker.com with the subject "Thatz Not Okay."

Randolph County in North Carolina recently voted to ban Ralph Ellison’s classic 1952 novel Invisible Man from school libraries over its portrayal of mature topics like sex and rape. Why? Kathi Keys at the Courier-Tribune reports that Kimiyutta Parson, the parent of a local high-schooler, submitted a “complaint” outlining in great, and often bizarre, detail how the National Book Award-winning novel “is not so innocent; instead, this book is filthier, too much for teenagers.”

Last month, Cameron Bay, who is not the woman pictured above, became the first of three U.S.-based adult performers to test positive for HIV. Before Bay came forth publicly, the Daily Mail dashed off an August 22 article about the porn industry shutting down in response to the affected actress's results and illustrated the story with a sultry photo of the above woman, soft-core webcam entrepreneur Danni Ashe. This was a major error for a few reasons: 1) Ashe never tested positive for HIV; 2) Ashe has apparently left the modeling business (the above photo is from 2000); 3) Ashe also never did hardcore porn.

Talk about a bad influence: A Washington teen is accused of convincing his friend to attack his own mother with a sword, and may have tried to convince him to eat her liver as well.

Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised that a boxer of Mike Tyson's caliber has the kind of spatial intelligence and awareness required to pull this off, and yet...

An empty bar is best. You just pick a seat where there's light enough to read, and the bartender comes right over. Then there are the busy nights, when people crush around the bar three deep and getting a drink seems impossible. What kind of supernatural skills are necessary for getting a cocktail on a Saturday night?

Scientists say the Earth will be habitable for at least another 1.75 billion years, though you will be dead in less than 0.000004286% of that time.

If you were thinking it would be a good idea to get drunk and let your friend tee off your face, this "golf fail" video might convince you otherwise.

At least 80 people were killed and thousands of tourists were left stranded in Acapulco and southwest Mexico Thursday after two tropical storms struck the area, triggering landslides and turning the tourist destination into a crocodile-plagued hellhole.

Last month, in the New Yorker's attempt to summarize the legacy of grumpy moneybags mayor Michael Bloomberg, reporter Ken Auletta left one of the mayor's contradictions unresolved. Auletta wrote of Bloomberg's philanthropic efforts:

"A team of British scientists is convinced it has found proof of alien life, after it harvested strange particles from the edge of space," the Independent reports. Will we all be destroyed by alien bacteria? Are we already full of alien bacteria?