Here is a fact about New York City: it is filled with jerks. Here's another fact about New York City: it is filled with rats. Here's a third fact, recently discovered by scientists: rats are actually super nice, possibly (probably) even nicer than New Yorkers.

It turns out that Newt Gingrich has been annoying the public with his many trillion half-baked ideas — remember that he is, fundamentally, an Ideas Man, in the fundamental sense — since 1954. He was an 11-year-old boy, and he and his "buddies" had a grand vision: to throw some animals in a park and call it a zoo.

For your daily dose of internet uplift, we bring you the amazing story of Regan — a friendly Yellow Lab who happened to notice a bag lying on the side of an Iowa highway, and proceeded to drag it all the way home. Regan plopped his gruesome delivery — a Meow Mix bag covered in blood and guts with something moving around inside — on his master's doorstep, and whined until they reluctantly opened it.

An angry snake charmer from India named Hakkal had his "99 percent" moment when bureaucrats at the Government Land Registry Office refused to process his land-request application. So Hakkal took matters into his own hands: He dumped three sacks full of 40 venomous snakes, including cobras, into the office. The scene was captured in the video above, and shows government workers shooing away the hissing snakes with fabric as the deadly reptiles slid onto chairs and desks. And miraculously — unlike the OWS protests — no one was bitten! [newsfeed.time.com via Telegraph]

Something to know about teenagers is that they are just constantly, persistently, relentlessly always trying to do it. You know, it. Yes, sex "it." I would imagine that high school teachers spend the bulk of their day trying to stop horny youngsters from mashing their gross little body parts into each other. And according to a new study, this early sex-having behavior makes for some pretty depressed and dysfunctional adults.

Forget Spotify, all the cool kids are jamming to sweet, soothing whale songs the Whale Song Project (Whale.fm.) Whale.fm is a joint project of Scientific American and the Citizen Science Alliance, which asks internet users like you to listen to whale songs in a massive database then match them up with similar-sounding songs, to help scientists figure out how whales communicate.

Lest there be any doubt that the purse dogs of Manhattan lead more glamorous lives than you do, check out this description of the "luxury dog run" planned for the upcoming $6.5 million renovation of TriBeCa's Hudson River Park:

When taking into account the fact we eat them for Thanksgiving every year, it's not hard to understand why turkeys seem to harbor disdain for people. But just in case you've remained unaware of the phenomenon, here are 10 videos of some angry toms and hens exacting revenge upon the evil carnivores among us. Happy Thanksgiving! (My mom would like everyone to know that this post was her idea.) View »

Annick Richardson not only feeds peanuts to the squirrels who frolic about on her yard, but also allegedly enters her neighbors' properties to feed their squirrels as well. This is how she ended up being charged with two counts of criminal trespassing.

This morning, a fuzzy baby seal swam up to the rocks behind Gracie Mansion, the official residence of New York City's mayor (though Michael Bloomberg doesn't live there), and sunned itself on a rock. Needled for pictures, the mayor's office eventually tweeted a photograph of the uninvited occupier.

Before buying that special dolphin in your life an Orbital CD this holiday season, note this: some animal rights activists say loud boom-boom music can stress out dolphins so much that they will drop dead. At a Swiss amusement park, for example, two dolphins recently died after a techno party took place just yards away from their dolphinarium.

Just as the world's fanciest coffee is made from the partially digested coffee beans plucked from a Filipino tree rodent's poop, the world's fanciest tea will soon be created from the dung of panda bears.

Men who put their penises in animals have a higher likelihood of penis cancer, a new study in the Journal of Sexual Medicine reports:

We all gasped in amazement at photos of a black rhinoceros being airlifted upside down to an area of South Africa where it stood a better chance at reproducing. Inconceivably, a new report suggests there's no other rhinos for it to reproduce with.

It's been close to a month now since the world was captivated by the bizarre and tragic massacre of 49 exotic predators released from their Ohio compound and set loose into the general population. When three young locals, friends who gathered for a regular poker game, had heard the news, they instantly landed on the kind of dumb decision that could only be made amongst poker buddies after a few (or a lot) too many: They decided to check out the scene.

Man, we've all been there, haven't we? So desperate for tacos that we crash antlers-first through our local Mexican joint's plate glass window, terrifying its poor employees before wandering dazed out back? Just a regular Sunday morning for us! And a sort of unique Monday afternoon for the Alpharetta, Ga. Taco Mac. (The deer lost an antler in the process but escaped otherwise.) [WYFF4 via HuffPo]

It's a bleak landscape for the mighty black rhinoceros. The WWF announced this week that 353 of the endangered mammals, whose horn is incorrectly thought to have cancer-curing powers, have been poached this year alone, already exceeding the number poached in 2010. Current estimates put the total population of the species at 4,240.

The gay hating zookeepers at the Toronto Zoo are about to do something awful. They're going to break up a pair of male penguins, Buddy and his Latin lover Pedro, and make them have sex with women. How could they do that?

You know that woman from Oregon who got naked and crawled inside a dead horse to both "feel one" with the animal and also pose for puke-inducing highly artistic photographs? The Seattle Weekly tracked her down and discovered that her project—which prompted a police investigation—was inspired by none other than Han Solo, the dashing Star Wars character. Go figure.

Even though the cost of having a pet in the U.S. is skyrocketing, Americans aren't abandoning their cute little companions. In fact, many pets are now living more comfortably than unemployed humans and on tonight's Report, Stephen Colbert proposed a pretty unique solution to the financial problems plaguing so many Americans: If you can't beat the pets, be the pets.