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NATIONAL PUMPKIN SEED DAY The first Wednesday in October offers up the seasonal delight, National Pumpkin Seed Day! As the temperatures cool and the leaves turn, snack on these delicious tidbits. #NationalPumpkinSeedDay Many of us have fond memories of roasting these delicious nuggets after carving the Jack o' lantern. However, we never realized just how good (and good for us) they were. Surprisingly, pumpkin seeds have been valued for their dietary and medicinal properties for thousands of years. In fact, pumpkin seeds have been traced back as far as 7000 BC, according to archeologists excavating a tomb in central Mexico....

When Colin Craig-Brown received a long-awaited email from Guinness World Records last week, his heart sank. For the past seven months, the New Zealand man and his wife believed that they had discovered the world’s largest potato, weighing more than 17 pounds. The email, however, informed them that their purported potato — which they named Dug — was actually no spud. “Sadly the specimen is not a potato and is, in fact, the tuber of a type of gourd,” the email from a Guinness World Records spokesperson read. “For this reason we do unfortunately have to disqualify the application.”

The gourd, originally used to store gunpowder, was extensively decorated on the outside with a flame tool. Burned into its surface is the text: "Maximilien Bourdaloue on January 21st, dipped his handkerchief in the blood of Louis XVI after his beheading. It is described in contemporaneous accounts that there was a lot of blood in the scaffold after the beheading and that, in fact, many people went there to dip their handkerchiefs in the blood," Carles Lalueza-Fox, lead author of the study and a researcher at Spain's Institute of Evolutionary Biology, told Discovery News. The handkerchief is now missing from...

Armand Michaud was tending his pumpkin patch when he heard something eerie. "I heard like a pfffff, and I looked around, and I thought 'What the heck is that?'" he says. Then he saw a 2-foot crack in one of his giant pumpkins. "I could put my arm right up in it," he says. Michaud had just witnessed a bizarre phenomenon plaguing New England — exploding giant pumpkins. Each year, thousands of pumpkin growers compete to grow the biggest pumpkin the world has ever seen. Just last year, a world record was set by Joe Jutras of Rhode Island. His...

The record was shattered today in the Half Moon Bay World Championship Pumpkin Weigh-Off, with the winning gourd weighing in at 1,524 pounds. The grower, Thad Starr, takes home the first prize of $9,144 or $6 per pound. The 40-year-old from Pleasant Hill, Ore., beat more than 70 competitors, including three-time winner Joel Holland, who came in second with a 1,384-pound pumpkin.